Hultgreen-Curie waits

The RAF foolishly decides to defy Hultgreen-Curie Syndrome:

First woman to command an RAF fast jet squadron named as Wing Commander Nikki Thomas. Wg Cdr Thomas is expected to lead bombing missions over Iraq this summer.  A woman who has become the first to command an RAF fast jet squadron is expected to lead bombing missions over Iraq this summer.

​Wing Commander Nikki Thomas​, who took charge of the newly reformed No 12 Squadron at RAF Marham in Norfolk​ ​on Friday​, flew a daring low mission to help foil a deadly rocket attack on a UK base in Afghanistan. The 36-year-old is a weapons system operator with extensive experience of combat operations, clocking up more than 35 missions in Afghanistan within three months alone. 

One wishes the Wing Commander the best of luck, but let’s face it, the odds are not on her side. It’s a daring move, especially after the first female Royal Navy captain lasted all of three months.

In not entirely unrelated news, the Marines are finding it hard to find a single woman who can pass the officer course:

Two female Marine officers who volunteered to attempt the Corps’ challenging Infantry Officer Course did not proceed beyond the first day of the course, a Marine Corps spokesperson confirms to the Free Beacon. The two were the only female officers attempting the course in the current cycle, which began Thursday in Quantico, Virginia.

With the two most recent drops, there have been 29 attempts by female officers to pass the course since women have been allowed to volunteer, with none making it to graduation. (At least one woman has attempted the course more than once.) Only three female officers have made it beyond the initial day of training, a grueling evaluation known as the Combat Endurance Test, or CET. Male officers also regularly fail to pass the CET, and the overall course has a substantial attrition rate for males.

The Marine Corps spokesperson, Captain Maureen Krebs, told the Free Beacon that the two officers, “did not meet the standards required of them on day one in order to continue on with the course.” Fifteen male officers also did not meet the standards. Of the 118 officers who began the course, 101 proceeded to the second day. 

It’s mildly amusing to see that the reporter feels the need to point out that men have been known to fail the course as well, although at least he’s honest enough to provide the statistics that demonstrate show 13 percent of the male candidates failed CET, compared to 100 percent of the female candidates.

The Marines are under tremendous pressure to water down their standards. One hopes, for the sake of future Marines, they will stand firm nevertheless. And we can be all but certain that if a woman ever does pass the course, she’ll be a strong candidate for Hultgreen-Curie Syndrome.

NYT covering for Islam

The mainstream media in the USA and Europe are absolutely desperate to maintain the myth of the “Islamic radical” and hide the fact that it is the jihadists who are the Islamic reformers, not the so-called moderates:

Here’s the latest example of the New York Times censoring itself to avoid offending Muslims after an act of Islamic terror. This morning, BenK at Ace of Spades quoted an NYT story by Liz Alderman titled “Survivors Retrace a Scene of Horror at Charlie Hebdo.” Take note of these two paragraphs from that story:

    Sigolène Vinson, a freelancer who had decided to come in that morning to take part in the meeting, thought she would be killed when one of the men approached her.

    Instead, she told French news media, the man said, “I’m not going to kill you because you’re a woman, we don’t kill women, but you must convert to Islam, read the Quran and cover yourself,” she recalled.

I was intrigued by this quote, and it seemed worth exploring, so I went to the NYT story to quote it. But guess what?

Here’s what it says now:

    Sigolène Vinson, a freelance journalist who had come in that morning to take part in the meeting, said that when the shooting started, she thought she would be killed.

    Ms. Vinson said in an interview that she dropped to the floor and crawled down the hall to hide behind a partition, but one of the gunmen spotted her and grabbed her by the arm, pointing his gun at her head. Instead of pulling the trigger, though, he told her she would not be killed because she was a woman.

    “Don’t be afraid, calm down, I won’t kill you,” the gunman told her in a steady voice, with a calm look in his eyes, she recalled. “You are a woman. But think about what you’re doing. It’s not right.”

Nothing about telling her to convert to Islam. Nothing about telling her to read the Quran. Nothing about telling her to cover her face.

Nothing about the very reason these animals did this.

It sounds like the New York Times might have downright substituted their own words for those that Ms Vinson reported as well. Trust NOTHING that comes out of the mainstream press at face value. If they could get away with it, you know they’d blame the Charlie Hebdo attack on right-wing Christian militias.

Remember, as long ago as 2006, FORTY PERCENT of British Muslims were calling for the establishment of Sharia in the UK. There can be no compromise between Islam and the West, because one is either part of the Dar al-Islam or the Dar al-Harb.

Unfortunately, the idiots on the Left have learned nothing. On Slashdot, various leftists are pointing to the Crusades, to the 30 Years War, falsely claiming that the atheist Anders Breivik was a Christian, and in short, doing everything they can to keep their heads planted firmly in the Sand of Religious Equivalence.

The end of the beginning

The French have taken out all three of the Muslim killers:

French police on Friday killed the two brothers suspected of massacring
12 people at a Paris newspaper on Wednesday and freed a hostage they had
been holding unharmed, the authorities said. The police launched a
simultaneous raid on a kosher supermarket in Paris where an alleged
associate of the brothers was holding an unnamed number of hostages.
That hostage taker was also killed, according to a senior French police
official, and at least five hostages were freed.

Now that the urgent work is done, it’s time for the West to elect nationalist governments and start discussing the best way to encourage their co-religionists to repatriate back to the Dar al-Islam. Steve Sailer put it best:

Westerners and Muslims don’t agree on the basics of social order and don’t want to live under the same rules. That shouldn’t be a problem because that’s what separate countries are for. We should stop occupying their countries and stop letting them move to ours.

To paraphrase E.M. Forster:

“Only disconnect.”

Islam is not compatible with Christendom. It is not compatible with Western traditions and values. It is not compatible with the secular West either. Muslims themselves will tell you this, that’s why 40 percent of Muslims resident in Great Britain are seeking to establish Sharia rule over the British. Only disconnect.

It is no longer possible to pretend that multiculturalism is viable. It is no longer possible to pretend that moderate Islam can reform the more fundamentalist forms. It is no longer possible to pretend that we can all get along in one country. That’s what separate countries are for.

They should not interfere with us here, and we should stop interfering with how they choose to live over there. The disconnect will take place eventually, the only question that remains is if the process is relatively peaceful or if it is massively violent. Any sane and decent Westerner should actively support the former option.

Mailvox: Did Charlie Hebdo have it coming?

MB asks a pertinent question:

Although it may appear to be like pouring salt on a wound, it occurs to me (and also from your POV) that the people at Charlie Hebdo were quite a bit involved in their own demise (which I do not celebrate or condone).

Just as the nations of the West can’t help but reap what they have sown, so too, the satirists at CH never seemed to accept the consequences of their actions and weren’t prepared to defend themselves very well. They attacked religions in the most vulgar terms (from what I’ve read) and thought it rather a lark. Although their offices were firebombed, they promised to continue to poke jihadis in the eye. But it appears they blithely thought giving offense to seriously nasty people should be inconsequential given their own finely ordered sense of c’est la vie and “can’t you take a joke?”

Back in 1981, I once attended a show in a small comedy club in San Francisco near the Haight. A very small young comedian who I thought was quite funny did some sort of riff that an older man in the audience was offended by and made it known. The comic tried to play it for a joke, but in this tiny venue (30- 40 people at best), the offended gentleman stood up and made it known he was going to kick the punk comic’s ass. He was a large man who looked like he could do it. All of a sudden, things, the comic, didn’t seem so funny as he tried to find a way to defuse the situation humorously, and it didn’t work.

The comedian feigned mock fear, for example, but the angry man was not impressed or deflected and made to approach the small, low stage. The fear in the comedian’s eye’s was not simulated. Members of the audience prevailed upon the the angry man to relinquish his complaints and let it pass, but the damage had been done. The event was no longer any fun.

Like Bill Maher et al, Charlie Hebdo felt it could attack other people’s most cherished beliefs with impunity, and their targets should simply take it in the spirit of ‘damn you if what we say offends your pathetically stupid sensibility’. It is horrific what happened in Paris, but should we wonder about those who sow literary contempt and reap violent physical contempt?

Charlie Hebdo was a self-conscious standard-bearer for secular France. Unlike most secular standard-bearers, unlike today’s SJWs, the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo actually stood by their professed principles of freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and disrespect for the sanctity of sacred cows. They were true Voltaireans; I don’t know enough about them to know if they were consistent or not (we know they attacked Christian symbols as well as Muslim symbols, but did they refrain from attacking Jewish and secular ones?) but they were certainly more consistent and catholic in their satires than the average Western secularist who heaps contempt on Christianity and Western tradition while remaining dead silent about Islam, Judaism, and the various shibboleths of political correctness.

Amused by him or not, the jester who enjoys immunity from the king has long been a feature of Western civilization. Charlie Hebdo was one such jester. I didn’t find their cartoons to be amusing, or of any artistic value, but then, I am not French. More importantly, they were acting under the long-respected Western principle of jester’s immunity, and by doing so in the expectation of continued immunity, they were upholding Western civilization in their own way.

Now, I had begun writing this post with the intention of saying that Charlie Hebdo should have taken more responsibility for its actions, and taken better defensive precautions, and therefore it was negligent in that regard, but in the course of thinking through that argument, I find that it is fundamentally flawed. The jester is neither knight nor king. It is not his job to defend himself, but rather, it is the responsibility of the warriors of the society whose hypocrisies and inconsistencies he criticizes to defend him.

So, my answer is no, Charlie Hebdo did not have it coming. It is the responsibility of the king and his knights to defend their jester, even though they are the primary target of his jests. (Of course, it also behooves the jester to listen to his king when he is warned that he has gone too far in offending the king; at the end of the day, he serves at the king’s pleasure. His immunity is not total.) And moreover, any party that insists it possesses a king’s veto over the king’s jester is a usurping party that presents a direct challenge to the king’s lawful authority and therefore must be expelled from the kingdom.

In fact, through their deaths, the men of Charlie Hebdo have fulfilled their traditional jester’s role of warning the king that his policies are false and harmful. Had they focused instead on defending themselves, they would not have been able to do so. Now it is time for the king and his knights to fulfill their traditional roles and address the active threat to the kingdom.

UPDATE: at least two people killed after shooting at kosher grocery in eastern Paris in which at least five were taken hostage

Three more counts

Three more counts of sexual assault against McRapey’s partner in psychological projection:

Canadian radio star Jian Ghomeshi was charged with three more counts of sexual assault in a court appearance on Thursday in a widening sex scandal that has prompted suspensions at the country’s national public broadcaster.

The three new charges, linked to three more women, bring the total number of charges facing Ghomeshi to eight and the number of complainants to six. A publication ban prevents naming any of the women.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corp fired Ghomeshi as host of Q, an internationally syndicated CBC Radio music and arts program, in October. The CBC said it had seen graphic evidence that he had injured a woman in what Ghomeshi said were consensual sex acts involving bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism.

Remember, John Scalzi has not only openly admitted to being a rapist and sexual batterer himself, he has also spent considerably more time attacking me than he has Mr. Ghomeshi. In fact, he barely ever refers to Mr. Ghomeshi at all. It tends to make one suspect that McRapey has some other agenda in mind than his professed purpose in defending women. And speaking of McRapey, here is the full extent of his Twitter commentary on the massacre in Paris.

As a non-Muslim, I’d like to apologize to Muslims for the non-Muslims
demanding that all Muslims should apologize for the attacks today.

Worked at a newspaper; made people angry with words. I was what those cartoonists were. I am still. #JeSuisCharlie 

Followed by extensive cat pictures to change the subject. Seriously, that’s John Scalzi’s reaction after Muslims murder more people… to apologize to Muslims. He’s exactly the sort of left-wing writer whom Sarah Hoyt decried as “asinine cowards, these craven and self-regarding poltroons… who routinely, three times a day, post some dig at Christianity, some mockery of Americans, some pseudo-witty comment about Republicans. But see, none of those people threaten to kill them. The brave social(ist) justice warriors are ever ready to speak truth to the power that will not hurt them. Towards Islam, otoh they adopt the crouching position and kiss the terrorists gangrenous blood-soaked pudenda.”

Scalzi isn’t what the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo were. Whatever else they may have been, they were brave. He is the precise opposite; a contemptible moral and physical coward. What a craven, self-promoting fraud. As one noTrust aptly tweeted: “The bodies aren’t even cold, and here’s Scalzi & other libs publicly fondling their own Moral Supremacy.”

The rabbits quiver

Two posts in which File 770 compares Sad Puppies to National Socialism, me to a disease, and science fiction writers to dogs.

A comment by Daniel on Vox Day’s blog put this amusing spin on yesterday’s story about the 2014 Worldcon financial report:

    Semi-on topic: thanks to record memberships, LonCon finished with a cash surplus of…

    …about £1,000.

    Without Larry and Vox last year, they would have been deep in the red.

There you have it: all the people who joined to stuff the ballot box for Larry Correia’s “Sad Puppies” slate kept the Worldcon afloat. Now I know how that English schoolboy felt in Hope and Glory when he discovered his school had been bombed by the Luftwaffe — “Thank you Adolf!”

No doubt the pinkshirts will try to deny it, but there is no question that Sad Puppies was to the financial benefit of Worldcon. Some have tried to claim that the huge increase in memberships was the result of the con being based in London rather than the reaction to the nomination of works by Larry, Brad, me, and others, but you have only to compare the percentage increase in voting memberships to the increase in nominations to see that Sad Puppies not only inspired more involvement on the Right side of the science fiction spectrum, but on the Left side as well.

Did you hear the mournful baying of the Sad Puppies this morning? Yes, the pack is back in 2015, this time under the direction of Brad Torgersen. And his arguments for renewing this bloc voting campaign are one dogwhistle after another. Usually you can’t see these kinds of contortions outside of a circus.

  • The Hugos are a popularity contest – but not the right kind of popularity.
  • The Hugos don’t necessarily correlate with sales success – but neither did last year’s Sad Puppies slate, once you got past Larry Correia.
  • The Hugos “skew ideological” – Did you know they were trying to cure
    that problem when Vox Day got a Sad Puppies endorsement last year? (I
    thought it was only on House they try to cure patients by giving them another disease…)
  • The Hugos often ignore “successful ambassadors of the genre to the
    consumer world at large” – That dogwhistle is at a frequency almost too
    high for me to hear, but I believe he has a particular New York Times bestselling author in mind.

Anyway, if you felt something pushing against your “Worldcon fandom
zeitgeist” today — that’s because the dogs are off the leash!

As one might expect, he’s missing the points.

  1. Mournful? They may not be enjoying this, but we certainly are.
  2. The pinkshirts have long denied that the Hugos are a popularity contest. Sad Puppies belied, and continues to belie that argument.
  3. No one has ever claimed Sad Puppies was about sales. That being said, an endorsement by Larry Correia can absolutely be proven to boost sales.
  4. Again, the pinkshirts have always denied that the Hugos skew ideological. Sad Puppies disproved, and will continue to disprove that denial.
  5. It’s not just the Hugos. For example, Chaos Horizon noted the refusal of mainstream reviewers to even review Monster Hunter: Nemesis, considered to be a likely Hugo nominee.

This is what diversity looks like

As usual, we’re seeing most of the usual suspects telling the usual taqiyya, claiming that murdering people is against Islam, that it’s just a few bad apples, that Christians do it too, that Charlie Hebdo had it coming, and so forth.

They are all lies. Islam is a religion of the sword and has been since its inception.

Christian popes are given names like Pius and Benedictus and Clemens. Islamic caliphs were proud to bear names such as al-Mansur “the victorious”, which the Caliph of Cordoba assumed after his victory at the Battle of Torrevicente in 981. Furthermore, if it is reasonable to hold Christians today responsible for the actions of other Christians during the Crusades nearly one thousand years ago, how is it unreasonable to hold Muslims today responsible for the action of other Muslims yesterday?

As I have repeatedly observed, we are about fifty years into the third great wave of Islamic expansion in the West. It was previously turned back at Tours, and again at Vienna. Given the delusions that still persist among the Western governments and the left side of the West’s electorates, it seems unlikely that the murderous assault on the Charlie Hebdo offices mark the high water mark of the third wave of Islamic aggression.

But the first shots in Reconquista 2.0 have already been fired; they were fired in Norway by Anders Breivik. And that is the terrible point to which multiculturalism and diversity and tolerance has brought the West: the choice between Breivik and Hebdo. Many have embraced the hashtag #JeSuiCharlie, but as Iowahawk wisely noted, never bring a candlelight vigil to a gunfight.

It will, of course, take time for people to understand that there is no third option, that reinforcing not only decades of failure, but irrational ideological dogma, is absolutely and utterly doomed to even more cataclysmic failure. It will take more attacks by the invaders, more innocent deaths, more dead Westerners, before the people throw out their traitorous governments and their ridiculous pleas for “unity” and true national leaderships arise to expel the invaders.

This pattern of Quislingesque behavior on the part of the Western elite is nothing new. A reader, JS, notes:

I’ve been reading Kissinger’s Diplomacy, and noted that in the lead-up
to WW2, many leaders in Europe and England were much more favorably
disposed towards a hostile and rearming Germany than they were to the Right
in their own countries. Like the Left today, their tactic in response to a
challenge was to attempt to cover themselves in ‘moar’ humiliation,
abase themselves even further. According to Kissinger,
they received grand accolades from other world leaders while betraying
their own peoples and increasing the death toll of WW2 by orders of
magnitude by disarming when they should have been attacking Hitler’s
Germany before Germany was prepared for offensive warfare.

Look at the picture above. Look at the terror and helplessness of the French policeman in his last moments. Look at what his surrender and willingness to appease his Muslim killer accomplished. That is what diversity looks like. That is what diversity means.

Then again, in the end, it may be that #JeSuiCharlie will turn out to be an appropriate slogan. After all, there was once another Frenchman named Charlie who was not afraid to confront the Islamic invader, Charlie Martel.

UPDATE: More blessings of diversity in Paris today:

Terrified workers in Paris’s business district were warned not to leave their office after a gunmen was seen outside – just hours after a female police officer was shot dead by a ‘North African wielding an assault rifle’. 

The costs of scientistry

A scientist laments the loss of scientific credibility:

If we want to use scientific thinking to solve problems, we need people to appreciate evidence and heed expert advice. But the Australian suspicion of authority extends to experts, and this public cynicism can be manipulated to shift the tone and direction of debates. We have seen this happen in arguments about climate change.

This goes beyond the tall poppy syndrome. Disregard for experts who have spent years studying critical issues is a dangerous default position. The ability of our society to make decisions in the public interest is handicapped when evidence and thoughtfully presented arguments are ignored.

So why is science not used more effectively to address critical questions? We think there are several contributing factors including the rise of Google experts and the limited skills set of scientists themselves. We think we need non-scientists to help us communicate with and serve the public better.

At a public meeting recently, when a well-informed and feisty elderly participant asked a question that referred to some research, a senior public servant replied: “Oh, everyone has a scientific study to justify their position, there is no end to the studies you could cite, I am sure, to support your point of view.”

This is a cynical statement, where there are no absolute truths and everyone’s opinion must be treated as equally valid. In this intellectual framework, the findings of science can be easily dismissed as one of many conflicting views of reality.

Such a viewpoint is dangerous from our point of view.

This is the result of scientists passing off their unscientific opinions as expertise for decades. No one trusts “science” anymore because no one trusts scientists. Everyone has seen too many idiots with advanced degrees and white coats trying to pull the Dennett Demarche, in which the scientist argues that biologists can be trusted because physics is very accurate.

This is why a clear distinction between scientody, the scientific method, and scientistry, the profession of science, is absolutely necessary. But because men are corrupt and fallen, too many scientists find it too useful to be able to cloak their unscientific (and all too often uneducated), opinions under the veil of scientific expertise.

And the writer undercuts his own argument when he laments that “evidence” (which may be scientific) and “thoughtfully presented arguments” (which have absolutely nothing to do with science) are ignored. Because the fact is that logic is not science, it is philosophy, and philosophy is exactly what scientody is designed to counteract.

Furthermore, science is intrinsically dynamic. So listening to the “real experts” in science is a guaranteed way to ensure that one ignores both logic, and in many cases, reality.

The three laws of behavioral genetics

JayMan explicates them:

  • First Law. All human behavioral traits are heritable.
  • Second Law. The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of genes.
  • Third Law. A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families.

These laws are more controversial than they should be. No one who comes from a large family will find it easy to take exception to them, and anyone who does must be put to the objective test.

What, specifically, is a behavioral trait that is not heritable? And how would one go about demonstrating that? My impression is that as with many other issues, the fact that most people are binary thinkers renders it very difficult for them to grasp the truth of probabilistic matters. If it can’t be answered with an absolute “yes, always”, then they assume that the answer must necessarily be “no, never”.

The decline of science fiction

It is well known that science fiction sales have declined since the 1980s, but what Daniel demonstrates in Evidence for the Bust Years is that the perceived quality of science fiction, as measured by average Amazon ratings for books representational of their year, have fallen as well:

What this chart argues is that science fiction of the 50s and 60s
averages better than a 4.3 rating at Amazon (and you’ll note that all
decades average more than 350 reviews per book, so small groups of rabid
reviewers really don’t factor in). The quality slides in the 1970s,
plummets in the 80s, recovers slightly in the 1990s, but falls back
below 4 throughout the 2000s.

Now, this is just some raw data from a list of books from the past 60
years or so, but two things stand out to me: Science Fiction has
measurably fallen off in quality, at least according to readers,
according to this relatively blind snapshot. I’m sure we could generate
different results with a different list, but I want to emphasize that
this survey was both as random and as fair as I could muster (in fact, I
noticed after the fact that my list is somewhat more heavily weighted
toward award-winners in the decade that performed the worst!)

This should surprise no one who has been paying attention to the corruption that is Pink SF as it has spread throughout the science fiction and fantasy genres. For me, the obvious point was when The Quantum Rose, a romance novel in space that was a middle book in a series virtually no one was reading, was awarded the Nebula for Best Novel in 2002. Notice that despite it supposedly being the best novel of that year, it has a paltry 29 ratings averaging 3.70.

If that was truly the best of the best, how bad was the average book that year? And if it wasn’t, then how could systematically elevating the mediocre fail to have a subsequent effect on the genre? While more comprehensive statistical work is required to make the case conclusive, this first analysis does indicate that in the eyes of the reviewers, the quality of science fiction and fantasy has objectively declined.