Stop! Puppy Time!

If you can get away, work at home, or have a sufficiently relaxed employer, don’t hesitate to join us at the Rabid Puppy Hugo Nomination Party, being held at Brainstorm today. The Party kicks off at 12:30 Eastern; the shortlist announcements are scheduled to start at 1 PM. Everyone is invited, so register here if you want to join the party.

Considering that we had a great time being No Awarded last August, I can guarantee that we’ll have a good time whether we sweep the whole damn thing or we are skunked. I’ve already got a very good bottle of red wine awaiting the ritual uncorking, so you may want to contemplate your own libationary strategy.

Also, if you happen to see the vote totals being reported, please write them down.


A judge worthy of the name

I am a harsh critic of the American judiciary. I think it is, structurally speaking, probably the biggest single problem in the USA today besides the immigrant invasion. But even in the morass of political corruption that is the judiciary, there are a few good men worthy of the title they bear:

Sgt. Joseph Serna of the US Army Special Forces was arrested and charged with driving under the influence in Fayetteville, North Carolina. He got probation and entered a treatment program. He had to regularly report to the court on his treatment. During one of those court appearances, he confessed to Judge Lou Olivera that he had lied about a recent urine test.

Judge Olivera was himself a veteran, having served during the Gulf War. He understood that though Serna had broken the law, he was not a criminal by nature.

But he had to do his duty, so Judge Olivera sentenced Serna to spent 24 hours in jail. Then he took off his robe and joined Serna in his cell for the full 24 hours. The Fayetteville Observer reports:

    “Where are we going, judge?” Serna asked.

    “We’re going to turn ourselves in,” Olivera said.

    “He said he was going to stay with me,” Serna said. “I couldn’t process a judge being my cellmate.

    “They take me to the cell, and I’m sitting on my bunk. And, then, in walks the judge.

And then the two veterans talked:

    Mostly, from five in the afternoon on April 13 until 6:30 a.m. the next day, the judge and the veteran talked about their respective military service, Serna’s post-traumatic stress disorder from three tours of duty in Afghanistan and how the inmate could turn around his downward spiral that had resulted in a driving-while-impaired charge and other serious traffic offenses. […]

    “We talked for hours about our families and our military service,” Olivera says. “Our dreams for us and our families, and the road to take us there.”

The judge wanted to help Serna climb out of the hole:

    “I thought about a story that I once read,” Olivera says. “It talked about a soldier with PTSD in a hole,” he says. “A family member, a therapist and a friend all throw down a rope to help the veteran suffering. Finally, a fellow veteran climbs into the hole with him.

    “The soldier suffering with PTSD asks, ‘Why are you down here?’ The fellow veteran replied, ‘I am here to climb out with you.’

 One has the responsibility to do one’s duty. That is one measure of a man. But how one does one’s duty is arguably a more significant measure.


Cargo Cult debate

One thing science fetishists can’t bear is to have their obvious ignorance of science pointed out:

Babak Golshahi ‏@bgolshahi1
I love being able to back up what I say with hard evidence, peer reviewed scientific consensus.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
50 percent of which is proven to be wrong when replication is attempted. You’re out of date.

Babak Golshahi ‏@bgolshahi1
replication of what? You got a peer reviewed piece or really any article that backs up your claim? Waiting.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
Mindlessly repeating the words “peer review” and citing “articles” shows you’re a low-IQ ignoramus.

Babak Golshahi ‏@bgolshahi1
you apologize for that or you’re blocked

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
Block away, moron. It won’t fix peer review or change the fact that you’re both stupid and ignorant.

Babak Golshahi ‏@bgolshahi1
You are blocked from following @bgolshahi1 and viewing @bgolshahi1’s Tweets.

I wish more of these morons would use Randi Harper’s anti-GG autoblocker, so I wouldn’t be subjected to their repetitive idiocy.

It is important to understand that if you’re prone to demanding “peer reviewed pieces” or shouting “logical fallacy” at people with whom you are arguing, you’re probably a midwit who doesn’t really understand what you’re talking about. In both these, and other similar cases, what we have is a person who has seen someone else win an argument successfully refuting another individual’s argument by comparing scientific evidence or identifying a specific logical fallacy being committed, and trying to imitate them without understanding what the other person was actually doing.

But if there is no genuine substance behind the demand or the identification, if you don’t have your own competing scientific evidence or you can’t point out the actual logical fallacy – and there is a massive difference between the set of flawed syllogisms and the subset of logical fallacies – then you have no business talking about such things.

The failure to cite a peer-reviewed study means nothing in the absence of competing citations. The claim of logical fallacy means nothing when the precise fallacy is not identified. If you don’t understand those things, stop embarrassing yourself by arguing with people and start reading.

Otherwise, you’re no different than the ignorant South Pacific islander building runways in the hopes that the magic sky machines will descend bearing gifts.


Nationalism rising fast

This is the first of the two election cycles I predicted beginning. So far, so anticipated:

Austria’s government was licking its wounds after the anti-immigration far-right triumphed in presidential elections, dealing a major blow to a political establishment seen by voters as out of touch and ineffectual.

According to preliminary results, Norbert Hofer of the Freedom party came a clear first with 36% of the vote in the first round of elections for the largely, but not entirely, ceremonial post of head of state.

Candidates from the two ruling centrist parties, which have effectively run Austria since the end of the second world war, failed to even make it into a runoff on 22 May, coming fourth and fifth each with 11% of the vote.

The result means that for the first time since 1945, Austria will not have a president backed by either Chancellor Werner Faymann’s Social Democrats or their centre-right coalition partners, the People’s party.

Having a president in the Habsburg dynasty’s former palace in Vienna not from either of the two main parties could shake up the traditionally staid and consensus-driven world of Austrian politics.

“This is the beginning of a new political era,” the Freedom party leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, said after what constituted the best result at federal level for the former party of the late Joerg Haider, calling it “historic”.

The Oesterreich tabloid described Hofer’s victory as a “tsunami that has turned our political landscape upside down”.

It’s very good news for everyone that the Freedom Party, AfD, the Swedish Democrats, and other nationalist parties are rising fast. At this rate, the nationalists will come to power in the second election cycle, in time to begin the necessary demographic modifications without excessive violence.


Joining forces against America

Ted Cruz demonstrates his anti-establishment bona fides by siding with John Kasich against Donald Trump:

Senator Ted Cruz and Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio have agreed to coordinate in future primary contests in a last-ditch effort to deny Donald J. Trump the Republican presidential nomination, with each candidate standing aside in certain states amid growing concerns that Mr. Trump cannot otherwise be stopped.

In a statement late Sunday night, Mr. Cruz’s campaign manager, Jeff Roe, said that the campaign would “focus its time and resources in Indiana and in turn clear the path for Governor Kasich to compete in Oregon and New Mexico.”

Minutes after Mr. Roe’s statement, the Kasich campaign put out a similar message. The Ohio governor’s chief strategist, John Weaver, said that his campaign would shift its resources to states in the West and “give the Cruz campaign a clear path in Indiana.”

Both campaigns said they expected allies and third-party groups to follow their lead, and a representative from the “super PAC” supporting Mr. Kasich confirmed late Sunday that it would not advertise in Indiana.

I very much doubt this is going to help them stop Trump. They’re operating in 2D while Trump is moving around in 3D. But it demonstrates my point about how Trump is on track to reach 1,237; his big win in New York has boosted him in Pennsylvania and California, the two states in which he needs to do well in order to go over the top.

While it’s true that Cruz hasn’t played nicely with the GOP establishment, it’s always been clear that he wants to be a part of it. Now he’s not bothering to pretend otherwise. He’s a smart guy, and he would have been a pretty good candidate several election cycles ago. But he’s still playing the game, and the time for playing the game is over.

Conservatives United Cruz Kasich. C.U.C.K.

Perfect.


The demand for social dominance

John C. Wright sees through the SJWs and their little speech-policing tactics:

A reader with the euphonious name of Ecreegan hold forth an opinion on the courtesy owed to transvestites, transgendered, and transrationals.

Sometimes there’s no polite option. Tell me, what pronoun do I use for a pre-operative male-to-female transexual? “She” is a lie. “He” is considered highly offensive, and “it” is considered beyond the pale. (I try to use names. The new name is not a lie, even if it doesn’t make any sense.)

I very strongly disagree, so much so that I cannot tell if you are making a joke.

When you say the words “considered highly offensive” I cannot imagine anyone having any right to be offended at such a thing, nor any honest man taking such offense seriously.

Highly? Really?

To the contrary, it is highly offensive even to assert that an honest man should lie like a dog, a lie no one believes and no one can believe, merely to please the arbitrary whims of some petty tyrant trying to demean your soul and rob you of dignity.

The rule in English is that males and male objects are “he”, and persons whose sex is unknown or undetermined is also “he.” One says “he or she” only in a legal document where that degree of precision overwhelms the need for good grammar. Otherwise is it an error. “They” used in a singular merits horsewhipping.

A man who cuts off his penis and has false breasts implanted is not changing his sex, that is, his biological reality, but is attempting to change his social role: he is a man who wants to be treated with the honors and titles of a wife and mother. He also suffers from profound mental illness, so much so that he cuts off parts of his body.

But since the pronoun deals with the sex and not with social roles, he has no right to be offended if he is a “he”.

It is like being offended that A is A or being offended that twice two is four. If twice two were four, then there would be four lights. There are five lights!

More to the point, it is like being offended if a prole says Oceania was allied with Eastasia last year. Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia!

Saying a he is a “he” is not what offends.

The political correction officer is playing a social dominance game with you. He is making himself to be offended with you so that you will obey him.

Precisely. The correct pronoun for both a man and an individual of indeterminate sex is “he”. This is a long-established grammatical rule and also happens to be in line with science. One no more need call an amputated man wearing a dress “a woman” than one need call a costumed man wearing a furry lupine outfit “a wolf”.

One can, of course, quite reasonably elect to indulge one’s friends if one sees fit. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with addressing a friend as “Emperor” if he happens to sincerely believe he is Napoleon. But etiquette does not demand that we automatically defer to the delusions of others.


Smarter than Scalzi

But then, you knew that. It’s not even close. The problem isn’t so much that Scalzi tweets at a sixth-grade level; one can only do so much in 140 characters, after all. It’s that he writes, and behaves, like an unpopular kid in junior high school who confuses attention for popularity.

Anyhow, Beakscore is a just a simple application based on the SMOG index, but it’s interesting to compare various commentators. Here are the scores for some familiar names:

  • 10.3 Nassim Taleb
  • 9.5 Vox Day
  • 9.5 Castalia House
  • 9.4 Ann Coulter
  • 9.2 Roosh
  • 8.9 Steve Keen
  • 8.8 Daniel Dennett
  • 8.5 Richard Dawkins
  • 8.2 Neil Gaiman
  • 8.0 Stefan Molyneux
  • 7.7 Instapundit 
  • 7.7 Patrick Nielsen Hayden
  • 7.5 Larry Correia 
  • 7.5 Paul Krugman
  • 7.4 Tor Books
  • 7.1 Milo Yiannopoulos
  • 7.0 Mike Cernovich
  • 6.4 Wil Wheaton
  • 6.3 John Scalzi 
  • 5.3 George RR Martin

Notice the pattern there? It’s not exactly what one would call surprising if you are familiar with the work of the various parties listed. The only real outlier is Milo, who speaks and writes very differently than he tweets. It’s a little surprising that Martin is so low; I’d have expected him to be in the 7 to 8 range.


SJWAL Spanish edition

Thanks to Emilio and Toni, two longtime readers who also speak Spanish, Los Guerreros de la Justicia Social Siempre Mienten: Derrotando a la Policía del Pensamiento is now available for the Spanish-speaking world. I am told there is a real need for it, as SJWs have been pulling their usual tricks in Spain, Mexico, and in the USA as well.

There is also a Spanish version of the SJW Attack Survival Guide which is available now on the right sidebar. A Portuguese version is available too, and a Portuguese translation of the entire book is in the works.

This blog is now an international community, and it’s good to see that nationalists from around the world can work together in thwarting the globalists and multiculturalists who would erase our differences, and even our nations, under the banner of la justicia social.

If you’re a Spanish speaker, I’d encourage you to review the Spanish edition, particularly on Amazon.es.


Billy Gibbons on a fellow guitar player

I thought this was fascinating, being the perspective of one great guitar player on another:

So much has been said about Prince but I do think it’s important to remember that his guitar playing was, I don’t know, just sensational. Tell me how you’d describe it.

Well, to borrow your word, sensational is about as close a description of Prince’s guitar playing as words might allow. I believe that the feeling one was left with, if afforded the luxury of actually seeing Prince perform … we’d be looking for other superlatives. Because it’s almost got to the point of defying description.

You had an interesting encounter with Prince.

It was following the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 25th anniversary celebration [in 2009]. They had a two night grand hurrah at Madison Square Garden and I was invited to perform with Jeff Beck. And following that appearance, I found myself back at the hotel and I wandered off in search of some late-night grub and my favorite 24-hour joint was shut down for unknown reasons. I tiptoed across the street to the Tiger Bar. I was just standing at the front and I was approached by a rather large gentleman and he said, ‘You’re wanted at the corner table.’ And there was Prince sitting all by his lonesome. And I gave him a brief tip of the hat and sat down and said, ‘Hey man, it’s so good to see you.’ He said, ‘It’s so good to see you. Let’s talk about guitar playing.’ I said, ‘Why not?’ And in the next two hours we really dove into the depth of his intent, interest and focus toward technique and tone. I left that evening even more mesmerized than I’d previously been, just knowing the sincerity that Prince kept toward his playing, his performing and his all-around showmanship.

You’re a little bit older, you come from Texas and I’d imagine you first learned about Prince in the early ’80s, when you were both MTV stars.

As you may remember, he began bubbling up without a lot of advance fanfare. There was just this vague knowledge of this new guy on the scene called Prince. And then, of course, we all got our world rocked when “Purple Rain” showed up at the theaters. Even today, I’m struggling to try and emulate that guitar introduction to “When Doves Cry.” It’s just a testament to his extraordinary technique.

Wait. When you say emulate — you mean you try to play it and you can’t?

I continually come back to attempting to piece together each and every one of those segments. And it’s very short. It’s not an extended solo by any means. But the way it is delivered. There’s certainly no way to write it. You’ve just got to dive in and feel it to see if you could come close.

What I find so interesting about these tributes from famous musicians is that they almost precisely echo what I’d heard from so many less well-known musicians around the Minneapolis scene in the early 1990s. Most of you probably never heard about Power of Seven, which was my short-lived effort to improve the music in the game industry, which ended up in little more than a few soundtracks for SSI and Bungie. But the Seven referred to the seven individuals originally involved, one of whom was Mike Koppelman, who engineered, mixed, and mastered Diamonds and Pearls before going on to found Bitstream Underground.

He, and others like the member of The Revolution who recorded a single with Paul Sebastian before we founded Psykosonik, always spoke about Prince and his attention to detail in awed, almost reverential tones. So, I’m not surprised to hear that even a great guitarist like Billy Gibbons was impressed by his knowledge and technique.

This is why I, and others, find it irritating when people dismiss him as being just a pop star. It’s like calling Mozart just a piano player. There is both talent and skill that goes into both musical performance and composition, and virtuosos of either are extremely rare. An individual who is a true virtuoso of both is practically a unicorn. Then throw in the voice, the multiple instruments, the engineering, the conceptual sensibilities… it’s literally unimaginable to me. I can more easily grasp Julius Caesar or Socrates.

And while one cannot reasonably expect Prince’s music to survive the test of time in the manner that Mozart’s has, one also cannot say that he did not make the most of the incredible talents he was given. Like everyone else who had anything to do with music in Minneapolis, I am absolutely itching to know what is in that vault. It’s been said for literally decades that he was putting his best stuff in there rather than let Warner Bros. have it, and said by some who are known to have actually heard a few of the tracks. And Prince being Prince, the chances are good that quite a lot of it is actually finished work, rather than bits and pieces of various song ideas.

Can you imagine if there is another Purple Rain in there? Or another two or three?


Fighting fire with fire

And doing so in a legitimate manner. Allen Davis considers blockbots and blacklists at Lew Rockwell:

“Are you, or have you ever been, a supporter of Gamergate, NotYourShield, Sad Puppies, Rabid Puppies, Men’s Rights Activists, Ron Paul, Donald Trump, White Supremacists, etc, etc etc?”

Blacklists have come a long way since the bygone days of McCarthy…. In a blog post, Vox Day suggested creating a list of confirmed SJWs, and his blog readers set about to create it.  Within a few hours, SJWList.com was being populated by a staff of volunteers.

Being added to SJWList has very specific criteria; the person in question needs to be “…on the record supporting censorship of some kind (no platforming, government censorship, or disemploying people).”  SJWList is structured as a Wiki, so each individual listed has their own page, linked to their statements and actions and thereby justifying their inclusion.

Criticism of SJWList has been vocal, as might be expected. Reddit suspended @TheRalph’s account for simply posting a link to SJWList.com.  Accusations have ranged from “building a list of people to harass” to “”sinking to their level” to “becoming SJW by adopting their own tactics.” 

The crew and supporters of SJWList, however, view it as more of a response to SJW tactics, an entirely acceptable escalation in the “arms race” that is the ongoing culture war.  As Brandon Eich, Tim Hunt, and many others can all attest, the social justice warriors have declared “track what they say or do and get them fired for it” a valid tactic. 

If one side in a war uses poison gas, while the other side refuses to “stoop to that level,” then they will cheerfully be the moral, upright, and dead, losers of the war.  The only way to convince the first side to stop using poison gas is to retaliate in kind.

He’s absolutely right. As Tom Kratman has pointed out, reprisals have usually been considered a legitimate and justified response to both escalations and even war crimes.

Frits Kalshoven writes about reprisals: When a belligerent party is hurt by conduct on the part of its adversary that it regards as a grave breach or systematic encroachment of the laws of armed conflict, one possibility is to retaliate by means of an action that itself violates the same body of law. While recourse to such retaliatory action can be arbitrary and in total disregard of any constraints, rules of customary law have developed in the past that provide the limits within which retaliation could be regarded as a legitimate reprisal. The main elements of this customary “right of reprisal” are: subsidiarity (failure of all other available means), notice (formal warning of the planned action), proportionality (the damage and suffering inflicted on the adverse party not to exceed the level of damage and suffering resulting from its unlawful conduct), temporary character (termination of the reprisal when the adversary stops violating the law).

As can be seen in the Davis article, which notes the difference between the SJW-created blockbot and the SJW List, even if one considers the list to be an expose rather than a hiring guide, the SJW List still fits all four limits of a legitimate reprisal: subsidiarity, notice, proportionality, and temporary character.

I have repeatedly warned SJWs that every tactic they utilize will be utilized against them. And since they have not only declared people’s employment to be fair game, but repeatedly acted in attempts to disemploy everyone from police officers to programmers, from students to scientists, it is entirely legitimate to target their jobs and their careers.

Indeed, the mere fact of being openly sympathetic to any social justice cause should now be sufficient to give serious pause to anyone contemplating any form of a relationship, however fleeting, with an SJW.

When
a belligerent party is hurt by conduct on the part of its adversary
that it regards as a grave breach or systematic encroachment of the laws
of armed conflict, one possibility is to retaliate by means of an
action that itself violates the same body of law. While recourse to such
retaliatory action can be arbitrary and in total disregard of any
constraints, rules of customary law have developed in the past that
provide the limits within which retaliation could be regarded as a
legitimate reprisal. The main elements of this customary “right of
reprisal” are: subsidiarity (failure of all other available means),
notice (formal warning of the planned action), proportionality (the
damage and suffering inflicted on the adverse party not to exceed the
level of damage and suffering resulting from its unlawful conduct),
temporary character (termination of the reprisal when the adversary
stops violating the law). – See more at:
http://www.crimesofwar.org/a-z-guide/reprisal/#sthash.Hfd61ZIT.dpuf
When
a belligerent party is hurt by conduct on the part of its adversary
that it regards as a grave breach or systematic encroachment of the laws
of armed conflict, one possibility is to retaliate by means of an
action that itself violates the same body of law. While recourse to such
retaliatory action can be arbitrary and in total disregard of any
constraints, rules of customary law have developed in the past that
provide the limits within which retaliation could be regarded as a
legitimate reprisal. The main elements of this customary “right of
reprisal” are: subsidiarity (failure of all other available means),
notice (formal warning of the planned action), proportionality (the
damage and suffering inflicted on the adverse party not to exceed the
level of damage and suffering resulting from its unlawful conduct),
temporary character (termination of the reprisal when the adversary
stops violating the law). – See more at:
http://www.crimesofwar.org/a-z-guide/reprisal/#sthash.Hfd61ZIT.dpuf