Category: Uncategorized

“Something big has happened”

A surprisingly astute article from a dyed-in-the-wool member of the US establishment, Robert Reich:

Something very big has happened, and it’s not due to Bernie Sanders’ magnetism or Donald Trump’s likeability.

It’s a rebellion against the establishment.

The question is why the establishment has been so slow to see this. A year ago – which now seems like an eternity – it proclaimed Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush shoe-ins.

Both had all the advantages – deep bases of funders, well-established networks of political insiders, experienced political advisors, all the name recognition you could want.

But even now that Bush is out and Hillary is still leading but vulnerable, the establishment still doesn’t see what’s occurred. They explain everything by pointing to weaknesses: Bush, they now say, “never connected” and Hillary “has a trust problem.”

A respected political insider recently told me most Americans are largely content. “The economy is in good shape,” he said. “Most Americans are better off than they’ve been in years. The problem has been the major candidates themselves.”

I beg to differ.

Economic indicators may be up but they don’t reflect the economic insecurity most Americans still feel, nor the seeming arbitrariness and unfairness they experience.

Nor do the major indicators show the linkages Americans see between wealth and power, crony capitalism, declining real wages, soaring CEO pay, and a billionaire class that’s turning our democracy into an oligarchy.

Median family income lower now than it was sixteen years ago, adjusted for inflation.

Most economic gains, meanwhile, have gone to top.

These gains have translated into political power to rig the system with bank bailouts, corporate subsidies, special tax loopholes, trade deals, and increasing market power – all of which have further pushed down wages pulled up profits.

Those at the very top of the top have rigged the system even more thoroughly. Since 1995, the average income tax rate for the 400 top-earning Americans has plummeted from 30 percent to 17 percent.

Wealth, power, and crony capitalism fit together. So far in the 2016 election, the richest 400 Americans have accounted for over a third of all campaign contributions.

Americans know a takeover has occurred and they blame the establishment for it.

Damn straight it has. And damn straight they should. They’ve created a system that is every bit as centralized and bureaucratic as Soviet communism and they called it “capitalism” and “free trade”.

It isn’t. It’s financial rape and plunder.

Rabid Puppies: Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form

The preliminary list of recommendations for the Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form category:

  • Grimm, Season 4 Episode 21, “Headache”
  • Tales from the Borderlands Episode 5, “The Vault of the Traveller”
  • Life is Strange, Episode 1
  • My Little Pony, Friendship is Magic, Season 5, Episodes 1-2, “The Cutie Map”
  • A Game of Thrones Season 5, Episode 8, “Hardhome” 

Other 2016 Hugo categories

    Neoreaction and the failure of democracy

    A very good, very intelligent article called “What is Neoreaction” by Clark, formerly of Popehat.com, at his new group blog Status 451:

    Why democracy doesn’t work

    In what ways does democracy fail?

    First, as noted above, many people vote as an expressive act. The typical Obama voter knew nothing of his policies, but wanted to be “part” of “something”. There are all sorts of cultural and emotional connotations associated with Team Pepsi, and people want to affiliate themselves with those signals. Team Coke is no better: many Republican voters are in favor of a culture of God, Flag, and Apple Pie, and cast a vote for the GOP as an expressive act, without knowing or caring the actual positions of the candidates they vote for.

    Second, we are rationally ignorant: even if every voter chose to vote based on policy, not emotions, our individual contribution to the outcome of an election is insanely close to zero, and — at some level — we all know this. Thus, almost none of us bothers to educate ourselves about the candidates and their positions. This is, individually, a smart choice.

    Third, democracy has the principal-agent problem: we voters send politicians to Washington DC for — well, for whatever purposes we have. We hope that, once there, they will do our bidding…and we expect to motivate them to do that bidding by using the threat of our future votes and future campaign donations. But a lot is hidden in that “voters hope to motivate them”. Because voters don’t have time or inclination to monitor politicians, and because they tend to vote for expressive purposes rather than policy purposes (think of all the anti-war Democrats who support Obama and his various undeclared overseas wars), politicians need only do just enough to appear to serve the voters, while actually pursuing their own policies.


    Fourth, we humans are hyperbolic discounters. Given the
    promise of one marshmallow now over two in five minutes, we choose the
    one now. Is it any surprise that we, en masse, repeatedly vote for the
    politicians who promise us bread and circuses today, and a bill that
    won’t come due for … a while?
    Fifth, democracy has the public choice problem. There are many
    issues which affect each of us very little — ten cents per person in
    extra taxes for program X, or three dollars per person more in the price
    of a commodity because of trade barrier Y, or a slight bit of extra
    hassle in doing thing Z. These hassles, collectively, destroy a lot of
    value in our lives, but individually, harm us very little. However,
    these small barnacles did not randomly accrete on the body politic —
    each is placed there by the dedicated lobbying of some group that
    benefits quite a lot from the tax, regulation, or trade barrier.
    Ethanol in our gasoline harms all of us a little, but helps a small
    influential group quite a lot. The outrageous salaries of some tenured
    public school teachers harms all of us a little, but helps a small
    influential group quite a lot. As long as one small group benefits from a
    regulation, they will be motivated to secure an outsized influence on
    politicians. And they will succeed.

    However, I would note it should be kept in mind that what the author means by “democracy” here is “representative democracy” and not genuine direct democracy of the sort practiced in Greece, US state referendums, and European national referendums of the sort in which Great Britain is presently engaged. But regardless, a very good article.

    My opinion, as I have previously expressed, is that the problems of “mob rule” of which the Founders so famously warned have proven to be considerably fewer and less problematic than the problems of establishing a political elite that uses the illusion of democratic approval as a protective shield. Now that technology makes it viable for larger polities, direct democracy is a moral imperative in any society with a government that is justified by the will of the people.

    The coming Trumpslide

    Historical model predicts Trump will win the general election in a landslide:

    The odds of Donald Trump becoming America’s next president currently range from 97 percent to 99 percent…. Norpoth predicts that Trump has a 97 percent chance of beating Hillary Clinton and a 99 percent chance of beating Bernie Sanders.

    Norpoth announced his prognostication on Monday night during Stony Brook Alumni Association event at the SUNY Global Center in Manhattan.

    “The bottom line is that the primary model, using also the cyclical movement, makes it almost certain that Donald Trump will be the next president,” Norpoth said, according to The Statesman. “When I started out with this kind of display a few months ago, I thought it was sort of a joke,” the professor told the alumni audience, according to the student newspaper. “Well, I’ll tell you right now, it ain’t a joke anymore.”

    “Trump beats Hillary 54.7 percent to 45.3 percent” in terms of popular vote.

    Well, it’s obviously now time for all those pragmatic Republicans whose only concern is electability to get on the Trump train, isn’t it. After all, we have been repeatedly assured that principles are not important, winning elections is important.

    No, that’s not it

    It’s amazing how many so-called pundits and analysts are casting about, looking everywhere except at the real reason, in their attempts to explain why Trump supporters are angry:

    Bernie Supporters’ Hatred Of Work Is Why Trump Supporters Are So Mad.

    The cultural disconnect about the value of work explains why there’s an open revolt in both parties and the future seems so uncertain…. Indeed, it is precisely this cultural disconnect about the value
    of work that explains why there’s an open revolt in both parties and
    the future seems so uncertain.

    If any one issue defines this election, it’s economic stagnation.
    Many Trump supporters in the GOP feel left behind by the
    twenty-first-century economy. They’re angry about it, because our
    “follow your bliss” culture doesn’t begin to appreciate coal miners or
    people who work in brake disc factories, even as it obsessively
    venerates empty celebrity and people like social media executives and
    hedge fund managers who are filthy rich in spite of the fact their
    contributions to society aren’t very tangible.

    Combine that with the
    self-loathing these guys feel from, say, being laid off and having to
    fake a fibromyagia diagnosis so they can collect disability and feed
    their families, and you have tremendous resentment.

    Trump was not only canny enough to speak to this, but he still
    remains arguably the only candidate to forthrightly talk about issues
    such as immigration that are feeding this anxiety, even if he speaks
    about them with great ignorance. It’s regrettable in many ways, but it’s
    also not a mystery why 30 percent of Republicans are lining up to
    support a lunatic who has (allegedly) made a lot of money and wields
    considerable influence despite now being despised by our cultural
    betters.

    What a prodigiously stupid headline. And what a transparently futile attempt to redirect that anger to the conventional Bad Democrat Good Republican channel. As usual, conservatives have it completely backwards. Americans are struggling economically, in part due to the economic policies that have caused their real wages to peak in 1973. But that merely exacerbates the anger that they feel at their country being subject to the largest invasion in human history, an invasion of 60 million that is nearly 16 times larger than Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union.

    They want their country back. They want to see America be great again, not prostrate before the boots and burqahs of foreign invaders.

    That is why they are angry.

    The stench of gamma

    Man, once you whiff it, you will never forget that bizarre scent of passive-aggression, insecurity, dishonesty, and truculence. One of Matt Walsh’s fans decided to jump in and white knight for Matt, and he appears to have obtained a copy of the McRapey playbook, right down to his very vocabulary:

    Supreme Dark Lord @voxday
    @mattwalshblog You sneer at Trump’s supporters. Trump tells them he loves them and wants them to be great. That is why you lose.

    Paul Foeller @pfoeller
    I’m not sneering at all. I’m echoing the sentiment that Trump supporters are all surface – and you’re proving it.

    Supreme Dark Lord @voxday
    You claim to be better than Trump’s supporters, but you’re not sneering?

    Paul Foeller @pfoeller
    I’m more policy-focused, yes. Do you disagree?

    Supreme Dark Lord @voxday
    I know nothing about you. The point is that you have publicly claimed to be better than all Trump supporters.

    Paul Foeller @pfoeller
    I don’t think I’m better. I think my views make more sense. There is a massive difference between the two.

    Supreme Dark Lord @voxday
    You said Trump’s supporters are all more superficial than you are. So, is being superficial a virtue or a vice?

    Paul Foeller @pfoeller
    Again, I’ve not done so. In fact, I’ve explicitly stated exactly the opposite. Do try to keep up?

    Read the rest at Alpha Game. Keeping in mind that this is how he describes himself on Twitter: “My wife’s only flaw is her taste in men.”

    After all, there are few things that women find more attractive than a self-deprecating man with much to self-deprecate.

    Rabid Puppies 2016: Best Short Story

    The preliminary recommendations for the Best Short Story category:

    • “Tuesdays With Molakesh the Destroyer”, Megan Grey, Fireside Magazine
    • “Asymmetrical Warfare”, S. R. Algernon, Nature Nr. 519
    • “Seven Kill Tiger”, Charles Shao, There Will Be War Vol. X
    • “The Commuter”, Thomas Mays, Amazon Kindle Single
    • “If You Were an Award, My Love”, Juan Tabo and S. Harris, Vox Popoli

    Other 2016 Hugo categories

    On a related note, there is an interesting discussion of what fueled the Puppies movement over at The Right Geek. She’s a Sad, not a Rabid, but her perspective is pretty accurate on the whole.

    Over the same time frame, the Puppies have also become concerned about the artistic direction of our field. The “Human Wave” movement, the “Superversive” movement, and the more generalized complaints about “message fic” and “grey goo” that started gaining steam before last year’s Sad Puppies campaign are all flailing attempts by the Puppies to describe the flatness we’ve perceived in many recent award winners — particularly in the shorter fiction categories, where the stylistic sophistication and emotional catharsis beloved by creative writing professors and MFA programs the world over appear to be crowding out more accessible stories with identifiable plots and recognizably science-fictional ideas. Have the aforementioned accessible stories been shut out of the mix entirely? No, thankfully — but prominent fannish critics have definitely been agitating against any “traditional” authors who happen to be short-listed. When Larry Correia was nominated for the Campbell back in 2011, for example, one such critic hyperbolically proclaimed that a win for Larry would “end writing forever.”

    Finally, before the Puppies became a controversial sensation, many of the same people were getting nominated for the Hugo year after year after year. Now, this state of affairs may have been justifiable if fandom were really tiny, but it’s not. As I remarked in my previous post, thousands of science fiction works are published and bought every year, and the most recent circulation figures I could find for, say, Asimov’s or Analog exceed the number of people who voted in the Hugos in 2012 by over 1000%. To us Puppies, the proposition that a couple thousand super-motivated Pre-Puppy World Con voters were in any way representative of the fandom in the aggregate was and is ridiculous on its face.

    The Puppykickers have been trying to have it both ways. On the one hand, a very small group of people were creating awards they can’t even define solely for the sake of giving them to an even smaller group of people they like (awards such as the Best Related Work and Best Long-form Editor), on the other, they have repeatedly asserted that these awards, which are nothing more than the subjective popularity contest among a very small group of people, somehow prove that the recipients are objectively superior to the majority of their various colleagues and competitors in the science fiction and fantasy fields.

    The Right Geek doesn’t quite go all the way back to the very beginning, however. The reason the original Sad Puppies campaign came to pass was because an SF-SJW was on Larry Correia’s blog, taunting him with being an inferior writer because although his books sold well, John Scalzi and other SF-SJWs had Hugo nominations and awards that Correia lacked. When Correia dismissed the SJW’s argument by saying that the Hugos were, like the Nebulas, nothing more than a popularity contest, the SJW furiously denied that was the case, prompting Larry to declare that he would prove otherwise.

    Which he did, repeatedly, in spades.

    Now Larry is a Hugo-nominated author. Brad Torgersen is a Hugo-nominated author. Mike Williamson is a Hugo-nominated author. Tom Kratman is a Hugo-nominated author. John C. Wright is record-setting Hugo-nominated author. I am a Hugo-nominated author and a Hugo-nominated editor. We are henceforth a part of Hugo history. And SF fandom can’t deny that, any more than they can take John Scalzi’s ludicrous “Best Novel” award away from him or Kameron Hurley’s utterly absurd “Best Related Work” award away from her.

    We didn’t make the Hugo Awards ridiculous. We merely drew attention to the fact that the SJWs in science fiction already had.

    If the SJWs in science fiction are unhappy with the present state of affairs, they need to realize that a) they started it and b) they exacerbated it. Patrick Nielsen Hayden and John Scalzi didn’t need to publicly attack me back in 2005 and collude to try to get me expelled from SFWA in 2013. SJWs didn’t need to falsely claim that I was responsible for gaming the 2014 nominations. And whoever that SJW was back in 2012 didn’t need to go to Larry’s site and start taunting him there.

    The SJWs in science fiction could have done what we were doing to them all along and simply left us alone. But for one reason or another, they didn’t. So, it’s more than a bit rich for them to complain that we are now paying them too much unwanted attention when they went out of their way to draw it in the first place. In the words of Metallica:

    Careful what you wish, you may regret it
    Careful what you wish, you just might get it

    They wanted the baleful eye of the Supreme Dark Lord upon them. Well, they have got it. And if they do not enjoy the burning touch of my gentle hand, how am I to blame for that? It is what they demanded, after all.

    Nevertheless, because I am kind, and in the interest of restoring a modicum of peace to the science fiction community, I will extend an olive branch to my enemies. I will be pleased to vacate and disavow my past Hugo nominations once John Scalzi and Patrick Nielsen Hayden return their past awards and do the same. And furthermore, I will forswear all future Hugo nominations for myself if both men agree to do so as well.

    Come, gentlemen, shall we not be inspired by the selfless and noble example of the late David Hartwell and allow others their moment to bask in Hugo glory?

    Why Trump will win

    It’s really quite simple, as this commenter at Althouse explained it:

    Hillary says “Vote for me because I’m a woman.”
    Bernie says “Vote for me and I’ll give you some of his.”
    Ted Cruz says “Vote for me and I’ll kick over all those rice bowls in Washington”.
    Donald Trump says “Vote for me and the emergency room at your local hospital won’t look like a bus station in rural Mexico”

    Might not be fair but I think I know who is going to win that argument.

    To this we can add: Marco Rubio says “Vote for me because I am electable as determined by the Republican establishment.”

    People want relief from pain. And the pain from losing their country to 60 million invaders is much greater than the constant Washington shenanigans that few understand anyhow.