Her precious….

You may recall that the Toad of Tor said this yesterday:

1. I have less power than I feel I should have.
2. I feel those people over there have power I don’t have.
3. They must have stolen mine!

A clear case of psychological projection, one would have to conclude. Especially after reading her subsequent statement today:

“The Hugos don’t belong to the set of all people who read
the genre; they belong to the worldcon, and the people who attend
and/or support it. The set of all people who read SF can start
their own award.”
– Teresa Nielsen Hayden, March 29,
2015, 03:43 PM

That’s coming right from the Toad’s mouth. And yet, here is what Sasquan itself has to say about the Hugo Awards.

Worldcons are the site of the Hugo Awards, the premier awards in the science fiction field, recognizing the greatest books and stories, related works, film, television, podcasts, and fan works.

So, we’re supposed to believe that the premier awards that recognize the greatest books and stories in science fiction don’t belong to the set of all science fiction readers?  Then what makes them “the premier awards”? Why are they even supposed to be relevant, if they mean nothing to anyone who isn’t one of the small number of people who attend “the worldcon”?

No income growth in two decades

Despite two stock market booms, there has been no real income growth since 1994:

Real Median Household Income Has Been Flat for 20 YearsDespite ultra-loose monetary policies over the past several years,
incomes adjusted for inflation have fallen for the median U.S. family.
With the benefits of monetary expansion going to a small share of the
population and wage growth stagnating, incomes have been essentially
flat over the past 20 years. In the long run, however, classical economics would tell us that the
pricing distortions created by the current global regimes of QE will
lead to a suboptimal allocation of capital and investment, which will
result in lower output and lower standards of living over time. In fact,
although U.S. equity prices are setting record highs, real median
household incomes are 9 percent lower than 1999 highs. The report from
Bank of America Merrill Lynch plainly supports the conclusion that QE
and the associated currency depreciation is not leading to higher global
output. The cost of QE is greater than the income lost to savers and
investors. The long-term consequence of the new monetary orthodoxy is
likely to permanently impair living standards for generations to come
while creating a false illusion of reviving prosperity.

Karl Denninger was among the first to point out that even if it worked, Quantitative Easing could not possibly do what was claimed of it. Thus demonstrating what I pointed out, which is that it was merely about buying more time for the bankers to make hay before the eventual crash of the global economy. We’re already seeing signs of the wars that conventionally accompany depressions, and depending upon your definition of depression, we’re only six years into this thing.

Asymmetric warfare

The war in Yemen has now gone regional:

Saudi Arabia’s King Salman said the military operation against the Houthis would not stop until Yemen was stable and secure. It will continue “until it achieves its goals for the Yemen people to achieve security,” he said.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Sisi, meanwhile, endorsed the creation of a joint military force, saying the Arab world was at a crucial crossroad and facing unprecedented difficulties. “The challenges are grave,” Sisi told the Arab leaders, like Salman not mentioning Iran by name. “It is a huge responsibility, heavy and burdensome.”

A Houthi spokesman countered Saturday that Hadi was a “puppet” of the United States and Saudi Arabia. “Yemenis may not have great and strong weapons like Saudi Arabia and their allies, but they have strength, and faith in God will win this battle,” said Dhaif Allah Shami of the Houthi political office.

In Tehran, a government TV station reported that thousands of people took to the streets of Sana to voice their readiness to confront Saudi aggression. The station also reported Houthi militias moving toward the border of Saudi Arabia. A third night of airstrikes targeted military bases and air defense sites around Sana and destroyed stockpiles of weapons that the Houthi militia had seized, said Ahmed Hassan Asiri, a spokesman for coalition forces. There were also late-night reports of airstrikes on Sana’s civilian airport.

Yemen airspace remained exclusively under the control of the coalition, Asiri said, and the Houthis suffered “grave losses.” He said their capability is “weakening on a daily basis.” But he acknowledged that the Houthis were continuing a push toward the port city of Aden and were also mobilizing near the Saudi border.

As always, combined arms are the most effective. What appears to be happening so far is air forces versus ground forces, and the latter usually win as long as they can reach the enemy. But it appears that the Saudis are not confident that their ground forces will be sufficient to repel a Houthi invasion, otherwise they would not be looking for help from Egypt and other Arab countries.

Brad Torgersen breaks the narrative

As you might expect, Brad Torgersen’s response to the Toad of Tor and the carnival of the grotesque on display at Making Light is considerably more polite and measured than mine. But it is equally dismissive in substance:

We’re about a week out from the release of the final ballot results, for the 2015 Hugo awards. These results will determine which picks are available for your choosing when it comes time for you to cast your ballot. Best Novel, Best Short Story, etc. Already, the critics of Sad Puppies 3 have been laying the groundwork for de-legitimizing SP3. To include statements which completely misunderstand the point of Sad Puppies. Some of it is innocent. Not everybody’s had time to do a deep-dig on the history of Sad Puppies, nor to be able to discern that each iteration of the project has tended to assume its own personality. What they’re hearing about SP3 is probably hear-say from friends, and much of that is at least one to two years out-of-date. And even then, many of the “facts” put forth are demonstrably wrong.

But other commentary is not so innocent. There are people who find the very existence of Sad Puppies 3 to be an affront to their personhoods. A sinister outside force come to trouble their precious genre and its establishment. For the people deliberately misconstruing the purpose and thrust of Sad Puppies 3, it’s all about getting out in front and shaping a narrative. They’re smart. They know that truth can be overwhelmed with lies if you just spin your narrative adroitly, and with enough volume.

Thus the charges, in no particular order.

● SP3 is a trojan horse effort conducted by and for the benefit of authors who cannot earn a Hugo award the honest way.

● SP3 is just ballot-stuffing, which ought to be disallowed according to precedent and the rules of ballot-counting established through WSFS.

● SP3 is artificially trying to warp the Hugos out of true; an outside effort conducted by and involving people who are not real fans.

● The SP3 slate works are substandard based on (insert garbledy-garble talk about taste here.)

● The SP3 slate is just a bunch of right-wingers who should go set up their own awards, and leave the Hugos alone.

● SP3 is not legit because its participants were drafted for the effort, and are not willing participants.

● SP3 is not legit because Larry Correia is a terrible human being who is hated by all real fans.

● SP3 is not legit because Vox Day is also running Rabid Puppies and everybody knows Vox Day is also a terrible human being who is hated by all real fans.

● SP3 is a trojan horse for GamerGaters, and all real fans hate and loathe GamerGaters.

● SP3 is just a bunch of straight white guys who are terrified of women, gays, trans, and folks with brown skin.

● SP3 would never happen in the first place if (resurrected conservative editor of the past) could lecture them about their wrongdoing.

● SP3 is a fringe minority faction that does not represent the “main body” of real fans.

● SP3’s slate selections are not the “natural” selections of real fans.

There’s more, but I think you get the gist of it.

Much of this is simply the “in” crowd reacting badly to watching the “out” crowd take a seat at the lunch table. As I’ve mentioned before in this space, according to the dyed-in-the-wool denizens of WSFS and Worldcon, a “real fan” is defined as someone who has been attending Worldcon (and other cons) for a long time, has been properly inculcated into the specific culture of Worldcon and con-going fandom, is someone who volunteers time and effort to cons, generally makes Worldcon (and con-going) a “family” affair, etc. So if you don’t go to Worldcon and you’ve not been part of that culture for a number of years, you don’t qualify as a “real fan” in their definition. And they resent the hell out of anyone who is not a “real fan” showing up to vote on the “real fan” award.

Imagine that, an SJW trying to deceitfully shape the narrative in her favor. Keep in mind that Brad is addressing those who are still running around saying demonstrably untrue things like “Vox Day is the originator of Sad Puppies” and “Spacebunny does not exist”. These SJWs are not so much insane as willfully delusional. I have no doubt that I could show up at Sasquan with Spacebunny and some of them would claim that I somehow managed to find and hire an escort who happens to look just like the model whose pictures I’ve been using to make it look as if I am married to a slender and attractive woman. Because #GamerGate. And also, raciss.

Of course, they know better, but they’re perfectly willing to lie for rhetorical effect. Which raises the question: once you know that, why would you believe a single word that comes out of their mouths? The good thing is that it is easy to destroy their narrative. Because it is false, all that is necessary to do so is to relentlessly tell the truth.

Since 1986, Tor Books has 84 Hugo and Nebula Best Novel nominations. In 2014, Tor.com had 50 percent of the short story nominations, 40 percent of the novella nominations, and 20 percent of the novelette nominations. Tor has also won the Locus Award for Best Publisher for 26 straight years, beginning in 1988.

Keep that in mind when you read the Toad of Tor’s claims about people being afraid of losing their privilege.

The Toad of Tor croaks

This ludicrously dishonest croaking from the Toad amused me. It demonstrates how completely, how utterly, how absolutely, the SJWs in science fiction have no conception whatsoever of the zeitgeist. Teresa Nielsen Hayden, who may or may not have already been fired from Tor, croaked:

A sense of injured privilege is what PUAs, Gamergaters, and Sad Puppies have in common. Their fury at SJWs comes from a sequence of assumptions that’s very common in individuals and groups that are smarting from a sense of wounded self-importance:

1. I have less power than I feel I should have.
2. I feel those people over there have power I don’t have.
3. They must have stolen mine!

And poof, there’s their evil enemy, made to order.

Gamergaters think gaming belongs to them, and should answer solely to their preferences. PUAs hate women who selfishly consult their own feelings and preferences, then turn them down. Torgersen wants awards to go to the people and works he thinks should win, rather than the ones the voters would naturally vote for.

In the long run, this is doomed. What the Sad Puppies are doing will not make disinclined readers love their work or respect them as authors — readers really are stubborn that way — but they might conceivably do a lot of damage along the way.

She might as easily have written “ribbit, ribbit, ribbit” for all that it has any relationship to reality except for her statement about Brad.  Let’s identify and count the errors just from the quoted section:

  1. Pick-Up Artists do not have a sense of injured privilege. They have a sense of mastery. Because they are sexually successful men who have sex with large quantities of women much more attractive than the Toad of Tor ever was. They don’t hate women who turn them down; the abundance mentality teaches precisely the opposite. She has literally NO IDEA what she’s talking about here. Or she’s simply lying.
  2. GamerGaters do not have a sense of injured privilege. They don’t think gaming belongs to them. They have a sense of being betrayed by the gaming media, which they no longer can trust to honestly review games, and a correct sense of being attacked by people for developing the games they want to develop and playing the games they want to play. The entire core message of GamerGate is simple: fuck off and leave us alone to play what we want to play, not what you think we should be permitted to play. Again, the Toad is saying things that are demonstrably false.
  3. Yes, Torgersen wants awards to go to the people and works he thinks should win. So does the Toad of Tor. Notice the deceit here about what the voters would “naturally vote for”. What is this “natural vote” and how does the Toad somehow know what it is? Isn’t that what the actual vote is meant to determine?
  4. What is doomed in the long run? Long after the Toad of Tor is dead and forgotten, pick-up artists will be picking up women, game developers will be developing games, and gamers will be playing them. As for Sad Puppies, here is a prediction: Sad Puppies will outlast Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s career at Tor Books.
  5. It’s true that Sad Puppies will not make disinclined readers love anyone’s work or respect anyone as authors. Now, I can’t speak for any other supporter of Sad Puppies, but as for me, the Toad is ludicrously mistaken if she genuinely believes I give even the smallest fraction of a damn. And Sad Puppies don’t have less power than they think they should have or that anyone stole their nonexistent power. This sounds a lot like psychological projection coming from someone who was until recently associated with Tor Books, the winner of the Locus Award for best SF publisher 20 years in a row and a sizable chunk of all the major science fiction awards given out over the last two decades.
  6. Our contempt for SJWs is because they are obnoxious individuals like the Toad of Tor who believe they have the right to tell other people what to write, what to read, what to develop, what to play, and for what it is natural to vote on the basis of their pinkshirted ideology. We stand for freedom. They stand for them being in control. And we do not accept it.

SJWs are the people of the lie. They are Aristotle’s people who are intellectually limited to the rhetorical level. We all know that no amount of new information will change the Toad’s mind. We all know that the Toad will not address any of this honestly. She will not recant her observably false claims. She’ll simply tell more lies about what other people really think and produce more incoherent rhetoric. And that is why she merits nothing but the utmost contempt. As disgusting as the Toad of Tor may be on the outside, she’s even worse on the inside.

All you need to know who is right and who is wrong in this is to note who is able to directly quote the other side, and who almost invariably has to resort to writing complete fiction about the other side’s thoughts and motivations. I don’t give a damn why the Toad thinks what she thinks. I don’t give a damn what her motivations might be. All I need to know, all anyone needs to know, is what her words are in order to reach an accurate conclusion and dismiss her accordingly.

If you do feel like a safari through the SJW fever swamp, I would encourage you not to leave any comments there. You cannot engage in rational discourse with the intrinsically irrational and Making Light is not a place where you are going to find anyone even remotely capable of dialectic. Treat it like the zoo it is, just drive through and marvel at the grotesquerie.

Punch harder

It’s amusing how many SJWs don’t understand how this “Internet” thing works. A woman whines about being criticized by Dalrock, among others.

A group of supposed “Christian” men bantered back and forth under a blog written with the sole intention of saying that women divorce so they can profit off of it by writing about it and I Laura Lifshitz, am one of the most evil women profiting off her dissolved marriage. Oh and by the way, the article is categorized under “ugly feminists.”

First, the comments focused on how terrible I was for writing about my divorce not only for The Huffington Post, but also for the New York Times because you know, the divorce must be my fault since I write about the experience, and I’m an evil Jewish feminist. And not only must the divorce be my fault but that I am a selfish mother who cares not for her own child and how she feels in the matter. In addition, let’s not forget to add that female writers writing about divorce are a bunch of leeches set to destroy our families all in the name of money.

Because, you know, I’m just filthy rich. It’s too bad my student loan lender doesn’t realize this.

Then, the commenters started to focus on my last name: Lifshitz.

“Ha, Ha, Ha! Is it even a real name?” joked one commenter.

Then the other commenters joined in to bash my last name, these anti-Semitic, vile, and immature babies (I mean men).

Now why would anyone be moved to criticize a woman who calls them “anti-Semitic, vile, and immature babies”? What is the bright line that separates a woman calling men “vile and immature babies” and a man calling women “rancid cunts”? And for crying out loud, look at her name. “Is it a real name” is about the mildest possible sport anyone could make of it. As for people getting personal about Ms Lipshits, it’s not hard to see why they might feel justified in doing so:

There is this one dude at the gym who is very buff. He’s not my bag of treats, but apparently he feels that any woman who looks in his direction must be interested. He has this stone face grimace. I see him at least three times a week. Smile you grouchy fuck! I am not interested in you, but I just hate looking at such a crabby face.

Any woman who writes like this has made herself entirely fair game for any verbal abuse anyone wants to pour out upon her. Like the McRapeys and McRacists of the world, she wants to be able to dish out abuse without being subjecting to it in return. Women like this are in shock that men on the Internet aren’t treating them the way that men in their daily life do, and that they can’t get away with talking about others in public the way they do in private.

The thing is, if you’re going to be a public figure and express your opinion on the Internet, you are going to upset a subset of the people who encounter it. A subset of that subset are going to respond by attacking you using nothing but rhetoric. I’ve had people calling me nearly every name in the book on the Internet since 2001. So what? It clearly hasn’t harmed me in the slightest. I quite like that it also gives me complete carte blanche to call everyone else anything I please since it seems to bother most of them considerably more than it bothers me.

The first rule of dealing with SJWs is Andrew Breitbart’s: always punch back twice as hard. The second rule is this: keep punching. Women are particularly susceptible to attacks on their appearance and their sexual behavior, so those are the most effective subjects to target with rhetoric. Once it is clear that they’re not engaging in honest dialectic or rational discourse, your best bet is to either ignore them or nuke them rhetorically.

The third rule is this: quote them and quote them ruthlessly.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden is a self-admitted racist. John Scalzi is a
self-admitted rapist. NK Jemisin is a self-admitted savage… and proud
of it.

The SJWs have to choose. Either they can engage in rational discourse or they can accept being called sluts and savages and racists and evil, ugly feminists on a regular basis. What is not on the table is one-way communication where they attack and lecture us and we humbly accept it in dutiful silence.

There are some things I cannot understand — like internet trolls and
people who hate chocolate — but there is one thing that I do know is
that I will never stop writing. I don’t care if they come to my house
and call me the ugliest cunt on the planet. I will never stop writing my
story.

Oh, I don’t think there was every any chance that Ms Lipshits was going to stop talking about herself. But she can be assured that as long as she subjects the public to her story, the public is going to talk back.

The failure of accomodation

The Washington Post laments the decline of the American church:

America’s churches are in trouble, and they are in trouble in communities that arguably need them the most.

One of the tragic tales told by Harvard scholar Robert Putnam in his important new book, “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis,” is that America’s churches have grown weakest in some of the communities that need them most: poor and working-class communities across the country. The way he puts it, our nation’s churches, synagogues and mosques give children a sense of meaning, belonging and purpose — in a word, hope — that allows them to steer clear of trouble, from drugs to delinquency, and toward a bright and better future, warmer family relationships and significantly higher odds of attending college.

The tragedy is that even though religious involvement “makes a bigger difference in the lives of poor kids than rich kids,” Putnam writes, involvement is dropping off fastest among children from the least privileged background, as the figure below indicates.

The picture of religion painted by Putnam, a political scientist and the foremost scholar of American civic life, is part of a broader canvass in his book showing that kid-friendly institutions — not just churches, but also strong families and strong schools — are withering, but almost entirely in less-affluent communities. American children from better-educated and more affluent homes enjoy decent access to churches, families and schools, which lifts their odds of realizing the American Dream, even as kids from less-privileged homes are increasingly disconnected from these key institutions, making the American Dream that much more difficult for them to pursue.

Why is it that the country is witnessing not only a religious decline, but one that is concentrated among its most vulnerable men, women and children? Four factors stand out in understanding the emptying out of the pews in working-class and poor communities across the United States: money, TV, sex and divorce.

These things are all symptoms, not the actual problem. There are many, many strong Christians across the USA and around the world who do not attend organized churches because the organized churches have been invaded by entryists and gutted. The tolerant, welcoming, accomodating, and worldly churches are dying because they lack the only thing a Christian church needs: an unflinching commitment to Jesus Christ and the Bible.

Society cannot destroy the Church, but the Church can destroy itself by making societal approval its priority.

Tech spying cutting US economic throat

This could bring a rapid end to the continued growth of the global data-mining business:

The European Commission has warned EU citizens that they should close their Facebook accounts if they want to keep information private from US security services, finding that current Safe Harbour legislation does not protect citizen’s data.

The comments were made by EC attorney Bernhard Schima in a case brought by privacy campaigner Maximilian Schrems, looking at whether the data of EU citizens should be considered safe if sent to the US in a post-Snowden revelation landscape.

“You might consider closing your Facebook account, if you have one,” Schima told attorney general Yves Bot in a hearing of the case at the European court of justice in Luxembourg.

When asked directly, the commission could not confirm to the court that the Safe Harbour rules provide adequate protection of EU citizens’ data as it currently stands. The case, dubbed “the Facebook data privacy case”, concerns the current Safe Harbour framework, which covers the transmission of EU citizens’ data across the Atlantic to the US. Without the framework, it is against EU law to transmit private data outside of the EU. The case collects complaints lodged against Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Microsoft-owned Skype and Yahoo.

Schrems maintains that companies operating inside the EU should not be allowed to transfer data to the US under Safe Harbour protections – which state that US data protection rules are adequate if information is passed by companies on a “self-certify” basis – because the US no longer qualifies for such a status.

Fortunately, we can be certain that the federal government would never sacrifice economic growth for centralized regulatory power, right? This could prove a rather serious problem if the one of the proposed engines of US economic recovery turns out to be intrinsically illegal in most of the rest of the world.

I’ve noticed that between Russia’s move away from SWIFT, the support for the Chinese alternative to the IMF, the fall of Yemen, and the complete lack of European support for the USA’s adventures in Ukraine, the world appears to be increasingly disinclined to follow the US lead. This does not bode well for the US if it indicates that the global perception of its effective power is on the decline.

A shot across the bow

At this point, given recent steps like these, I think it is eminently clear that the US government has told the Israeli government to take a hike and is going to reach an agreement with Iran that will permit it to become an acknowledged nuclear power:

In a development that has largely been missed by mainstream media, the Pentagon early last month quietly declassified a Department of Defense top-secret document detailing Israel’s nuclear program, a highly covert topic that Israel has never formally announced to avoid a regional nuclear arms race, and which the US until now has respected by remaining silent.

But by publishing the declassified document from 1987, the US reportedly breached the silent agreement to keep quiet on Israel’s nuclear powers for the first time ever, detailing the nuclear program in great depth.

The timing of the revelation is highly suspect, given that it came as tensions spiraled out of control between Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama ahead of Netanyahu’s March 3 address in Congress, in which he warned against the dangers of Iran’s nuclear program and how the deal being formed on that program leaves the Islamic regime with nuclear breakout capabilities.

Another highly suspicious aspect of the document is that while the Pentagon saw fit to declassify sections on Israel’s sensitive nuclear program, it kept sections on Italy, France, West Germany and other NATO countries classified, with those sections blocked out in the document.

The 386-page report entitled “Critical Technological Assessment in Israel and NATO Nations” gives a detailed description of how Israel advanced its military technology and developed its nuclear infrastructure and research in the 1970s and 1980s…. Declassifying the report comes at a sensitive timing as noted above, and
given that the process to have it published was started three years
ago, that timing is seen as having been the choice of the American
government.

This appears to be a clear message to the Israelis that since they have nukes themselves, they have absolutely no grounds to complain about anyone else obtaining them. I do find it somewhat amusing that the article claims the US has breached a nonexistent agreement.

If an agreement of the sort that appears to be in the works does in fact take place, it should be interesting to see how all the “Iran is the New Hitler”
neocons explain the complete failure of a nuclear Iran to immediately
launch the attack on Israel that they have been telling us is imminent for at least the last
decade.

Given what is presently taking place in Yemen and Iraq, I would think it is Saudi Arabia that has a lot more to be concerned than the Israelis.

Mailvox: The Singularity

One of the readers here, who also happens to have the good taste to be a John C. Wright fan, sends word of his band’s new EP, “The Singularity”. Good voice and some interesting guitar work.