#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
The preliminary recommendations for the Best Novel category.
I will post the final list of Rabid Puppy recommendations this week after making a few eligibility checks and examining an alternative or two in a few categories.
Other 2016 Hugo categories
Ben Shapiro white-knights himself into unemployment:
Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields and editor-at-large Ben Shapiro are resigning from the company over the site’s handling of Donald Trump’s campaign manager’s alleged assault on Fields, BuzzFeed News has learned.
Fields and Shapiro informed Breitbart News chairman Steve Bannon of their decision Sunday night.
“Today I informed the management at Breitbart News of my immediate resignation,” Fields said in a statement sent to BuzzFeed News. “I do not believe Breitbart News has adequately stood by me during the events of the past week and because of that I believe it is now best for us to part ways.”
In his own statement, Shapiro said the episode was emblematic of how he believes the site’s management had sold out the legacy of its founder and namesake, the late Andrew Breitbart.
“Andrew’s life mission has been betrayed,” Shapiro wrote. “Indeed, Breitbart News, under the chairmanship of Steve Bannon, has put a stake through the heart of Andrew’s legacy. In my opinion, Steve Bannon is a bully, and has sold out Andrew’s mission in order to back another bully, Donald Trump; he has shaped the company into Trump’s personal Pravda, to the extent that he abandoned and undercut his own reporter, Breitbart News’ Michelle Fields, in order to protect Trump’s bully campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, who allegedly assaulted Michelle.”
I look forward to the inevitable charges that Breitbart is not only the personal Pravda of the God-Emperor Trump, but anti-semitic, mysogynistic, and mean.
And yes, I did laugh when I heard about it. I told you all years ago that Shapiro isn’t particularly intelligent. People really need to learn to stop confusing verbal facility with intelligence. The former is a subset of the latter, not a synonym. Some of the smartest people I’ve known can barely form a coherent sentence in a reasonable period of time, because, I suspect, they struggle to translate their stream of consciousness into something their intellectual inferiors will be able to follow.
UPDATE: This brutal dismissal of Shapiro by William Bigelow at Breitbart borders on sadism, but it is more than a little amusing. Breitbart certainly doesn’t appear to be shedding any tears.
Ben Shapiro Betrays Loyal Breitbart Readers in Pursuit of Fox News Contributorship.
And not a moment too soon:
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative CDU party was humiliated in key regional elections on Sunday as voters delivered their verdict at the ballot box about her open-door refugee policies.
Exit poll results in three out of 16 German states foretell a wipeout in next year’s general election as the hard-right capitalized on public disquiet and altered the political landscape forever.
Baden-Wuerttemberg – solidly middle class and home to blue chip companies like Porsche and Daimler – was won by the Green Party after Merkel’s CDU lost nearly 11 percent support since the last vote there in 2011.
And the Alternative for Germany – AfD anti-immigrant party – garnered 12.5 percent of the votes, propelling a party that her supporters call ‘Nazis in pinstripes’ into the local parliament.
Leader Frauke Petry said: ‘We are seeing above all in these elections that voters are turning away in large numbers from the big established parties and voting for our party. ‘They expect us finally to be the opposition that there hasn’t been in the German parliament and some state parliaments.’
‘The people who voted for us voted against this refugee policy,’ added AfD deputy chairman Alexander Gauland.
‘We have a very clear position on the refugee issue: we do not want to take in any refugees,’ he declared.
I very much hope the German nationalists succeed in coming to power in a democratic fashion and sending all the non-German nationals back to their homelands. Because if they don’t, we can safely anticipate that the German ultras are going to come to power in a very non-democratic manner and I doubt they’re going to bother with the expense of sending anyone back anywhere.
Merkel and the mainstream parties are not the solution to the problem, for the obvious reason that they are the cause of the problem.
Michael Sebastian concludes that the “Trump is violence” meme being pushed by the media this week is the result of the Stop Trump meeting at Sea Island:
After Trump won the Michigan and Missouri primaries with strong numbers, the establishment went into panic mode. They arranged a meeting between execs of top technology companies Apple, Facebook, and Google, and the members of the GOP establishment including Karl Rove, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, Ben Sasse and Kevin McCarthy.
The conspirators met on a private island off the coast of Georgia called Sea Island. Their goal? To plot how to stop the GOP front runner—Donald Trump. We don’t know what plans the elite concocted at this meeting because it was invitation-only. However, we may glean the nature of the plan from the events that followed.
After the meeting, the next Republican debate in Miami was a muted affair. Rubio, Cruz, and Kasich mostly laid back. While they did throw some light punches in Trump’s direction, it was probably the most civil debate to date. Did the other candidates know that the establishment had something in store for Trump?
The very next day, Trump was scheduled to have a rally in Chicago. MoveOn.org, Bernie Sanders supporters, and other leftwing groups coordinated a massive protest. This was combined with hundreds of threats of violence on social media, including threats against Trump’s life. To preserve the safety of his supporters, Trump canceled the rally.
Immediately after the cancellation, I noticed that all the networks suddenly were carrying the same story—how Donald Trump’s words provoke his followers to violence. There was nothing about the threats on social media to assassinate Trump. Only this unprovable allegation that Trump’s words somehow caused his supporters turn violent.
The major newspapers carried the same message:
One of the most startling things about is how quickly all of the mainstream media outlets adopted the “Trump’s rhetoric causes violence” message. It’s notable because Trump’s rhetoric has never been violent. At most, Trump told his supporters that if someone throws a punch at them at a rally, they should punch right back. To me, that is not a violent message. It is just common sense self-defense. It is the same advice my mom gave to me on my first day of kindergarten.
Some of the media outlets say that Trump’s message about building a wall and putting a temporary ban on Islamic immigration are somehow inherently violent. But those policies are several months old. Why did the violence narrative suddenly take hold? I believe that this was a coordinated attack by the media, which is owned and controlled by the elite.
If you would have asked me one year ago, I would have said that this was a crazy idea. But after we all lived through the attack upon Return of Kings surrounding the meetups, where dozens of news outlets in different countries all carried the same false message, it is clear that media coordination does take place.
The good news is that it is not working. The now-obvious fact of the establishment support for Cruz (which you may recall I observed from the start), to say nothing of Cruz’s own missteps, is driving many of his supporters to Trump.
For those readers here who are not yet behind Trump, what I would ask you is this: do you support the US establishment? If not, then why aren’t you lined up with the man they obviously hate and fear more than anyone?
Rubio, Kasich, and Cruz are all owned by them. Trump, for all of his ideological and personal flaws, is not. They are not pulling out all the stops in a desperate attempt to try to stop him in some sort of elaborate charade. Nor do they believe that Hillary Clinton can beat him, or they would simply let him enjoy his moment in the sun before defeat in the general election.
They fear him. So, ask yourself this: why?
The beauty of the Trump campaign is that it is unmasking all of the entryists, infiltrators, and cuckservatives who have been leading conservatives astray for decades. Case in point, the white-hating “conservative” Kevin Williamson:
In a featured article for the prestigious conservative journal
entitled “The FatherFuhrer,” Williamson seeks to rebut criticism that he
and other conservatives don’t articulate any policies that would appeal
to Trump’s blue collar supporters.Williamson, a long-time critic of The Donald, essentially agrees that
he doesn’t support any policies or rhetoric directly tailored to the
working-class — particularly about jobs being taken by outsourcing and
immigration — because it would be wrong to do so.“It is immoral because it perpetuates a lie: that the white working
class that finds itself attracted to Trump has been victimized by
outside forces,” the NR roving correspondent writes. “[N]obody did this
to them. They failed themselves.”He then goes on to make the conclusion that it’s great these
communities are dying out because they have a warped morality and are a
dead weight on the economy.“The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that
they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally,
they are indefensible,” the conservative writer says.
What is conservative about calling working class white communities morally indefensible and deserving of death?
It’s telling that National Review, which fired everyone from Sobran to Derbyshire, not only didn’t fire Williamson, they published his appalling, anti-white hate.
I thought the VFM, in particular, would enjoy this Twitter exchange:
Roosh @rooshv
Breitbart has a traitor on their staff who is feeding secret company information to the competitor.big snout @davisiain
i called it right the otherday by tweeting cuckbart at them. milo needs to run their counter intel.Leana Braun
he could always borrow @voxday shitlord army. Effective and ruthless.
Just to be clear, in GG-speak “shitlord” is a term of art. It’s one step above “edgelord” and several above “troll”.
I’m not surprised that Breitbart has SJW entryists burrowing inside the organization, though. Every anti-SJW organization and institution that isn’t actively on guard against them does.
Meanwhile, I’m not sure how conclusively this debunks the Michelle Fields’s claim to have been ritually sacrificed to Satan on the stage at a Trump rally; I leave it to the viewer to decide.
As those who have read it know, in SJWs ALWAYS LIE, I repeatedly remind the reader to never apologize on demand. Yesterday, despite having issued a correction within three hours of making the original mistake, hundreds of SJWs attempted to put pressure on me and on Donald Trump Jr to apologize, retract, and delete our tweets.
The telling thing is that they put no such pressure on anyone else who had tweeted or retweeted the same image, including the people who had tweeted it before me. In other words, they didn’t give a damn about the actual situation or the two women involved – and make no mistake, it was not the second lady who was wronged, it was the first one who was misrepresented and falsely characterized by the media for the crime of supporting Donald Trump – they were simply looking to damage and discredit those they deem enemies dangerous to the Narrative.
To the younger Trump’s credit, he had the sense to refuse to apologize or retract. After all, he did nothing more than say that the media was unlikely to report something, and he was generally correct. I didn’t do anything at all, except state that I would be happy to delete the tweet if the second lady asked me to do so.
But when Twitter moved on to other, more interesting things, Donald Trump Jr. finally deleted his tweet, presumably at the advice of the PR professionals advising his father’s campaign. Needless to say, the few SJWs still paying attention promptly attacked.
Tim Weeks @TRWeeks
You falsely accused a woman of giving a Nazi salute, deleted the tweet and weren’t man enough to apologize. Trump class.Ali Momen @alimomen
noticed you deleted that tweet…without an apology. Shame on you brother.Matthew Koomen @TheKooMan
why did you deleted your tweets. Afraid of actually having to own up to a lie?PaulieP @PauliePFunq
Awww deleted tweets now?Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald
No apology. No retraction. Just quietly deleted them, slinking away, hoping nobody notices & that he won’t get sued.
Those responses are why you never give into SJW pressure to do anything. Anything you do in response to their pressure will be taken as a victory on their part and a moral failure on your own. I did nothing and gave no ground, except call out Olivia Nuzzi for her lies about me and about the younger Trump, and in less than 24 hours, the SJWs have largely vanished.
Never back down. Never apologize. Never show weakness. They are cowards and herd animals, and they will always retreat from those who don’t flinch in front of them. They wouldn’t be SJWs if they didn’t have short time preferences, so stand your ground no matter what they threaten and the storm will pass soon enough.
Now, don’t be pedantic about this; this does not mean you should not relinquish an indefensible position; it would have been stupid and a different form of weakness to insist that the second lady was the first lady once I saw another picture of her that made it clear she was not.
One last observation: the Twitter SJWs are remarkably incurious and rather less numerous than they pretend to be. Despite 191,014 organic impressions of the mistaken tweet (versus 11,628 of the correction they were so vehemently demanding), yesterday’s site traffic was 66,941 pageviews, nearly two thousand fewer than the 68,894 recorded two weeks ago.
So, this morning I retweeted a tweet that someone sent me about the “Nazi Trump supporter”; I think it was a tweet to Louise Mensch. I didn’t just retweet it because it had the fake children’s book “Everyone is Hitler” as part of the image, so I cropped that off, then tweeted the picture of the woman attached to the picture of another woman who looked like the same woman.
Except that woman was a Bernie Sanders activist. Which appeared to prove what looked like a media plant was, in fact, a media plant. Quite a few people retweeted the tweet, including Donald Trump Jr., which led someone to look more closely about three hours later and observe that the two women were different and the “Nazi Trump supporter” was from a Chicago Tribune story.
It was just a simple mistake, not an intentionally dank meme, so naturally I corrected the tweet right away.
Now reports are that the “Trump Nazi” is not pro-Sanders Portia Boulger, but “Birgitt Peterson of Yorkville”.
I didn’t delete the tweet because a) Ms Boulger did not request that I do so, and, b) because I am in the habit of owning up to my mistakes, not trying to conceal them. If Twitter had an edit function with a strikethrough, I would have noted the error that way, just as I do on this blog.
However, the Left erupted with minor outrage, apparently unfeigned, although I suspect it was more because the tweet disrupted their absurd attempt to once more portray Donald Trump’s supporters, and therefore Donald Trump himself, as a National Socialist. Probably the most notable reaction was from Ken at Popehat, apparently off his meds again, as he first insisted that I would need a lawyer, then started babbling something about something called Moon Court. I will leave it to the lawyers, and the mental health professionals, to interpret that.
They kept calling for me to correct the tweet, which I had already done, until, after finally realizing that I had, in fact, already done so, they demanded that I apologize and that I delete the tweet.
Needless to say, I did not apologize. I did, however, assure everyone that if Ms Boulger wished me to delete the tweet, I would do so. I have not, as yet, heard the lady express any such wish.
But wait, there’s more! One Olivia Nuzzi, who claims to be a “reporter” at the Daily Beast, thought that this would be a wonderful time to attack Donald Trump Jr. by also claiming that I am “a white supremacist”.
I reached Boulger by phone on Saturday morning, a few minutes after Donald Trump Jr. tweeted her photo with the caption, “Big surprise. However, the media will never run with this.” As the New Republic’s Jeet Heer pointed out, the user who Trump Jr. got the photo from, @voxday, is a white supremacist.
Naturally, I immediately let Ms Nuzzi know that Mr. Heer’s libelous, and baseless, accusation notwithstanding, I am nothing of the sort.
Supreme Dark Lord @voxday
Actually, Olivia, you’re lying. I’m not a white supremacist. I’m an American Indian. We just made a mistakeSupreme Dark Lord @voxday
I corrected my tweet. Are you going to correct your post falsely accusing an American Indian of being a white supremacist?Supreme Dark Lord @voxday
You are calling an American Indian – and the great-grandson of a Mexican revolutionary – “a white supremacist.” Retract. Now.Olivia Nuzzi @Olivianuzzi
I cite another reporters writing on you. If you dispute his story, I’m happy to add that to mine.
Her first response was to add additional information instead of correcting it.
I was not content with that:
Supreme Dark Lord @voxday
Not sufficient, Olivia. Retract. And mention that I am an American Indian and the great-grandson of a Mexican revolutionary.
So she continued trying to finesse it.
Apparently I’ll have to get in touch with her editor on Monday. First VFM to provide me with the contact details for Olivia Nuzzi’s editor wins a free copy of On The Existence of Gods and the Castalia House ebook of his choice. First one with her email wins the latter. The rest of you keep an eye on your inbox.
This week we dine on SJW flesh!
Update: And we have 2nd Law at work:
Olivia Nuzzi @Olivianuzzi
nothing to retract, sorry.Supreme Dark Lord @voxday
(shakes head) Oh dear. See where it says “Supreme Dark Lord”? You really should have paid more attention.Olivia Nuzzi @Olivianuzzi
Portia Boulger, the woman inaccurately smeared by @DonaldJTrumpJr and others as a Nazi, just told me she needs time to decide if she’ll sue.Supreme Dark Lord @voxday
Except she wasn’t smeared as a Nazi. She was mistaken for the woman whom the media smeared as a Nazi.Supreme Dark Lord @voxday
You lied and called me “a white supremacist”. Then you lied again and said @DonaldJTrumpJr smeared Portia Boulger “as a Nazi.”
The second course (and first online one) is coming to an end today, but in the interest of maintaining the little dev community that the course has inadvertently spawned, I have created a blog to which a number of the course participants have author privileges.
The course itself has been extremely successful. The guests have included everything from programmers at cutting-edge studios to senior producers at EA, from game journalists like The Escapist‘s Oliver Campbell to well-known game developers like Mark Kern (Diablo II producer and World of Warcraft team lead.) And the attendees are working on five dev projects, all of which are updates of classic early 80’s games.
The course spawned a Develop article on imitative design requested by the editor who attended Session Three, and even merited a mention in this month’s GDC issue of the magazine.
The next course will begin in May. If you’re potentially interested in taking it or getting involved in one of the dev projects, I would encourage you to begin following the DevGame blog and reading a few of the testimonials that can be found on the right sidebar.
“The Devgame course is great. It’s a fantastic opportunity to learn the
history of games and the industry, to get the real word on how the
industry is, and to receive practical information on how games are made.
It was obvious from the first seminar that this class was worth every
penny.”
And yes, Brainstorm members will be permitted to attend the next course as well.
Those who organized the mass multiethnic chimp-out in Chicago are celebrating their defeat of the Evil Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, millions of white Americans, or as they were historically known, Americans, are deciding they had better vote for the only candidate who is going to deal with the invasion of America.
And if you weren’t already convinced that Ted Cruz is not the man for the job, his response to the situation should suffice.
Ted Cruz hit The Donald on such violence, saying his campaign bears some responsibility for encouraging it. “A campaign bears responsibility for creating an environment when the candidate urges supporters to engage in physical violence,” Cruz declared on Fox News’s The Kelly File Friday night.
I’ve never supported Cruz in any way because he’s a Goldman-Sachs creature, and I don’t regard him as being eligible for the presidency anyhow, the various emanations and penumbras that declare him a “natural born citizen” notwithstanding. But the political tone-deafness that he is showing here is truly astonishing.
Meanwhile, Mike Cernovich brings us news about the Washington Post’s contribution to the media’s desperate anti-Trump campaign:
Jabin Botsford has been ordered by Washington Post reporter Ben Terris to cover up a media hoax, we can now report. (Credit for these shocking revelations goes to this Internet sleuth.)
When Michelle Fields was nudged during a Donald Trump press conference, Ben Terris blamed Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. Fields went on the media circuit, accusing Lewandowski of assault. Her accusation was later revealed to be false.
Yet the story goes deeper. The Washington Post is actively covering up the false accusation against Trump’s campaign.
Trump’s decision to cancel the rally is looking more and more like his previous decision to skip the Fox debate; he knows a trap when he sees it and isn’t afraid to take action to evade it.