GGinParis

Mike Cernovich, Milo Yiannopoulos, and I will be at GGinParis on Saturday, July 11 at 8 PM. If you’re in Europe, or if you’re going to be in Europe this summer, and intend to come, please shoot me an email with GGinParis in the subject.

Hugo Awards 2015: Best Novella

This is how I am voting in the
Best Novella 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.

  1. “One Bright Star to Guide Them”
  2. “Big Boys Don’t Cry”
  3. “The Plural of Helen of Troy”
  4. “Pale Realms of Shade”
  5. “Flow”

In the relatively near future, I will be debating the merits and demerits of John C. Wright’s “One Bright Star to Guide Them” versus those of The Wasp Factory by Iain M. Banks with Phil Sandifier. It should be an interesting discussion, as the two works in some ways represent the two poles of the Blue SF/Pink SF divide, even if few would consider the Banks novel to be science fiction or fantasy.

Other categories:


Good riddance

The death of the print media in America. It’s pretty astonishing, but having grown up reading the Star Tribune, aka “the Red Star”, it’s good to see them collapsing in such a dramatic manner. At this rate, many of them should be gone altogether by 2023.

And it is a very healthy sign, I think, for a one-way monopolistic medium to be replaced by a two-way medium with literally thousands of options. I expect the conventional publishing world to follow suit in reasonably short order once Barnes & Noble goes out of business.

Paul Gottfried reviews VICTORIA

I don’t think anyone with any grasp of history doubts that the USA is in the process of going the way of the Byzantine Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union at this point. It is a now a centralized multi-ethnic empire held together by the threat of military force, after all, and such empires always fracture sooner or later. And for all the various unpleasantries it recounts, VICTORIA: A Novel of 4th Generation War represents one of the more rosy-hued outcomes possible. Paul Gottfried reviewed it on VDARE.

William Lind’s VICTORIA Heralds Coming America Breakup
By Paul Gottfried

William S. Lind is a man of many talents. He’s an institution of the American conservative movement, formerly the Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism of the Free Congress Foundation (under the late Paul Weyrich), a regular contributor to The American Conservative, and a noted military theorist. And now, with the publication of Victoria he is a novelist, putting forward a highly readable vision of the breakup of the United States and a traditionalist restoration. It’s a sign of the times that we can no longer regard such a story as implausible.

Victoria is subtitled “A Novel of Fourth Generation Warfare,” and Lind’s writings on warfare bleed (perhaps too much) into his storytelling. His theory of Fourth Generation Warfare contends that warfare has ceased between states with standing armies and operative governments. Instead, it is decentralized, on at least one side, lacking a regular command structure and no longer identified with an established state or regular army. Countries like the U.S. find themselves in partisan struggles around the world that violate the “rules of war” built up under the old European state system.

Bill’s ideas about changing forms of warfare may have been influenced by the German political-legal theorist Carl Schmitt, who wrote on partisan warfare after the Second World War. His novel is written under the nom de plume “Thomas Hobbes,” so even in this he reveals his connection to Schmitt, as the German jurist profoundly admired the seventeenth-century Englishman who wrote about the rise of the state [The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, by Carl Schmitt] (I wrote an intellectual biography of Schmitt and also deeply respect the philosopher who wished to protect us against “the war of all against all.”)

In Victoria, all Hell breaks loose in a way that Hobbes might have understood. Yet it is only the Time of Tribulations before the golden age of social restoration that ends the novel. Indeed, we are told the ending in advance in the opening scene when we learn “The triumph of the Recovery was marked most clearly by the burning of the Episcopal bishop of Maine.”

The revival of witch-burning in New England was certainly an eye-opener, but I’d have to say that my favorite scene was the rather egregious violation of academic freedom at Dartmouth. It’s kind of funny to imagine what the reaction would have been if I’d recommended VICTORIA for a Hugo instead of THE CHAPLAIN’S WAR. But it’s not science fiction, it’s political fiction, so that wouldn’t have been proper and neither Mr. Hobbes, nor his agent, Mr. Lind, would have approved.

In any event, VICTORIA is now available as a 592-page paperback. And speaking of Mr. Lind, I should also mention that Martin van Creveld’s A HISTORY OF STRATEGY: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind is now available in hardcover.

Vox’s First Law at work

Vox’s First Law: Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from insanity. Or, in this case, autism:

State therapy specialists claimed Jacob
Barnett would never tie his shoes, read or function normally in society.
But the boy’s mother realized when Jacob was not in therapy, he was
doing “spectacular things” completely on his own.
She decided to trust her instinct and
disregard the advice of the professionals. Instead of following a
standardized special needs educational protocol, she surrounded Jacob
with all the things that inspired passion for him – and was astonished
at the transformation that took place.

Following a diagnosis of autism at age
two, Jacob was subjected to a cookie cutter special education system
that focused on correcting what he couldn’t do compared to normal
children. For years, teachers attempted to convince Kristine Barnett
that her son would only be able to learn the most basic of life skills….

By the time Jacob reached the age of 11, he entered college and is currently studying condensed matter physics at Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis. According to an email Professor Scott Tremaine wrote to Jacob’s family:
“The theory that he’s working on
involves several of the toughest problems in astrophysics and
theoretical physics … Anyone who solves these will be in line for a
Nobel Prize.”

Jacob also has an IQ of 170 — higher than that of Einstein.

This is an object lesson in what we discussed at the May Brainstorm. Never, ever, blindly trust the so-called experts. Respect, but verify.

Tanith Lee, RIP

British writer Tanith Lee passed away on Sunday May 24th, aged 67.

Lee was the author of over 90 books and 300 short stories, as well as four BBC Radio plays, and two highly-regarded episodes of the BBC’s SF series Blake’s 7 (Sand and Sarcophagus). She was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton in 2013 and the Horror Writers Lifetime Achievement Award this year, which joined her British Fantasy Award from 1980 for Death’s Master, and her World Fantasy Award for her short story “The Gorgon”.

I was very sorry to hear this since Lee’s The Secret Books of Paradys and The Secret Books of Venus are two of my favorite fantasy series. I’ve been re-reading them over the last month or so, and it’s sad to know that she won’t be writing any more.


Like many a British writer before her, she loved Italy and her love for the country shone through in her writing.  Based on her books, Venice must have struck her in much the same way it struck me, a dark, watery, and mysterious place of beautiful decay.

If you haven’t read her, you really should. If you like Poe, you will enjoy her work.

You don’t like the medicine, doctor?

Glenn Hauman on May 26, 2015 at 2:20 am said:

Dave Freer: No-one has called for a
boycott or blacklist of David Gerrold, or Glenn Hauman, or to have
their reputations tarnished and Amazon reviews deliberately lowered.

And yet they got bad reviews? What a coincidence! I also didn’t call for a boycott or blacklist, and yet somehow there’s a sudden rash of bad reviews of my books up on Amazon. See http://www.amazon.com/Star-Trek-Engineers-Creative-Couplings-ebook/dp/B000WJSA3I/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

No, Glenn Hauman didn’t call for a boycott or a blacklist, he called for fake negative reviews to be posted on Amazon, fake negative reviews which were immediately posted on Amazon in response to his calls for them.

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
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.

I see absolutely no evidence that the sudden rash of bad reviews of Mr. Hauman’s books reflect anything but the opinions of people who have read it and are honestly expressing their disappointment with their inferior quality. After all, absolutely no one has called for anyone to review or otherwise pay attention to his work at all. It must be, as Mr. “Put Them Down” himself has said, a mere coincidence.

And because Public Enemy is always appropriate:

He book-reviewed, he S.J.W’d
Vile minions viewed his anti-Puppy feud
One-star the rating, listen to him double trouble
He signs in now he’s pushing for the lower level
Like crashing cars he’s out there stealing stars
From books he took without a single look.
Taking a toll ’cause his soul broke with the poll
From the revelation… of a Puppy Nation.
Now this is what I mean an anti-Puppy machine
If Hugo come out at all, he won’t come out clean
But look around here go the sound of the wrecking clown
Boom and pound when he put ’em down

The principles of Agile

I’ve never been much impressed with any of the “best practices” concepts, from Six Sigma to Agile. They strike me primarily as a way for midwitted bureaucrats and technical workers of modest talent to cover their asses and claim failure can’t be their fault because they are Doing Everything The Right Way:

The Twelve Principles of Agile Software

  1. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
  2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
  3. Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
  4. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
  5.  Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
  6.  The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
  7.  Working software is the primary measure of progress.
  8.  Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
  9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
  10. Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.
  11. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
  12. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

My thoughts on each point:

  1.  Sounds good in principle. In reality, the customer seldom knows what he really wants. The good designer has to anticipate his user and provide him what he doesn’t know he wants yet. “Early and continuous delivery” sounds like more ass-covering stuff. “It’s not our fault, he approved the deliverable” is what this sounds like to me.
  2. Bullshit. That’s fine in the early stages. In the middle to late stages, this is what is known as “mission creep”.
  3. Good for testing, but against, strikes me as more CYA, especially if it is going out to the customer.
  4. No. Hell no. While the biggest failure of which I’ve been a part was the fault of the chip engineer failing to listen to the marketing guy, I did talk to him on a bi-weekly basis. Talking to him daily wouldn’t have helped. The key is that the technical people must LISTEN to the business people, not see their faces on a regular basis.
  5. Yes.
  6. No. I run into this problem frequently. Most companies would rather have an inferior employee they can talk to face-to-face than a better one who is external. This makes no sense, especially if they then leave the position vacant because they can’t find anyone local who is good enough.
  7. Yes.
  8. Dubious. Sounds like snake oil to me.
  9. True, but obvious to the point of being tautological. “Program good code that works properly!” Okay….
  10. True. But I prefer “don’t reinvent the wheel”.
  11. No. A certain amount of flexibility is desirable, but there must be someone who is accountable for the vision and someone to make the hard decisions. Which is to say a designer and a producer. The best designs most certainly do NOT emerge from self-appointed committees.
  12. Yes, this is reasonable.

Overall, the entire concept stinks of being little more than client-marketing to me. “Hey, we’re AGILE-CERTIFIED, obviously we are much better than those guys over there who don’t have CREDENTIALS. All they have is a proven track record of delivering successful products, and we all know how little that means.

We’re going to need a bigger facepalm

More brilliance from the genius-commenters at File 770. Seriously, what you have to remind yourself whenever you read them is to keep in mind that they quite genuinely believe that they are our intellectual betters. It makes everything much, much funnier.

Glenn Hauman on May 25, 2015 at 9:51 am said:
Stevie: The deal with Tor means that Scalzi gets to write, and all the other stuff is done by Tor who are better at it than Scalzi is; VD is too egotistical to accept that he isn’t the best at everything he does. Scalzi certainly has a healthy ego but he’s got the brains to know that it doesn’t make any sense to spend his time doing something which other people do better

More, that implies that Beale has never heard of Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage, which states that you should be doing what you’re best at even if you do other things better than other people, as it’s a waste of your efforts otherwise. Surprising for Beale to claim to be so well versed in economics and yet be ignorant of a basic tenet of the field.

I wonder what Mr. Hauman believes I was addressing when I wrote the column entitled The Religion of Free Trade, which begins in the following manner:

Let us suppose I told you of a certain doctrine in which millions of people believe without ever having read the book in which it is contained, which is predicated upon a situation that has never existed, and promises positive consequences that not only have never been delivered, but we are told cannot even be measured and cannot be realized without achieving something that has never been done before in the history of Man. Furthermore, the doctrine was developed by a gambler and politician with absolutely no credentials or qualifications on the subject, which subject he had never encountered before the age of 27, in tandem with a related theory that is so obviously insane that barely anyone has ever even heard of it.

So long as we are careful to set aside any reliance upon the genetic fallacy, does this sound like a doctrine that is not only infallible, but one that it would be crazy to even consider questioning? And yet, the fervor with which the advocates of the free-trade doctrine defend David Ricardo’s outdated, disproven theory of comparative advantage and decry those who question it is so ferocious as to indicate the nature of a belief that can only be described as religious.

David Ricardo was without question a brilliant and successful man, but what is much less often noted is how intellectually dishonest he was. In a previous WND column, titled Free Trade Harms America, I showed how Joseph Schumpeter labeled his peculiar and tautological method of argument the “Ricardian Vice.” Furthermore, he was not even the original author of the theory of Comparative Advantage, it having been first introduced by Robert Torrens in “An Essay on the External Corn Trade” two years before Ricardo transformed a specific argument for a specific situation into something passing for a general principle, which he published in “On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation.”

Truly, my ignorance on the subject, which I also addressed in 2010 and in 2014, astounds. The theory of Comparative Advantage also came up in my interview with Ian Fletcher, who has devoted a considerable amount of time and effort to utterly demolishing Ricardo.

Remember, SJWs always lie. And perhaps more importantly, we again see an example of the midwit having so little ability to grasp what his intellectual superior is saying that he erroneously assumes stupidity and ignorance on said superior’s part. As it happens, I am probably one of the 100 people on the planet most equipped to discuss David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage in critical detail, so it is vastly amusing to see Mr. Hauman assert that I am “ignorant of a basic tenet of the field.”

Perhaps Mr. Hauman, being such a noted expert in Ricardian theory, would do us all the favor of calculating the real value of Mr. Scalzi’s new contract based on the only true determinant of profit.

And just to be clear, if you are not one of the five people reading this who understand the reference, that is a joke.