Xanatos unveiled

You know, of all the SJWs in science fiction, I would have thought that John O’Neill would have known me well enough by now to understand that I am an accomplished player of games. I mean, I contributed to Black Gate for several years and a fair number of my posts were game-related. I thought he knew me better. But, in any event, he explained his 2015 Hugo ballot at Black Gate.

I’ve explained my rationale elsewhere, and I won’t rehash all that again, but in short — regardless of how the voting goes, the Puppies have made it abundantly clear that their primary goal is to have their ballot accepted. Having the bulk of fandom acknowledge their ballot as legitimate, and having their nominees read and voted on, paves the way for future Hugo ballots to be decided the same way: through the Puppies aggressive form of slate voting, which I feel drowns out far too much worthy fiction in favor of the Puppies extremely narrow selection process (dictated almost entirely by two individuals).

Or to put it another way: Any slate in which Vox Day puts eleven works from his own tiny publishing house on the Hugo ballot — and nominates himself for two Hugos — will have a hard time convincing me that it is anything other than a naked Hugo grab, poorly masquerading as a reactionary literary movement.

Now that the voting is complete, I will simply quote Mr. Correia.

“Vox is off doing his own thing. You tried to shun a man who is
incapable of being shunned. He got kicked out of the market, so went and
built his own market. The more you go after him, the stronger he gets. I
don’t think you guys realize that most of me and Brad’s communication
with Vox consists of us asking him to be nice and not burn it all down
out of spite.”

I like Larry. I like Brad. They’re good men. I respect them both. And out of my respect for them, I agreed to play it straight this year, support Sad Puppies, and refrain from nuking the Awards. (The VFM were champing at the bit to burn SOMETHING and there was a category that eminently had it coming, so I graciously acceded to their humble requests and unleashed them.) That is why I wish I was more surprised to observe that the science fiction SJWs were dumb enough to do what the Dark Lord wanted in order to teach Brad and Larry a lesson.

See, now that’s what a fucking Xanatos Gambit looks like, bitches.

Note to Richard Brandt: I am not the habit of keeping my self-appointed enemies informed of my true intentions at all times. I said I would support Sad Puppies. I supported Sad Puppies. I kept my word. That’s what I do, even if it means running the risk of delayed gratification. Fortunately, as I anticipated, the SJWs were almost as outraged by Brad’s recommendations as they were by mine.

My intentions were always right out there in the open for anyone with the wit to see it. Based on some of his wry commentary, I suspect Mike Glyer knew. The Dread Ilk certainly understood. I even warned the SJWs that if they went No Award this year on the basis of their disapproval of our award pimpage, they’d have no grounds to complain about our utilization of their tactics in the future, only not in revenge, but because that was the goal. In addition to not voting No Award across the board, we also didn’t respond to any of their shady tactics, not Mary Kowal’s vote-buying, not the various proposed rule changes, not the spurious disqualification of John C. Wright’s sixth Hugo nomination.

The reason is that I wanted our hands to remain entirely clean this year and to gauge the true strength of the motivated opposition. Why buy 500 votes when we’ve learned that Kowal only bought 75?

Next year, we bring the noise. Sad Puppies won’t be led by the Cuddly Care Bear, but by Kate the Impaler. The VFM will grow in size and malice, and the GG-inspired counterattack will spread into new industries. Next year, Rabid Puppies will utilize every useful tactic, explore every potentially usable angle. Because we’re not here to win awards, we’re here to kick ass and chew SJWs. John O’Neill has never grasped that. For some reason, he still thinks we are craving the approval of the human wreckage that risibly deems itself a literary elite.

The last few months has been a remarkably dynamic and exciting time for fandom. The Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies accomplished something absolutely incredible: joining together to make a resounding statement about the current state of science fiction awards, and forcing the entire industry to sit up and take notice. They have, without question, been the single largest story in fandom this year.

Unfortunately, the subsequent discussion has been a Public Relations disaster for the Puppies. When the eyes of the world were upon them (and while they were admittedly being unfairly criticized by people who misunderstood what they were really about), the Puppies responded by relentlessly going on the attack, hurling bombs at “SJWs,” liberals, secret cartels controlling the Hugos, and (especially, and rather senselessly) Tor, the publisher that has tirelessly promoted and sold many of the authors they championed.

In short, four months ago the Puppies grabbed the microphone and stood on stage in front of the entire industry. They seized the genre by the throat, and had a golden opportunity to make their point. And instead, they simply proved that they had nothing of any real value to say.

Today, the Sad Puppies are already seen as a spent force. Irrelevant, misguided, and not particularly very interesting. Perhaps I’ll be be proven wrong, and when the Hugo Winners are announced at Sasquan in Spokane, Washington, on August 22, the Puppies will sweep again, just as they swept the nominations.

But I don’t think so. I think the result will be quite the opposite, and the Puppies will be swept aside in a wave of NO AWARDs. When that happens, I’m sure there will be plenty of dark muttering about “next year.” But by then, the microphone will have been turned off, and the audience will be long gone. The Puppies are part of history; they just don’t know it.

Yeah, they said much the same last year too. The problem is that John still thinks we seized the genre by the throat in order to make a point. We’re not making a point, we’re strangling an evil and obnoxious ideology. And we have only begun to squeeze.

Later this month, one of two things will happen. Either one-third of the Hugo Awards will be obliterated or the twenty-year dominance of the science fiction SJWs will be publicly shattered for the world to see. The former is a win for Rabid Puppies, the latter is a win for everyone except the SJWs, but in particular for the Sad Puppies. And if the former result is not quite as dramatic as I would have liked, well, we can always seek to do better next year.

On a tangential note, I appreciated this response to one of O’Neill’s sillier statements in the comments:

“In short, the Puppy slate just doesn’t measure up.”

“Riding the Red Horse is the first great mil-sf anthology since Jerry Pournelle tapered off back in the 90′s.”

To summarize: We are the reavers and the renegades, the rebels and the revolutionaries, and we
don’t give a quantum of a damn about pieces of plastic or the insider
approval they represent.

If they’re upset now….

This is interesting. Apparently the SJWs are more than a little worried about my upcoming book, SJWS ALWAYS LIE: Taking Down the Thought Police.

KIA mods censor major threads and happenings including Julian Assange and Vox Day. (self.KotakuInAction)

submitted 8 days ago * by endomorphosis
Vox Day
Before https://archive.is/zLVKT
After https://archive.is/gS76X
Julian Assange
https://archive.is/UkfNu
Sargon’s kickstarter controversy
https://archive.is/zQHvp

Just wait until August 27th, the one-year anniversary of #GamerGate, which I plan to celebrate by publishing the book. It is a pulls-no-punches, gives-no-fucks book in the tradition of The Irrational Atheist; some of it you’ll be familiar with since it involves concepts I’ve worked out here on the blog, but now usefully clarified, codified, and weaponized.

As for the concern trolls at KiA, I have a direct message for you.

You’ve done good work, but you’re not the leaders of #GamerGate. You’re not the GG police either. You don’t speak for #GamerGate anymore than I do. That’s the beauty and the power of a decentralized organization; no one is in charge, no one is in control, and no one is able to decide who can or cannot support it.
 
Now stop acting like SJWs, shut the fuck up, and send emails. We can turn on each other and fight it out once Gawker and Vox Media are dead, the Vampire Sarkeesian moves onto her next industrial victim, John Flynt is committed, and the Advocacy Track at GDC is history.

Communicating with Cucky

Jared Taylor types as slowly as he can and lays out the logical case against them to the cuckservatives:

Do you stand for limited government and a balanced budget? Count your black and Hispanic allies. Do you admire Thomas Jefferson? He was a slave-holder who will end up on the dung heap with the Confederate flag. Do you care about stable families and the rights of the unborn? Look up illegitimacy, divorce, and abortion rates for blacks and Hispanics. Do you cherish the stillness at dawn in Bryce Canyon? When the park service manages to get blacks and Hispanics to go camping they play boom-boxes until 1:00 a.m. Was Ronald Reagan your hero? He would not win a majority of today’s electorate.

Do you love Tchaikovsky? Count the non-whites in the concert hall. Do you yearn for neighborhoods where you can leave the keys in your car? There still are some; just don’t expect them to be “diverse.” Are hunting and firearms part of your heritage? Explain that to Barack Obama or Sonia Sotomayor. Are you a devout Christian? Muslim immigrants despise you and your faith. Do you support Israel? Mexicans, Haitians, Chinese, and Guatemalans don’t.

Your great festival–CPAC–is as white as a meeting of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. That’s because blacks and Hispanics and even Asians don’t share your dreams. You’ve heard the old joke: “What do you call the only black person at a conservative meeting? The keynote speaker.” Outreach doesn’t work. You can’t talk someone into loving what you love. Faith, patriotism, duty, and honor come from deeply cultural, religious, and ancestral sources you can’t reach….

You are not just betraying your principles and dreams–even though you
think you are working for them. You are betraying your people.

That’s the dialectical approach. In my observation, cuckservatives do not speak that language and they are not sufficiently versed in current genetic science to intelligently discuss the subject, which means that we can only expect to communicate with them through the rhetoric to which they are limited. So, allow me to summarize and translate: If you are a white man who thinks other white men calling you names is racist, you’re a cuckservative and a traitor to your nation.

It would be interesting to hear a cuckservative explain “the crisis in Calais“. The rational individual looks at the picture and worries about a violent, dystopian future on the horizon. The cuckservative looks at it and wonders why that awful Nazi racist is delaying the myriad blessings those vibrant young immigrants are going to convey upon their new native land.

 
The Road Haulage Association (RHA) warned that the lives of lorry drivers were now in danger because French police were simply no longer able to cope. The RHA’s chief executive, Richard Burnett, said: “It has become clear that the French authorities in Calais simply cannot cope. This has become an untenable situation and is obviously now beyond the capabilities of the French police. The RHA strongly repeats its request, made in June, for deployment of the French military to contain, segregate and control the migrant threat.

The woman who didn’t exist

Gorilla Mindset author Mike Cernovich explains what it is like meeting a supposedly fictional character:

For years I read a blog by Vox Day, but to be honest, I had my concerns about the man. I thought it was weird that he pretended to have an attractive wife. Why do this?

John Scalzi, one of Vox Day’s haters, had convinced me and others than Vox’s wife did not exist. As Vox did not post pictures of his wife, I took Scalzi at his word that @spacebunnyday was a sock puppet.

I learned a valuable lesson about John Scalzi. He’s a con man.

After seeing John Scalzi joke about being a rapist on his blog, I decided to stop taking him at his word. I investigated the facts for myself. Vox Day’s wife is real, and she’s pretty cool.

Read the rest of it there. It’s rather amusing to learn that there were actually some people who fell for the SJW line that SB didn’t exist, and that I was posting pictures of some pretty fitness model I’d found somewhere. I didn’t post pictures of her or talk about her very much because my family life is no one else’s business.

But now she is active on Twitter, lots of people follow her because she’s a smart woman who has her own opinions that she is perfectly capable of defending without my help, and she is well-respected in the homeschooling community, an area in which she is an accomplished and knowledgeable expert. I’m proud of her and her accomplishments, even if I’m little more inclined to talk about them here than I am about my own.

SJW men may pretend to be champions of women, but as Scalzi’s behavior demonstrates, they don’t hesitate to denigrate them and disappear them simply to try to score points off other men. And, of course, Mike should have known better than to believe an SJW about anything, because, as we all know, SJWS ALWAYS LIE.

#GamerGate is far from over

When I think about how much I used to love going to CGDC in Santa Clara, this news just infuriates me.

UBM Tech Game Network, the organizers of the Game Developers Conference 2016, are now accepting submissions to present lectures, roundtables, panels, posters and tutorials through Thursday, August 27th.

Now entering its landmark 30th edition, GDC is expanding its Advisory Board, which reviews and refines submissions for the event, by welcoming pioneering developer Amy Hennig to help guide the content of the show….

GDC is the world’s largest and longest-running event serving professionals dedicated to the art and science of making games, hosting thousands of game developers from around the world for a week of learning, networking and inspiration. GDC 2016 will take place March 14th-18th at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California.

For the main conference, the GDC Advisory Board is considering session submissions for seven tracks: Audio, Design, Production, Programming, Visual Arts, and the Business, Marketing & Management track,  as well as a track on Advocacy, which covers social issues from diversity to quality of life.

Amy Hennig isn’t the problem. She’s no Social Justice Cabbage Patch Kid like Sarkeesian or Alexander, she’s a longtime dev and she knows what she’s doing, having been responsible for the Legacy of Kain and Uncharted series. What is infuriating is the fact that the conference organizers added a track on “Advocacy, which covers social issues from diversity to quality of life.” Which, you’ll note, is something that directly interferes with “the art and science of making games”.

Both GDC and GDCE already have the huge problem of having largely been taken over by the shills and the marketeers. I’ve actually heard of talks that have been rejected because the technology isn’t implemented in a game yet. Back in the day, learning about new technology and techniques is exactly what we went to CGDC for! No wonder fewer and fewer senior designers and developers are attending, what is the point if you can’t learn about new tech ahead of time and you’re going to get lectured by clueless non-developers about putting their politics in your games?

I’ve designed six games this year, have three development, and will ship two. And I have less than zero professional interest in anything even remotely related to social issues.

I hope the baleful eye of #GamerGate will turn on the UBM Tech Game Network and make it clear that the game industry is no place for Advocacy.

Gamers only

A little help, if you will. If you’re a serious gamer, I would appreciate if you would provide four questions and answers about your favorite game for a game design on which I’m working. It should contain the following information:

Name of Game
Genre:  Action, Strategy, Simulation, Role-playing
Platform: Arcade, Console, PC, Handheld/Mobile/Online
Decade: 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s
Easy Q&A
Medium Q&A
Hard  Q&A
Expert Q&A

So, for example, this is how I would describe SSI’s Warlords:

Warlords
Strategy
PC
80s
Easy: What is the name of the evil general? (Lord Bane)
Medium: What color are the Horse Lords? (Light Blue)
Hard: What is the capital city of the orcs? (Kor)
Expert: What is the movement rating of cavalry from Dunethal? (19)

If 10 or more of you could provide similar summaries, I would appreciate it.

I said good day, sir!

I had to post it because it makes me laugh every single time I see it. Sad Puppies has its spokesmanatee, and no one would deny the masterful eloquence of Wendell, but you have to love the otters of #GamerGate.

Institutional bias

This is one that isn’t readily explained away by right-wing disinclination or incompetence:

Of the fourteen honorary degrees bestowed by Ivy League institutions to living Supreme Court justices twelve went to those on the left of the Court. Justice Ginsburg is the champ: she has an honorary degree from every Ivy League university except Cornell and Cornell does not award honorary degrees. And she is by some political science measures the farthest to the left on the Court. Justice Sonia Sotomayor has two such degrees (Princeton, Yale) and Stephen Breyer, John Paul Stevens and David Souter have one each (Penn, Princeton, and Harvard respectively). While I am not knowledgeable about all foreign judges, the two I did recognize from the Ivy lists, getting two honorary degrees each, were Albie Sachs of South Africa and Aharon Barak of Israel—two of the most famous left-leaning jurists from abroad. Indeed, some of Barak’s opinions make those of William O. Douglas seem modest and lawful.

It’s interesting how all of these coincidences invariably favor the left. Of course, the left doesn’t understand statistics or probability, so they don’t understand how obvious their cleverly sneaky actions are.

Rabid Puppies: don’t forget to vote

If you are, for any reason at all, interested in perusing my 2015 Hugo ballot, which I have already cast, you are certainly welcome to review it. If you are registered with Sasquan, you can vote at the link here.

As I told the lady from the publication covering the developing story to whom I spoke last night, whatever happens, we have already won. No Award was the original objective for Rabid Puppies, and with the exception of Best Novel, that is now the worst case scenario for us. The best case scenario is that we publicly break the perceived power of the science fiction SJWs and demonstrate their impotence by denying them the ability to do what we originally sought while seeing the awards go to various meritorious works and individuals.

Which, of course, was the Sad Puppies goal. It’s more than a bit ironic that the SJWs rushed to do the Rabid Puppies’ bidding in order to teach the Sad Puppies a lesson, but then, no one ever said they were smart.

The Sad Puppies’ victory condition may be unlikely, but it is still in play. We simply don’t know how all the 5,599 supporting members are going to vote and neither does anyone else. There are nearly as many new supporting members as there were total votes last year. Loncon had 10,826 members, of whom 2,882 were supporting, and 3,587 cast Hugo votes. Consider, for example, the reaction of one neutral reader to the various nominees:

I read the Best Novel nominees (and Ancillary Justice), the Best Novella nominees, the Best Novelette nominees, the Best Short Story nominees, the Best Graphic Story nominees (and Saga vols. 1 and 2), and every story by a Campbell nominee I could get a hold of (the only works I had read before the nominations were announced were Ancillary Justice, The Lives of Tao, and Rat Queens vol. 1). The oft-maligned Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies nominees held up well against the non-Puppy nominees, with the large caveat that four of the six categories were dominated by Puppy nominees and one was dominated by non-Puppy nominees.

After reading all that, what do I think? First, I was somewhat surprised to learn that, for those six categories, the average rankings I gave the books were almost identical. My average ranking for the works not on a Puppy slate was 2.8, my average ranking for the Sad Puppy works was 3.0, and my average ranking for the Rabid Puppy works was 3.2. I wasn’t blown away by the Puppy nominees, but I wasn’t blown away by the non-Puppy nominees either. I would have more sympathy for anti-puppies if better works were being nominated.

But regardless of what happens, the fact remains that the Puppies howled and the world of science fiction will never be the same again. The cultural war in science fiction isn’t over, in fact, it has barely begun in earnest. They thought they’d won, but we hadn’t even begun to take the field.

And it’s necessary. I read The Year’s Best Science Fiction #18, edited by David Hartwell and published by Tor Books. (Never fear, I respected the boycott, and believe me, with a few exceptions, this was research, not pleasure.) I’ll post my analysis here in a few days, but I can assure you, many of the “best” stories were outright Pink SF message fiction. We have accomplished far more than anyone expected already, but a long march through the SF institutions remains ahead of us.

My hope is that Tor Books will one day follow Gawker’s lead in publicly announcing that they have learned the error of their ways, and force its SJWs to abandon their objective of thought-policing science fiction and fantasy while enforcing diversity of identity and uniformity of ideology.

The illusion of knowledge

Now, I like Clark of PopeHat, but a challenge is a challenge. And one of the lures I find most irresistible is the cocksure breeziness of the man who thinks he knows what I know perfectly well he does not know. The fact is that no one who thinks “David Riccardo” is a reasonable response to a comment about immigration knows anything about economics. Or, for that matter, free trade.

James Thompson @JamesPsychol
Immigrants only benefit locals if they are better than the local average in ability and character, & make greater contributions

ClarkHat ‏@ClarkHat
The jury finds you guilty of economic ignorance and sentences you to read David Riccardo. 

Casher O’Neill @CasherONeill
@ClarkHat Do not invoke the sacred writings of Ricardo, that will get @voxday on your @@@ if he notices. 😀

ClarkHat ‏@ClarkHat
Vox can attack me on economics if he wants; I’ll fight back.

First, however, I will correct Mr. Thompson and observe that immigrants in sufficient numbers present a significant problem if even they are “better than the local average in ability and character”. Consider the British in India, for example. If immigrants are inferior, they drag the invaded nation down. If they are superior, they tend to set themselves up to rule over the natives in their own interest and at the natives’ expense.

Second, David Ricardo IS economic ignorance. Ricardo believed in a) the cost-of-production theory of value, which is a precursor of Marx’s Labor Theory of Value, b) the price-of-corn theory of profit, and c) the theory of comparative advantage, all of which are widely recognized by modern economists to be intrinsically false. His mode of argument was so hopelessly inept that Joseph Schumpeter even mocked it in his epic History of Economic Analysis.

His interest was in the clear-cut result
of direct, practical significance. In order to get this he cut that
general system to pieces, bundled up as large parts of it as
possible, and put them in cold storage – so that as many things as
possible should be frozen and ‘given’. He then piled one simplifying
assumption upon another until, having really settled everything by
these assumptions, he was left with only a few aggregative variables
between which, given these assumptions, he set up simple one-way
relations so that, in the end, the desired results emerged almost as
tautologies…. The habit of applying results of this character to
the solution of practical problems we shall call the Ricardian Vice.

Third, David Ricardo did not take immigration into account when he copied the concept from Robert Torrens, who introduced the theory of comparative advantage in An Essay on the External Corn Trade. As Ambrose Evans-Pritcher noted:

Ricardo described a world where free trade in goods was opening up, but labour markets remained largely closed. This is no longer the case. Globalisation bids up the wages of high-skilled engineers or software analysts towards international levels wherever they live.

Since Ricardo never took immigration into account, we shall do so on his behalf. I direct your attention to his original postulates from On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation.

Unit Labor Costs

Britain 100 cloth 110 wine
Portugal 90 cloth 80 wine

In the absence of transportation costs, it is efficient for Britain to produce cloth, and Portugal to produce wine, since, assuming that the two goods trade at an equal price (1 unit of cloth for 1 unit of wine) Britain can then obtain wine at a cost of 100 labor units by producing cloth and trading, rather than 110 units by producing the wine itself, and Portugal can obtain cloth at a cost of 80 units by trade rather than 90 by production.

Now we introduce immigration into the equation and the free movement of labor. Obviously both wine and cloth laborers will move to Britain, since they believe they will receive an 11 percent raise and a 38 percent raise respectively. However, once they get there, the doubling of the labor supply in Britain this immigration causes will quickly cause the price of labor to fall. It will fall considerably.

This is great for Britain! It can now produce the same amount of cloth as before for price of only 47.5 units of labor and the same amount of wine for 47.5 labor units as well, thereby obtaining an equal quantity of both wine and cloth for less than what it used to cost to produce the wine alone. This will vastly increase profits in the British cloth and wine industries, as well as creating a windfall for the financial industry investing those profits! Granted, this is because wages have fallen by 50 percent; other consequences include how the newly unemployed British workers go on the dole and turn to crime, the new Portuguese immigrants are heavily inclined to vote for the Labour Party thereby imbalancing the British political system, and British women begin bearing half-Portuguese children and lower the average IQ of the next generation from 100 to 97.5, but those are mostly non-economic factors and therefore don’t count as far as economists are concerned.

They sound suspiciously familiar, though, don’t they?

In conclusion, we can see that open immigration and the free movement of labor is not only economically desirable, but is vastly preferable to comparative advantage by a factor of 105/200 and to autarky by a factor of 105/210. QED. What else can we conclude from this exercise of the Ricardian Vice?

  1. Ricardo implicitly postulated the immobility of labor.
  2. The mobility of labor not only fails to disprove comparative advantage, but actually strengthens the case for even freer trade… at least if you’re in the higher labor cost country and you only look at the labor costs.
  3. The mobility of labor will eliminate international trade since everyone will be living in Britain.
  4. The mobility of labor operates to the detriment of labor.
  5. Ricardo’s logic is remarkably stupid.

But my argument against free trade does not rest on David Ricardo’s intellectual corpse. It is not even, strictly speaking, economic in nature. This is the four-step Vox Day Argument Against Free Trade.

  1. Free trade, in its true, complete, and intellectually coherent
    form, is not limited to the free movement of goods, but includes the
    free movement of capital and labor as well. (The “invisible judicial line” doesn’t magically become visible simply because human bodies are involved.) 
  2. The difference between domestic economies and the global
    international economy is not trivial, but is substantive, material, and
    based on significant genetic, cultural, traditional, and legal
    differences between various self-identified peoples.
  3. Free trade is totally incompatible with national sovereignty,
    democracy, and self-determination, as well as the existence of
    independent nation-states with the right and ability to set their own
    laws according to the preferences of their nationals.
  4. Therefore, free trade must be opposed by every sovereign,
    democratic, or self-determined people, be they American, Chinese,
    German, or Zambian, who wish to preserve themselves as a free and
    distinct nation possessed of its own culture, traditions, and laws.