Category: Uncategorized

The graveyard of empires strikes again

How, exactly, is this failure to win in Afghanistan even remotely surprising, considering the past failures of the British and Soviet empires there?

Taliban outlast 14 years of U.S. combat in Afghanistan

The sudden killings of six American service members on a foot patrol by a suicide bomber this week is a graphic message back home that the Taliban are durable, able to launch a number of coordinated attacks in recent months across Afghanistan 14 years after the U.S. invasion.

A Pentagon report calls the security situation “fragile” and writes of the Taliban’s “resilience throughout the second half of the year.”

Perhaps they are unaware of our superior technology? Or perhaps we simply aren’t trying hard enough. Here is the thing. If you can’t win in nearly four times the amount of time it took to force both Japan and Nazi Germany to surrender, you can’t win, period.

So stop already. Declare victory if you must, even if no one will believe it. But stop!

You don’t say

Chaos Horizon provides additional evidence of how the SF-SJWs guide their bloc vote:

A few weeks ago, the 2015 Tor.com Reviewers’ Choice list came out. Over the past several years, this has been an important list to track for several reasons. First, it gathers recommendations from 11 Tor.com critics, making it a collated list of its own. Second, it has been fairly well synced up to the Hugos and Nebulas, at least before the campaigning of last year. In 2013, they recommended Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice three times; it swept the Hugo and Nebula. Last year, Goblin Emperor was recommended 3 times; it scores Hugo and Nebula noms and that could very well have won the Hugo if not for the Puppies.

Tor Books has been an award-chasing publisher for decades. That fact that the Puppies have risen up to stop them from dominating the awards every year is why they changed the rules with E Pluribus Hugo. Patrick Nielsen Hayden and his little coterie calculated that as long as they can guarantee themselves a single nomination per category, they can muster enough muscle to win at the final round.

What Puppykickers quite willfully fail to understand is that in 2015, the Puppies, even the Rabid Puppies, engaged in less bloc-voting, in percentage terms, in 2015 than the SJWs did. In the past, the Tor-led SJWs didn’t need to publish public lists because it was all a whisper campaign among a few dozen people; you could see references to it in every “I haven’t read X yet, but I’m voting for it because I hear….” statement. You could also see the Nebula logrolling take place in the SFWA NAR every year, until it was hidden from the public; to Cat Rambo’s credit, she has apparently made public what, if I recall correctly, John Scalzi was responsible for hiding.

Table 1: Correlation Between Top 6 (and Ties) of the 2014 Nebula Suggested Reading List and the Eventual 2014 Nebula Nominees

Novel: 4 out of 6, 67.7%
Novella: 6 out of 6, 100%
Novelette: 5 out of 6, 83.3%
Short Story: 6 out of 7, 85.7%

Total: 21/25, 84%

The Tor.com Reviewers’ Choice has reinforced, and to a certain extent supplanted, the Tor whispering campaign; based on the way in which reviewers tend to chase the crowd, we can anticipate that the novels the SJWs will be pushing for the award season include:

Uprooted by Naomi Novik (Del Rey)
Ancillary Mercy by Anne Leckie (Orbit)
Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear (Tor)
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)

It’s all women, as one would expect, but surprisingly light on Tor-published books. One would assume the fifth book would be The Dark Forest, the sequel to The Three Body Problem, but there is very, very little SJW buzz about it. Perhaps the SJWs finally figured out that Cixin Liu is a man. Or perhaps it is perceived to have been tainted by the Puppies playing kingmaker last year. Who knows? These are not rational people.

We now also know why John Scalzi very publicly counted himself out in 2015; unlike last year, he is aware that neither Tor nor the SJWs are pushing his latest mediocrity for any awards. No doubt he’s waiting for EPH, when Tor can again guarantee him a spot to make up for his declining popular support.

Now let’s go and see what the top novels are in the 2015 SFWA Suggested Reading List. And note that I did not see these until AFTER reaching my conclusions based on the Tor.com reviewers’ choices.

21     Uprooted     Novik, Naomi     Del Rey
17     The Grace of Kings     Liu, Ken     Saga Press 
16     Karen Memory     Bear, Elizabeth     Tor Books
15     Updraft     Wilde, Fran     Tor Books   
14     The Traitor Baru Cormorant   Dickinson, Seth  Tor Books
12     Ancillary Mercy     Leckie, Ann     Orbit
11     The Fifth Season     Jemisin, N. K.     Orbit   

Interesting, is it not? All four novels identified are there. After looking into the three previously unmentioned novels, I think it’s likely that Seth Dickenson’s debut novel will turn out to be the book that Tor is pushing in 2015. They badly need a new star now that Scalzi is running out of steam and they lost the HALO books; based on this review, Dickenson certainly appears to understand the Tor Game: “While I enjoyed The Traitor Baru Cormorant, and will read the second
book in the series when it arrives, I felt at times I was being giving a
sociology lecture by someone steeped in women’s and LBGT studies and
political economy.”

Seth Dickinson, we are told, “is the author of THE TRAITOR BARU CORMORANT and more than
a dozen short stories. During his time in the social sciences, he
worked on cocoa farming in Ghana, political rumor control, and
simulations built to study racial bias in police shootings. He wrote
much of the lore and flavor for Bungie Studios’ smash hit DESTINY. If he
were an animal, he would be a cockatoo.”

Yeah, about that… “Destiny’s initial release was met with a chorus of ‘meh’.  It
wasn’t a bad game, but it was hampered by a damp squib of a main
storyline.”

In any event, Mr. Dickenson sounds like an ideal standard bearer for Tor Books for the next few years. Regardless, I won’t be reading The Traitor Baru Cormorant, because BOYCOTT TOR BOOKS.

The true lesson of Star Wars

Markku helpfully summarizes the Star Wars Saga:

The plot so far:
-Empire builds a Death Star
-Empire builds a bigger Death Star
And now… Wait for it…
-Empire builds EVEN bigger Death Star

And
the movie knows how silly this is. When the rebels hear, they basically
go “Oh come on, not this shit again? *sigh* Ooooh-kay. Where’s the
shield generators? There. Where’s the weak spot? There. Ok, guys, let’s
go blow this up.

Now, it’s really nice that the movie is
forthright about how much the central plot element sucks, but I wonder
if the alternative occurred to anyone, to make it NOT suck and not have
to apologize for it.

That’s the real weakness of the movie.

The third one burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one will stay up! And that’s the true lesson of Star Wars, kids, just keep building bigger and better Death Stars until one finally survives the arduous construction and beta testing process and you rule the galaxy.

Reliable in what regard?

Jonathan Haidt considers whether an entirely biased social science is capable of reliability:

Truth is a process, not just an end-state. The Righteous Mind was about the obstacles to that process — confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, tribalism, and the worship of sacred values. Given the many ways that our moral psychology warps our reasoning, it’s a wonder we’ve gotten as far as we have, as a species. That’s what’s so brilliant about science: it is a way of putting people together so that they challenge each other and cancel out each others’ confirmation biases and tribal commitments. The truth emerges from the interaction of flawed individuals.

But something alarming has happened to the academy since the 1990s: it has been transformed from an institution that leans to the left, which is not a big problem, into an institution that is entirely on the left, which is a very big problem.

Nowadays there are NO conservatives or libertarians in most academic departments in the humanities and social sciences. The academy has been so focused on attaining diversity by race and gender (which are valuable) that it has created a hostile climate for people who think differently. The American Academy has become a politically orthodox and quasi-religious institution. When everyone shares the same politics and prejudices, the disconfirmation process breaks down. Political orthodoxy is particularly dangerous for the social sciences, which grapple with so many controversial topics (such as race, racism, gender, poverty, immigration, politics, and climate science). America needs innovative and trustworthy research on all these topics, but can a social science that lacks viewpoint diversity produce reliable findings?

Based on the evidence, the answer is yes, as a social science that lacks viewpoint diversity produces findings that are reliably insane. At this point, the term “social science” has become an oxymoron akin to “military intelligence” or “new Star Wars movie”.

US military vs the CIA

To say these reports of the US military taking one side and the CIA taking the other could have explosive repercussions would be putting it mildly:

The military’s resistance dates back to the summer of 2013, when a highly classified assessment, put together by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then led by General Martin Dempsey, forecast that the fall of the Assad regime would lead to chaos and, potentially, to Syria’s takeover by jihadi extremists, much as was then happening in Libya. A former senior adviser to the Joint Chiefs told me that the document was an ‘all-source’ appraisal, drawing on information from signals, satellite and human intelligence, and took a dim view of the Obama administration’s insistence on continuing to finance and arm the so-called moderate rebel groups. By then, the CIA had been conspiring for more than a year with allies in the UK, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to ship guns and goods – to be used for the overthrow of Assad – from Libya, via Turkey, into Syria. The new intelligence estimate singled out Turkey as a major impediment to Obama’s Syria policy. The document showed, the adviser said, ‘that what was started as a covert US programme to arm and support the moderate rebels fighting Assad had been co-opted by Turkey, and had morphed into an across-the-board technical, arms and logistical programme for all of the opposition, including Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State.

Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, director of the DIA between 2012 and 2014, confirmed that his agency had sent a constant stream of classified warnings to the civilian leadership about the dire consequences of toppling Assad. The jihadists, he said, were in control of the opposition. Turkey wasn’t doing enough to stop the smuggling of foreign fighters and weapons across the border. ‘If the American public saw the intelligence we were producing daily, at the most sensitive level, they would go ballistic,’ Flynn told me. ‘We understood Isis’s long-term strategy and its campaign plans, and we also discussed the fact that Turkey was looking the other way when it came to the growth of the Islamic State inside Syria.

Our policy of arming the opposition to Assad was unsuccessful and actually having a negative impact,’ the former JCS adviser said. ‘The Joint Chiefs believed that Assad should not be replaced by fundamentalists. The administration’s policy was contradictory. They wanted Assad to go but the opposition was dominated by extremists. So who was going to replace him? To say Assad’s got to go is fine, but if you follow that through – therefore anyone is better. It’s the “anybody else is better” issue that the JCS had with Obama’s policy.’ The Joint Chiefs felt that a direct challenge to Obama’s policy would have ‘had a zero chance of success’. So in the autumn of 2013 they decided to take steps against the extremists without going through political channels, by providing US intelligence to the militaries of other nations, on the understanding that it would be passed on to the Syrian army and used against the common enemy, Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State.

Once the flow of US intelligence began, Germany, Israel and Russia started passing on information about the whereabouts and intent of radical jihadist groups to the Syrian army; in return, Syria provided information about its own capabilities and intentions. There was no direct contact between the US and the Syrian military; instead, the adviser said, ‘we provided the information – including long-range analyses on Syria’s future put together by contractors or one of our war colleges – and these countries could do with it what they chose, including sharing it with Assad. We were saying to the Germans and the others: “Here’s some information that’s pretty interesting and our interest is mutual.” End of conversation.

The Joint Chiefs let it be known that in return the US would require four things: Assad must restrain Hizbullah from attacking Israel; he must renew the stalled negotiations with Israel to reach a settlement on the Golan Heights; he must agree to accept Russian and other outside military advisers; and he must commit to holding open elections after the war with a wide range of factions included.

Settle down, ladies

La, such a catfight! It’s always a bit amusing to see when a disagreement here moves to rhetorical metargument, where instead of arguing about the actual point of disputation, the argument is transformed into who can generate more feelbads in the other side.

It is readily apparent that “you’re arguing like an SJW” has become the new “that’s a logical fallacy”, pseudo-dialectic that is both rhetorical and ineptly applied. It’s not quite as irritating, of course, as SJW is a more recent and less perfectly defined term; it used to make my teeth itch to see people use “logical fallacy” as a synonym for “statement with which I disagree”.

I stomped that inept rhetorical device out by the simple tactic of always asking the individual a single question: what was the logical fallacy? Was it the Undistributed Middle? Denying the Antecedent? Ignoratio elenchi? The fact that they could neither identify nor even describe the “fallacy” they had decried usually sufficed to teach them their error in a sufficiently embarrassing way to prevent them from again resorting to the rhetorical tactic.

Now, who is “arguing like an SJW?” Neither “the new Star Wars is a great movie everyone should see” nor “the new SJW Wars sucks and I wish I hadn’t seen it” crowd has, as far as I can tell, lied. Neither side has decried the other’s right to hold its opinion, or made any attempt to shun, discredit, or disemploy the other. Neither side has attempted to claim that the other side is intrinsically immoral, racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or bigoted.

Both sides have indulged heavily in rhetoric, but while SJWs are limited to rhetorical communication, so are most non-SJWs.

So, it’s simply not true that anyone is “arguing like an SJW”. And the fact that someone could imagine the other side doing so is not reflective of anything but the individual’s own imagination. I could imagine that JJ Abrams might one day make a movie that I want to see, but that does not indicate that he has actually done so, or that he will do so in the future.

I knew I wouldn’t bother seeing the Disney movies as soon as I learned he was the director. Mr. Abrams has had a long, distinguished, and successful career in Hollywood, during which he has not made a single movie or television show that interested or entertained me in the slightest. Considering that I saw one of his Star Trek movies when it was on TV one night, I was not surprised to learn that he has delivered what is essentially an repetitive remake of one of its predecessors. He may be a master of lens flare, what he is is not is an original story teller.

And to turn the old saying on its head, while history rhymes, it does not repeat. The absurdity of what Abrams has produced, from a story perspective, can perhaps be best understood if one applied his storytelling technique to a hypothetical remake of Lord of the Rings.

Imagine the Shire. Imagine a party, not a birthday party, but a 50th wedding anniversary for Sam and Rosie Gamgee. In the midst of the party, they disappear, and leave behind them a mysterious piece of jewelry for their daughter, Frodette Gamgee. Then, one day, a grey-bearded, dark-skinned stranger appears; it is Gandhi the black dwarf, warning Frodette that it is a shard of Morgoth Bauglir’s iron crown, in which the fallen Ainur had imbued with his immortal essence. The shard had escaped notice in the War for the Ring, but now that Sauron and the One Ring are gone, it is the key to ruling Middle Earth.

A new power, an evil power, an invisible power has risen in the East, and the King of Gondor, Aragorn’s son Sarugorn, has been acting strangely of late. Frodette must bring the iron shard to Aglarond, where the King of the Glittering Caves will know what do… but beware, the Knight Riders of the Invisible Empire are hunting for it!

Personally, the only movie review in which I am genuinely interested in is Mr. John C. Wright’s. Those who have read Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth
 will understand why.

Fighter Verse 5

Fighter Verses Songs: Set 5 (English Standard Version) is comprised of word-for-word Bible passages (English Standard Version) set to music. These passages are specifically selected to help believers fight the fight of faith. The Fighter VersesTM Songs also coordinate with the five-year Fighter VersesTM Bible memory program from Children Desiring God.

This CD includes 33 songs (over an hour of music) from important and beloved Bible passages from 19 books of the Bible. The songs were creatively written and recorded to make Scripture memorization easy and fun.

Musical styles include folk, a cappella, jazz, blue grass, pop, gospel and family songs. Tunes are easy to learn, fun for kids and enjoyable to listen to on repeat.

The songs include passages from Romans 8 (Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?), Psalm 84 (A day in your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere), Numbers 23 (God is not man that he should lie), John 8 (If you abide in my word), and all of Psalm 34. Your children will memorize scripture without even trying-and so will you! Companion CDs for Sets 1, 3 and 4 are also available, as is the Extended Set 5 CD (the Sermon on the Mount).

The Farce Awakens

A reader posts a scathing review of the new SJW Wars episode at Alpha Game:

You’ll be glad you didn’t see Star Wars VII: The Farce Awakens. The glaring questions it begs are projections of the female imperative. Darth Vader, Luke, Kylo Ren, Obi Wan Kenobi, and all other force using experts in any previous Star Wars story, needed training based on years of apprenticeship with a 24/7 mentor to master the force. The entire premise of Jedi powers, like all martial skills, is that they must being “learned” and they develop over time with practice. Our heroine Rey, hinted heavily as being Luke’s daughter, instantly and without training or foreknowledge gets abilities with the force that took all other Jedi, Sith, decades to develop. So with no Jedi’s around, how does she even know the force can control weak-minded storm troopers, much less use the old “you don’t need to see his papers” shtick.

There is more, and none of it is good. The usual spoiler warnings apply, although the review doesn’t so much contain spoilers as it calls into question the core conceit of the film.

It occurs to me that there is probably a market for books, and even films, that “continue” the story of SJW-infested properties in a traditionalist manner. What should the Star Wars prequels have looked like? How should the post-Jedi story actually proceeded?

I shall have to think on this further… about Star Lords battling for power in a galaxy far, far away.

You’re not stupid, you’re just… inefficient

It should be fun to watch all the blank-slatists doing 180s from claiming that intelligence has absolutely no genetic foundation to claiming that everyone can be maximally intelligent regardless of their genes thanks to SCIENCE, which, as we are reliably informed, they f*%*#(! love:

Genes which make people intelligent have been discovered and scientists believe they could be manipulated to boost brain power.

Researchers have believed for some time that intellect is inherited with studies suggesting that up to 75 per cent of IQ is genetic, and the rest down to environmental factors such as schooling and friendship groups.

But until now, nobody has been able to pin-point exactly which genes are responsible for better memory, attention, processing speed or reasoning skills.

Now Imperial College London has found that two networks of genes determine whether people are intelligent or not-so-bright.

They liken the gene network to a football team. When all the players are in the right positions, the brain appears to function optimally, leading to clarity of thought and what we think of as quickness or cleverness.

However when the genes are mutated or in the wrong order, it can lead to dullness of thinking, or even serious cognitive impairments.

Scientists believe that there must be a ‘master switch’ regulating the networks and if they could find it, they could ‘switch on’ intelligence for everyone.

There must be? Or is it merely that they desperately want there to be one? Regardless, that is my new favorite insult that will reliably go over the target’s head: it appears your cognitive network is remarkably inefficient.

This actually makes sense, though, as one of the chief differences I notice between the highly intelligent and the moderately intelligent is speed of processing. As Ender once described a young mathematical genius of our acquaintance, some take the slow, winding path to the mountain peak, some climb straight up, and then there are those few who can simply fire up their jet pack and fly right to the top.

20 Million Views for 2015

Just passed the number last weekend. I’ll have a full report early in 2016. But still: 20 million
views. It doesn’t suck. Thank you.

You may now throw your yellow flag: Unsportsmanlike conduct, 15 yards, taunting.

In other news, it isn’t easy being a Supreme Dark Lord at Christmas time. Forget all the various festivals and invitations from cringing inferiors too frightened to not invite one to their tedious celebrations, the real problem this year is that my Ice Princess wants a freaking cheetah as a companion for her puppy.

Because having four large beasts underfoot clearly isn’t enough. Well, I suppose it could be worse. She might have asked for a pair of matching polar bears or a narwhal. Whatever happened to a nice, simple necklace of gilded SJW ears, anyway?

UPDATE: Dance party makes Waco go away!

John Scalzi @scalzi
Also muting 27 keywords, mostly Twitter handles I’d already muted, so I don’t have to see jerks sucking up to other jerks by insulting me.

If you don’t see it, you can pretend it isn’t happening. You were right back in 2005, Johnny. There is a LOT more candy in me. An infinite amount. What a pity you don’t like the taste of it anymore.