Onward and upward

An ex-Gamma writes the fourth, and probably the most important, section in his Graduating Gamma series at Alpha Game:

There is no man on the planet more intellectually dishonest than a
Gamma, as even an Omega has enough self-awareness to avoid being a
buffoon at social event and will instead stay at home and play computer
games. Everything from a Gamma is a con or a presented image, because
behind that shell is a scared, miserable boy who uses whatever tools are
at his disposal to build the Gamma Delusion Bubble. The Gamma Delusion
Bubble shields the Gamma from somehow and some way ever being wrong
about anything, as there is no being wrong about “something”, there is
only being a wrong “person”. His identity is so tied up in his opinions
about everything, including himself, that any slip-up is a catastrophe
which must be avoided at all costs.

I’ve learned a tremendous amount from this series, some of which I’ve even been able to apply here. The most important thing for me has been the explanation of a) why Gammas like Scalzi, Brayton, and Myers flee from public debate when they are so otherwise argumentative and contentious, and, b) why it is almost impossible to get a Gamma to admit that he is wrong without him going through every definition in the dictionary, every pedantic nitpick, and every contortion in the Kama Sutra in order to avoid it no matter how obvious it is to you and everyone else.

Some of you have noticed that I’ve gotten increasingly intolerant of rhetorical arguments, particularly pseudo-dialectical ones, of late. This is because I now understand that there is no real prospect of normal dialectical closure if the other party shows repeated signs of being a Gamma and is engaging in customary Gamma argumentation. Chief among these signs are false summaries, digressions into motivation and psychological diagnosis, appeals to emotion, the production of ad hoc definitions, and the targeting of strawmen rather than the actual statements made. If you happen to be aware that you are prone to utilizing any of those rhetorical tactics, I would strongly recommend that you read the linked article, because you’re not going to find much toleration for them here.

Interview with Vox Day

Sam Roberts at Reaxxion interviewed me about the game industry, the SJW attack on it, and our upcoming plans for First Sword:

SR: Many commentators, at our site and elsewhere, have noticed the sudden outbreak of prudishness in the gaming industry. We saw this with PAX and its ban on booth babes, even to the point of specifying a minimum length for girl’s skirts. Even Mortal Kombat, the franchise that established itself in the 1990’s through its willingness to break all the rules, is moving to “more realistic” characters with smaller breasts and thicker waists. What do you think has changed in the gaming industry in the past 20 years that’s made it so much less able to resist moral scolds?

VD: The most important change is that game development no longer belongs to the mavericks. When we started Fenris Wolf in 1993, literally everyone thought we were crazy. We were throwing away good jobs and wasting our educations to do what people considered to be the equivalent of playing with digital Lincoln Logs. Now that games are widely understood to be big business, many of the jobs pay decent salaries, and you can get degrees in “game development” and “game design,” you have considerably more risk-intolerant, conflict-avoidant people entering the industry.

Twenty years ago, the average developer would have laughed his ass off at the idea that he should design or develop anything other than whatever the hell he wanted to do. These days, there are a fair number of bed-wetters in game development who are terrified at the idea that someone, somewhere, might take offense at something in one of their games. And then, of course, you’ve also got SJWs trying to stick their noses into the industry in order to change it, just as they did in comics and science fiction & fantasy fiction.

You’ll definitely want to check out the screenshots of the 3DV engine in action. Be sure to click on the image of the High Elven archers. 3DV is visually spectacular and is intended to do for miniature gaming what VASSAL did for board-and-counter games. In addition to various other topics addressed, you can also see our response to the SJW demands for more women in games, beginning with the introduction to Morwyn Shadowsong, a female elf gladiator who is the face of First Sword, the fantasy gladiator miniatures game.

It probably won’t take a genius to put two and two together and realize that the Tactical Uncertainty model I’m developing, which has been discussed in some detail over at Castalia, is intended for the third edition of Striker that Marc Miller has asked me to develop. The rules will be developed for use in 3DV and on the tabletop alike; the challenge is how to make something that works almost automatically in the former can be translated to the latter. With regards to some of the other games mentioned, we will have some exciting new announcements soon.

The benefits of abolishing high school

It wouldn’t just help those on the bottom, but quite a few of those on top as well:

[A]bolishing high school would not just benefit those who are at the bottom of its hierarchies. Part of the shared legacy of high school is bemused stories about people who were treated as demigods at seventeen and never recovered. A doctor I hang out with tells me that former classmates who were more socially successful in high school than he was seem baffled that he, a quiet youth who made little impression, could be more professionally successful, as though the qualities that made them popular should have effortlessly floated them through life. It’s easy to laugh, but there is a real human cost.

I think we see some of the human flotsam and jetsam that is the result of high school shipwrecks floating through here from time to time. From the overconfident midwit who has never recovered from the experience of being the smartest guy in a room with a 115 IQ to the deluded ex-cheerleader who is now fifty pounds overweight but still thinks she’s as attractive to men as she was when she could fit into her little skirts to the bitter omega who can’t accept a compliment at face value for fear that it is another cruel trick intended to humiliate him, the psychological scars of the high school experience are often visible to complete strangers on the Internet.

I tend to include myself in that mix, although perhaps wrongly since my psychological idiosyncracies tend to trace back deeper, which is to say, back to elementary school. My suspicion is that being constantly pushed around and marginalized by one’s intellectual and athletic inferiors, and thereby simultaneously finding oneself at the bottom of some social hierarchies and at the top of others at a very young age, tends to leave one permanently unable to take any of them very seriously or place much value upon them, for good or for ill. When one is both king and beggar, how can one find one’s identity in either state?

For a while, I thought it was strength of character or innate stoicism that enabled me to so easily walk away from various attachments and obligations without looking back. But eventually, it became clear that it was not a positive attribute, it was simply that I was lacking something normal, in much the same way sociopaths lack empathy, autistics lack social cognizance, and atheists lack an intuition of the supernatural. Specifically what it is, I don’t know, but one might describe it as lack of set bonding.

So, I don’t think the abolition of high school would have made much difference to me, but I do think it would greatly benefit those who are either oppressed by the social hierarchy or crippled by too much success too soon in it. And, of course, ending the intellectual lobotomization of entire generations by maleducated, intellectually sub-standard propagandists of the State would be a desirable outcome too.

Yemen falling to Shia

It looks like there is a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia being fought in Yemen. And Iran’s proxies are winning.

The Iran-backed ethnic Houthis that captured and occupied Yemen’s capital city Sanaa last year are following up from Friday’s announce military mobilization have seized much of the city of Taiz and the surrounding province. They’ve taken control of the airport and security and intelligence buildings in Taiz, and have set up checkpoints in the area.

Yemen’s internationally recognized president Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi was forced last month to flee Sanaa, which is Yemen’s largest city and is in in the north of Yemen, to Aden, which is Yemen’s second largest city, and is a port city in the south of Yemen. Taiz is Yemen’s third largest city, and it’s located about halfway between Sanaa and Aden, so it’s a critical waypoint on the Houthis’ planned assault on Hadi’s forces in Aden.

The Houthis have been using Yemen’s air force for bombing strikes on Aden every day since Thursday. Now that the Houthis have control of Taiz airport, it’s expected that further air strikes will be launched from there.

It now seems unavoidable that within the next few days there will be a sectarian civil war between the Shia Houthis versus Hadi’s Sunni tribal militias. This will be further complicated by the presence in Yemen of two Sunni terrorist groups, the Islamic State / of Iraq and Syria (IS or ISIS or ISIL or Daesh) and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

The Houthis are now in control of the army and air force, and they’re backed by Iran which is suspected of shipping additional weapons to them. Saudi Arabia and the other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) have expressed deep dismay at the Shia takeover of Yemen, but it remains to be seen whether they take any military action to counter it. If they do, then the result will be a sectarian proxy war in Yemen between Saudi Arabia and Iran. The National (UAE) and CNN and AFP and AP

Meanwhile, the US has been forced to retreat and evacuate Al Anad air base.

Another SFWA resignation

Holly Lisle resigns from Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America:

Ms. Kate Baker
Operations Manager
SFWA

Dear Ms. Baker,

I’m canceling my SFWA membership.

While it was encouraging to see SFWA edging toward acceptance of the indie publishing model, it’s too little and too late, and offset by an appalling reason behind the change of SFWAs incorporating state.

SFWA moved from Massachusetts to California for the purpose of allowing SFWA to claim tax dollars to offer grants. I’m aware that there were other—good—reasons for the organization’s move, but this particular poison pill in the changes made to SFWA requires me to walk away and never look back.

This is interesting, as her letter indicates how the SJWs in the SFWA intend to survive the opening up of the SF/F market and the inability of the publishing gatekeepers to protect their income: as government-funded parasites.

It helps make their continued move towards unpopular academic-style fiction somewhat more comprehensible, as you may recall Neal Stephenson’s explanation of the difference between popular fiction that is funded by fans and academic fiction that is funded by bureaucrats.

Ed Brayton wants to kill nationalists

Ed Brayton is one of those low midwits who stumbles through life thinking that he’s intelligent because he’s a little smarter than the average idiot. I’ve rubbed his nose in his own incompetence several times in the past; believe it or not, he’s actually dumber than PZ Myers. But he’s really outdone himself this time:

People often ask me how I manage to troll the right-wing fever swamps without becoming hopelessly misanthropic. Mostly I’m able to laugh rather than cry or explode in anger. But bullshit like this makes me want to climb a tower with a high-powered rifle and start picking people off.

When Andrew Zink passed the microphone over to his classmate and allowed her to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in Arabic, he said, he knew most students wouldn’t support his decision.

As president of the student senate at Pine Bush High School in New York, Zink leads the pledge every morning. But on Wednesday, a teacher asked him if he would mind if a classmate did it instead. It was National Foreign Language Week, and the students were encouraged to learn about different cultures.

 “I wanted to say yes because I felt this is the right thing to do,” Zink, 18, said in an interview Thursday with the Los Angeles Times.

Outrage quickly flowed throughout the campus, about 75 miles north of New York City. The principal apologized to the school later that day, Zink said, for allowing the Pledge of Allegiance to be recited in a different language.

  But the apology did little to quell student and parent anger.

 “The anti-Muslim sentiment started to build,” Zink said. “The poor girl who read it, she’s so sweet and when she finished reading it people called her a terrorist. They told her to go back to the Middle East. They mercilessly degraded her and I felt awful for her.”

 Zink didn’t get by unscathed either. He said he was threatened over Twitter and received death threats.

Of course he did. Because xenophobes are fucking idiots and I really don’t want to share this planet with them anymore.

I don’t wish to share the civilized West with fifth column-coddlers like Mr. Brayton myself. I suggest we send Mr. Brayton to live in the Dar al-Islam where he can discover what true xenophobia is, and why it exists in the first place. When the civil wars start across the West, don’t forget what side these treasonous idiots were on. And don’t offer them safe haven when they try to escape those whose invasion they supported either. When they cry and plead that they’ve seen the light, tell them “too late now.”

Speaking of Brayton’s reliable intellectual ineptitude, this is my favorite set of Braytonisms, from when he was running away from a proposed 2010 debate with Ellis Washington:

“As for your challenge to debate, I will consider it – if you can give a coherent answer to the following question”
– Ed Brayton, February 26, 2010

“Ellis Washington did not challenge me to a debate.”
– Ed Brayton, March 1, 2010

Don’t go out without carrying

And if you are confronted, don’t hesitate to use lethal force. Because the vibrants, particularly the younger ones, won’t hesitate to kill even when it’s absolutely unnecessary and they’ve already got what they demanded:

According to NBC Philadelphia, the three black teens were playing basketball when one of them got the bright idea to go rob someone at random. After seeing a different man out walking his dog and deciding not to rob him, they saw 51-year-old James Patrick Stuhlman.

Stuhlman apparently would usually walk with his 13-year-old daughter, but on the night of his murder he had told her to stay home because it was getting late, likely saving her life. As he walked down the dark street on March 12, the father and owner of a local landscaping company saw three teens approach him, and upon running into him they announced a robbery.

“At one point, he did plead for his life,” Captain James Clark said Thursday at a news conference, according to the New York Daily News. “He said, ‘Please don’t shoot me, please don’t shoot me,’ and they still shot him one more time.”

On Thursday, 15-year-old Brandon Smith and a 14-year-old whose name has been withheld were arrested by police and said they had decided to rob Stuhlman rather than the other man they saw because he looked more vulnerable.

At this point, every robbery by young Africans is sufficient reason to believe one’s life is in imminent danger and is sufficient justification for lethal self-defense. Of course, in the mainstream media’s version, the three murderers were merely “teens” and “high school freshmen”.

Civil disobedience

The Germans aren’t exactly known for it, but when they do it, they do it well:

“A few years ago the German Minister of Justice—kind of like the
Attorney General here in the United States—he was pushing very hard for
Germans to have biometric data on their national ID cards, and he wanted
all Germans to be fingerprinted. And the Germans pushed back,
particularly privacy advocates and those in the Chaos Computer Club.
And so what they did is when the German Minister of Justice was out at a
restaurant, they went ahead and after he left they got the glass that
he had left behind, and they were able to lift his fingerprint off of
the glass. They then took a photograph, brought it into Photoshop,
cleaned it up, and then were able to replicate it on 3D printers, in
latex. … [They] included it as a handout in their Chaos Computer Club
magazine that went out to 5,000 people, and they encouraged their
readers to leave the Justice Minister’s fingerprints at crime scenes all
over Germany, which they did.”

This points out the only way one can reasonably expect to gain any privacy, which is by flooding the system. It is a known fact that figuring out what information is valuable is much harder than obtaining raw data in the first place, so rather than futile attempts to lock things down, one’s focus should be in flooding the data collectors with vast quantities of meaningless information.

4GW coming to America

The USA is about to discover the distinct military disadvantages of permitting a massive Fifth Column of immigrants in its midst:

A division of ISIS published a ‘kill list’ containing the names, photos and addresses of 100 US military members online and called upon its ‘brothers residing in America’ to kill them. The list was posted online by the ‘Islamic State Hacking Division’. The group claimed it hacked several military servers, databases and emails to obtain the information.

The ISHD said it wants ‘lone wolf’ attackers to go after the military members and ‘kill them wherever you find them’.

The list did appear to match up with information which was available online, TheBlaze reported.

The posting read: ‘With the huge amount of data we have from various different servers and databases, we have decided to leak 100 addresses so that our brothers in America can deal with you. And now we have made it easy for you by giving you addresses, all you need to do is take the final step, so what are you waiting for? Kill them in their own lands, behead them in their own homes, stab them to death as they walk their streets thinking that they are safe.’

Notice how even ISIS recognizes that which neither the Democratic nor Republican parties are willing to admit. America is land that belongs to white Christian people of European descent, (only after being conquered and taken from my people, of course), it is not part of the Dar al-Islam, and it does not belong to the ISIS “brothers in America” who have invaded it or to the millions of other alien immigrants who presently reside in it. Not yet, anyhow. And perhaps not ever.

Perhaps after members of the US military begin dying in their own lands, Americans will begin to take the concept of defending their own lands, and their own people, seriously.

More Hugo predictions

One Aled Morgan responds to the Chaos Horizon Hugo predictions, which were as follows:

  1. Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer
  2. Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie
  3. Monster Hunter Nemesis, Larry Correia
  4. The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison
  5. Skin Game, Jim Butcher  

First, the two I’d be astonished not to see on the ballot:

Lock In
Ancilliary Sword

Then very likely:

The Three Body Problem
Annihilation

Then at about the same level of probability fighting for the fifth slot:

Monster Hunter Nemesis
My Real Children
The Goblin Emperor
Symbiont

Possible but unlikely:

The Peripheral
The Darkling Sea

What you’re overlooking about Scalzi is that he has a massively popular blog, he has orders of magnitude more readers than the “Sad Puppies”, and while he never opersteps the line he encourages his fans to nominate him… and they do. The same goes for Grant, who has made the ballot so often already but doedn’t win — she has the same kind of nominating fans.

For the Hugos, what’s important is not wide readership but readership within Worldcon going fandom. Lots of the measures you’re assessing would be great if this were a wide-constituency vote, but it isn’t. It’ll be around two thousand people. SFWA’s even smaller, and everyone in SFWA knows each other. Butcher’s really really popular in the wider constituency, but his books don’t feel like the kind of thing people nominate for Hugos to the people who nominate, so I’d say it has zero chance except with Sad Puppies. And I expect a backlash against Sad Puppies this year.

I have to admit, The Three-Body Problem looks pretty good. I find the concept interesting, seeing as I used a variant of it to explain some of the problems with Keynesian economic theory in RGD. As a fan of Japanese literature both ancient and modern, I’m curious to see what Chinese SF is like. I tried Vandermeer’s Balzac’s War and ended up putting it down before long, but perhaps his Southern Reach Trilogy is better. In any event, Holmwood, who both reads the occasional Scalzi book and is a Sad Puppy supporter, offers a mild correction:

John Scalzi is a good author. I enjoyed both Old Man’s War and Agent to the Stars. His books are pushed heavily by his publisher (deservedly so) and Lock-In was a better work than Redshirts which won previously. That said, I believe his blog’s readership is a good deal smaller than (say) that of Vox Day, and certainly smaller than Day, Correia, Wright, Torgersen, Hoyt, etc combined.

Back to the general topic of Puppies, sad and otherwise.

I would be both surprised and disappointed if Puppies locked up overwhelmingly to vote a slate en masse without regard to quality. So far that’s not been the case, though I’m well aware there are those who’d love to poke a stick in the putative SF establishment fans’ collective eyes and do just that.

But this, while very well and good, VIOLATES THE NARRATIVE. Tudor leaps in to explain that Whatever is not merely big. It is ENORMOUS:

Scalzi’s blog is not big, is enormous. There are many good SF writers, but there are only a handful NY Times Bestsellers. Scalzi became one because of his blog. I only like some of his books but even I read his blog regularly. And if an author will write on his blog about her/his new book, than it’s certain that its sales will receive a great boost.

And so it fell to me to actually provide the relevant facts of the matter:

John Scalzi’s blog, Whatever, is not reasonably described as “enormous” and his blog readership is considerably smaller than mine, let alone the combined readership of the various Sad and Rabid Puppy authors. The most traffic Mr. Scalzi ever had is just over 1 million Google pageviews per month back in May 2012. Since then, his blog traffic has declined to around 450,000 pageviews per month. By comparison, my blogs alone now enjoy traffic of 1.5 million pageviews per month, about three times that of Mr. Scalzi’s Whatever.

In 2014, Mr. Scalzi’s blog had 5.6 million annual pageviews whereas mine had 15.7 million. Where Mr. Scalzi is very popular, however, is on Twitter, where his 70k+ followers are more than all of the aforementioned authors combined. Whether Twitter followers or blog readerships are more predictive of Hugo success, I leave to Chaos Horizon to predict.

The reason many people have a false impression of Mr. Scalzi’s blog is that Mr. Scalzi has historically been prone to a considerable amount of exaggeration. For example, in an August 2010 interview with Lightspeed magazine, he claimed Whatever had 2 million monthly pageviews. The actual number of pageviews that month was 305 thousand, or about 15 percent of the amount claimed.

I do find it intriguing that more than a year after the greater part of Mr. Scalzi’s claimed blog traffic was exposed as nonexistent, there are still those pinkshirts who fail to recognize that the numbers in the science fiction market simply do not add up in the way they apparently believe they do. I wonder what would suffice to convince them otherwise?

As for Holmewood’s concern about quality, I would simply urge the prospective Worldcon voter to compare the Rabid Puppy slate to last year’s Hugo winners. I contend that the Rabid Puppies are, across the board, considerably superior in terms of both science fiction essence and and science fiction quality to the 2014 winners.