How civilizations fall

John C. Wright explains the process of civilization decline, and in doing so demonstrates how far along the West has traveled down that dark path:

The first thing that can start the dissolution of civilization, and place our foot on the long, blood-soaked, sad path toward that aboriginal tribe that has forgotten how to make needles or sew, is the treason of the clerks.

One the king is convinced (or in these more degenerate and democratic times, the parliaments and congresscreatures who have kingly duties but no sense of a higher power to whom they are obligated) that he has authority to overrule the laws of civilization, perhaps to make the pathway clear to the alleged utopia that the priests said surely will arise once anarchy is unleashed, then the legitimacy of his state is gone, and he is merely a raving beast like a mad man-eating lion.

The first thing the lion eats is the sense of honor that keeps his fighting men in check. His fighting men includes what in the modern day is both the military and the police. The police are made more and more militaristic; they are cast as the enemy of the people; and the military is degenerated from its ancient precepts of honor and courage, and instead becomes sensitive and friendly to womenfolk or sodomites.

Now, to be clear, in a modern bureaucratic state, any one who has the power to enforce the law and harass the people is, for all practical purposes, a policeman, a soldier, a fighting man of the king. We would call these bureaucrats, everyone from the tax man to the clerk on a planning and zoning board enforcing an irrational eco-nutbag regulation.

The sense of honor needed to keep soldiers and civil servants in check evaporates as the lawlessness of the anarchic King spreads down the wall to the next row, and the soldiers, police, and civil servants become young lions, red in tooth and claw.

Once the fighting men are corrupted, next oldest support of civilization vanishes: the burghers, the townsmen, the bourgeoisie, the merchants, the shopkeeper and tradesman, and middle class. Their corruption is far easier and far quicker, because trade and possession depends on a faith in objective law and evenhanded enforcement of contracts, not to mention the soundness of coin or currency. The middle class can be taxed out of existence, as they were in ancient Rome, which collapsed the Western Empire in one generation, and kept the Eastern Empire in a state of servitude and poverty for the remainder of its millennium.

The merchants who turn to the King to make a sweetheart deal create crony capitalism, which is also, more correctly, called fascism. The industries, such as are left, become organs of the state and are protected by increasingly one-sided and nakedly unfair taxations and regulations.

The important point to note is that the treason of the merchants undermines the unspoken social contract which allows trade and manufacture, or even guilds and small shops, to exist: that is, namely, the unspoken social contract provides that spoken contracts shall be upheld, and trade be fair and free. This idea is laughed into nonexistence, and the merchants are no longer merchants, but become jackals slinking and slouching in the shadows of the lions consuming the people, greedy for scraps.

But no civilization of this is possible without the brotherhood of family and clan. And that is not possible without marriage and an institution of paternity.

So the final course of stones to go is the social contract, the bargain, between fathers and mothers, between male and female. The deal is that, in return for the bearing the burden of bearing children, the womanfolk will be protected and cherished. When the barbarians attack, the women and children go first to the stronghold, and the men man the walls; the iceberg strikes, the women and children go into the lifeboats, and the men go to death in the icy water. In return, the women preserve and reproduce the race.

To defend civilization, it is necessary for men and women to take the risks that modern society places upon us. Yes, there is risk of divorce. Yes, there is risk of missing out on something, whatever that something might be. But in the end, if even those who are civilizationists give in to the temptations and whispered promises of safety offered by modern society, civilization will fall.

It will most likely fall anyhow. But the important thing is to provide, like the monks of an earlier civilizational decline, a means of preserving that which will permit civilization to rise again.

The risk is worth it, because there is more to life than maximizing your number of sexual encounters and your bank account. So take the risk. Marry. Have children. Teach them right from wrong. And raise up a new generation that is not only civilized, but capable of defending the remnants of civilization.

For consideration 2014

And the fun is about to begin again! Here are my Hugo-eligible works published in 2014:

NOVEL 

QUANTUM MORTIS: A Mind Programmed, Castalia House (with Jean & Jeff Sutton)

SHORT STORY

“The Logfile”, The Altar of Hate, Castalia House
“A Reliable Source”, Riding the Red Horse, Castalia House
“Tell it to the Dead”, Riding the Red Horse, Castalia House (with Steve Rzasa)

BEST RELATED WORK

“What is Pink SF/F”, June 12, 2014, Vox Popoli

If you want to get in on the action, you can join Sasquan 2015 here. I tend to suspect $40 for two years of voting rights will provide even more entertainment bang for your buck than it did last year. Also, note that you can buy two memberships, so long as the second one is marked “Guest of X”.

Less guns, more crime

So much for the notion of the USA being unusually violent due to its guns and legal carry laws:

With a murder rate many times higher than the US, Russian legislators approved the carry of guns for self-defense. The new law was announced on November 18.

The International Business Times reports that prior to this change “Russians were only allowed to own firearms for hunting or target practice.” Because of this, there are only “13 million” privately owned firearms in Russia compared to approximately 310 million the US. On the other hand, “there were 21,603 murders in Russia” in 2009 compared with just over 13,600 in the US, “which has a population almost twice as large [as Russia].”

In other words, in the past few years fewer guns equaled more murder in Russia while more guns equaled fewer murders in the US.

Under the new law, Russians can acquire a license to carry a firearm for self-defense. The license has to be “renewed every five years” and applicants must “undergo background checks and take a safety course.”

The law allows licensed Russians to carry a variety of different guns.

No wonder the gun control lobby is trying to rebrand as “gun safety”. Their arguments are failing on an international level.

Is John Scalzi a malignant narcissist?

As if being a self-confessed rapist who associates with men accused of sexually battering women wasn’t enough of an indication, reading Michael Trust’s fascinating work on malignant narcissists tends to indicate that there is something seriously off about John Scalzi. Consider these various points from the book:

Competitive/Relative Inferiority

Narcissists are weirdly competitive and strangely envious over seemingly insignificant details, from how the salary they earn compares to other’s, to the respectability of the shampoo they use, compared to the shampoos that others use. It is a shielding mechanism, designed to protect their ego, and their amygdala, from confronting their own insecurity.

You can sometimes spot this trait in a narcissist, by how they will try to verbally downplay their competitiveness in realms where they can’t compete, as a way of creating a false reality where they don’t care about their competitive inferiority. If your narcissist, out of the blue says, “Other people are obsessed with how much money they earn, but I really don’t care about things like that,” then you know they were just obsessing over exactly that subject. They are trying to establish a verbalized reality where their not caring, will allow their brain to relax over their abject failure in that regard.

McRapey on weightlifting (or practically any other subject, for that matter. To take all his various protestations about not caring at face value, you’d have to assume he was a Stoic of an emotional flatness to put the Romans to shame.)

Last week, as part of my general “try to lose weight and get a little healthier because you’re middle-aged now and you don’t want to die” thing, I started going to the local YMCA to use its weight room and indoor track, with my daughter as my workout partner. She’s been on the powerlifting team at her school for the last three years, so she’s knowledgeable about the weights in a way I am not, and is thus a good person with whom to work out. At the end of our first session, I tweeted the following:

    Let it be known that my daughter can lift more than I do. Because she’s on her school’s weightlifting team, and also because she’s awesome.

    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) June 30, 2014

This naturally aroused the derision of the hooting pack of status-anxious dudebros who let me live rent-free in their brains, prompting a predictable slew of tweets and blog posts about how this is further proof of my girly-man status, hardly a man at all, dude do you even lift, and so on.  I am delighted in all the ways that they are the best, and also, better than me.


Diminution of Stature/Humiliation

The narcissist needs to feel as if they have power, so as to pacify their insecure amygdala. It is only when everyone around them reflexively supplicates, that the narcissist can let their amygdala relax. For this reason, narcissists often build a perception of themselves as superiors, and they demand that others treat them this way. 

McRapey on running for SFWA President for the fourth time 

I have decided to step forward once more (last, last very last time I swear)
as a candidate for President, a position to which I was first elected
in 2010. I had originally intended to step down at the end of this term,
but on reflection decided there were still some things I wanted to
accomplish in the role, and it made sense to try them over the course of
an additional year. Whether I get that year will be up to SFWA members,
of course; they may be tired of me and my management style. In which
case I hope they elect someone else, rather than, say, stabbing me
Caesar-style at the Nebula Awards. Please, SFWA members: No stabbing.
That’s pointy and hurts.

Insist on Arguable Untruths

Narcissists who do this will insist on an untruth, especially one which would impede the attainment of a goal important to the group, and then they will refuse to acknowledge the falsity of the untruth. I fully believe narcissists who practice this technique do it knowingly. They know that what they are asserting is false, they enjoy seeing you upset over the fact that they are so unable to accept logic, and they refuse to give in purposely, to watch you grow increasingly agitated and frustrated. To these narcissists, truth is immaterial, the group’s goals are meaningless, and your upset emotional state is blissfully amusing. As a result they have one goal – to see your frustrated.

McRapey on the lack of women writing hard science fiction

I have a degree in philosophy from the University of Chicago
(specializing in the philosophy of language), and therefore have ample
training in rhetoric, so I doubt that rhetorical deficiencies on this
end are the issue. I read your column Vox, and I grasped your
obvious rhetorical device. It doesn’t impress me. As continually stated,
your rhetorical device is obviously bad: Poorly stated, poorly
supported, and rheorically incoherent. To restate: Your thesis is wrong
and you lack the rhetorical skills to present your thesis in a coherent
fashion. Your latter-day attempt to brush off your sexist and ignorant
statement as sarcasm is baldly transparent as backtracking; even if it
were true, it shows that your use of such devices is appallingly clumsy.
Again one wonders how you got your columnist gig, or, alternately, if
anyone bothers to edit you, as you so clearly need.

Being a Central Information Hub

Two things narcissists try to do to irritate is to invade privacy, and control and guide the flow of all information. This is probably due to some deep perception that their entire self-worth is defined by the group’s beliefs and perceptions (ie, it’s acceptance of their false reality), combined with an assumption (erroneously assuming that everyone else thinks like them), that everyone else’s self-worth is as well. Thus, to a narcissist, control the information flow, and you control everyone’s self-assessments of their own self-worth. To the narcissist, that information is pure power over not just everyone, but in the narcissist’s mind, the very (false) reality that everyone inhabits.

1. McRapey on all controversial subjects of the last 10 years

Comments off on this

2. McRapey on all people who might disagree with him


You are blocked from following @scalzi and viewing @scalzi’s Tweets.
  
Out-grouping

When interacting socially, narcissists are snakes in the grass. One of their major objectives when dealing with those they dislike is to alienate their targets from any social group to which they belong. They do this because they themselves require social validation to support the false reality that they construct to shield their amygdala from stimulation. As long as the group accepts the narcissist and their false reality, the narcissist can cling to the belief that they are somehow normal, or even superior. It is this social validation which serves as a crucial psychological crutch, shielding them from the pain that would result from an honest self-assessment of what they are. Projecting this psychology on others, the narcissist will assume that group-affiliation is just as vitally important to you. As a result, they will seek to disrupt your group affiliations as a way to both, try to disrupt the group-validation of the false reality they assume you have, and preserve this vital psychological crutch for themselves.


McRapey on August 14, 2013, after I announced my expulsion from SFWA


For No Particular Reason At All, This Song Seems Strangely Appropriate Today…. On an entirely unrelated note, today I renewed my SFWA membership. Seems I forgot to do it earlier. Oh, well, an easily corrected oversight, and it was. 


Privacy Invasion

The narcissist will intrude into their private spaces, and then feign ignorance of why they should care that he is there.

McRapey

Ask McRapey about this one. He knows what he did. This was the bizarre behavior that made it evident Scalzi’s behavior isn’t merely that of a normal self-centered individual, but more akin to that of the malignant narcissists described in the book. One would do well to keep these things in mind before one too quickly accept McRapey’s retroactive claims concerning his “satirical” practices at face value.

I’d add one more red flag in addition to those mentioned in the book. It’s what I would call a “probing” style of communication. Everything is two steps forward and one step back; if resistance is met, then it’s all only a joke, ha ha ha, and the individual retreats. If not, the breakthrough is quickly reinforced and a new narrative is established. It’s basically a deceptive tactic used to control the narrative while concealing the narcissist’s objectives. The joke about not wanting to be stabbed at the Nebula Awards is a good example of that; what is the point of the joke in the first place given that it’s not even remotely funny. It is to keep things lighthearted and distract from the fact that the narcissist is dead serious about seeking what he perceives to be power again.

How to Deal with Narcissists is a remarkable book. And it’s astonishing how well it describes the behavior of certain trolls known to infest these parts, as well as explain the reasons for that behavior. My completely unprofessional opinion is that John Scalzi is not a full-blown malignant narcissist, but merely has some observable tendencies in that regard and is rather less psychologically normal than most of his fans and his critics would tend to believe. These tendencies are most clearly seen in his habitual dishonesty and complete inability to admit the truth even when caught out publicly in a lie.

Continental warming

Temperatures continue to rise in Europe:

[T]he relentless stream of migrants to Europe — propelled by the war in
Syria and turmoil across the Middle East and the Horn of Africa — has
combined with economic troubles and rising fear of Islamic radicalism to
fuel a backlash against immigrants, directed most viciously at Muslims.

The
simmering resentments and suspicions have driven debates across Europe
about tighter controls on immigration. Worries about immigration have
helped buoy right-wing parties in Britain, Denmark, France and Hungary.
German officials recorded more than 70 attacks against mosques from 2012
to 2014, including an arson, and the police in Britain have recorded an
increase in hate crimes against Muslims. There are few places where the
turn against immigrants is more surprising than Sweden, where a solid
core of citizens still supports the 65-year-old open door policy toward
immigrants facing hardship that has long earned international respect
for the country….

Opposition
to the rising numbers is growing. The far-right, anti-immigrant Sweden
Democrats had their best showing ever — nearly 13 percent of votes — in
elections in September. The
entry of the Sweden Democrats to parliament in 2010 had already opened
the door for a previously unthinkable discussion about turning back the
country’s policy of taking in foreigners on humanitarian grounds and
granting them access to the country’s generous welfare system.

Adrian
Groglopo, a professor of social science at the University of
Gothenburg, has studied discrimination in Sweden over the past decade.
He said that Sweden has long been a racially segregated country where
many immigrants live in ghettos and struggle to find jobs, but that the
success of the Sweden Democrats has made racism more socially
acceptable.

By the time the current generation of young people take power, “racism” (or as it is more properly described, nationalism) will not only be socially acceptable, it will be legally mandated. Merkel and her merry band of multiculturalists are on their way out, and once the nationalists gain power everywhere from Greece to Germany, from Serbia to Sweden, the tides will reverse in a manner that will surprise nearly everyone who knows nothing of history and its cycles.

Note this growing movement in Germany, which has already surpassed the peak popularity of the Tea Party: One German in eight would join an anti-Muslim march if a rapidly-growing
protest movement organized one in their home towns, according to an
opinion poll published on Thursday.

Immigration in small numbers by those who fully integrate in every way, including language and religion, is beneficial to a nation. But that is very different than mass migration, which is not merely detrimental to a nation, it is materially worse than war. And multi-ethnic societies always collapse, usually in violence.

Gun control by any other name

Would still stink of totalitarianism. Don’t fall for the rebranding of gun control as “gun safety”:

The gun control movement, blocked in Congress and facing mounting losses in federal elections, is tweaking its name, refining its goals and using the same-sex marriage movement as a model to take the fight to voters on the state level.

After a victory in November on a Washington State ballot measure that will require broader background checks on gun buyers, groups that promote gun regulations have turned away from Washington and the political races that have been largely futile. Instead, they are turning their attention — and their growing wallets — to other states that allow ballot measures.

An initiative seeking stricter background checks for certain purchasers has already qualified for the 2016 ballot in Nevada, where such a law was passed last year by the Legislature then vetoed by the governor. Advocates of gun safety — the term many now use instead of “gun control” — are seeking lines on ballots in Arizona, Maine and Oregon as well.

It’s always pure deceitful rhetoric with the fucking rabbits. Always. The fact that they’ve been roundly defeated for two decades just means that they’ll rebrand, lie, and try again.

And observe that giving their inch only encourages them to immediately go after the mile.

In Washington, those who pushed the ballot measure through say they will begin a campaign to get the State Legislature to pass measures to keep guns from those with mental illnesses, children and people with a record of domestic violence.

Never give them an inch. Never compromise. Never moderate. And always punch back twice as hard.

The Orwellian imperative

I was thinking about why the SJWs make such a mission of celebrating sexual aberration as normal and elevate the acceptance of those who are deluded about their sexual identity as secular saints as a moral imperative.

In addition to the way in which it reveals the intrinsic illogic of the SJW Left – on Alpha Game, I observed that the logical Left’s position would be that it was a tragedy Joshua had to kill himself rather than permitting someone to legally kill him – it occurs to me that their linguistic demands are another example of their Orwellian imperative.

By weakening the independence and strength of individuals’ minds and forcing them to live in a constant state of propaganda-induced fear, the Party is able to force its subjects to accept anything it decrees, even if it is entirely illogical—for instance, the Ministry of Peace is in charge of waging war, the Ministry of Love is in charge of political torture, and the Ministry of Truth is in charge of doctoring history books to reflect the Party’s ideology.

That the national slogan of Oceania is equally contradictory is an important testament to the power of the Party’s mass campaign of psychological control. In theory, the Party is able to maintain that “War Is Peace” because having a common enemy keeps the people of Oceania united. “Freedom Is Slavery” because, according to the Party, the man who is independent is doomed to fail. By the same token, “Slavery Is Freedom,” because the man subjected to the collective will is free from danger and want. “Ignorance Is Strength” because the inability of the people to recognize these contradictions cements the power of the authoritarian regime.

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy.

In other words, if you are willing to call a HE a SHE, if you are willing to address Joshua as Leelah, you are willing to pretend that XY is XX or XX is XY, you are signaling your intellectual slavishness and that you will be willing to declare that WAR is PEACE, FREEDOM is SLAVERY, and 2+2=5 upon demand.

Of course, to paraphrase one AG reader’s observation, if Joshua Alcorn had really been a woman, he would have taken 30 Advil in a failed suicide attempt.

An interview with John C. Wright

A Castalia House blogger interviews the leading Castalia House author at Castalia House:

Q: Your conversion story from atheism to Christianity is remarkable.  Some critics have been surprised to discover which of your books were written as a Christian, and which were written as an atheist.  You have said that in each case you simply followed the internal logic of the story to its conclusion.  How much has your faith influenced your fiction, if at all?

A: This is a very difficult question, because my firm resolution when first I converted was to simply tell stories to entertain.

I am often annoyed by stories that preach, even when they preach a sermon with which I wholly agree, such as Philip Pullman’s THE GOLDEN COMPASS. I was an atheist when I read it, a full-throat anti-Christian zealous in my love of godlessness, and even I could not stand the obtrusive excrescence of the preaching in that miserable book.

Now that I am in the other camp of the endless war between light and darkness, I confess I am still nonplussed and unamused by preaching disguised as entertainment, whether it supports my side or not. The idea of ‘Christian entertainment’ is a sound one, as long as it is entertaining as well as being Christian. There is an odor of self satisfied smugness and piety which is as repellant as the musk of a skunk clinging to much Christian entries into the literary world, which one never finds in older works, such as Milton or Dante, and never in the works of masters even in so humble as genre as science fiction. I challenge anyone to find anything nakedly and blandly pious or preachy in the work of J.R.R. Tolkien, R.A. Lafferty, Gene Wolfe or Tim Powers, but there is clearly a spiritual dimension to all their works.

So I vowed a great vow never to let my personal feelings creep into my books, but merely to tell a tale for the sake of the tale, keeping faith with my readers. I am not their teacher, nor their preacher, nor their father confessor, and I have no duty to instruct them, and no qualifications to do so, no more than the jester in a King’s court has the authority to criticize the laws and policies of the King. My customers are my kings, and my job is to do pratfalls and take pies to the face to amuse them.

In the space of a single hour my great vow was overthrown when a reader, practically in tears, so deeply and thoughtfully praised the vision of spiritual reality presented in one of my short stories, the wholesomeness of the moral atmosphere portrayed there, that the reader likened it to a man trapped on some alien world of chlorine gas and sulfurous clouds being allowed to step on the fair, green fields of Earth for a single breath of wholesome, springtime air.

The reader was talking about my Christian faith, and the strength and firmness and clarity it lent to my writing. If I can wax lyrical about Ricardo’s Theory of Comparative Advantage, as I did in THE GOLDEN AGE, then surely I can wax lyrical about truth, virtue, and beauty.

The king is sad, and the jester needs to bring him comfort, for I know tales of a country where these sad things do not reign, but a king kindlier and mightier than any mortal king. As a jester, I owe it to my kings here on Earth and the King of Kings in heaven not to hide or waste my talents.

You’ll definitely want to read the whole thing. And afterwards, if you happen to find yourself still failing to be in possession of excellent books by the interviewee such as THE GOLDEN AGE, AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND, ONE BRIGHT STAR TO GUIDE THEM, and THE BOOK OF FEASTS & SEASONS, I find it impossible to imagine that you will not want to swiftly rectify the situation.

It’s an excellent interview with a fascinating author. Scooter did an excellent job of formulating much deeper questions than one generally sees in the SF genre, in addition to demonstrating that he was actually very familiar with the author’s material.

Of rabbit fear and hate

Interesting though it is, I’m not entirely convinced by this particular aspect of AC’s theory myself:

In one post though, [John C. Wright] pointed out that he felt the work here was incomplete, because it didn’t deal with the spiritual. He is correct, of course. If you meet pure evil, face to face, you will realize that there is clearly something much deeper than a mere mechanism, which happens to produce evil as a byproduct of some other purpose. As one examines evil up close, the only answer which really makes sense is that the evil are soldiers, with a mission, serving some authority. They will sacrifice their own interests, destroy their own lives, and fall on their own swords, in a genuinely selfless pursuit of their evil purposes. They will even do evil when it doesn’t matter, and when there is no sense to it. Their evil mechanism is so self-sacrificial that it seems the type of thing which nature would eliminate over time. He is right about the spiritual lacking here, and I encourage others to not mistake its absence here for some endorsement of a non-spiritual world model.

One part of his response I take issue with however, is his assertion that the rabbits hate him because he exposes them to truth. A proper explanation of this touches on the spiritual, in part because a full understanding of the rabbit’s hate offers a window into the same hatred Satan holds for the good.

In short, the rabbits do not so much hate John, as they hold him in contempt. Hate is more of a visceral rejection of some moral or emotional aspect of something. Hate can be applied to anything – you can hate a beggar or hate a King. Contempt carries with it a subtle air of rejecting something due to inferiority or weakness. Hate is a raw emotion that you express without regard to your enemy’s status. Contempt is reserved, solely for the weak, whom you can afford to hold in contempt, and it is most often expressed by cowards who only attack their lessers, and who hold little in regard beyond their own immediate safety.

Rabbits have contempt for John because he is kind, rational, and compassionate, and they see that all as weakness. The rabbits dislike John because he is a man who challenges the falsehoods they need to quiet their amygdala. However it is only because his goodness renders him harmless, that this dislike manifests as contempt. The real source of the rabbit’s hatred of John is his tolerance of them – the very quality they claim so ardently to espouse and champion, but which they only use to infiltrate and corrupt any organization too tolerant to reject them.

The reason I’m not sure about this is that I find it very difficult to believe that I am not actually hated by the Pinkshirts. First, because I get a definite anger, fear, and hatred vibe from most of them, second, because I find it very difficult to believe that they sense any inferiority or weakness on my part.

I could be wrong, but I certainly don’t feel either of those things, particularly not with regards to the flabby, overweight, evolutionary dead-ends who have never seen the inside of a weight room nor tested themselves in any form of combat, and flee from the mere suggestion of seeing their intellectual skills tested by debate with me or other formidable figures of the not-rabbit Right.

Then again, the fact that I am patient and a counterpuncher by both training and inclination has caused people to misread me before, both online and in real life. My impression has tended to be that the rabbits hate me less because I disagree with them than because I remind them of the jocks they used to fear, envy, and hate back in junior high and high school. We are dealing with fairly serious cases of arrested development here, and back in the day, more than one girl told my friends and me that we reminded her of the bad guys in every 80’s movie ever, right down to the Porsches, Triumphs, and Jaguars. And in real life the athletes and arrogant rich boys with cars always get the girl, which tends to foster a certain lasting resentment among the would-be white-knighting gamma males of the world.

But regardless, there is one thing concerning which AC is indubitably right, and that is that their father is the Devil. They don’t merely hate the truth, they love lies, seemingly for their own sake. Every SJW I’ve met not only lies, but lies effortlessly, and without any shame whatsoever after being caught in a lie. And perhaps that is where the aspect of contempt that AC mentions comes in; like Nietzsche and the Nazis, the rabbits do not understand honor and they find those who are not willing to embrace every possible tactic and weapon to be weak and possessed of insufficient will-to-power compared to the progressive Ubermensch they consider themselves to be.

Of course, it’s a little difficult to put his hypothesis to the scientific test. I mean, what are we supposed to do, have Tom Kratman crucify John Scalzi on his lawn, then poll the rabbits to see if his popularity has risen among the science fiction left?

Comment champions

One of Blogger’s flaws is that its comment management tools are crude to the point of being nonexistent. So, as part of Operation Yama, our elite team of trollhunters has created a tool that permits the datamining of Blogger comments in order to accurately document the full extent of the cyberstalking that has taken place here. In addition to providing us with a complete list of his trespasses, the tool also helped us identify two of Yama’s identities that had previously gone undocumented.

Interestingly enough, it’s also allowed us to see who left the most comments here in 2014. The winner, with over 3,000, was Nate. The top seven are as follows:

  1. Nate
  2. Josh
  3. Markku
  4. Bob K. Mando
  5. Tom Kratman
  6. James Dixon
  7. Jack Amok

The updated cyberstalker list:

Yamamanama, Dan Picaro, Andthestarshine, Kasa the Wicked, Nikola,
Alauda, Arachnothera, Beardsley McTurbanhead, Chokley Carmichael,
Clamps, Comrade Questions, Daphis, Daphnis, Freddy Foreshadowing,
Luscinia, Luscinia Hafez, Starshine, Sunlight, Will, Will leFey, Yama,
Yama the Space Fish, Count Bullets-ula, Lilacanddatura, Phoenixwing667, Darkprophet667, Ciconia, inimbe karu ava, and @Pure, Impure.