Strong female characters

It’s always interesting, and amusing, to listen to science fiction writers debate the topic of “strong female characters”, particularly in the modern context of Princess Kung-Fu. That, of course, is the unstoppable martial art practiced solely on film, by every kick-ass female character who appears on screen.

And everyone – everyone – does it. Even those who correctly criticize the Buffies and Emma Peels do it in their own way. Consider Declan Finn describing what he presumably considers to be more realistic versions of female fighters:

Five-feet tall (really 4’11”) Goldberg is a computer nerd. She used to work for the NSA, but went over to the Secret Service to audit security, since she’s not tall enough to jump in front of Presidents. Her fights included: punching someone in the balls, and dropping low and cutting their Achilles tendons.

This reveals the fundamental problem with science fiction writers: they don’t get into fights. Oh, they are more inclined than most to get into word spats and verbal scrums, and even to engage in the proverbial handbags at dawn, but virtually none of them, of either sex, have ever punched anyone in the face, or been punched in the face.

For example, any time anyone mentions “punching someone in the balls” as an effective fighting technique, you know they have never actually seen anyone get struck in that manner in a combat situation. You see, there is this useful little substance called adrenaline that tends to fire up when people are engaged in combat of one form or another. It is why someone who is shot five times in the chest can nevertheless stagger forward and bury a machete in a policeman’s head. It is why someone can have a black belt’s sidekick ride up his extended leg, crush his balls between the heel and the pubic bone, and nevertheless continue fighting at full speed for 90 seconds without even slowing down.

And then, after the round was over, grimace, sink to his knees, and ask those who’d been watching, “did he hit me below the belt or something?” I once got my nose broken in a ring fight and didn’t even notice it. You can’t write about potentially lethal combat and ignore the effects of adrenaline. Actual conversation from my fighting days:

Vox: Why’d they stop the fight?
Alex: It’s the rule. Have to stop the bleeding.
Vox: Who’s bleeding?
Alex: You are. Like a stuck pig.

As for “dropping low” to attack someone’s Achilles tendons – plural, no less – that sounds like a wonderful way to get kicked in the face. There is a good reason wrestlers go for the waist, not directly for the legs, after all.

Seriously, no writer should even think about writing a hand-to-hand scene until he – or she – has been punched full-force in the face by a strong man and by a weak woman. Nor should he do it until he has punched both a strong man and a weak woman in the face. Better yet, exchange blows with a strong woman and a weak man too. The experience will absolutely prove educational and should suffice to illustrate how utterly absurd 99 percent of all hand-to-hand combat in film and fiction is. I mean, one might more reasonably, more convincingly, just give the woman wings and a devil’s tail, with which combination she defeats bigger, faster, stronger men by flying out of their reach, wrapping her tail around their neck, and strangling them.

Of course, even then, a sufficiently strong and alert man would simply grab her tail and bounce her face off the ground. All right, strike that, all the succubi don’t know kung fu.

Anyhow, if you would like to read a much more realistic depiction of how hand-to-hand combat in science fiction would work in any universe where F still equals MA, I suggest reading “The Amazon Gambit” from Forbidden Thoughts, set in the Quantum Mortis universe. I wrote it, in part, to illustrate the one way the women can be effectively used in combat.

However, comic readers need not worry. Alt-Hero will certainly contain female superheroines such as Dynamique, Kosmik Girl, Vespra, and La Fille Furie. And they will be lethal superhumans who kick prodigious ass, they simply will not necessarily be able to match fists with the likes of Capitán Europa, the head of the European Commission’s Global Justice Initiative, or Michael Martel, better known as Hammer.

Amazon cuts affiliate income

By reducing affiliate compensation by more than 50 percent. Independent publishers need to be aware that this is eventually going to happen to them too. KU was the original warning. Note that even a relatively small affiliate used to be able to count on making 8.5 percent on its affiliate sales, with a minimum of 6 percent. Now the standard compensation is less than half that. The publishing equivalent would be reducing ebook royalties from 70 percent to 30 percent. Peter Grant has more about this at the Mad Genius Club.

The Hitler that wasn’t

It’s rather fascinating that despite the media’s ritual anointing of a Hitler du jour, the one world leader who has thus far escaped being granted the title is the one most aggressively engaged in the pursuit of foreign expansionism, imperialism, and the pursuit of Lebensraum, and has now utilized the Hitlerian practice of expanding his personal power through plebiscites.

A narrow majority of Turks will vote “Yes” in Sunday’s referendum on changing the constitution to grant President Tayyip Erdogan sweeping new powers, two opinion polls showed on Thursday.

The April 16 vote will decide on the biggest change in Turkey’s system of governance since the modern republic’s foundation almost a century ago, potentially replacing its parliamentary system with an executive presidency.

Polling company Konda said the number of “yes” voters stood at 51.5 percent, but said its survey had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.4 percent.

“When this forecast is considered within the survey’s margin of error, a final judgement might be misleading,” Konda said in a statement.

Its survey, carried out face-to-face with 3,462 people in 30 provinces on April 7-9, showed turnout for the vote would be around 90 percent. It said the level of undecided voters had fallen to 9 percent from more than 20 percent in January and there was no evidence to indicate their preference.

On vulgarity

I am getting more than a little tired of the unending stream of vulgarity pouring out of a) some of the newer commenters and b) the usual suspects. First, my occasional use of the same does not constitute permission for you. Second, it is particularly unacceptable when directed at fellow commenters. Third, it makes me want to stop paying attention to the blog, so I can only imagine how it affects the casual readers. There is a reason I and many of the long-time commenters have increasingly disengaged from the comments; I have no interest in attempting to communicate with people who emote rather than think before they speak.

Seriously, get a grip. “TRUMP HAS CUCKED AND BETRAYED US ALL, THE END IS NIGH AND REICHSFUHRER KRISTOL REIGSN UBER ALLES!” doesn’t make you look clever, or smart, or even sane. There is not only no need for you to announce your opinion of every zig and zag of foreign policy, but the unpredictability of the God-Emperor all but guarantees that you’re going to look like a complete buffooon within days, if not hours, regardless of what you say.

On a tangential note, I note that, as I anticipated, virtually no one has acknowledged that I correctly observed, from the very start, the way in which the Syrian cruise missile attack was primarily about China and North Korea. So, next time, don’t ask me to make my predictions on this sort of thing public if I have chosen to withhold them for one reason or another. There is literally no reason for me to do so. When I get it wrong like everyone else, I hear about it for years. And when I am very nearly the only one to get it more or less right, everyone either ignores it or simply pretends it was obvious in retrospect.  Now, I’m not annoyed, I expected this, and I’m simply taking the opportunity to remind those of you who asked me to share my interpretation on the day of the missile attacks that I will not pay any heed to such requests in the future.

Anyhow, the moderators and I are going to start deleting comments containing vulgarity on sight and spamming those who refuse to moderate their language. Nor am I interested in any discussion of what words are acceptable and what are not. If you’re going to play the childish game of “let’s see how close to the line I can dance”, I’m just going to delete your comment for being tedious and immature. If your comment is nothing but an insult directed at me or someone else, it’s instant spam. And remember, these are Google comments and any spamming will affect your account across all Google products.

I don’t blog for the comments. I don’t get a rush out of seeing lots of comments. I’d much rather have five intelligent comments than 400 comments when most of them consist of idiots escalating rhetorical hostilities and talking past each other. While it’s fine to criticize, disagree, and utilize rhetoric, you’re going to have to learn how to do so without resorting to the insults and vulgarities that many of you have been using in the recent past.

There is no point in asking for clarification or trying to argue for the benefits of free speech here. The comments exist as a courtesy I extended in response to requests from my readers. If they annoy me sufficiently, I will simply turn them off and continue to blog as before. So, if you happen to want to have this particular microphone available to you, please treat it with more care and respect.

And for God’s sake, stop touching the poop! It’s not that hard. You’re not the poop police. And you’re not helping. Unless you have deletion powers, you are not part of the cleanup process, you’re part of the problem.

UPDATE: From a longtime reader:

I appreciate the vulgarity crackdown.  I had indeed been spending less
time on your site, and, especially, less time reading the comments,
because of the language used.

I had sensed as much. I probably should have done it right after the election, but better late than never.

Nationalism intensifies

As if yet another indicator were necessary, overseas adoptions are at a 35-year low:

Overseas adoptions by Americans have dipped to the lowest level in 35 years, data released on Wednesday showed. The State Department reported that it issued 5,372 visas to children who were adopted abroad or were coming to the United States to be adopted by American parents in 2016, down from 5,648 in 2015 — and a fraction of the 22,884 overseas adoptions in 2004, the peak.

There are, of course, a variety of factors involved. The economy is bad, fewer people are getting married, and married women who are not inclined to bear and raise their own children are even less inclined to raise someone else’s children.

That being said, the decline of international adoption in America is interesting in light of the celebrity fad for virtue signaling by adopting Africans; those religiously reading People magazine would almost certainly have assumed the complete opposite. First, it is a sign of rising national consciousness by other nations who don’t want their children to be taken away and raised as pseudo-Americans. And second, it is a sign that Americans are beginning to realize that many of their friends and neighbors don’t admire their cuckish virtue or generosity for giving a home to yet another invader.

About ten years ago, a straniera we knew was shocked by how she was not infrequently met with sneers and disdainful glares by Italians when she was out and about with her adopted African daughter. She found it hard to understand that they did not, on the whole, view her decision as a good thing or consider her to be a good person as a consequence. It would be understandable if this European nationalist perspective is becoming increasingly common in the USA as Americans find it harder and harder to recognize the society in which they live.

Besides, what need is there to go to Somalia to adopt Somalians anymore? You can find tens of thousands of them in Minneapolis now.

The money quote: “No children were adopted from Russia, once a major source; it shut out prospective American parents for political reasons three years ago.”

另类右派：16点 (中文)

以下为另类右派哲学思想的十六项核心点，供大家参考改善：
  1. 另类右派（又称“另类右翼”或“非主流右派”，英语为“Alternative
    Right”）是一个属于右派的政治思想，不管从美国或从欧洲所谓“右派”的意义上来讲。社会主义者不属于另类右派，进步主义者不属于另类右派，自由主义者不属于另类右派。信从共产主义、马克思主义、马克思哲学、马克思主义文化主义（即，法兰克福学派的马克思主义）或新保守主义的人一律都不属于另类右派。
  2. 另类右派是有别于美国主流保守主义运动的一种另类选择。美国主流保守主义思想名义上可以以罗素·柯克所撰的“十大保守主义原则”为思想概要，实际上其已逐步地向进步主义退化。另类右派也是有别于自由意志主义的一种另类选择。
  3. 另类右派不是一种防守的态度。它拒绝所谓“君子式的有原则性的失败”这样的消极态度。另类右派在各个方面都是具有瞻前性进攻性的哲学思想。另类右派坚信以坚忍不拔的态度取得胜利，也认为应当遵循科学、现实、文化传统并吸取历史的教训。
  4. 另类右派认为西方文明是人类成就的巅峰，并支持西方文明的三大基本支柱，即：基督教、欧洲各民族和希臘羅馬文化遗产。
  5. 另类右派是公开的、大张旗鼓的民族主义。另类右派支持各民族的民族主义，并支持所有民族以单一民族形式、未经异族侵入或移民掺杂而存在的权利。
  6. 另类右派反对全球化。另类右派反对所有致力于全球化理想或全球化目标的团体。
  7. 另类右派是反平等主义的。另类右派拒绝平等这个概念，就像拒绝麒麟和妖精的真实存在一样。换句话说，所有人平等的概念，在科学上、法律上、物质上、智力上、性别上或精神等形式上都是不存在的。
  8. 另类右派主张遵循科学方法
    (scientodific)。另类右派暂且接受通过科学方法(scientody)目前得出的结论，但同时也认为a）该等结论未来或被修正；b）科学研究行业
    (scientistry) 易受腐败侵袭；
    而且c）所谓科学共识并不是按照科学方法
    (scientody) 所达成的，而是为民主所左右的，因此科学共识该概念本身就是不科学的。
  9. 另类右派认为：身份认同（identity）
    > 文化 >
    政治。
  10. 另类右派反对一个本土民族被另一个民族所统治或主宰，尤其是发生在被统治民族的自治领土上。另类右派反对任何非本地民族通过裙带关系、部落主义或任何其他手段，来取得在社会中过度的影响力。
  11. 另类右派认为：不同民族文化
    + 近距离混杂
    = 战争。
  12. 另类右派并不在意他人对其观点的看法。
  13. 另类右派不承认国际自由贸易以及自由贸易所需要的无疆移民。本国贸易自由的益处并不证明跨国贸易自由会有益处。
  14. 另类右派认为我们需要确保白种人的存在和白种人儿童的未来。
  15. 另类右派不认为任何种族、民族、人民或人种具有总体上的优越性。每一个种族、民族、人民和人种均具有其独特的优势和弱势，应有权自主选择在本民族文化聚居地不受外来干扰地居住。
  16. 另类右派的哲学思想珍视世界各国之间的和平，反对一个民族用武力或战争将其价值观念强加给另一民族，也反对一个民族用战争、种族清洗、移民或基因同化等方式以毁灭其他民族。
总而言之：另类右派这一西方思想体系，尊崇科学、历史和现实，并相信每个民族都应该有权利独立存在，有权利为其自身利益自己治理自己的民族。

China warns Pyongyang

When reading this editorial, understand that The Global Times is essentially a foreign vehicle for the Chinese government, being published by “the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) paramount mouthpiece”, the People’s Daily.

US President Donald Trump tweeted Tuesday that “North Korea is looking for trouble. If China decides to help, that would be great. If not, we will solve the problem without them!”

North Korea’s Supreme People’s Assembly convened on Tuesday. A few days later, North Korea will mark the birth anniversary of the late leader Kim Il-sung on April 15, also known as the Day of the Sun. Pyongyang likes to launch nuclear activities as a political salute around this date. Therefore, April is widely seen as a high-risk period for new nuclear tests by North Korea.

The US aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson is headed toward the Korean Peninsula after abruptly turning back from sailing to Australia, and Trump sent a warning via his tweet. These are probably related to reports that satellite surveillance shows North Korea is likely to conduct new nuclear tests. Washington’s latest threat to Pyongyang is more credible given its just launched missile attack at an air base in Syria. The Korean Peninsula has never been so close to a military clash since the North conducted its first nuclear test in 2006.

If Pyongyang conducts its sixth nuclear test in the near future, the possibility of US military action against it will be higher than ever. Not only Washington brimming with confidence and arrogance following the missile attacks on Syria, but Trump is also willing to be regarded as a man who honors his promises.

Now the Trump team seems to have decided to solve the North Korean nuclear crisis. As the discussion runs deeper, a situation of no-solution will not be accepted. A new nuclear test or an intercontinental ballistic missile test, if conducted by Pyongyang at this time, will be a slap in the face of the US government and will intensify the confrontation between North Korea and the US.

Presumably Beijing will react strongly to Pyongyang’s new nuclear actions. China will not remain indifferent to Pyongyang’s aggravating violation of the UN Security Council (UNSC) resolution.

Translation: China is utilizing US bellicosity as an excuse to save face in Asia and use force if necessary to resolve the North Korean situation. It is unlikely that this result is an accident or was unforeseen by the President.

Mailvox: Convergence and the Presbyterian Church

A reader writes up a very informative summary of Gary North’s detailed account of how the Presbyterian Church was successfully converged over a period of 60 years.

Given how reliably organizations get captured by the left, there’s an amazing lack of curiosity about how it happens. I recently read Gary North’s 1996 book Crossed Fingers: How Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church, a rare case study of liberal takeover. North provides a detailed – at 1100 pages too detailed – case study of how the left took over the northern Presbyterian church between 1875 and 1936.

This books echoes many of the same themes of SJWs Always Lie. It’s uncanny how little things have changed, including the failures of conservatives. I’m attaching three docs: a one page summary, a writeup of lessons learned from the book, and a collection of substantial quotations from the book that pulls key points out of this monster. I thought you might be interested in other researchers who validate your SJW analysis, and am providing multiple length options depending on your interest level.

Crossed Fingers: How Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church
By Gary North / Institute for Christian Economics (September 1996)

1. The single most important cause of the liberal capture of the Presbyterian Church was the conservatives’ failure to kick out liberal heretics and impose negative sanctions while they had the chance.

2. Liberal strategies and characteristics that led to their victory:

  • Willingness to lie (they had their “fingers crossed” when swearing that they held to the Westminster Confession): “SJWs always lie”
  • Intense public calls for freedom of inquiry, tolerance, pluralism, unity while weak or assimilating power
  • Deliberate focus on institutional capture, which included the property, money, and brand prestige.
  • Long game perspective (the takeover took 60 years: 1875-1936)
  • Far superior skills at bureaucratic maneuvering, including an analog of a “code of conduct”.
  • Presence of amenable authorities (the WASP establishment, media) & outside money (esp. from John D. Rockefeller, Jr.)
  • The liberals “took care of their wounded” – anyone who suffered in the fight got a cushy job somewhere else.
  • Once they consolidated power they were willing to kick out conservative leaders like Machen.

3. Conservative strategies and characteristics that led to their failure:

  • They also had “crossed fingers” and did not themselves fully support the Westminster Confession (e.g., they rejected six day creationism). This limited their ability to call out others for heresy.
  • They were on the “wrong side of history” with slavery (i.e., took a stance of neutrality on what the Bible said about it), which weakened their moral authority, rather like modern political conservatives and the Civil Right Act.
  • Initial inability to respond compellingly to key challenges to orthodoxy: Darwinism and Higher Criticism
  • Strategy was purely defensive – nothing on offense (“surrender on the installment plan”)
  • Focused on ideas, theology and church mission, not institutions and bureaucracy, and had a very weak understanding of bureaucratic warfare.
  • Were incredibly polite, charitable, and moderate in their rhetoric – they rarely dared to directly confront heretics

4. Other lessons and implications

  • The modernists were fighting to win the war; the conservatives didn’t even understand they were in one
  • High standards people tend to lose out vs. low standards people. Key: conflict between orthodoxy and church growth mindset, stay pure but small or grow large but compromise on beliefs.
  • The more bureaucratic and complex an organization, the more vulnerable to liberal takeover (Confessional documents and hierarchical structures were perceived as strengths but were – and are – really weaknesses)
  • Confessional documents are irrelevant when faced with liars (cf: today’s US Constitutional law)
  • Presbyterian takeover pre-dated Gramsci and could not have been inspired by him
  • Presbyterian takeover pre-dated the modern political Conservative movement
  • You can’t fight the tape – the tides of history were with the liberals
  • Despite best efforts of smart but flawed conservatives, the liberals won: God preserved only a remnant and the Presbyterian church was lost
  • The winners write history; noxious liberal causes like eugenics were memory holed.

Diversity and comic sales

Jon Del Arroz looks deeper into the decline of Marvel as it relates to the comic giant’s descent into diversity:

A comic book retailer in the San Francisco Bay Area voiced his frustration, saying Marvel went from 48 percent to 25 percent of his sales. His shop and livelihood are at risk because of Marvel’s continued dedication to their shallow faux-diversity. If this type of cheap virtue signaling doesn’t work in San Francisco, what audience do they think they’re selling to?

Hearing the poor sales figures from a retailer prompted me to look into Marvel’s writers. Over a period of two weeks, I dug through the Twitter accounts of every current Marvel writer listed on marvel.com‘s new releases page, to see where they stood on politics. What I found would have been shocking, if I hadn’t already seen the extreme left-wing preaching posing as superhero adventures from their products. Even with that, the sheer lockstep and groupthink that these social media profiles display is unthinkable.

Out of 30 writers, every single one made bitter posts attacking President Trump and conservatives. There were no dissenters. Not one had a difference of opinion, not one even saw the sense in refraining from posting about politics… As a business, one would think that a company the size of Marvel would keep their customers’ demographics in mind. But as we’ve seen above, a large portion of their customer base has been told they’re not wanted. Their problem: the new, diverse crowd they desire didn’t come into comic shops to purchase their books to replace those they shunned.

I ran a Twitter search again, this time to investigate Marvel’s religious leanings. Marvel has writers who profess to be atheist, Jewish, and they even have a Muslim writer. Most writers, eager to speak out on their left-wing politics, don’t talk about their religion at all.

I did find one oddity: out of the entire group, I did not find one writer that openly professed Christianity. On the contrary, many of the writers made comments mocking Christians or the Bible. It begs the question: does Marvel hold a latent religious intolerance toward Christians? Based on this research, it would appear so.

No wonder the response to the idea of Castalia House Comics has been so strong. Marvel has completely turned its backs on most of its audience. Increasingly, it appears that disruption is the natural consequence of diversity in the corporate world.

This is what “Zero Fucks” looks like

John Scalzi goes into great detail explaining that he doesn’t care that people hate him, that only a few dozen people hate him anyhow, that it doesn’t matter that people hate him, and also, it totally doesn’t bother him at all that people hate him:

Specific, embarrassingly devoted hater and his pals:

I don’t have much time for this dude anymore, and I suspect it really bothers him. Cultivating the idea of a feud between us is a cornerstone of his publishing strategy, and asserting equivalency in our careers is how he tries to convince others he’s important. And while it’s nice every now and again to raise lots of money for charitable causes off his obsession with me, in a general sense I’ve been kind of busy. I pretty much don’t think of him unless he’s jumping up and down to get my attention, or trying to make a buck off my name. It’s a lopsided deal — he needs me, but I don’t need him for anything. My real annoyance at this point is that other folks are unintentionally doing this jerk’s desperately attention-seeking work for him, sending me updates on the latest nonsense he’s saying or doing, involving the version of me he peddles to his pals. If all y’all could resist the temptation, I’d be obliged. I don’t actually care about this dude.

“Don’t actually care” is where I mostly am with my haters these days, in fact, and I acknowledge it’s a nice place to be in. I’m blessed with work I like and people in my life I love, and the time I have now is all the time I’ll ever have. I plan to spend as much of it focusing on the things I like and people I love as I can, and rather little of it on the people who get off on hating me. Go on and hate me, dudes. It’s your karma. I have better things to do with my time.

First, SJWs always lie. And John Scalzi lies more than most. Scalzi is an insecure poser, which is why you can be certain that whatever the truth might be, it is not whatever he is saying.

Second, I never paid any attention whatsoever to John Scalzi until he began attacking me in 2005 in order to curry favor with Patrick Nielsen Hayden. I had no idea who he was. If Scalzi disappeared tomorrow, it wouldn’t bother me in the slightest. I don’t need him, I don’t want his attention, and I don’t even hate him. He’s nothing but PNH’s tool; his entire career is entirely dependent upon PNH. PNH and Tor Books are the disease, Scalzi is merely the symptom. I don’t read his blogs. I don’t read his books. I don’t read his Twitter account. I almost certainly pay less attention to him than he does to me; if nothing else, I don’t have the time.

Third, John Scalzi was so indifferent that he took the time to narrate the audiobook of a parody of SJWs Always Lie in 2015. (I found this somewhat remarkable given that I couldn’t be bothered to do the same for my own book.) This uncomfortable fact was completely swept under the table and ignored by those who found it utterly outrageous that Castalia House would dare to publish a parody of his most recent novel. Those who run with the ridiculous “envy” and “obsession” themes always skate over the fact that my responses to Scalzi are just that: responses to his little forays.

Fourth, I will always find the time to hammer John Scalzi. He is a horrible, dishonest little creature, and very nearly Plato’s Form of everything that a man should not be. If he didn’t exist, we’d have to manufacture negative examples.

Fifth, this long post indicates that Mr. Scalzi is rattled by the failure of The Collapsing Empire to break out in a manner justifying his book contract. Tor Books pushed it as hard as they could, but once more, they discovered that while you can call a midlister a “bestselling author” all you want, that’s not going to make his book a hit. The book sucks; even his fans don’t think much of it. Which is why the over/under on the contract being “renegotiated” moves from Book Four to Book Three.

From the comments:

I didn’t mention the name of my specific, embarrassingly devoted hater in the piece because it amuses me not to, but I don’t mind if you name him in the comment thread here. With that said, don’t turn your mentions of him into a two-minute hate, please. We all know he’s an awful person. Let’s not reiterate it endlessly.

So very amusing! See: First Law of SJW. What’s fascinating is the idea that their pretending not to pay attention to me is somehow “infuriating”. I didn’t pay any notice to these weird little losers in high school, what on Earth makes them think I am desperate for their attention now?