Twelve rational virtues

I’m no devotee of the cult of reason, and one could easily blow a hole through the philosophical underpinnings for these “virtues”, but they are genuinely good advice if you’re willing to turn a blind eye to the base assumptions involved.

The first virtue is curiosity. A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth. To feel the burning itch of curiosity requires both that you be ignorant, and that you desire to relinquish your ignorance. If in your heart you believe you already know, or if in your heart you do not wish to know, then your questioning will be purposeless and your skills without direction. Curiosity seeks to annihilate itself; there is no curiosity that does not want an answer. The glory of glorious mystery is to be solved, after which it ceases to be mystery. Be wary of those who speak of being open-minded and modestly confess their ignorance. There is a time to confess your ignorance and a time to relinquish your ignorance.

The second virtue is relinquishment. P. C. Hodgell said: “That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.” Do not flinch from experiences that might destroy your beliefs. The thought you cannot think controls you more than thoughts you speak aloud. Submit yourself to ordeals and test yourself in fire. Relinquish the emotion which rests upon a mistaken belief, and seek to feel fully that emotion which fits the facts. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is hot, and it is cool, the Way opposes your fear. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is cool, and it is hot, the Way opposes your calm. Evaluate your beliefs first and then arrive at your emotions. Let yourself say: “If the iron is hot, I desire to believe it is hot, and if it is cool, I desire to believe it is cool.” Beware lest you become attached to beliefs you may not want.

The third virtue is lightness. Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf, with no direction of your own. Beware lest you fight a rearguard retreat against the evidence, grudgingly conceding each foot of ground only when forced, feeling cheated. Surrender to the truth as quickly as you can. Do this the instant you realize what you are resisting; the instant you can see from which quarter the winds of evidence are blowing against you. Be faithless to your cause and betray it to a stronger enemy. If you regard evidence as a constraint and seek to free yourself, you sell yourself into the chains of your whims. For you cannot make a true map of a city by sitting in your bedroom with your eyes shut and drawing lines upon paper according to impulse. You must walk through the city and draw lines on paper that correspond to what you see. If, seeing the city unclearly, you think that you can shift a line just a little to the right, just a little to the left, according to your caprice, this is just the same mistake.

Virtue isn’t really the correct term here, but that’s merely a rhetorical flourish for improving one’s rational performance. As with historical pagan sentiments, the higher paganism is often more admirable than the corrupt and imperfect realization of Christian ideals. But while those sentiments are worthy of respect and even implementation, they should never be mistaken for the genuine article of true godly virtue.

Western civilization vs SJW media

That’s what #GamerGate boils down to according to Allen Quatermain on Reaxxion:

The long range objectives of #gamergate has been summarized as less outside interference, more responsibility in the gaming media and greater accountability of game publishers and so of course we have collided with cultural Marxists, for these purposes bring us immediately into conflict with the SJW’s on two levels.

On the Ideological plain, the SJW’s seek always and everywhere to bring about more interference, less individual responsibility and an amoral way of doing things. On the plain of action, until the SJW’s can be stopped from their subjugation of all western society, there will be no opportunity for us to move forward at all. We have undertaken therefore to play a leading role in slowing down, stopping and eventually routing the SJW interlopers.

We realise that the one thing that the SJW’s cannot withstand is the light of day on their activities. What cultural Marxists fear is exposure. For this reason we do all that we can to bring to our fellow people more knowledge and a better understanding of the methods, the progress. and the menace of the SJW machine. In this undertaking we have become a new form of opposition to the SJW’s which they have never faced before in any of the vast areas they have already taken over.

The SJW’s, grasping this fact very early on, set out destroy us as a movement. The western mainstream media help the SJW’s by laying down the line for the faithful. There has not been one mainstream media publication which has not been used to attack #gamergate.

I’m not sure the Wall Street Journal has bothered to attack #GamerGate, but it was a little startling to see First Things come out and pronounce us dead for the Nteenth time, albeit in a nominally sympathetic manner.

The media has been entirely coopted and cannot be trusted in any way, shape, or form. Even the nominally conservative media readily falls in line under social pressure from more extreme SJWs. But as I noted on Alpha Game today, media reality is not synonymous with objective reality; it portrays the world as they believe it should be, not as it actually is.

This is why blogs like this one will continue to grow in popularity, as the mainstream media ratings consistently fall no matter the medium. The reason the media keeps declaring #GamerGate dead is because they need it to be dead, as the longer it persists, the more obviously doomed they are.

Pity the poor professors

If this isn’t an excuse for well-justified schadenfreude, I don’t know what is:

“Deplorable, deeply regressive, a sign of the corporatization of the university.”  That’s what Harvard Classics professor Richard F. Thomas calls the changes in Harvard’s health plan, which have a large number of the faculty up in arms.

Are Harvard professors being forced onto Medicaid? Has their employer denied coverage for cancer treatment? Do they need to sign a corporate loyalty oath in order to access health insurance? Not exactly. But copayments are being raised and deductibles altered, making their plan … well, actually, their plan is still extraordinarily generous by any standard:

    The university is adopting standard features of most employer-sponsored health plans: Employees will now pay deductibles and a share of the costs, known as coinsurance, for hospitalization, surgery and certain advanced diagnostic tests. The plan has an annual deductible of $250 per individual and $750 for a family. For a doctor’s office visit, the charge is $20. For most other services, patients will pay 10 percent of the cost until they reach the out-of-pocket limit of $1,500 for an individual and $4,500 for a family.

The deepest irony is, of course, that Harvard professors helped to design Obamacare. And Obamacare is the reason that these changes are probably necessary.

Demonstrating, yet again, that nothing is more short-sighted than an activist rabbit. Give them exactly what they want, provide them exactly what they are agitating for, and they are outraged!

“When I demanded more comprehensive government services requiring more taxes, I didn’t mean that I wanted to pay for them myself!”

Is it any surprise that college educations are increasingly worthless, given that idiots like these are supposedly the creme de la creme of the professoriat?

A request for substantiation

This morning I sent summaries of the ongoing cyberstalking and online harassment committed by Yamamanama aka inimbe karu ava, Alauda, alauda, Luscinia Hâfez, Luscinia, Clamps, Ciconia, Arachnothera, daphnis, Count Bullets-ula, Beardsley McTurbanhead, Freddy Foreshadowing, Comrade Questions, comrade questions, Dan Picaro, Andthestarshine, Kasa the Wicked, Nikola, Chokley Carmichael, Clamps, Daphis, Daphnis, Starshine, Sunlight, Will, Will leFey, Yama, Yama the Space Fish, Lilacanddatura, Phoenixwing667, Darkprophet667 to the Marshfield police department and the New England Wildlife Center.

A selection from the summary of my experience being harassed and cyberstalked:

Aside from the realization that the cyberstalker did not appear to be entirely mentally stable, this incident also caused me to learn that the cyberstalker “Will leFey” was “Yama the Spacefish” on DeviantArt and “Yamamanama” on Live Journal as well as “@pure, impure” on Twitter. I also learned that the cyberstalker lived in Marshfield, Massachusetts and is a longtime volunteer at the New England Wildlife Center. And I learned that I am far from the first person he has subjected to this persistent online harassment.

• https://twitter.com/pure_impure
• http://yamathespacefish.deviantart.com/
• http://yamamanama.livejournal.com/

Since that time, Will/Yama/etc has intensified his cyberstalking and willfully and maliciously engaged in conduct that seriously alarms or annoys me, left hundreds of comments that would cause a reasonable person to suffer substantial emotional distress, and has made threats with the intent to place me in fear of bodily injury for me, my wife, and my children. A few of the more recent threats include:

  • “Vox Day and his idiot followers need to know how much of an untalented waste of carbon he is.”
  • “The only award Vox Day should be nominated for is “the worst fucking person in existence award.””
  • “Vox is a mentally unstable stalker.”
  • “Vox should be castrated.”
  • “You pompous stuck-up snot-nosed expatriate giant twerp scumbag fuckface dickhead asshole.”
  • “I want his heart rate to increase to the point where it can’t pump blood anymore.”
  • “May a thousand kraits bite you. May a crane rip out your tongue. May skylarks remove your eyes.”
  • “May Lord Yama visit you soon, Vox.”

These are only a few of the many threats he has made to me and others in the course of his long campaign of online harassment. Note that Lord Yama, the cyberstalker’s primary identity, is the Hindu god of death.

It is my understanding that the erratic behavior of this observably disturbed individual falls well under the scope of Massachusetts law, specifically M.G.L. c. 265, s. 43, and it is my opinion that he presents a clear and present threat to the individuals he is harassing online as well as to the local community of Marshfield.

If you have witnessed any of this online harassment by the cyberstalker who utilizes these identities, I would appreciate it if you would write a brief summary of what you have witnessed, and the period over which you have witnessed it, here in the comments. If you would prefer to do so privately, please email me with “CYBERSTALKER” in the subject. You don’t need to use your real name, but do mention your state, or if you’re outside the USA, your country.

If you have been cyberstalked or harassed by Yama et al on your own site, please send me a list of the comments he has left there and the dates he has been active on your blog. If he has left too many comments to easily copy and paste them into a text document, you can export your blog to XML and we can utilize our data-mining tool to extract all of his comments in one fell swoop.

Please note that all summaries may be sent to the appropriate authorities in order to substantiate the assertions made in the summary.

Explaining the mental gymnasts

Anonymous Conservative explains the bizarre affection the Left habitually displays for Islam, despite the way in which it goes against nearly everything they say they believe:

One religion is held in utter contempt, while the other receives freely groveling praise and welcoming admiration. Which is which?

Again, rabbits don’t grovel before Muslims because they think it through, and decide to appease the people who could kill them. Rather, their mind touches violent Islam tentatively and experiences an almost imperceptible shot of fear – in rabbit-speak, a triggering. Their brain then looks at the facts of the matter, and subconsciously realizes that embracing Islam as superior, is the least amygdala stimulating of the various thoughts running through their head. Far less stimulating than insulting or opposing Islam and being killed, and far less than consciously groveling at the feet of people they intellectually acknowledge reviling, to save their own lives. If they embrace Islam and believe their own embrace is true, they can even claim to be intellectual, moral, and tolerant, all best described as anti-triggering concepts in the rabbit’s mind.

Here, once this feat of mental gymnastics occurs, you enter a strange realm. Their initial jump to the counter-intuitive position has already been established in their mind as not due to some deficit of intellect, but rather due to the immensity of their intellect. At that point, the more counter to logic the position embraced by the rabbit, the more they see it as a mark of their tolerance, evolved-ness, advancement, and superiority over the more base, primitive, stupid, caveman-like tendencies of their opposition.

You have to view leftism and rabbitism as simple logical programs, run as if on computer, by a mind that cannot tolerate triggering, and which will believe anything to avoid experiencing it.

I’m pleased to be able to say that Anonymous Conservative is now an Associate of Castalia House, so if you wish to purchase his books in either EPUB or Kindle format, you can now do so through our online store. I highly recommend both of them, as they offer genuine insight into the Left from a perspective that is as unique as it is informative.

Both books provide a useful, hands-on theoretical explanation for behavior that we have all witnessed and found inexplicable. While AC would be the first to agree that considerably more scientific evidence would be required before one could assert either of his primary hypotheses as unassailable fact, even in the absence of published peer review they are very useful heuristics in attempting to better understand, and deal with, the literal lunatics of the political Left.

How the media manipulates science fiction

I discovered an interesting site called Chaos Horizon yesterday. The author has developed a model to predict future Best Novel Hugo Award nominations on the basis of media coverage and past awards, and it worked pretty well last year. But what I found even more interesting and informative was his review round-ups, in which he tracks the media coverage of the various books he expects to be nominated.

Two of the listed favorites for 2015 are LOCK-IN by John Scalzi and MONSTER HUNTER NEMESIS by Larry Correia.

LOCK-IN

Mainstream Reviews:
Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
NPR
A.V. Club

WordPress Blogger Reviews:
Ristea’s Reads (4 out of 5)
Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!
Bibliotropic (5 out of 5)
Alison McCarty (9 out of 10)
As the Plot Things (9 out of 10)
The BiblioSanctum (4.5 out of 5)
Infinite Free Time
Lucy Moo’s Book Reviews
Books, Bones, & Buffy (4 out of 5)
For Winter Nights

As you can see, that’s already a lot of reviews, and they’ve been pretty uniformly positive, averaging out to a solid 4.5 out of 5. The number of reviews is a testament to Scalzi built-in fanbase; the high scores speak to the book being well-liked.

Amazon Reviews:
(299) 4.2 out of 5 stars



MONSTER HUNTER: NEMESIS

Mainstream Reviews:

None? For each of these Review Round-Ups, I check the same places: Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, NPR, NYTimes, the Guardian, and Entertainment Weekly. These are some of the most popular and widely distributed reviewing venues, and they give us a good idea if the book is reaching beyond the core SFF audience. The fact that Correia received no discernible support from these outlets certainly says something. The lack of reviews in Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus is surprising, as they do short capsule reviews of tons of texts. For most authors, this lack of mainstream coverage would hurt them; for an author like Correia, this lack of coverage re-enforces his outsider or maverick status.

WordPress Blog Reviewers:
AdVerb Creative
Koeur’s Book Review
Bookstoge’s Reviews on the Road (4.5 out of 5)
Attack of the Books!
Alternative Worlds II

Not the biggest group of reviews, but all are fairly positive. It’s interesting that Monster Hunter Nemesis doesn’t show up as strongly in these places. Goodreads has 1700+ ratings for Monster Hunter Nemesis, which does indicate it’s selling copies. People just don’t seem to blog about Correia’s book with the same intensity as they do other texts.

Amazon Reviews:
(283) 4.8 out of 5 stars

It’s somewhat amusing to see that even though Chaos Horizons is aware of the Hugo controversy, he’s still genuinely surprised that there are zero mainstream reviews for Nemesis. What’s happening here is a microcosm of what happens in the gaming world. The pinkshirt media puffs up Pink SF and attempts to make it look better and more popular than it is, while ignoring better and equally popular non-Pink SF in an attempt to pretend it is not merely irrelevant, but doesn’t exist.

It’s even more obvious if you actually read the reviews for LOCK-IN. Most of them are more about the author than the book itself, because the content of the book is largely irrelevant, the object of the review is to signal that the book reviewed is the product of an ideologically-approved author and therefore should be supported.

I note that the Goodreads data is different than the Amazon data, but I tend to discount the Goodreads data as a proxy for comparative purposes because its readership has such a strong SJW bias. That being said, it’s probably an excellent proxy for the WorldCon membership and a Hugo-predictive model for precisely that reason.

Paedophiles in Parliament II

Is it an accident that so many of the UK’s parliamentary pedophiles were instrumental in helping the UK surrender its sovereignty to the EU? I would tend to doubt it.

As Prince Andrew becomes the latest figure to be named in an establishment paedophile scandal, the British nation has woken up today to face, yet again, the uncomfortable possibility that they are governed by an elite political and media establishment that has, for at least the past 50 years, engaged in, covered up, and ignored institutionalised paedophilia.

I spent the month of November in the United States, whilst there the UK Home Office’s “Independent Investigation” into historical child abuse in Westminster hit new levels of absurdity when the SECOND appointed head of the investigation resigned due to links to those implicated in a paedophile ring….

Having come across much of this information as a Parliamentary intern in 2005, where it was described to me as “just what goes on here”, I  cannot believe that anyone with a long-term political career in Britain has not only not heard the rumours, but has come across or witnessed enough consistent information to believe they merit investigation.

Members of Parliament past and present would therefore fall into three categories: those who participated in child abuse, those who directly assisted in covering it up, and those who were aware of the issue but decided to do nothing. Indeed Lord Tebbit, Margaret Thatcher’s former Cabinet Minister and confidante, has bravely stated that both he and Thatcher were aware of a problem, which now implicates many of their close colleagues, but that there was a feeling at the time that investigating or exposing them would destroy the British Establishment, and that it was more important to protect it.

There may have been a time when I, and perhaps a large proportion of the British public, felt that the value of protecting the institutions and traditions of the British Establishment outweighed the necessity for justice for the victims of these crimes, but when current members of the Establishment issue their “strenuous denials” and still dismiss the possibility that such a thing could have possibly occurred, it seems they may be really operating either in the panic of self preservation, or in the assumption that there are simply still matters we don’t talk about for the “greater good”.

It’s also very hard to argue that there is any reason, let alone value, to protect the legitimacy and popular perception of the “British Establishment” now that the establishment doesn’t have much power any more after having ceded most of its important decision-making functions to bureaucrats in Brussels and NATO generals.

“Simon Danczuk MP, who has previously chaired meetings in Parliament on
the investigation has stated that he feels that the Prime Minister has
been “intentionally dismissive” of the issue, and that the investigation is being purposely “delayed and sabotaged” by the government.”

I suspect that the deeper the investigations go, the more it will become obvious that the pedophilia of British politicians has been the way in which their political loyalties have been directed. If UKIP throws its growing weight behind the investigations, they could well topple the evil British establishment on the wave of popular outrage and revulsion.

Finally, a good game

The difference between watching games between two teams who should be in the playoffs – Dallas and Detroit – and teams who shouldn’t be – pretty much the other six teams – was glaringly apparent yesterday. I think the playoffs worked best when there were three divisions and one wild card team; just as there are more teams than there are NFL-caliber quarterbacks, there are more teams in the playoffs than there are playoff-caliber teams.

But as long as there are four divisions (which works well for other reasons), it would be better if there was only one wild card team and one first-round bye. I have no regard for the “best teams” argument, because the only “best teams” that matter are already guaranteed entry. If you’re only the third-best team in your four-team division, you shouldn’t be in the playoffs. If you’re only the third-best of the non-division winners, you shouldn’t be in the playoffs.

The Eagles, who lost to the Seahawks, Cowboys, and Redskins before beating the Giants to close out the season, weren’t going to do anything that Carolina won’t do, which is to say lose to the Seahawks next weekend.

As for last night’s game, it was good to see Tony Romo finally get the playoff monkey off his back. The controversial call shouldn’t have been made in the first place, because a) it was offensive pass interference when Pettigrew grabbed Hitchens’s facemask, b) the contact was minimal, and most importantly, c) it was a completely uncatchable ball. Stafford literally hit Hitchens in the back right in the numbers; there was absolutely no way the receiver had any sort of play on the ball. Furtheremore, there is no “face-guarding” rule in the NFL, or, for that matter, in NCAA football; it is only deemed pass interference in high school football, specifically National Federation of State High School Associations rule 7-5-10: “Any player hinders an opponent’s vision without making an
attempt to catch, intercept or bat the ball, even though no contact was
made.”

When the officials call pass interference on a player who hasn’t turned around, they do so because he has crashed into a receiver who is coming back for a high ball, to distinguish them from defenders who crash into a receiver when they themselves are going for a high ball. That was not the case in the play being discussed, for the obvious reason that Stafford threw the ball into the Dallas linebacker’s back. Recall the NFL’s pass interference rules: Actions that do not constitute pass interference include but are not limited to: (c) Contact that would normally be considered pass interference, but the pass is clearly uncatchable by the involved players.

ESPN’s Todd Archer asked Pete Morelli (who is admittedly not a very good ref: see the NFC Championship Game 2009) about the call turned non-call:

Todd Archer: Can you talk about the decision to overturn the call and why you overturned the call?
Pete Morelli: The back judge threw his flag for defensive pass
interference. We got other information from another official from a
different angle that thought the contact was minimal and didn’t warrant
pass interference. He thought it was face-guarding.
Archer: Which official?
Morelli: The head linesman.
Archer: What did you see?
Morelli: It’s not my responsibility. I’m a hundred miles away.
Archer: Face-guarding is not a foul?
Morelli: Face-guarding is not a foul. It is a penalty in college but not in professional football.
Archer: What is the process you go through after you announce the call? Should you have waited before you announced the call?
Morelli: Probably, yes. The information came and then the officials got
together a little bit later, after it was given to me, the first
information. It would have probably been smoother if we got together.

He did the right thing. It’s better to get it right and look like a fool or a fix than allow a bad call to stand when he knows better. As for the decision not to flag Dez Bryant for coming onto the field without his helmet in protest of the call, I think it was a correct no-call. We want to see the refs let minor things go in the playoffs (that’s why Suh was permitted to play when his suspension would never have been overturned in the regular season), and no one wants to see a playoff game settled by an off-the-field foul by an excited player in an overheated moment that harmed no one. I wish more NFL games this year had been refereed in the style Dallas-Detroit was; I simply do not understand those fans who seem to enjoy a blizzard of yellow flags and seeing every third play called back.

If the Lions fans want to blame anyone, they should blame Jim Caldwell for failing to go for it on 4th-and-1. The football gods obviously did not like that, as they promptly punished the Lions with a 10-yard shanked punt. Caldwell played to avoid losing throughout the second half; switching to a four-man rush and abandoning the blitz took the pressure off Romo, who made Detroit pay for it.

And besides, those petty flags would have caused us to miss the redemption of Dallas’s rookie defensive end, whose utter stupidity in not falling down to seal the game once he’d recovered the fumble was made up for by creating and recovering another fumble to win the game. In the end, with two minutes left and two timeouts, Stafford only managed to produce two fumbles. Game over. The better team won.

NFL Playoffs: Wildcard round

I felt rather sorry for the Cardinals. I have no doubt they would have won with even a journeyman starter, but it’s a little tough to generate offense with a 4th-stringer. As for the Steelers, it’s obviously time for Polamalu to retire. I don’t know why the media is always down on Flacco; he may not be Manning, Brady, or Rodgers, but you can obviously win a Super Bowl with him.

The Bengals are similarly overmatched. They’re playing hard, but I can’t see them coming back against the Colts. The only game I’m even all that interested in is Detroit-Dallas. I can’t help but notice that no one is clamoring for an expanded playoffs considering how bad the first-round matchups have been this year.

As for the Super Bowl, New England beating Seattle as the last hurrah of Brady and Belichick is my prediction.

The shills of anti-GamerGate

The media never bothers to look close enough at the situation to observe that a considerable amount of the objectionable behavior of #GamerGate is actually the work of anti-GamerGate shills trying to make #GamerGate look bad:

Leader ID 036072 01/02/15 No. 170287

So guy how many trannys have we helped drive to commit suicide? I think we should really focus on Brianna Wu. She is the head of the anti gamer cobra. She offs herself and the rest of the freaks will follow suit. 

A few hours later….

Leader ID 036072 01/02/15 No. 170532
>>170287

I can’t do this anymore.

I’m making myself sick with the comments I’m making in this thread. I honestly feel sick to my stomach. Transexuals don’t deserve to be bullied. Anyone who might have followed this tread please don’t do anything.

I just want you guys to stop harassing my friend Zoe and my friends at ghazi. I figured helping you guys look bad would help stop you. Please just stop bothering my friends and I truly apologize for the awful things i said about trans people. Can someone tell me how to delete this thread?

Remember, for rabbits, it is always about the appearance rather than the substance, and victory is synonymous with positive PR. Of course, it’s usually not hard to spot these provocateurs, since they are too solipsistic to effectively emulate their opponent’s patterns of thought and speech.

The idea that Brianna Wu is the head of anything was sufficient to expose this shill even before her confession. No doubt AC will be amused by the evidence of a rabbit accidentally overstimulating her own amygdala.

Notice how the rabbit apologizes for her violation of warren dogma, but not for the deceit she practiced upon everyone. Rabbits feel literally no shame about lying, nor do they feel any obligation to tell the truth. Never, ever forget that.