PAST EVENTS: Martin van Creveld, 31 May, 2 PM EDT Brainstorm May (Crohn’s, Dark Energy, Hugos)
Members should mention what topics they are interested in discussing this month either here or on the chat channel, I’ll pick three and then select two panelists after the topics are settled. Save the astrophysics for July, as that will be the main topic, Stickwick will be one of the panelists again and she wants some time to prepare for it.
Also, most of you are probably unaware that I taught a 12-week course on game development and the history of games in Zurich last year at a Swiss technical institute. Although it was well received and I was asked to repeat it, the regular travel was a bit too brutal and with the promised fast train from Milano still more than a year away, I declined.
However, I plan to revive the course in September with the sponsorship of the institute, albeit online via the webinar software we’re using for Brainstorm. It’s going to be a 10-lesson course for $150, and Annual members will be allowed to attend free if it’s of interest to them. In addition to the core material, the course will feature 30-minute interview/Q&As with various industry figures, including veteran designers, programmers, artists, magazine editors, and even a studio head.
This is how I am voting in the Best Novel category. Of course, I merely offer this information regarding my individual ballot for no particular reason at all, and the fact that I have done so should not be confused in any way, shape, or form with a slate or a bloc vote, much less a direct order by the Supreme Dark Lord of the Evil Legion of Evil to his 367 Vile Faceless Minions or anyone else.
The Three-Body Problem
Skin Game
The Goblin Emperor
The Dark Between the Stars
No Award
As for Ancillary Sword, the fact that Ancillary Justice won last year was an indictment of the Hugos, the Nebulas and every other science fiction award it won. The fact that Ancillary Justice is the most-awarded novel in science fiction history will be seen as a complete joke within a decade, and within 15 years it will be as little read as the now-forgotten Nebula-winner The Quantum Rose (Amazon Rank: #2,563,748 in Books) is now. And the first book was better than the sequel. Therefore I am leaving it off the ballot.
Other categories will follow over the next few weeks, in the off-chance that anyone happens to be interested in my opinion.
Roosh@rooshv Surprise: one of my committed haters @Popehat is mentally ill, served time in an institution. I wish him the best
Popehat @Popehat @rooshv “committed haters” is actually pretty clever.
Popehat @Popehat .@rooshv Ken isn’t the Popehat blogger who hates you. Patrick is the one who hates you, you scrofulous little Ben-wa ball.
Vox Day @voxday .@Popehat @rooshv Is this “Patrick” an actual person or one of the 16 Personalities of Popehat?
I find it rather astonishing that anyone would be so naive as to imagine, in this day and Information Age, to think that it is a good idea to simultaneously a) be mentally ill and b) play attack dog on the Internet. If being medicated or otherwise under treatment for mental illness meant that one was to be regarded as off limits, it would be impossible to respond to an estimated one-in-five people and four-in-five SJWs. So that’s a complete non-starter.
Now, I don’t wish disease of any kind on anyone. I never have and never will. I would very much like for everyone, even those who most hate me, to be healthy, happy, and well. But if you have a mental illness and you are foolish enough to attack me, then you can be certain that I will exploit your weakness to whatever extent I happen to find useful or amusing. Why? Because you gave up any claim to my sympathy or civility of your own free will when you decided to attack me or mine without provocation.
My advice to Ken White is threefold:
Get off the Internet for your own good. Seriously. It’s no place for the depressed, the bipolar, or the schizophrenic. There is no way the form of conflict-laden communication it fosters will do anything but undermine your mental health.
If you won’t do that, then try to stay out of the hot zones. Based on my observations of the behavior of other mentally unstable individuals active on the Internet, at some point your illness is likely to lead you to write checks that your mental stability can’t cash.
If you insist on mixing it up on the Internet, then at the very least do not seek out and attack notoriously ruthless individuals like Roosh and me. We won’t hesitate to strike at your vulnerabilities and we don’t care about the opinion of the delicate souls who will dramatically take to their fainting couches at the horror of it all. Just leave us alone and we’ll leave you alone.
My code of behavior is very simple and straightforward. Leave me alone and I will leave you alone. Start something and I will do my level best to finish it to my satisfaction, no matter how long it takes. So, once you’ve made it personal, don’t whine about how cruelly I take advantage of your feelings of worthlessness or complain about how viciously I exploit your sense of being a failure. All you had to do was leave me alone. And if you can’t manage something as simple as that, well, then perhaps you really are a stupid and worthless individual doomed to inevitable failure in life.
If you are weak, then for the love of God and anything else in which you happen to believe, do not attack the strong!
One thing I think might be useful to keep in mind that the genuinely stable and self-confident individual has as much trouble understanding the perspective of the unstable and insecure person as the latter does the former. When I read Ken’s post about his breakdown and his struggles, my overwhelming impression was sheer bewilderment. He might as well have written it in Chinese for all that I related to it. And what’s more, in writing this post, I begin to understand just how evil and pernicious the behavior of the SJWs who constantly try to spin the false narrative of my incessant failure really is: I now understand that being mentally unstable themselves, they are intentionally attempting to provoke me into a psychological tailspin.
That is foolish for two reasons. First, I’m not susceptible to it. It will never, ever work on me because the effect is precisely the opposite of the one intended. In fact, it’s exactly what my track coach at university used to do in order to motivate my sprinters group on speed day. (NB: in the track world, sprinters are well known for being the most self-confident of athletes. As it is said, sprinters are born, not made, and you either have it or you don’t.) Second, and more important, their use of the tactic tells me precisely who is going to be most vulnerable to it.
At least Mr. Beale isn’t claiming I’m calling for false reviews anymore, though he still hasn’t retracted that statement.
I am absolutely claiming that Glenn Hauman has called and is still calling for false reviews of certain works to be posted on Amazon. He has publicly, and disingenuously, called for them twice now. Ten negative reviews, at least five of them confirmed by the reviewer to be false, have now been posted, some by his known associates. Mr. Hauman is either lying or woefully mistaken when he says I am not claiming that he’s calling for false reviews anymore.
This is standard SJW behavior. They say something in a passive-aggressive, plausibly deniable manner that they expect others to interpret in a certain way and act accordingly. This is why they are always talking about “dog whistles”; that is how they communicate amongst themselves.
Then, when criticized for the very consequences they intended, they deny having done what they did, reject all responsibility for the consequences of their words, and insist that everyone accept the false narrative of the disconnect between their call to action and the subsequent actions.
Hauman points out that he said people should read the various Puppy works before the reviewers “put them down”, but some of the reviewers didn’t, by their own admission, read them, nor did Hauman give a damn whether they did or not. His objective was for the Puppy works to receive negative reviews, which they subsequently received. Mission accomplished. The pretense the SJW attempts to maintain is usually a childishly transparent one, and it both confuses and alarms them when one simply ignores the verbal fog of nominal “plausibility” with which they try to preemptively defend themselves and focuses on the intention and the effect.
As, one notes, the justice system likewise does. No drug dealer has ever escaped conviction because he said “melons and cantaloupes” in the place of marijuana and cocaine when wire-tapped. What he said may be true, but it is irrelevant. His intentions are best judged by the response to the words, and not the words themselves.
The reason we know it is disingenuousness and dishonesty and not an inability to connect cause-and-effect is that SJWs are not similarly inclined to respect genuine deniability whenever they are accusing someone of one of the many isms they wield as weapons to DISQUALIFY. In fact, SJWs regularly claim the ability to read minds and discern intentions even when there are no actual consequences to observe.
Don’t ever take an SJW’s spun narrative at face value. That’s exactly what they expect you to do; that’s exactly what they need you to do. Punch through it and expose them. You can be sure that the narrative will be false because SJWs always lie.
Speaking of which, these two false narratives are excellent examples:
Stevie on May 22, 2015 at 7:24 pm said: One thing you will discover is that the canine conspirators are now in total disarray, because the Sads didn’t realise that they would be Shanghaid by the Rabids. Equally, the Rabids are in total disarray because Beale really thought he was going to be treated as an entrepreneurial mastermind by the WSJ and therefore was completely blindsided when the WSJ laughed at him. In other words, all they’ve got left is to be as destructive as possible, and do their best to make everyone else miserable.
Chris Hensley on May 22, 2015 at 7:37 pm said: “Equally, the Rabids are in total disarray because Beale really thought he was going to be treated as an entrepreneurial mastermind by the WSJ and therefore was completely blindsided when the WSJ laughed at him.”
All the while Vox Day is screaming “Why are you running? We have them right where we want them!”
Are you in total disarray, Rabid Puppies? As for the idea that I was “completely blindsided” by Michael Rappoport’s article in the Wall Street Journal, this is exactly what I wrote to the Evil Legion of Evil about it two weeks before it ran: “Wall Street Journal piece coming soon, possibly tomorrow. Strangely enough, they didn’t even ask me if I hate black lesbians or kick kittens. It will probably be moderately against us, in my opinion. He wasn’t hostile, but he played “devil’s advocate”, in his own words, several times.”
I was, of course, under absolutely no illusions that the piece would have anything to do with entrepreneurship or my being a mastermind of any kind for the obvious reason that I actually talked to the reporter for about ten minutes. Not only were his questions mildly accusatory in nature, but the fact that he was also talking with two people who had nothing to do with the story, George Martin and John Scalzi, was sufficient to tell me which way he was going to spin it. As in fact, turned out to be the case. But the tone of the article was considerably less poisonous than the Entertainment Weekly, Guardian, and Popular Science stories that were planted by the Torlings. Which was nice, and I also noticed that the comments on the WSJ web site ran about 10-1 in our favor.
As for the clueless wonders at File 770 who don’t understand how the Torlings plant stories in the mainstream media, they should look at who publishes the authors of some of those “journo things”.
It’s always fascinating how economists who like nothing better than to cite the Law of Supply and Demand turn around and claim that increasing the labor supply by nearly 20 percent neither reduces average wages nor native employment:
The number of foreign-born workers kept rising. Last year, there were 25.7 million in the U.S., up from 25.3 million in 2013. They accounted for 16.5% of the labor force in 2014, up from 16.3% the year before and 15.5% in 2009, the year the recovery began.
The foreign-born worker labor-force participation rate—the share aged 16 and older working or looking for work–was 66.0% in 2014, higher than the native-born rate of 62.3%. Foreign-born workers are more likely than native-born workers to be male and more likely to be between the ages of 25 to 54, ages when the participation rate is highest, according to the BLS.
About 48.3% of the foreign-born workers in 2014 were Hispanic and 24.1% of them were Asian last year, according to BLS. The composition of foreign workers has shifted since 2009, with Hispanics’ share decreasing and Asians’ rising.
Foreign-born workers saw their median usual weekly earnings rise to $664 in 2014, up from $643 in 2013. The difference between the weekly earnings of foreign-born workers and their native-born counterparts narrowed slightly as well from $162 in 2013 to $156 in 2014. The earnings gap peaked at $173 in 2010 and has been trending down since.
Since 20 percent of the US labor force is non-American, it should be no surprise that the number of Americans now outside the labor force has increased dramatically in line with the increase in immigration.
This shouldn’t be rocket science. Let’s use a reductio ad absurdum to explain. If 100 percent of the labor force is foreign-born, what percent of native-born Americans have jobs?
a) 100 b) zero c) mu
The immigrants aren’t even that much cheaper, as their median usual weekly earnings are 81 percent of the native-born workers. If we assume that employers are unable to spend any more money on employment than they already are, that means that immigrants are responsible for putting 20.8 million Americans out of work.
Kicking Puppies is not nice. Glenn Hauman issued a second call for anti-Puppy Amazon reviews, this time on File 770:
Glenn Hauman on April 15, 2015 You can game Amazon ratings as well. Here’s a list of all of Mr. Beale’s nominees, complete with handy links to Amazon. It might be a good idea to take a look at the reviews and see which ones are helpful. If you’ve read the works, you should add your own review. Oh, and to answer the title question: what do you do to rabid puppies? You put them down.
Glenn Hauman on May 20, 2015 at 10:51 pm said: Just a reminder to all Hugo voters: After you’ve read items in the Hugo packet, you don’t have to confine any reviews of them to your own blogs and social media. Feel free to add them to Amazon as well.
And once again, SJWs have obediently responded to his call. Mr. Hauman’s actions strike me as a very good way to encourage publishers to stop participating in future Hugo Packets. I mean, why should we do so if it’s only going to provide the SJWs in science fiction with another means of attack? Mr. Hauman has demonstrated how the Hugo Packet can be destroyed in a single year; what publisher is going to even be willing to include excerpts when inclusion in the Packet means several hundred one-star reviews on Amazon within weeks?
BIG BOYS DON’T CRY Not recommended This is not a very good story. To be honest, it is not my kind of SF and the only reason I read it was because of the Hugo nomination. Published 3 hours ago by Hampus Eckerman
Lame Whiny Book. (Disclaimer: I didn’t buy the book here; got it as part of the Hugo ballot packet.) David Weber can write cartoon villains and cowardly REMFs and it’s fun to read, even… Published 10 hours ago by Bill Stewart
What a Waste of Time This must have been a rough year for novellas if this is one of the front-runners for a major award. Did he pay his friends to nominate him? Published 11 hours ago by Janelle Wilbanks
Dated and amateurish MilSF Another 2015 Hugo nominee from the Puppies. Magnolia, a.k.a. Maggie, is a Ratha, an armored war machine in the military forces of a starfaring and aggressive Earth… Read more Published 21 hours ago by Elisabeth Carey
These reviews averaged 1.5 stars, whereas the 142 other reviews averaged 4.3 stars. Elisabeth Carey is also attacking John C. Wright, giving ONE BRIGHT STAR TO GUIDE THEM its only two-star rating in 80 reviews which otherwise average 4.5 stars. No doubt this is merely a matter of differing tastes combined with some coincidental timing. Again.
Of course, BIG BOYS DON’T CRY and ONE BRIGHT STAR TO GUIDE THEM are not the only Hugo nominees included in the Hugo Packet. ANCILLARY SWORD presently has 204 reviews and a 4.1 rating. THE GOBLIN EMPEROR has 232 reviews and a 4.4 rating. To quote Mr. Hauman: “Just a reminder to all Hugo voters: After you’ve read items in the Hugo packet, you don’t have to confine any reviews of them to your own blogs and social media. Feel free to add them to Amazon as well.”
Feel free, the man says. Feel free. On a tangential note, while Chuck D brought us the concept of the one-man riot, Lori Coulson has invented the one-woman blacklist. She’s going to continue to not read books by authors she had never read before:
Lori Coulson on May 21, 2015 at 8:38 pm said: The one thing the Hugo packet has demonstrated to me? That there are a bunch of authors out there I never want to read again, and not only will I not read anything more by them, I definitely won’t be reading anything the “Evil League of Evil” writes, edits or publishes. After being wowed by “The Crucible” in High School and taking the lesson within to heart, I find I’m starting my own personal blacklist. And it makes me very unhappy that it’s necessary to do so.
And here we were told blacklists were bad. Anyhow, this sounds rather like MSNBC’s audience threatening to never watch Fox News again.
A Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, David McCleary, wrote to me this week with a complaint about being subjected to what he called “a Jewish litmus test” during a Times interview.
The interview (conducted by a Times stringer, or regular freelancer, who is not on the full-time staff) was done for an article that eventually appeared on the front page, “Campus Debates on Israel Drive a Wedge Between Jews and Minorities.” It took up efforts on college campuses to pressure Israel over its policies toward Palestinians and its occupation of the West Bank.
Mr. McCleary, who is Jewish, said that the reporter, Ronnie Cohen, asked him “insulting and demeaning questions,” including whether he “looked Jewish,” after telling him that his name didn’t sound Jewish and asking if he had been bar mitzvahed. He also said that after talking with the reporter for more than an hour, he was displeased to find that none of that interview made its way into the article, and that no other Jewish student who supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement was quoted or represented in the story….
After speaking to Ms. Cohen, who confirmed, in general terms, the nature of the questions to Mr. McCleary, Ms. Mitchell told me, “If she indeed pursued that line of questioning, it was inappropriate.”
These litmus tests are the way SJWs in the media and elsewhere attempt to shoehorn people into their anti-white narrative. You’ve probably noticed that they absolutely hate to admit that I am a Native American, because that blows their “white supremacist” angle to Hell. You can tell they don’t really care about Hispanics because they have no similar problem admitting that I am Mexican… except for the few who were trying to raciss-DISQUALIFY on the basis of my statements against open immigration.
In the case of the intrepid Ms Cohen, it’s obvious that she didn’t like the fact that a Jewish man was taking what she believed to be the wrong position, ergo she tried to DISQUALIFY him as a Jew. This is one of the many inevitable consequences of identity-based ideology. As one professor objected:
I am distressed about the lack of evidence in the piece to support the authors’ assertions about this deeply sensitive and volatile issue. Divestment is supported by a large group of individuals — some of them members of minority groups, and some Jews. (I, incidentally, do not support the movement). To make this into a “Minority vs. Jewish” question, without supplying evidence, is to distort the issue.
Of course, distorting the issue is the main objective. But this story of ethics in ethnic journalism also points to something more important. When talking to the media, ALWAYS record them. It’s clear that the national editor doesn’t want to fire Ms Cohen, hence the statement “If she indeed pursued that line of questioning”. Since Mr. McCleary probably didn’t record his conversation with the reporter, he probably can’t prove it and she’ll get away with it.
So, I repeat: when speaking with the media, ALWAYS record your conversation. This prevents them from playing their usual game of attempting to spin what you said even as they deny what they did and said.
This is one of the first rational things I’ve seen the SJWs at File 770 produce in weeks:
Nick Mamatas on May 21, 2015 at 9:21 am said:
There are three options as far I can tell:
The Hugos being a product a fandom, much of the discussion around “fixing” the issue boils down either angry blog posts about white people (ie, admissions of pathetic whining defeat) or statistical wonkery (ie foolishness). These are all wrongheaded—slating is essentially a political issue, and political issues need political responses. There are three possible ones:
1. Suck It Up. Probably a pretty good idea. This bed was made some years ago when blogging culture sparked a shift from significant social sanction when people tried to get votes by asking publicly for consideration to “obligatory” posts promoting their own work, and later, the work of their friends. Loud Blogs win; Loud Blogs Plus Online Workshop-Clubhouses win more; and Loud Blogs plus political discipline win even more. Why should only the Loud Bloggers people have decided that they personally like and are “friends”* with win? Eventually, it’ll all even out, especially as what is most likely to happen is that the SPs get nominated and then lose decisively year after year.
2. Castigate all campaigning, not just the campaigning you don’t like Pandora’s Box isn’t necessarily open forever. However, you can’t close half a lid. It would take significant effort to change widespread attitudes, but it is not as though those attitudes have not changed before. If campaigning was always met with eye-rolling or even outright disgust, it would stop being so effective. Some people would betray and try to promote, but if the audience was inured to such appeals, it just wouldn’t work and hopefuls would eventually stop.
3. Counter-slates We’ll almost certainly see attempts at counter-slates. I’m against the idea, but the current cry to vote “No Award” in all SP-dominated categories is itself a counter-slate after a fashion. Someone will come up with Happy Kittens and stump for non-binary PoCs or stories with lots of scene breaks or or or…well, that’s the problem. One counter-slate would likely thwart the SPs, more than one would not. And we’re sure to see more than one. Disciplined slate voting works best when only one side does it and the other side isn’t even a side. Two slates split demographically. Three or more, uh… At any rate, it all comes around to political discipline again. If some party were to launch a counter-slate next year, would others who found that slate imperfect let it by without critique and another alternative slate. (There are actually two Puppy slates, but they are largely similar.) There can be slates that are so attractive that many more people sign up to vote for the Hugos, but I strongly suspect that people overestimate the amount of outside “pull” these slates have; general Hugo chatter across blogs and Twitter in general is driving increased education about supporting Worldcon memberships, and then there are all the free books voters might receive, which is also a new thing. One counter-slate would be effective, though of course the cure could be worse than the disease, and more than one would likely not.
So aggrieved Hugo Award followers, which shall it be?
Two is still the best bet.
This is at least dealing with observable reality, unlike those who fantasize that tinkering with the rules is going to slow down any group that contains at least one individual with a brain, or worse, those who think that MOAR DISQUALIFY is magically going to accomplish anything. So, let’s consider their options from our perspective.
1. Suck it up
This is what they should have done. It would have taken a fair amount of the wind out of our sails. However, most of the potential benefits are now lost since they’ve already motivated our side through their histrionics and media-planted stories.
2. Castigate all campaigning
Won’t happen. Far too many people on their side are guilty of it, and far too many people are already invested in the idea that what is very, very bad for us is just fine for the Tor set and everyone who bought memberships for their children and extended families.
3. Counter-slates
This is the only real option for them now. It’s also the one that is most frightening for them, because it puts an end to their gentleman’s agreement to stick to logrolling and whisper campaigns as long as no one gets too greedy, and forces them to come out and compete in the open. They hate open competition on principle and the idea that they might come out for a fair fight next year and lose will strike them as so terrifying as to be beyond imagining. Furthermore, because they really, really care about winning awards, it’s going to be much harder for them to put together a slate, much less find the numbers to support it in the disciplined manner required now that a bloc of 40 votes is no longer sufficient to put something on the shortlist.
I’m not saying that Sad Puppies will automatically win a battle of slates, but that sort of honest and open competition suits us much better than it suits them. But I expect that next year there will be at least two rival slates, one of which will be centered around the Torlings.
I felt last night’s event went fairly smoothly, all things considered. Even though we went about 15 minutes longer than scheduled, I wasn’t able to address all of the questions in detail, but the chat server worked, as did both of the recordings. Transcripts will be sent out to everyone who signed up as soon as they are completed.
If you’re interested in signing up on an annual basis for a 20 percent discount, you can do so now, otherwise you can just sign up on a monthly basis as your schedule and interests permit for $25 per event.
The next event is a free one and will feature an interview with Martin van Creveld, the Israeli military historian, on Sunday 31 May at 3 PM Eastern time. Members will have priority seating; I don’t know yet if there will be 100 or 500 seats available.
If you attended and want to share your opinion about how it went, for good or ill, feel free to do so. Three panelists seemed to work pretty well, but in the future I we’ll definitely want to nail down the three primary subjects, one per panelist, ahead of time.
I checked – somebody on File 770 thinks that Wright forgot the name of one of his characters, and changed it from Sarah to Sally randomly. Not so – she is referred to as both names, but there’s no explanation as to why in the story. It would have been better to be consistent.) …. – SJW Chris Gerrib
One wonders if Mr. Gerrib would also require an explanation if the same character was referred to as Joey at 10 and as Joseph at 35. The SJW inability to figure this out has been a small, but telling demonstration of the intellectually inferior looking at the work of their superiors, and because they lack the wits to make sense of it, pronouncing it stupid.
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