Social justice convergence at the bookstore

Ladies and gentlemen, it appears we have a new tactic at our disposal:

I’ve talked to a couple of book store owners in Toronto and someone is sending out Jim Hines roundup of the SP/RP affair. As a result, they are stopping making orders for Correia, Wright, Torgersen, Williamson and others of the worst broadcasters who have supported homophobic statements. I would assume the originator is part of Toronto’s gay community (which was oddly intertwined for years when Baka Books and the GLAAD bookstore were next door). It’s only the independents that I’ve heard so far, but if it hits Book City or Indigo, that could be a big repercussion. – Dexfarkin on January 2, 2016 at 7:59 pm

Remember this when they start crying about how morally reprehensible it is that we are daring to nominate books for awards and rate books on Goodreads.

Capital-F Fandom, on the other hand, is actively trying to destroy the careers of some of the most popular authors in science fiction and fantasy. Apparently it’s not enough that they publicly rejected anyone and everyone connected with Baen Books at Worldcon last year, they want to make sure that Baen books are not sold in any bookstores either.

If you live in Toronto, please find out which independent bookstores have done this and let me know.

A reaction to federal overreach

A family militia has taken over a federal wildlife building in Oregon.

The Mandate of Heaven has clearly been lost. Many, if not most, Americans no longer support the federal government, for a very wide variety of reasons.

This particular action is unlikely to be a successful challenge to federal authority, but it is even less likely to be the last. And as we saw in the case of the Soviet Union, all it takes is a single successful one before the whole system collapses.

A message from the Hammond family can be read on Oathkeepers. A more detailed account of events can be found here.

Secularism is not constitutional

Justice Scalia calls out those who would suppress Christianity in the USA:

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said Saturday the idea of religious neutrality is not grounded in the country’s constitutional traditions and that God has been good to the U.S. exactly because Americans honor him.

Scalia was speaking at a Catholic high school in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, Louisiana. Scalia, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986 is the court’s longest serving justice. He has consistently been one of the court’s more conservative members.

He told the audience at Archbishop Rummel High School that there is “no place” in the country’s constitutional traditions for the idea that the state must be neutral between religion and its absence.

“To tell you the truth there is no place for that in our constitutional tradition. Where did that come from?” he said. “To be sure, you can’t favor one denomination over another but can’t favor religion over non-religion?”

He also said there is “nothing wrong” with the idea of presidents and others invoking God in speeches. He said God has been good to America because Americans have honored him.

Scalia said during the Sept. 11 attacks he was in Rome at a conference. The next morning, after a speech by President George W. Bush in which he invoked God and asked for his blessing, Scalia said many of the other judges approached him and said they wished their presidents or prime ministers would do the same.

“God has been very good to us. That we won the revolution was extraordinary. The Battle of Midway was extraordinary. I think one of the reasons God has been good to us is that we have done him honor. Unlike the other countries of the world that do not even invoke his name we do him honor. In presidential addresses, in Thanksgiving proclamations and in many other ways,” Scalia said.

“There is nothing wrong with that and do not let anybody tell you that there is anything wrong with that,” he added.

Moreover, the idea that Congress shall make no law “respecting an establishment of religion” does not bar the several States, or the executive branch, from doing as it likes with regards to any religion. The fact that various courts have interpreted this as meaning that Christian football players cannot pray before a football game doesn’t mean that it actually does mean that, it merely means that Christians should use their weight of numbers to do whatever they please.

The public is under no moral obligation to obey the courts. Law that is invented out of thin air can be justly ignored. Whether it can be safely ignored, of course, is another question.

They don’t like comments

Lis Carey apparently doesn’t like comments on her reviews.

this may explain a recent comment on one of my reviews of last year’s Hugo nominees–and means maybe I can expect more. (sad face)

Even I occasionally forget how fragile these psychologically decrepit specimens are. Anyhow, it’s a good reminder to ALWAYS USE RHETORIC on them. They’re vulnerable to it; they can’t take it. That’s why they resort to it even when it doesn’t make sense in the context of a discussion, because they are trying to make you feel the emotional pain that they feel whenever they are criticized.

Remember, SJWs always project.

They don’t have the numbers to do much to the awards, but if someone has the time and energy it might not be a bad idea to keep an eye on other activities, if they’re going after reviewers. Individual reviewers are a lot more vulnerable to malicious actions and I find it hard to celebrate Rabid activity in that area even if the continued lack of impact on the awards results next year proves something.

“Vulnerable” the Lacedaemonians said.

Just remember to play by the rules; you cannot criticize the author, only the book. You cannot criticize the reviewer, only the review.

In other SF-SJW news, Rape Rape has run into writer’s block now that he can’t reasonably expect to get away with writing one rape every twenty pages. That, or whining about the Rabid Puppies is cutting into the Dorito-eating binges with which he powers his writing.

‘THE WINDS OF WINTER is not finished. You’re disappointed, and you’re not alone. My editors and publishers are disappointed, HBO is disappointed, my agents and foreign publishers and translators are disappointed… but no one could possibly be more disappointed than me.

‘For months now I have wanted nothing so much as to be able to say, ‘I have completed and delivered THE WINDS OF WINTER’ on or before the last day of 2015. But the book’s not done.’

I’m not disappointed. I’m laughing at the fat bastard. It should be amusing to see who will push their next book into 2018 first, Rape Rape or McRapey.

PNH’s assault parakeet

Scott Lynch, whose lips have been firmly attached to Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s posterior for over a decade now, is speaking out for the Macmillan-silenced Tor Books senior editor in falsely accusing John C. Wright.

This was especially frustrating in the wake of the 2015 World Science Fiction Convention, after which the ponderously self-important blowhard John C. Wright publicly accused veteran editor and lifelong fan Patrick Nielsen Hayden of both assaulting Wright’s wife and masterminding the long-term “corruption” of the Hugo Awards, to which the SF/F field largely replied: “Meh.” Now, some of that is certainly due to Wright’s tireless self-marginalization and frothing bigotry, but regardless, I think Patrick deserved better of his friends and colleagues. He deserved to have someone stand up and state plainly what he could not– that John C. Wright talks a big game about truth and courage, but that he is demonstrably full of shit. 

The only individual here who is completely full of shit is the habitually vulgar Scott Lynch. Wright was telling the truth about Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s unprofessional and inappropriate verbal attack on Mr. Wright’s wife, and he is also telling the truth about PNH’s involvement in corrupting the Hugo Awards. No one stood up and defended PNH because they knew that Wright was telling the truth: PNH is a hot-tempered, unprofessional, and literally uneducated awards whore.

I know it too. I have had direct, personal conversations with a senior executive at an SF publishing house who confirmed that Patrick Nielsen Hayden is a shameless award-chaser who was finally persuaded to finally step back and recuse himself one year so that a perennial second-placer could have a chance to win an award, before promptly putting himself forward again in order to chase more awards.

I don’t know if PNH’s awards-whoring is due to his shame at being one of the very few without a high school degree in a highly literate field; perhaps he thinks collecting awards will somehow compensate for his inferiority complex or perhaps he simply requires external approval for his efforts. Whatever the reason, the simple fact is that PNH and the little coterie of authors around him have connived, pimped, and collaborated to manipulate the Hugo Awards process on their own behalf for well over a decade. This isn’t up for debate. It’s the recent history of the Hugo Awards.

In fact, the ONLY reason that two different Best Editor awards exist in the first place is because PNH was whining and crying to anyone who would listen about the fact that he kept losing out to short form editors like Gardner Dozois. And no sooner did the Puppies knock him out of contention in 2015 than his site became the center of efforts to change the rules so that PNH would be able to reliably nominate himself for Best Editor (Long Form) again.

Wright makes these points clear over and over again on his own time, and the fact that he’s a bigoted goofball is hardly a state secret. What is important is that nothing he’s tried to push about the Hugo Awards or about Patrick Nielsen Hayden has any scintilla of truth to it, and anyone who tries to tell you differently in the coming months is either a liar or a water carrier for a depressingly stupid conspiracy theory spun by liars.

It’s amusing to see Lynch talk about what isn’t a state secret, considering what he obviously doesn’t know about PNH. Scott Lynch clearly doesn’t know a damn thing about any of this. He wasn’t there at the time that Patrick Nielsen Hayden verbally attacked Mrs. Wright and he isn’t sufficiently well connected in publishing circles to know the truth about what an insecure little awards whore PNH is.

In a post to his own weblog, Scalzi expresses regret that I personally didn’t make the “Best Professional Editor” ballot, despite the fact that I acquired three out of the five Best Novel nominees and personally shepherded two of them to publication. This is generous of John, and I wouldn’t have declined the nomination, but in fact as every book editor in our field knows, while the Best Professional Hugo is regularly awarded to high-profile magazine editors and anthologists, it only goes to book editors if we die. It’s for this reason that there’s a pending proposal to split the editorial award into “long form” and “short form” categories; whether this will be ratified by this year’s Worldcon Business Meeting is anyone’s guess.

How generous of John indeed! Fortunately, PNH was able to repay that generosity at Macmillan’s expense. Notice that PNH doesn’t see fit to mention mention that he was the co-sponsor of the new award.

I sought out Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s support for the Editor’s split and brought him into the fold; I needed a prominent editor to co-sponsor the amendment or it would never have been taken seriously by the Business Meeting.
– Chris Barkley

Both Mr. and Mrs. Wright were published by Tor Books, and they know the same thing I do as a result of my conversations with the publishing executive. PNH was colluding and conspiring and campaigning for awards long before the Sad Puppies entered the picture, and long-time industry professionals know it.

In any event, the fact that Macmillan still hasn’t responded to the complaints about PNH’s Code of Conduct violation means that it is time to start requesting responses from them again. And if they don’t respond to his unprovoked and unprofessional attack on a woman of Jewish descent, then the matter will be brought to the employment authorities.

McRapey’s take: “What it looks like when one writer calls another writer onto the carpet, and then sets the carpet on fire…. Seriously, I think I’m just gonna spend my day eating ice cream and
figuring out what part of science fiction I’m totes ruining next.”

Well, we already knew he’s not going to spend it writing….

The least of the three

I was rating books on Goodreads today, when it occurred to me why I have never liked The Return of the King as much as either of the two books that preceded it. It is a very good work of fantasy, and it is a satisfactory ending to the trilogy – which was written as a single book – but as one of the three volumes, it is the weakest link.

I read The Lord of the Rings in a somewhat unusual manner. I was at an overnight church lock-in, and I read about thirty pages of a book that someone else had brought. It was fascinated and really leaped right into the action, with someone named Boromir bravely battling some orcs as he defended two little guys with weird names.

Sadly, I couldn’t convince my friend to let me take the book with me the next day, but I begged my mother to take me to the library first thing after school. She went one better and picked up the books from there while I was at school, and after I sorted out my confusion concerning which book actually came first, I devoured The Fellowship of the Ring that afternoon and evening, and the rest of the trilogy, followed by The Hobbit, that week.

It was already December, and that Christmas I received a gold boxed set of white paperbacks that I read and re-read until they fell apart. I now have a beautiful red leather set with a matching green leather Hobbit that Big Chilly and the White Buffalo gave me for my birthday one year.

But as much as I loved the books, I noticed that when I re-read them, I seldom read The Return of the King cover-to-cover. I usually skipped ahead once Frodo and Sam reached the swamps. And what I realized today is that in addition to the drudgery of trudging through Mordor as a reader, I’ve never felt that the Scouring of the Shire ever made any sense, at least not in the form it appeared.

The idea that Saruman and Wormtongue had time to not only travel to the Shire, but take it over and institute a repressive, very anti-Hobbit regime simply overstretched the bounds of my credulity. It simply didn’t make any sense to me, then or now. The various endings were otherwise very satisfactory, which makes me think that this was perhaps a very early example of message fiction – in this case, Tolkien’s rural anti-industrialism – leading an author astray.

It’s a minor flaw, but it is a flaw nevertheless. For all that Peter Jackson has been rightly criticized for permitting the tomfoolery of his fellow writers in The Lord of the Rings, and for the ridiculous metastasized cancer of the second trilogy he produced afterwards, he did well in excising that particular ending from the story.

Cuckservative Churchianity

As Red Eagle and I mentioned in Cuckservative, there is nothing that drives the modern Churchian evangelical like the desire to demonstrate that he is not racist:

When Michelle Higgins addressed a gathering of 16,000 evangelical students meeting in St. Louis this week for a missions conference, she brought the same intensity and fervor she’s often displayed as a leader of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Ms. Higgins, a St. Louis native and director of Faith for Justice, a protest group devoted to “Biblical activism,” minced no words when she told the crowd what happened after Michael Brown was killed last year in Ferguson, Mo.

“When I first heard that our brother had been killed, we began looking for churches to host discussion groups,” said Higgins, also the director of worship and outreach at a local congregation. “All of our evangelical partners said, ‘We’re not ready to talk about race and justice; we’re not ready to talk about police brutality and mass incarceration; we’re not ready to talk about the fact that black bodies are grotesque to us – we don’t want to admit that.’ ”

Her provocative words at the 2015 Urbana conference, a student gathering co-hosted by the conservative campus ministry InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, not only laid bare some of the deep racial divisions in the United States after the killings of Mr. Brown and other black men over the past year and half, but they also went directly to the fact that, as a whole, evangelical Christians remain among the least likely to have sympathy for the Black Lives Matter movement.

But at the Urbana conference this week, many evangelical student leaders and others have expressed full solidarity with the emergence of the protest movement. Worship leaders onstage, a diverse group leading worship with the kind of praise music that many evangelical churches are known for, wore Black Lives Matter T-shirts and sang songs in Spanish, French, Korean, and Swahili, as well as English.

Those “evangelical student leaders” are pure SJW entryists. Any church that accepts them into leadership will be led astray. Whatever it is they worship, it isn’t the God of the Holy Bible. And whomever it is they follow, it assuredly isn’t Jesus Christ.

Here is a reliable heuristic for the Christian: if a fallen world lauds you for what you are doing, the chances are very good that what you are doing isn’t in line with the Will of God as expressed in the Scriptures.

The new battleground

George Kirby throws down a gauntlet.

Look – you will be represented in accordance with your numbers. It’s just that you have really small numbers. That’s why you got your ass handed to you during the vote. And its going to get smaller. Once EPH goes into effect people will stop forking over $40 just because Bard/Larry/Vox tells them them TOR is controlling the Hugos. Again – look at the Goodreads Choice Awards. How are the pups doing? Why don’t you freep that? Because you can’t. Your numbers are tiny.

It’s remarkable how SJWs keep doing the same thing over and over again. I seem to recall when John Scalzi told us that instead of complaining about the increasingly poor quality of the fiction that was winning Hugo awards, we should get involved, nominate, and vote. And instead of being praised for that, we were attacked, vilified, and abused by the deviants of Fandom.

In the event that we follow Mr. Kirby’s suggestion and are successful in 2016, does anyone think he will congratulate us? Or will we meet with more vilification? I think we can guess given this pair of mind-boggling assertions on his part.

“Scalzi writes good stuff and doesn’t call you anything.”

In any event, there is really only one way to find out. I created my Goodreads account yesterday, as it is clear that with Amazon increasingly policing their reviews, Goodreads has become a primary locus of effort for SJWs. It’s time to for us to start contesting that territory; create an account there and friend me. If you’ve already got a Goodreads account, friend me. You can also follow my author page there. And then start rating. Don’t worry about writing reviews for now, just hit the ratings for the time being.

You can also join the new Goodreads group: Rabid Puppies.

The other thing to do is to flag all of the attack reviews. For example, an SJW named Aaah tried to pass this off as a one-star review of SJWAL:

Ah, Vox Day. This gif reflects how I feel whenever I hear/read him argue about something, which I’ve been doing since reading A Throne of Bones (a fantasy novel by Vox Day so bad it may cause indelible fits of laughter).

Unlike with A Throne of Bones, I didn’t actually read SJWs Always Lie.

I didn’t have to. It’s all in the title.

1. Because Vox Day’s horde – and I swear to god, they’re a “horde” he calls “the Dread Ilk” – have given the book 5 star ratings across the board on Amazon. They actually gather online to discuss “tactics”, as they’re now doing for the 2016 Hugo Awards. I am not making this up. Day, who failed at destroying the 2015 Hugo Awards, is actually happily sneering at liberal speculative fiction writers, using fandom’s post-Hugo celebratory time to (I swear) try and plan a sneak attack. His own words.

“Sneak attack.” No fucking irony.

2. Vox Day’s inability to grasp irony makes its way to the book title. Because Vox Day is, I’ve decided in the time since reading A Throne of Bones (somehow not explicitly subtitled Jesus is the Light of the World and Also Women Are Timid, Frail, Innocent Creatures Which Ought to Be Ruled By Men) an actual idiot….

It takes a real toilet-clogger to earn 1-star based on title alone, but Day did it.

Congratulations, Einstein.

Of course, because SJWs Always Lie, it’s apparent that he didn’t read ATOB either. Goodreads is already aware it has a problem with SJWs posting DISQUALIFY reviews like this; some of them still complain about the great review Purge that began in 2013 after it announced a policy that banned reviews like the one quoted above.

**Delete content focused on author behavior. We have
had a policy of removing reviews that were created primarily to talk
about author behavior from the community book page. Once removed, these
reviews would remain on the member’s profile. Starting today, we will
now delete these entirely from the site. We will also delete shelves and
lists of books on Goodreads that are focused on author behavior.

With that in mind, in addition to rating whatever books you’ve read, those participating should go through the various reviews of the books of the Castalia House authors and flag every review that contains content focused on author behavior rather than on the book itself.

I do not want. I WILL.

Mike Cernovich hits another one out of the freaking park.

How to go from “I want” to “I will.”

The first step from going from a day dreamer to a doer is recognizing the self-sabotaging language patterns we use as part of our self-talk.

As with all mindset training, vigilance is crucial. Stop yourself every time you say, “I want.”

When you say to yourself or others, “I want,” pause and reflect in the moment.

Do you want what you say you want?

Perhaps you don’t. I’ve caught myself saying, “I want…,” and upon reflection, realizing I didn’t want that person or thing in my life.

If you desire in your heart what your mind tells you what you want, begin creating a vision of what you want.

Create a clear vision for what you want.

I said on Twitter that the most significant event of 2016 for me was meeting Mike and Milo in Paris. It was pure serendipity; I didn’t really know who Mike was or why he was co-hosting GGinParis with us, but Mike, Shauna, Spacebunny, and I got together for dinner before the event and we really hit it off in a way one seldom does at my age.

I’m middle-aged. I’m reasonably successful, all things considered, and I’m fairly set in my ways. But Mike inspired me and caused me to need to adjust my thinking in a way that hasn’t happened in decades. Somehow, he made me realize that I’m too prone to thinking about things, and planning things, and contemplating things, and not actually DOING things.

I used to only feed on the Dark Side of the Force. I needed negativity to motivate me; I needed to feel the need to vanquish someone, or something, to really get myself in gear. I don’t think it is a coincidence that my best athletic performances have always come against archrivals or in playoff games. But since having the opportunity to sit down and spend some time with Mike a second time, in Spain, I’ve learned how to act without waiting for that motivation, without having a plan in place, and without overthinking the matter.

And I’ve learned that energy and momentum are contagious. Mike has it. I’m more introverted than he is, but I have more energy than most people my age and I’m learning to let it show so that others can be inspired and feed off it the way I am inspired by Mike’s energy.

Mike is right. Mindset is absolutely key; one of the primary factors in most of my successes has been my unshakable confidence in something, whether it is my speed, my strength, my ability to take a shot, or my intelligence. And two of the primary factors in most of my failures has been either laziness – which is a failure of the will – or a lack of willingness to expect excellence from myself or others – which is a failure of confidence.

In the end, it’s not about intelligence or natural gifts, it’s about mindset. Castalia House WILL become the dominant force in science fiction and fantasy. The Castalia Blog WILL become the leading blog in science fiction, fantasy, and wargaming. And Vox Popoli WILL pass 100 million annual pageviews. I know these things will happen because I can already see them happening.

We’re not there yet, but we’re a damn sight closer to them than we were 12 months ago.

The new sheriff

In order to better focus my activities in the coming year, I have relinquished my responsibilities as the manager of the Castalia House blog. If you’d like to see who is going to do a much better job of running it than I did, visit the CH blog to see who has been named the new Blog Editor at Castalia House.

Mark my words. In two years, the Castalia House blog is going to be the best and most popular SF/F and gaming blog. There are few pleasures as satisfying as handing off responsibility to someone who is more capable than you are.