He’s on a manic swing again

I always enjoy McRapey’s manic phases. That’s when he produces his most amusing quotes and you get a clear glimpse at how messed up and insecure he is. He’s apparently been feeling his oats lately, so he decided another shot at #GamerGate was in order, which promptly led to him feeling insecure after a number of #GamerGaters wondered who the hell he was:

4 NYT Best sellers. 3 Hugos. 3 TV series currently in development. Books in 20 languages. CLEARLY, public opinions have hampered my career.

(I should note that two of those Hugos were awarded to me, essentially, FOR having opinions in public. So.)

GamerGater: YOU ARE TERRIBLE FOR TELLING ME NOT TO READ YOUR BOOKS AND I WILL NEVER READ THEM NOW Me: Ate a lot of lead paint as a kid, huh?

Lots of GGers smugly asking who I am because they’ve never heard of me. Of course not, you’d have to be literate for that, lads.

It’s amusing how Johnny can’t open his mouth without trying to spin the narrative. I mean, full credit for admitting that two of the Hugos were political in nature, but we all know that all THREE of them actually were. There is not a single person on the planet who genuinely believes Redshirts was the best science fiction novel of 2013 in any sense of the term. Including McRapey himself.

And the idea that anyone who is literate has heard of John Scalzi is hilarious. I live in Europe. I know many highly literate people. Absolutely NONE of them have ever heard of him. We have over 100 players at the adult level. Ender has a game this weekend, so between that and practice next week, I should see everyone. I’ll report back on how many of these literate and multilingual Europeans have ever heard of “the science fiction writer John Scalzi”.

It’s also funny that Scalzi thinks he’s big time because he can sell up to 150k books per shot with Tor pushing him as hard as it can. He’s trying to break into the game industry, where games that have 17 million active players are still practically unknown to the game journalists as well as everyone who doesn’t play in that particular genre.

One more amusing note. Back in 2012, someone named CDaniell claimed I was jealous of Scalzi. His words are even funnier today, now that we know what we know about SF’s biggest con artist.

I did have a chance to read up a bit on Mr. Scalzi. So: The SFWA presidency, the Hugo nominations, the ascendancy to the the New York Times best seller list, the 50,000 visitors-a-day blog and a novel being adapted to film with Wolfgang Petersen attached to direct? Goodness. Talk about an Alpha who can seriously put the bread on the table. 

The film was canceled, the 50,000 visitors a day was proven to be a lie, the fan writer nominations are now an award and a Best Novel award that is a historic embarrassment, and the NYT bestsellers show every sign of being nothing more than his publisher gaming the list.

The NYT pumps anti-GamerGate

It’s amazing how the mainstream media thinks they can just blatantly lie about easily verified facts and control the narrative thereby:

Originally intended as a short about the indie game scene in Mr. Francois’s native Australia, “GameLoading” soon transformed into a feature about indie developers worldwide. Among the interviewees are Ms. Quinn, who created the free, text-driven interactive fiction game Depression Quest in 2013. Instead of battling dragons and demons, players fight clinical depression. Ms. Quinn’s creation enraged some gamers, who objected to its subject matter and to the fact that, like more conventional video games, it was being released on Steam, a popular digital store. Anonymous trolls sent her rape and death threats and posted her home address and phone numbers online, prompting her to relocate.

Mr. Francois has struggled to understand why fans of mainstream games would feel threatened by an indie like Depression Quest, since they’re hardly in competition with one another for fans. “The reality is, we’re going to see more games, and more variety of games. Obviously, Activision isn’t going to kill off their first-person shooters.”

It’s not that hard, Mr. Francois. No one is threatened by Depression Quest. But everyone was furious that a bunch of game journos tried to claim it was a great game, then conspired to hide the fact that some of them had personal connections to Quinn.

As for Activision, there is this out of Redmond:

In an interview dating back to late last year, Bonnie Ross, the woman in charge of stewarding and developing the blockbuster HALO franchise, stated that her goal in managing the franchise was to increase the diversity of characters appearing in the games produced by Microsoft subsidiary 343 Industries. She further reinforced her position on women in the gaming industry by stressing the importance of hiring more female game developers and giving them role models to aspire to within the industry.

Ms. Ross’s influence has already been heavily felt within the HALO canon: she is the executive responsible for tearing up the original script for HALO 4, which featured women as villainous characters, and forcing a complete rewrite to include stronger female protagonists.

So, do they seriously struggle to understand or are they just disingenuous? We know perfectly well that Ross will turn HALO into the tale of a female Master Chief torn between her love between two soldiers if given the opportunity. While there’s nothing wrong with that per se, male gamers don’t want that in their games. If they did, they’d be reading Twilight.

This is Christian leadership

The nations of Europe are throwing off the poisoned dream of multiculturalism. And I don’t think it is an accident that it is those who successfully survived decades of socialism that are the first to clearly recognize the evils of diversity. From the Prime Minister of Hungary’s State of the Nation address:

The Honourable Chair has mentioned wiseacre analysts who take the view that the concept of a civic Hungary (i.e. one based on Christian-democratic, conservative principles) is merely a political product, and that this has somewhat shaken the faith of the members of our political community. I understand the concerns, but I hope for more self-confidence from Reformed Church pastors, let alone ministers. For our flag is flying high; everyone can see that. Everyone can see that we are a people’s party community, based on Christian-democratic foundations – the ideal, guiding star of which is a civic Hungary. I do not think that this would change in the next hundred years….

Hungary gave its own answers to the most important European questions in
2010. Already since 2010, we have been living in the future which many
other countries are only just setting out towards or will attempt to
reach sooner or later. Europe today continues to huddle behind the moats
of political correctness, and has built a wall of taboos and dogmas
around itself. In contrast, we took the view that the old pre-crisis
world will not return. There are things from past periods which are
worth keeping, such as democracy – as far as possible in a form which
needs no modifying adjectives; but we must let go of everything that has
failed and has broken down. We must let go of these things before they
bury us beneath them. We have chosen the future. Those who do not make
choices find that instead circumstances will make the choices for them.
Those who do not actively decide will find that their lives will be
decided for them. We therefore let go of neo-liberal economic policy,
and perhaps we did so as late as we possibly could have; we let go of
the policy of austerity, just before we were about to share the fate of
Greece; we let go of the delusion of the multicultural society before it
turned Hungary into a refugee camp, and we let go of liberal social
policy which does not acknowledge the common good and denies Christian
culture as the natural foundation – and perhaps the only natural
foundation – for the organization of European societies. We decided to
face the barrage of unfair attacks and accusations, and also let go of
the dogma of political correctness.

And as far as I see it,
Hungarian people are by nature politically incorrect – in other words,
they have not yet lost their common sense.

What a tragedy that the USA does not have such a leader. What a tragedy that we don’t even have a nation for such a leader to address.

Immigration as weapon

Still convinced that immigration is not invasion? Greece is rather convincingly threatening the use of immigrants as a weapon to hold Europe financial hostage. Greek Defense Minister Panos Kammenos said:

“If Europe leaves us in the crisis, we will flood it with migrants, and it will be even worse for Berlin if in that wave of millions of economic migrants there will be some jihadists of the Islamic State, too.”

European Union finance chiefs are currently debating whether to continue a bailout plan, with Germany a deciding vote.

“If they strike us, we will strike them,” the official said. “We will give to migrants from everywhere the documents they need to travel in the Schengen area, so that the human wave could go straight to Berlin.”

It’s a brilliant move, hanging the European Union on the gallows of its own rhetoric about the sanctity of the free movement of peoples. In one fell swoop, Greece can rid itself of all its invaders and hit the EU much harder than if it had an actual army. In fact, it’s a great strategic move whether the EU comes through with the cash or not.

Either way, it is putting the lie to the EU’s suicidal policy on immigrants and Islam.

“It just makes sense”

Parody is the homage rhetoric pays to dialectic:

Star Wars is getting its first lesbian character. Paul S Kemp has revealed that he is adding the mystery woman to his upcoming novel Lords of the Sith, the next instalment in the official sci-fi canon due out on 28 April.

Little is known about her, but “nerd news” blog Big Shiny Robot has dropped a few hints about what fans can expect.

“Moff Mors is an Imperial who has made some very serious mistakes, but she is an incredibly capable leader and spends much of the book working hard to prevent absolute failure,” a recent post reads. “She also happens to be a lesbian.”

Shelly Shapiro, editor of the Star Wars books, explaining that including a lesbian character “just makes sense”.

“There’s a lot of diversity…there should be diversity in Star Wars,” she said. “You have all these different species and it would be silly to not also recognise that there’s a lot of diversity in humans.

And yet, we won’t find any Muslims in Star Wars despite there being a billion of them. We won’t find any Christians in Star Wars despite there being nearly two billion of them. How many Chinese, serial killers, and Green Bay Packers fans will we find? But More Muff (how very clever) just happens to be a lesbian.

It certainly didn’t take Disney long to gay it up. I’m very glad that I lost all interest in Star Wars about ten minutes into The Phantom Menace. If there is one thing you can count on, it is that once SJWs get involved in something, it’s just a matter of time before it is ruined. At this rate, they’ll have Han Solo transitioning in the second new film and we’ll learn that Luke and Leia got married despite knowing they were brother and sister.

Reddit aGGros busted

Reaxxion has the news of a big leak proving Reddit’s anti-GamerGate bias:

Reddit, an internet social news aggregator based in San Francisco, has recently had a monster leak from their moderator chatroom. It is purported that this leak came from a disgruntled user, who dumped the contents of the whole #modleak channel to pro-gamer media. This leak entails a lengthy chat log which captured conversations from September 15th 2013 to February 17th 2015….

Here is a chatlog of /r/Gaming mods talking about filtering the
submission of new threads. Any of these words in the title will trigger
the auto-delete function. Notice the high anti gamer-gate slant in the
mod list. The biggest gaming subreddit has been caught red-handed trying
to stifle gamergate.

I’ve never used Reddit much myself, but it is now abundantly clear that, like Wikipedia, it is SJW-occupied territory and therefore unreliable.

Rabid Puppies Final Notice

If you’re registered as a Supporting Member of either LonCon or Sasquan, don’t forget to get your nominations in today. The nominees should be announced in about a month. The list of Rabid Puppies recommendations can be found here while the nomination form is here.

BA noted that the “best editor” categories were originally in the opposite order on the form, so you may want to check your editor nominations to make sure you didn’t put them in the wrong order. I’ve since switched them around on the list, so they should match now. It should be fascinating to see how it all shakes out. To be honest, I have absolutely no idea how things are likely to go, but regardless, I think everyone here will admit that it has certainly been entertaining.

UPDATE: Sasquan, The 73rd World Science Fiction Convention, will announce the
nominees for the 2015 Hugo Awards at Norwescon, starting at noon Pacific
Daylight Time on Saturday, April 4th, 2015. A real-time video stream of the announcements will be available on the
Internet on Ustream at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/worldcon1

UPDATE 2: If you’re interested in seeing a more comprehensive selection of recommendations, Mike Glyer of File 770 has helpfully compiled all of the various lists in one easy, if extensive, collection.  

Sexism 6x worse than racism

No doubt this disparity in criminal sentencing will be of DEEP concern to our friendly neighborhood SJWs:

After controlling for the arrest offense, criminal history, and other prior characteristics, “men receive 63% longer sentences on average than women do,” and “[w]omen are…twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted.” This gender gap is about six times as large as the racial disparity that Prof. Starr found in another recent paper.

It seems to me that a smart criminal should have the good sense to reduce his risk ratio by finding a woman to be his fall gal.

Assuring mutual destruction

The “bad bank” concept only appears to have delayed the inevitable default, not prevented it:

It was the failure of Creditanstalt, a Viennese bank founded in 1855 by Anselm von Rothschild, that arguably sparked the Great Depression, setting off an unstoppable chain reaction of bankruptcies throughout Europe and America.

No-one would think that what happened last week at Austria’s failed Hypo Alpe-Adria Bank International falls into quite the same category; we are meant to be in the recovery phase of the latest global banking crisis, so this is more about re-setting the system than again bringing it to its knees, right?

Well, make up your own mind. I suspect neither financial markets nor policymakers have yet caught onto the full significance of the latest turn of events.

In a nutshell, the Austrian government has had enough of funding the bank’s losses, and announced plans to “bail-in” external creditors to the tune of €7.6bn instead. As such, this marks a test case of new European rules to make creditors pay for failing banks. About time too, you might say. What took them so long?

Only in this case, the bonds are notionally guaranteed by the Austrian state of Carinthia, which now theoretically becomes liable for the bail-in. It’s an echo of the mess Ireland got itself into at the height of the banking crisis, when it foolishly attempted to stem the panic by underwriting all Irish banking liabilities; the move very nearly ended up bankrupting the entire country. Hypo will bankrupt Carinthia.

What the central bankers and politicians are doing is trading risk for time. I, and other economic realists, have been repeatedly wrong about the timing of events; I thought both Greece and Ireland would go bankrupt by 2013. But the fact that the defaults have not begun yet does not mean that the crisis is over, in fact, it does not even mean that the crisis is less serious than before. Quite the opposite, actually.

While I understand if those who don’t pay much attention to international economics might simply assume at this point that I don’t know what I’m talking about because things don’t seem to necessarily be all that bad, it might be helpful to keep in mind that the current situation is unprecedented.

For example, in most previous historical situations, Austria’s Hypo Bank would have gone bankrupt back in 2009. Instead, it was nationalized and put Austrian taxpayers on the hook for up to $25 billion.  The assets were divided and a “bad bank” created, but now that bad bank is in such dire straits that the Austrian government isn’t willing to continue funding its ongoing operational losses. But instead of simply declaring it bankrupt, they have put the assets of the equivalent of a U.S. state behind it.

This may buy them as much as another five years. But it also assures the financial destruction of an entire region of the country. What the banks have successfully done is create a system of mutually-assured destruction, gambling that electorates would rather let them off the hook than risk their governments defaulting, with all the turmoil that would subsequently ensue.