We’re #98

Right Wing News ranks the top 100 conservative sites:

91) Canada Free Press: 68,023
92) Human Events Online: 68,967
93) Jewish World Review: 76,215
94) GOPUSA: 71,293
95) Ricochet: 71,358
96) Day by Day: 73,755
97) Numbers USA: 76,280
98) Vox Day: 76,816
99) X Tribune: 76,417
100) City Journal: 84,176

This would probably appear to be more impressive if I hadn’t ranked 52nd with an Alexa rating of 27,594 in 2014. How is it possible that my ranking dropped 46 places when the monthly pageviews have risen more than 400,000 from one year ago? Simple. The Alexa ratings are nonsense as they are based on links rather than traffic. I bounced the blog rating last year in order to prove my case, then let it decline to its “natural” level because I don’t care about things like that.

So, don’t take any list that is based on Alexa or any similar ranking system too seriously. And also, I’m still not a conservative, but I gave up trying to fight that battle a long time ago.

Easton Ellis on Foster Wallace

Brett Easton Ellis kind of likes the movie about David Foster Wallace, he just doesn’t recognize the character in the movie:

For many of us who couldn’t get through the David Foster Wallace novel Infinite Jest
(and tried a few times), and found the journalism bloated and minor-key
condescending and thought the puling Kenyon commencement speech was
pure BS, and resisted the coronation of Wallace since his suicide in
2008 as St. David, based on a particular and very American brand of
sentimental narrative, the new film about Wallace, The End of the Tour, is surprisingly easy to take even though it’s reverential to a fault….

Wallace is presented as a guy who was just too sensitive for this world —
and that strikes a certain emotional chord, especially with younger
viewers and actors. The movie portrays Wallace as an angelic Pop
Tart-sharing schlub, a lovable populist, a tortured everyman and
ex-addict who loves dogs, loves kids, loves McDonalds, exudes “realness”
and “humanity,” and the movie completely ignores referencing the other
Wallace: the contemptuous man, the sometime-contrarian, the asshole with
an abusive side, the cruel critic — all the things some of us find
interesting about him. This is the movie that prefers the Wallace who
was knighted into sainthood with his Kenyon commencement speech called —
deep breath — “This Is Water: Some Thoughts Delivered on a Significant
Occasion About Living a Compassionate Life,” which even his staunchest
defenders and former editors have a hard time stomaching, arguing it’s
the worst thing he ever wrote, but which became a viral sensation as
well as a soggy self-help guide for lost souls.

And the David in this movie is the voice of reason, a sage, and the movie succumbs to the cult of stressing likability. But the real David scolded people and probably craved fame — what writer isn’t both suspicious of literary fame and yet curious in seeing how that game is played out? It’s not that rare and — hey — it sells books. He was cranky and could be very mean and caustic and opportunistic, but this David Foster Wallace is completely erased.

I never bought into the cult of DFW. Unlike Ellis, I actually read Infinite Jest, and it struck me as one part genuine literary talent, one part imitation Irving, two parts literary posturing, and three parts unrealized ambition. He was hailed as great when he did nothing more than show potential, and I suspect that had more than a little to do with his self-inflicted demise.

John Scalzi on #GamerGate

Because McRapey is due to start claiming that he’s always been a gamer – in fact, he’s a game developer who has written games – and claiming that he and #GamerGate were just joshing each other a little like him and John Ringo, that they’re really good pals just like him and Larry Correia, any day now, I figured this particular Twitter rant should go on the record as the one-year anniversary of #GamerGate approaches.

    Astounding the number of dudes who think a woman game developer being harassed has nothing to do with a movement founded to harass women.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 11, 2014

    And yes, GamerGate was founded to harass women. We’ve all seen the IRC logs. Part of the plan: recruit others to be their useful idiots.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 11, 2014

    And there sure have been a lot of useful idiots letting offering up their services to those who want to harass women! Well done, you.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 11, 2014

    Face it, dudes: “GamerGate” is a toxic thing. You can’t say you support WITHOUT explicitly standing with those who hate and harass women.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 11, 2014

    Excellent post about GamerGate. “If you don’t step away… then you *are* part of a hate movement.” http://t.co/IOB0nSiFJE
    — N. K. Jemisin (@nkjemisin) October 11, 2014

    So stop standing with people who WANT you to be their useful idiots while they threaten women. You can’t pretend you don’t know anymore.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 11, 2014

    You know. We know you know. EVERYONE knows you know. No one else buys into your denial. Just stop. AND repudiate. Stop being used. Simple.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 11, 2014

    And if you refuse to stop being a useful idiot for those who harass and hate women, we’ll know that too. And remember.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 11, 2014

#GamerGate is going to remember too, Johnny. Of course, it’s hardly surprising that one SJW fame whore who has virtually no connection to the game industry would rush to take the side of corrupt SJW journalists and other SJW fame whores who have virtually no connections to the game industry.

It’s no secret how actual devs feel about McRapey. But speaking of devs and game development, here is a screenshot from one of our games that will be released this fall. I expect seriously old school gamers will have no trouble identifying the original inspiration, as well as one of the new elements added.

It may interest you to know that while this particular project is a small one, it is a 100 percent Dread Ilk production. And to continue on to a second tangent, I should mention that another member of the Ilk is looking for a web developer.

I had an idea for a web business and I’ve had an acquaintance designing the program over the past year – he’s become unreliable so I need to find someone.  It’s a start-up and I’d like to find someone who’s willing to design the software for an equity share in the company. The system was developed in .net framework (I think with ASP).  There may be a better way and I’m not committed to that platform.  If you know someone that may be interested in such an arrangement, please forward my email to them.

If you’re interested in learning more about it, shoot me an email with WEB DEVELOP and I’ll pass your email onto him.

Seeing the face of evil, and flinching

This is why forcing people to see the truth they are attempting to avoid seeing is important. It makes a difference. It sears the conscience. The five videos released by The Center for Medical Progress have Ruben Navarette rethinking his longtime support for abortion:

I still consider myself pro-choice, as I have for the last 30 years. I staked out this position during my freshmen year in college. Even then, I understood the abortion debate was a tug-of-war between competing rights—those of the mother versus those of an unborn baby. I sided with the mother. And I tried not to think about the baby.

All this was happening in the 1980s, which was a particularly tense time in the abortion debate. Americans were at each other’s throats. Protesters picketed the offices of abortion providers. Clinics were bombed or set on fire. Doctors who performed abortions were being threatened. The Moral Majority, Operation Rescue, and the Republican Party seemed an intolerant lot. I couldn’t imagine siding with them, so I lined up on the pro-choice side.

I arrived there for a simple reason: Because I’m a man. Many will say that this is not a very good reason, but it is my reason. Lacking the ability to get pregnant, and thus spared what has been for women friends of mine the anguishing decision of whether to stay pregnant, I’ve remained on the sidelines and deferred to the other half of the population.

Over time, I made refinements—going along with waiting periods and parental notification laws at the state level, and coming out against the barbaric practice known as partial birth abortion.

As I’ve only realized lately, to be a man, and to declare yourself pro-choice, is to proclaim your neutrality. And, as I’ve only recently been willing to admit, even to myself, that’s another name for “wimping out.”

At least that’s how my wife sees it. She’s pro-life, and so she’s been tearing into me every time a new video is released. She’s not buying my argument that, as a man, I have to defer to women and trust them to make their own choices about what to do with their bodies. To her, that’s ridiculous—and cowardly.

“You can’t stand on the sidelines, especially now that you’ve seen these videos,” she told me recently. “That’s bullshit! These are babies that are being killed. Millions of them. And you need to use your voice to protect them. That’s what a man does. He protects children—his own children, and other children. That’s what it means to be a man.”

The idea that men have to defer to women and permit them to do whatever they want so long as their bodies are involved is both ridiculous and cowardly. There is no “my body” exception to the law; the law that can ban shooting up heroin or drinking unpasteurized milk certainly has the ability to ban the murder, mutilation, and parting-out of prenatal infants.

The USA is considerably worse than National Socialist Germany in this regard. Abortion in America is the equivalent of 9 Holocausts; only Stalin and Mao have been more statistically monstrous. And whether a nation sacrifices its children to Moloch or Mammon, it is not one that will long survive, nor does it deserve to do so.

UPDATE: A summary of the sixth video from The Center for Medical Progress:

The pro-life advocates behind the five shocking videos exposing Planned Parenthood selling the body parts of aborted babies for research have released a 6th video today that shows how the abortion business sells body parts of aborted babies without patient consent.

The video features Holly O’Donnell, a licensed phlebotomist who unsuspectingly took a job as a “procurement technician” at the fetal tissue company and biotech start-up StemExpress in late 2012. That’s the company that acts as a middleman and purchases the body parts of aborted babies from Planned Parenthood to sell to research universities and other places.

The new video includes O’Donnell’s eyewitness narrative of the daily practice of fetal body parts harvesting in Planned Parenthood abortion clinics, describing tissue procurement workers’ coordination with abortion providers, the pressure placed on patients, and disregard for patient consent.

It is time – it is long past time – to shut down Planned Parenthood. Permanently.

Two out of three isn’t bad

At File 770, a glimpse of the Sasquan committee’s view of the Puppies, which is surprisingly accurate:

There’s been a lively discussion on my Facebook about this all. In particular an explanation of part of the thinking of the committee –

Glenn Glazer Christopher: I put three simple facts before you:
1) The puppies have a strong tendency to _retaliatory_ action.
2) The puppies are crazy, but they are not suicide terrorist crazy.
3) Antonelli has a long history of being an online asshat, but no history of physical violence, including at Worldcon in San Antonio, which he was at.

1) This is correct. Leave us alone, we’ll leave you alone. Attack us unprovoked, and we won’t let it go until either a) you publicly and unconditionally submit to the Supreme Dark Lord or b) the Vile Faceless Minions have lapped up your blood and devoured your corpse. Your call.

2) We’re not crazy at all. We simply have different motivations and different objectives, and we operate on a longer time scale than most. If you still think the goal of Rabid Puppies is to win science fiction awards, you’re the one who is observably crazy. We care as much about them every bit as much as #GamerGate cares who wins Kotaku’s Game of the Year.

3) Now, Lou Antonelli would appear to be crazy, or at the very least, stupid. We don’t support his letter to the police, we don’t support his apology, and we don’t support his subsequent attempt to make nice with his new BFF David Gerrold. We may be, in fact, we indubitably are, Evil, but we are not stupid. In any event, we don’t care whether Sasquan bans him or not. He is not, by his own account, a Sad Puppy, a Rabid Puppy, or an SJW, and therefore we’re no more interested in him than in Black Gate, Guardians of the Galaxy, or any other non-Puppy on our lists.

As for Sasquan, we have no interest in disrupting it, but we do expect our attendees to be prepared for any SJWs inclined to violate the posted Sasquan harassment policy. That is why I encourage every VFM, Puppy, and Dread Ilk attending Sasquan to keep a recorder running at all times on your Android or iOS phone. If you’re subsequently subject to any verbal or physical harassment, you’ll have material evidence on hand to bring to the relevant authorities. More importantly, you’ll also have a strong defense to present against the inevitable SJW lies concerning your own behavior.

This map by Camestros Felapton is rather clever. I always pictured Rabidonia as being more northern, but he does a good job of placing the various relationships. Moreover, if Voxpopoli were in the upper right, it would be right where Lord Bane is in Illuria.

Presidential predictions

I am entirely out of the business of predicting American election results, but the International Lord of Hate is entirely willing to stalk where the Supreme Dark Lord is disinclined to tread:

My prediction is that the republican nominee will be Ted Cruz. The democrat nominee will be Hillary Clinton.  At this early point in the campaigns I got Dole, Bush, and Romney right. McCain surprised me, but I think I was just blinded by my dislike for him. I predicted Obama as soon as he got done with that first original DNC speech, and sadly got that one right. Though I was surprised how fast he usurped the Clinton machine.

Here is my reasoning. First, the democrat side is really easy to predict. You’ve got one batty old socialist and a slightly battier old socialist. Though I’ve been told that Hillary Clinton isn’t actually a socialist because the way she loves taking bribes is very capitalistic. Good point.

Bernie is nuts, but he’s honest. He skips right over all the typical democrat feel good, heart string tugging reasons why they think the government should control everything, and gets right to the government controlling everything. He is economically illiterate. Those Occupy Democrat memes going around Facebook where they are quoting Bernie fucking up some basic economic principle are literally painful. Every time you share one of those, an accountant dies.

The only reason Bernie is actually polling surprisingly decently is because many democrats sense just how lackluster Hillary is. However, Hillary is still going to get the nomination. Because as much as democrats like to think that they’re all about tolerance, there is something incredibly emasculating about watching your candidate get chased off the podium of his own rally. There’s a reason the Black Lives Matter protestors haven’t invaded Hillary’s space, because we all suspect she’d shriek “GUARDS! SEIZE THEM!” super villain style, and then have them devoured by her nanotech enhanced attack weasels.

Hillary may be a liar and a cheat, and she’d sell your children’s organs to Russian mobsters to make five bucks, but at least she’s not a total chicken shit. So, barring the highly unlikely event that Hillary gets arrested by the FBI for one of her multitude of scandals between now and the primaries, Hillary is it.

On the GOP side it gets really hard to predict just because there are a slew of candidates. Right now I see it going Cruz, with an outside chance of Rubio or Walker. Yes, I know that isn’t what the polls say right now, but this is how I see it playing out.

Trump is a stunt candidate. He’s sitting around twenty percent, lots of people are flipping out about it, and the media is loving that. But the rest of the GOP can’t stand him. As we head into the primaries we always do this thing, where somebody will pop up, the voters will say Oooooh New and Shiny, they’ll surge, and then once people have a chance to actually look at what they’ve really done, they come back down.

I can neither pretend to know nor care. But for those who do, that’s what the Correiakin prognosticates. Discuss amongst yourselves.

“The man Canada couldn’t keep out”

The Canadian media is developing a grudging new respect for RooshV:

The man Canada couldn’t keep out: ‘Pickup artist’ unbowed despite public condemnation over lectures

For a man fuelled by controversy, the self-proclaimed “pickup artist” known as Roosh V doesn’t like talking to the media — “I’m a bit squeezed for time,” he said Tuesday, politely rebuffing requests for comment on public condemnation that his speaking engagements in Canada aroused.

“I have my own media channels. It’s not worth my time to talk to reporters,” he said in an email to the National Post. To a Toronto radio station he was more dismissive: “Bell Media can go to hell.”

Daryush Valizadeh, who goes by the name Roosh V and writes about convincing women to have sex, says he gave his lecture in Montreal to a group of 34 in a secret location, travelling in disguise, before he was spotted and chased out of a restaurant and down the street by a small, angry mob on Saturday.

In anticipation of his scheduled appearance in Toronto on Saturday, Toronto mayor John Tory denounced him and his views as a form of hate speech. “While free speech is the law in this country, promoting violence against women is wrong,” Tory tweeted. “I am calling on those hosting this tour to do the right thing — cancel this show.”

    We won. Men won. Free speech won. Here’s my Montreal victory speech:
    Roosh (@rooshv) August 09, 2015

Toronto and Montreal were the two Canadian dates on a tour his website says also includes Berlin, London, Washington D.C., and New York City. In the face of it all, the American blogger appears unbowed, lampooning his detractors in social media for being ineffective and hysterical.

This is what happens when you don’t back down and you don’t flinch in front of the media heat. Roosh is now “the man Canada couldn’t keep out”. I am now “the most hated man in science fiction”. From National Post to Newsweek, from Le Monde to a media outlet that shall remain nameless until the piece runs, the international media is no longer content to let our enemies talk about us, they are asking us to speak directly for ourselves.

That doesn’t happen when you cringe, and apologize, and recant. That doesn’t happen when you flee from criticism like a coward. You have to earn your right to be heard, because no one is going to take you seriously if you don’t stand by what you have said in the face of disapproval. It is only those without character who can expect to avoid repeated attempts to assassinate it.

Milo has some thoughts on the failed Canadian attempt to deny Roosh a platform:

No-platforming, a favourite tactic of the progressive left, denies us, the public, the ability to interrogate a speaker ourselves. It’s not only illiberal and profoundly anti-intellectual but it can create a halo of martyrdom around people who are already pushing at an open door – such as men’s rights activists, who rightly point to dozens of structural inequalities in the way men are spoken about and treated in today’s uber-progressive societies.

Of course, no-platforming is a dangerous strategy, because if the wrong sort of man is no-platformed, he will simply go off and build a new platform, one over which those who previously denied him a platform will not only lack control but even a modicum of influence.

Progress at the speed of light

Tangent Online addresses the problematic issue of gender issues in author identification with an ingenious solution:

While we applaud Lightspeed’s recent groundbreaking, progressive Women Destroy SF and Queers Destroy SF special issues, we feel they didn’t go far enough. To effect change one must not only talk the talk, but walk the walk. Women and Queers are not the only groups destroying science fiction, for those who champion such a worthwhile social cause as androgyny are at fault too. These forward-thinking social futurists should be given their just due as androgyny is perhaps the most important social issue facing science fiction practitioners today, and which, for the most part, the SF community has chosen to ignore with its retrograde thinking in regards to the problem of gender inequality and gender bias in its fiction.

With greater frequency (which we welcome, but is still a small percentage of the fiction published in the magazines and in book form today), science fiction stories with nameless protagonists or ancillary characters are at the forefront of the androgynous revolution. But only in the field’s fiction do we see how it might work, as fictive experiments, so much enlightened theory on paper—food for thought and nothing more. If the lofty goal of the Androgyny Revolution is to reveal unconscious bias and prejudice in fiction by rendering invisible the gender of its characters then the same ideology should just as readily reveal bias and prejudice in other areas of the real world, but not if gender assignation is permitted to continue.

Therefore, Tangent Online will show how the philosophy, the core defining predicates of androgyny can be applied to non-fiction as well as fiction and how in other ways it should be applied to areas of our real world lives. Thus, the table of contents for the August issue of Lightspeed below will contain only story titles—no author names; for revealing an author’s name would give immediate rise to the same conscious or unconscious bias we find in so much of our fiction. As well, the name of the reviewer is not mentioned for the same reason. Following the lead of the special Women and Queers Destroy SF issues of Lightspeed, you will find an essay following the review. Its author is also nameless, as it should be. It is the content of the words which truly matter and not who penned them. Content over author or editor is the only way to go in the Androgyny Revolution.

Lightspeed and its companion magazine Nightmare have seen the light and no longer showcase author names on their covers. Only the magazine title and subtitle, issue number and issue date are shown for each. The exception being that the editor’s name is prominently displayed on every cover. We can forgive this seeming contradiction to the basic canons of the androgynous movement because it is a given that the editor’s name on the cover of any magazine is perforce a more lucrative marketing strategy than displaying author names—those who provide the content for which the potential buyer is shelling out their beer money. It works, and so we give it a pass because we all already know the editor is really one of “us” (yes, this previous knowledge leads to bias but since the editor thinks like we do it’s no big deal; insider exceptions are one of our most sacred, binding rules).

There is no end to progess in the SJW quest to bring about a more perfect world. So brave. Thank you for this.

We have precedent

Sasquan deems Lou Antonelli in violation of their Code of Conduct:

The Executive Committee of Sasquan, the 73rd World Science Fiction
Convention, would like to address the matter of actions taken by Mr. Lou
Antonelli with regards to one of our Guests of Honor, Mr. David
Gerrold. On August 1st, Mr. Antonelli participated in a podcast in
which he stated that he had written a letter to the Spokane Police
Department, in which he stated to them that Mr. Gerrold was “insane and a
public danger and needs to be watched when the convention is going on”.

Normally, online communications between members is not
something in Sasquan’s purview to referee. However, Mr. Antonelli’s
letter, which requested police action against Mr. Gerrold during the
time of the convention, is within our purview. As such, we found that
there was a strong possibility this act was a violation of our posted harassment policy[1], particularly if the letter had, in fact, been
sent.

The Executive Committee then turned the matter over to our
Operations Head, Ms. Robbie Bourget, who initiated formal proceedings in
accordance with that policy. During these proceedings, it came to light
that Mr. Antonelli had issued a formal apology to Mr. Gerrold and
admitted culpability: he actually sent the letter, not merely claimed to
have sent it.

We thoroughly reviewed all available data,
including email from both involved parties, social media postings,
discussions with key committee members, and so forth. The inescapable
conclusion was that Mr. Antonelli had violated our Code of Conduct in
this matter. The recommendation was to refund Mr. Antonelli’s membership
and prohibit his entry to any convention location or function. However, after the recommendation was made, Mr. Gerrold, as the
aggrieved party, specifically requested that the Executive Committee set
aside this recommendation on the grounds that Mr. Antonelli did
apologize, is sending a retraction to the Spokane Police Department and
because, as a Hugo Nominee, he deserves to attend the ceremony.

The Executive Committee has chosen to accept Mr. Gerrold’s request, and
considers the matter closed as of this time. Ms. Bourget has spoken and
corresponded with the Spokane Police Department, and they also consider
the matter closed. We would like to thank Ms. Bourget for the calm
professionalism she lent to the proceedings, and Mr. Antonelli and Mr.
Gerrold for coming to a settlement that benefits not just them, but the
Worldcon and its members.

So, a single letter is sufficient to comprise code of conduct-violating harassment. This is good to know. Perhaps we should do a little looking into who contacted The Guardian, the New Zealand Herald, and other media outlets concerning Sad Puppies, as that most certainly constitutes harassment according to the Executive Committee.

Sad and Rabid Puppies, if you’re going to Sasquan, make sure you know the Code of Conduct cold, and if anyone so much as puts a toe across the line, shriek bloody murder. The precedent has now been set by the SJWs. Make use of it.

We already know that people have expressed similarly harassing concerns to Kevin Standlee, so keep your eyes open. Black knight them twice as hard. And for the love of all that is good, holy, and true, do NOT apologize to SJWs. Ever. Under any circumstances. How hard is this to understand?

I repeat: you never, ever, apologize to SJWs.

UPDATE: This comment at File 770 will likely amuse the VFM:

One of the things that has been so atrocious about Puppygate is the way
the Puppies seem not to give a damn about the collateral damage of their
actions.

They’re just noticing this now? What part of “we don’t care” was hard to understand?

“the American Era is over”

Jerry Pournelle pronounces the end of the American era:

Everyone must understand that the American Era is over: the United States domination of the world is ended, just as the British domination of the world (pink all over the globe) I learned in grade school ended after World War II. For some this was an objective to achieve. For others it is a disaster. For all it is a coming fact. The nuclear weapon, like the .45 Colt, is an equalizer, and it is now inevitable that Iran will acquire nuclear weapons whenever they decide to do so, given that the deal essentially gives up on inspections, and Iran has announced that under no circumstance will there be any inspection of their military installations even if there is inspection – after 24 day’s notice – of their peaceful installations. Intelligence experts say Iran is about a year from their decision to have them. My guess is that there will be a demonstration in Summer, 2017.

Meanwhile the other nations of the Middle East will rush to acquire their own; they can read the newspapers as well as I can.

It’s impossible to argue with him in light of the following, although the problem would appear to be less the loss of the country’s military dominance and more the fact that the population is now almost completely retarded:

After covering the usual local news, the show began to transition into a segment about one of the Kardashian daughters recently naming her new pet rabbit “Bruce.” (Just typing that sentence made me want to launch my fist into the computer screen where my pupils are currently fixated. Rest assured, I’m still typing, so I obviously mustered up all of the self-control in my being and refrained.) That’s when Brown interrupted the correspondent reporting the “story” in mid-sentence:

“I am having a good Friday, so I refuse to talk about the Kardashians today,” said Brown. “You are on your own, Amy. I can’t do it.”

As the program’s co-host storms off set, he can be heard off-screen shouting, “I’ve had enough Kardashians. I can’t take any more Kardashian stories on this show.”

After a replacement anchor rushes in to fill the void left on the morning show’s couch, the fed-up Brown — whose microphone stays on despite walking off set — can be heard continuing his rant away from the cameras: “I don’t care about this family. I’m sick of this family. It’s a non-story!”

I have never watched a single moment of the Kardashians doing anything, but I have to admit, the idea that the naming of a pet rabbit is a national news story does strike me as surreal.

All I can say is that no matter what happens to America as it gradually slides towards historical oblivion, one cannot possibly argue that its fate was not eminently merited.