From r to K: the end of post-scarcity

Anonymous Conservative’s take on Donglerape and #GamerGate:

I just kept seeing this scenario, as I read through Vox’s post here. First, this woman’s amygdala is so accustomed to total ease and control that a guy makes a dongle joke to a friend at a computer conference, and she immediately takes offense. That is an amygdala unaccustomed to harshness. Then she asserts to the interviewer that she tweeted her horror, out of a fear that the guy sitting five rows away was going to rape her, in the middle of a conference of 2000 computer geeks. The interviewer asks why she didn’t think any of the 2,000 other conference goers would stop the rape and her response is that they are all white males, as if they might rape her too, for good measure, all because she is a black Jewish female. The narcissism, self absorption, and expectation that everyone give her whatever she wants has to be read to be believed.

You can tell, the way she says “I’m a black Jewish female,” over and over, that she has used that phrase a lot. In the context she applies it, it isn’t a logical, thought-out response. It is a conditioned response thrown out in response to any threat or challenge – the type of response which can only be conditioned through frequent repetition when resources are free, and everyone avoids the fight….

What these incidents should show you, is that we are beginning the transition from r to K, and the rules are changing. Gamergate is a great accomplishment, but it required motivation, and motivation required irritation. If this were the dot-com boom, I suspect those gamers would have been too busy making money and partaking of other sources of pleasure, to unite together and mount a fight. Games would have deteriorated as everything does under r-selection, but the gamers would have found bliss elsewhere, and left gaming until it got better again.

Yet now, all it takes is a single web post somewhere to set off an army of angry warriors, obsessed with justice and right. Feminists like this bimbo used to dominate only because people avoided the fight, but now there are so many people itching to fight that they are looking for fights in other people’s battles. This is a big change, and we are not all that resource-restricted yet. Wait until the economic system collapses. The rage will be epic, and rabbits will run.

The rabbits are noticing this rule change now, even though it is so minor, and it is tripping their conflict-avoidance circuitry. Scalzi, the pied rabbit piper, sees his blog traffic plummeting as his followers retreat into the shadows, even as Vox’s traffic breaks new records. Blue SF is beginning to realize the gains in its economic muscle as it advances on pink SF. In American politics, Democrats are trying to figure out what to stand for to avoid getting destroyed in the future. And legions of little tyrants like the bimbo in Vox’s post are noticing that their social attacks are generating very real counter-attacks, making them begin to retreat from their side as well.

Being rooted as it is in an outmoded theory of evolution, r/K theory may sound more than a little alien, if not lunatic. But it is a remarkably useful explanatory, and at times, even predictive model. I highly recommend AC’s book, so much so that we recently began selling it in the Castalia House store.

Read the whole linked post, as he explains why an abundance of resources favors the rabbits and creates a false impression of reality with them. They are fearless and eager to engage in the posturing and verbal interplay that for them, passes for conflict, failing to realize that the only reason they aren’t being ripped limb-from-limb and devoured is because it’s less trouble for the wolves to simply go somewhere else where they can live in peace.

#GamerGate erupted because there is nowhere else to go. The demon-rabbits have invaded the Last Redoubt; Anita Sarkeesian calls herself a “gamer” and the likes of Zoe Quinn and John Scalzi even fancy themselves “game developers” now. They simply won’t leave us alone, and so we have no choice but to fight back simply to be able to do what we have always done, which is to make the games we want to make and play the games we want to play. As AC noted, the same thing is true of science fiction. After being being offered book contracts that were subsequently pulled or violated on purely political grounds by three different publishers, it became apparent that I would be better off simply starting my own publishing company. Now Castalia House is growing as fast as we are able to edit the books and authors are contacting us specifically because they know we will publish things that the r-selected mainstream publishers will not. And even after a record year with over 15 million pageviews, site traffic here is up an average of 35 percent in 2015; thanks to you, we’re presently on target to exceed 21 million this year.

The transition from r to K is in the process of taking place on a much larger scale as well. The white flight of the last fifty years, first to the suburbs, then to the exurbs, is no longer possible. Everywhere from South Africa to Vancouver, formerly white communities are being invaded by rainbow hordes of orcs who would rather live among white people than among their own kind. Once the land resources are scarce and there is no longer a choice between retreat and conflict, then conflict will inevitably begin. Whites aren’t unable to engage in the sort of ethnic cleansing that Hispanics are already engaging in across the Southwestern United States (look at the demographic history of Compton sometime; it is borderline mind-blowing to anyone who associates it with NWA), but tend to be reluctant to engage in it because they are too efficient and lethal at it. These furious attempts to enforce diversity by thought police are actually a harbinger of the ongoing transition.

The rabbits can sense the wolves beginning to turn on them, and quite rightly, they are afraid. Don’t forget who they truly are and what they have done.


Tarnished, but still knighting

White Knights never learn. Well, they might learn just enough to stop sticking their genitals in the fire, but they never seem to grasp the basic principle that the end result of fire is to burn things into ashes:

I started advocating for women in engineering in 2006 when my dean at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering, Kristina Johnson, made me aware of the declining numbers of women entering the field. As a former tech entrepreneur, I found the situation alarming. I had spent the last few years researching how education, immigration, and entrepreneurship drive innovation. The fact that half of our population was being left out of the fields most important to our future seemed deeply wrong to me….

Over the past few weeks, I have been accused of financial impropriety, arrogance and insensitivity, and sexual harassment. You expect these types of insults from bloggers, but I was quite surprised to find them coming from a National Public Radio affiliate, WNYC.

On February 6, WNYC published a podcast titled “Quiet, Wadhwa.” It criticized me for “taking the oxygen out of the room” by “speaking for women.” There were more than 11 minutes of inaccuracies and innuendo made against me without even an attempt at fact-checking — despite the serious nature of the charges. The vast majority of allegations would not have passed a simple Google search. Yet I was not even asked to comment. WNYC completely disregarded the fact that I routinely share my media platform with women and regularly refer journalists to women in tech….

I may have made the mistake of fighting the battles of women in technology for too long. And I may have taken the accusations too personally. Today there is a chorus of very powerful, intelligent, voices who are speaking from personal experience. The women who I have written about, who have lived the discrimination and abuse, as well as others, deserve the air time. So I am going to bow out of this debate.

I am still going to be an advocate for disenfranchised minorities; I will continue to mentor women and men entrepreneurs; I will surely coach my friends who are in positions of power in corporations; and I will echo the words of great women.

You would think that these jokers would learn that once they let the entryists into the room, their services are no longer required and they are expected to leave the newly surrendered ground to its new owners.


Sad Puppies Short Fiction Bomb

The Mountain That Writes turns around and comes back for a second pass:

This Book Bomb is a little different. Because the ones I’m doing right now are to get more people exposed to the works we nominated for the infamous Sad Puppies slate, we’re bombing a bunch of works at the same time. I don’t like putting this many links, but time is of the essence, and next week I’ll post about the Campbell nominees and Best Related Works.

We did three novellas last week and it was a huge success. They’re still selling well a week later. Overall we sold a couple thousands novellas, which in novellas is freaking huge.

But shorter fiction is tough, because it isn’t always available for sale by itself, but is usually bundled as part of an anthology, or in a magazine which often isn’t available on Amazon.

As you can see from the list below, luckily many of these are available on Amazon, and some are available for FREE:

BEST SHORT STORY

Both Rabid Puppies recommendations in the Short Story category can be read for free at the following links. I can attest that Sci Phi Journal #2 is quite good and I think the Big Book of Monsters looks particularly interesting.

I’ve also got a short story you can read which is not part of either slate, but I promised to make it available for free reading, so here it is:

BEST NOVELETTE


“The Journeyman: In the Stone House”by Michael F. Flynn, Analog, June 2014
“Championship B’tok” by Edward M. Lerner, Analog, Sept 2014
“Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Alluvium” by Gray Rinehart, Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show

And the Rabid Puppies recommendation in the Novelette category:

“Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus” by John C. Wright, The Book of Feasts & Seasons

The Book of Feasts & Seasons is presently ranked #15,271 54,462 on Amazon and has a 4.9 rating on 18 16 reviews. It’s genuinely that good, so I’d highly recommend reading it if you haven’t yet, and posting a review if you have.


Speak until they silence themselves

Please don’t hit them, the Washington Post begs. After all, they are just little girls.

Jessica Valenti is one of the most successful and visible feminists of her generation. As a columnist for the Guardian, her face regularly appears on the site’s front page. She has written five books, one of which was adapted into a documentary, since founding the blog Feministing.com. She gives speeches all over the country. And she tells me that, because of the nonstop harassment that feminist writers face online, if she could start over, she might prefer to be completely anonymous. “I don’t know that I would do it under my real name,” she says she tells young women who are interested in writing about feminism. It’s “not just the physical safety concerns but the emotional ramifications” of constant, round-the-clock abuse….

Once a woman is singled out by a men’s rights group such as A Voice for Men, the misogynist Reddit forum The Red Pill or even just a right-wing Twitter account like Twitchy, she is deluged with hatred. The barrage, in addition to scaring its target, serves as a warning to onlookers. Jill Filipovic, a senior political writer covering feminist issues at Cosmopolitan, says she recently tried to persuade a friend to run for office. “There’s several reasons why I wouldn’t want to do it, but one of them is that I follow you on Twitter, and I see what people say to you. I could never deal with that,” the friend told her.

Many people can’t. Last year, abortion rights activist Lauren Rankin pulled back from writing online and, for the most part, from Twitter because the threats and insults were becoming so wearying. She continues to serve on the board of the reproductive rights nonprofit A Is For and faces off against antiabortion protesters as a volunteer clinic escort, but she no longer engages publicly. “I don’t like the idea that it seems like I was scared or intimidated away from the Internet,” she says. “But I think I’ve recentered why I do what I do, in ways that I can maintain my mental sanity. Unfortunately, that really doesn’t involve the Internet as much.”

Filipovic, the former editor of the blog Feministe, says that, although her skin has thickened over the years, the daily need to brace against the online onslaught has changed her. “I doubt myself a lot more. You read enough times that you’re a terrible person and an idiot, and it’s very hard not to start believing that maybe they see something that you don’t.” She also finds it harder to let her guard down. “I have not figured out how to spend all day steeling against criticism — not just criticism, but really awful things people say to you and about you — and then go home and 30 minutes later you’re an emotionally available, normal person.”

Meanwhile, the creator of Feministe, Lauren Bruce, no longer has an online presence at all. “I had to completely cut that part off in order to live the rest of my life,” she says. “In order to work, have a nice family and feel like I was emotionally whole, I could not have one foot planted in a toxic stew.”

#GamerGate has them on the run. They can’t take the heat. What they call “harassment” and “abuse” is seldom anything more than free speech answering free speech. They have a right to speak their piece, and we have a right to speak right back. We have a right to speak back with all of the contempt, disdain, and loathing that we feel for their insane and societally suicidal ideas.

Open up your hate and let it pour over them. Don’t think for even one nanosecond that they don’t deserve it every bit of the criticism, of the contempt, of the disdainful dismissal that overwhelms them. They are trying to destroy Western civilization. They are trying to destroy marriage and civil society. They are advocates of child murder. They are advocates of a philosophy that makes National Socialism look merciful and Communism practical and Fascism coherent by comparison. Do not hold back. Speak back twice as hard. Speak back until they fall silent.

Women are particularly susceptible to shame. So shame them relentlessly. Shame those who agree with them. Mock their white knights who rush in to save them. Above all, dignify their views and voices with all the respect you would show to a particularly noxious fart in an elevator.


#GamerGate claims another SJW scalp

Flawless wetwork by @br00ke27, with a spotting assist from sleepax. One shot, one kill:

Kim Crawley posted an article on InfoSec that stated Baphomet was closed and tons of other mis-info. She didn’t even do the basic research, legitimately didn’t even try to back up her claims. She didn’t even attempt to visit 8chan what-so-ever. All of her sources were anti-gamergate clickbait, very unusual for InfoSec.

Then, people like me and @br00ke27 brought the attention to InfoSec (seriously she deserves credit she was the first to e-mail them and engage them), then we made fun of her for posting an article that had literally zero research. … Not because she’s a woman (which I’m sure she’ll say). Not because she attacked gamergate, or 8chan (which I’m sure she’ll say). Not because I’m a misogynist death threat murder harasser (today ;], at least) but because her work was absolutely atrocious.

InfoSec starts getting more complaints regarding the awful article and writes to her about it. They even mention that her articles have been stupidly controversial before (paraphrasing). She then posts their confidential e-mail to Ghazi.

The post claims InfosSc fired her DUE to us, (even though the letter says she’s done this shit before) and now she’s contacting kotaku etc. saying we harassed her out of the industry.

They do say women make good snipers. It occurs to me that a true conspiracy theorist would surmise that Patreon is behind #GamerGate, considering how many unemployed SJWs go running there shrieking harassment. The chief exploitable weakness of SJWs is that they always lie. Always. So, destroying their credibility is a simple matter of doing the research, finding the lies, and then exposing them to their employers, associates, and audience.

They are the cultural enemy. They have openly declared no quarter and asserted that there is no place in their society for those who don’t submit to their vision of social justice. Rendering them unemployed, from within and without, and otherwise removing their microphones is a purely self-defensive, and above all, necessary tactic. If you have a known SJW in your organization, purging them should be a priority, because enforcing their vision of social justice is mission one for them and they do not hesitate to turn on anyone, even former allies, the moment they feel it serves their sacred cause.

SJWs don’t hesitate to make use their employers and their superiors either. Consider, for example, the email from her editor Miss Crawley publicly posted on Ghazi before she was fired:

Kim,

Regardless of any possible merit in the Gamergate article, it has caused more than a little grief for me and for InfoSec. At best, it was a bad fit for us. At worst – which I am now in my third day of being called on the carpet for – it has tarred our name and damaged the brand. Whether or not the haters coming after you and us have any legitimacy is irrelevant. This is exactly the kind of bad press that can cost us business. In the end, that’s the sole criteria that counts for anything around here.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been taken to task for content appearing under your byline but it is the last. They wanted to can you outright and pull all your articles. For the time being, they are being kept up, but that can change at any moment.

To the extent that you can call off anyone out there making noise on your behalf, please do so.

She actually threw the very editor who was trying to save her job under the bus in order to score some “poor me victim” points with anti-GG. Now imagine what your SJWs are capable of doing to you. These people are lunatics. You cannot win them over with kindness and reason. You can only expose them for what they are and thereby ensure that they are driven back under the rocks from which they crawled.

I’m not sure which of these two tweets from an anti-GGer was more amusing:

Dr. Envoy ‏@drenvoy
#gamergate only has 15 posts an hour its dying

Dr. Envoy ‏@drenvoy
#gamergate rejoices getting people to lose thier jobs OMG

It’s fascinating to see how the SJWs are upset by seeing their own tactics used against them. No doubt the Wehrmacht in Russia thought it was tremendously unfair when the Red Army started cutting off their lines of retreat and encircling the 16th Army to create the Demyansk Pocket.


Deactivate Olbermann!

Hitler will be disappointed.

A day after he engaged in multiple Twitter arguments and called Penn State students “pitiful,” ESPN suspended Keith Olbermann for a week. The global sports network released a statement Tuesday announcing the news, saying Olbermann’s actions were “completely inappropriate and [do] not reflect the views of ESPN.”

So much for saving the news media from the Brian Williams crisis.


You had ONE job!

Far too many women of my generation were let down by their mothers failing to teach them the one basic skill they actually need in life:

My mother hadn’t felt the need to give me a recipe—she knew that I
had watched her, and before her my Nani, make the same pot of sauce
nearly weekly in my previous 17 years. So many times I smelled the meat,
browning in olive oil before the garlic and onions were added,
intensifying the distinctive aroma of Nani’s kitchen, which lingered
even years after her last pot had been simmered. Yet I didn’t know how
to cook.

But what did my mom expect? Both she and my late Nani had always
praised and encouraged my good grades and scholarly instincts, and
neither had encouraged me to do anything in the kitchen other that set
the table. Nani never taught me to forage for burdock or can tomatoes
because “you won’t need to,” she said. Cooking was something else the
modern young woman wouldn’t have cause to do either, it seemed. So, I
focused on my career.

What had stuck with me from those hours in the kitchen watching my
mom and Nani cook weekly Sunday dinners or nightly from-scratch meals
was not the recipes for beef bracciole or manicotti, but the
conversation. “Go to college,” I was always told, “have your own money
and don’t rely on a man.”

Let’s not make the same mistake with our daughters and sentence them to a lifetime of bad food, obesity, and culinary frigidity. There is nothing more important than for a young girl to be taught how to be a good wife and mother. Nothing. Because nothing less than civilization and the continued existence of the human race depends upon it.

Don’t raise your daughters to be dead ends.


Therein lies the problem

Zerohedge reports on a world engulfed in debt:

If anyone has stopped to ask just why global central banks are in such a rush to create inflation (but only controlled inflation, not runaway hyperinflation… of course when they fail with the “controlled” part the money paradrop is only a matter of time) over the past 5 years, and have printed over $12 trillion in credit-money since Lehman, the bulk of which has ended up in the stock market, and which for the first time ever are about to monetize all global sovereign debt issuance in 2015, the answer is simple, and can be seen on the chart below.

It also shows the biggest problem facing the world today, namely that at least 9 countries have debt/GDP above 300%, and that a whopping 39% countries have debt-to-GDP of over 100%!

The problem with this can be seen in one of the famous Reinhart-Rogoff papers, Growth in a Time of Debt:

Our main findings are: First, the relationship between government debt and real GDP growth is weak for debt/GDP ratios below a threshold of 90 percent of GDP. Above 90 percent, median growth rates fall by one percent, and average growth falls considerably more. 

And before you cite the well-known Excel error, that changes nothing substantive. The core cause of the global depression is becoming increasingly obvious to everyone. The root of the problem, as I have been pointing out since about 2002, is that in a credit money system, the central banks cannot print borrowers.

This means their obvious next step will be the usual attempt to move the problem up a level by centralizing internationally and pushing for a global currency that will automatically devalue the currencies being replaced by a factor that will reduce debt/GDP below 90 percent.


The SJW reader challenge

Larry Correia fisks Teapot Bradford’s call to not read straight white male authors while Superversive SF takes her SJW reader challenge:

In the spirit of taking this challenge seriously, I will be making an effort to avoid such writers and see what it does for my outlook. So I guess I should make a list of authors that are “acceptable” to read because they aren’t “cis white het males” to make it easier for anybody that wants to join me.

So lets see what is in?

    Sarah A. Hoyt – POC Womyn
    Larry Correia – POC
    L. Jagi Lamplighter – Womyn
    Kate Paulk – Womyn
    Amanda Green – Womyn
    Vox Day – POC

and out

    John Scalzi – Cis Het White Male
    Jim Hines – Cis Het White Male

It really is time that Native American literature finally found its place in fantasy and science fiction after all. It is, frankly, shocking how white women like Catherynne M. Valente are shamelessly appropriating our culture and our legends. I can only applaud Ms. Bradford for encouraging her readers and followers to read my work and I hope they will enjoy it.

Meanwhile, another SJW at File 770 warns about the consequences of the cultural war in SF in light of the attempt to ban Adam Baldwin from a convention in Australia:

This isn’t going to end any better than the rest of these discussions.

Let me ask a question based on two possible thought experiments. Those who want to can ban Adam Baldwin if they want. The right get to ban a person of their choice from an event of their choice. Are we all happier and better people?

Alternatively we allow this sort if banning but to stop people using it capriciously we say you have to pay some amount of money which is not easy to raise in order to do it. The ‘other side’ get to donate it to a non political charity of their choice. In this case I’d guess it would be between a quarter and a half million dollars. Is this issue really that important to people if it comes down to real effort, not just arguing online?

Think up your own method if you like but remember that your opponents get to use the same rulebook.

We can’t go on doing this. It has just about destroyed the gaming community and it could do the same to the SF community. The politics don’t matter. The same situation will crop up sooner or later with different politics. The problem is that neither side respects the process. Whoever amasses the most angry tweets wins but nobody believes that is either just or fair. Nobody has their thinking chaged, simply reinforced. The losers just retreat to reorganise and swear to be more vicious next time.

And now, the punchline, from the same SJW, Martin Easterbrook:

At Loncon last year we had many fans from the Ukraine and Russia, two countries who are effectively at war and who go out of the way to humiliate each others POWs. There were no problems with any of them. They stuck to the fan tradition that, as far as we can, we “leave our guns at the door”. This has become unfashionable lately but for some of us it remains something that is part of the core of being a fan.

Some decisions are difficult, for instance I’ve personally suggested to a convention that they exclude Vox Day because I believe he has personally insulted another author to the point where she would be justified in punching him on the nose if she met him. I would not want to attend a convention that had Orson Scott Card as a goh but neither would I want to go to a convention that excluded him completely.

As I pointed out, by Mr. Easterbrook’s standard, John Scalzi is due enough punches in the nose that he’s effectively given me permission to beat the little creep to death. I wonder, how many insults does Larry Correia have to take before he is justified in playing Mountain to Scalzi’s Viper?


US defeat in Ukraine

Waging war by proxy runs the risk of being defeated by proxy too:

In less than a year, the United States has toppled the democratically-elected government of Ukraine, installed a Washington-backed stooge in Kiev, launched a bloody and costly war of annihilation on Russian-speaking people in the East, thrust the economy into a downward death spiral, and reduced the nation to an anarchic, failed state destined to endure a vicious fratricidal civil war for as far as the eye can see.

Last week, Washington suffered its greatest military defeat in more than a decade when Ukraine’s US-backed army was soundly routed in the major railway hub of Debaltsevo. Roughly, 8,000 Ukrainian regulars along with untold numbers of tanks and armored units were surrounded in what came to be known as “the cauldron.” The army of the Donetsk Peoples Republic led by DPR commander Alexander Zakharchenko, encircled the invading army and gradually tightened the cordon, eventually killing or capturing most of the troops within the pocket. The Ukrainian Armed Forces suffered major casualties ranging between 3,000 to 3,500 while a vast amount of lethal military hardware was left behind.

According to Zakharchenko, “The amount of equipment Ukrainian units have lost here is beyond description.”

Additionally, the US-backed proxy-army saw many of its crack troops and top-notch units destroyed in the fighting leaving Kiev unable to continue the war without assistance from allies in the US or Europe. The full impact of the defeat will not be known until angry troops returning from the front amass on the streets of the Capital and demand Petro Poroshenko’s resignation. The Ukrainian President is responsible for the massacre at Debaltsevo. He was fully aware that his army faced encirclement but ordered them to remain in order to satisfy powerful right-wing elements in his government. The disaster is even more terrible due to the fact that it was entirely avoidable and achieved no strategic purpose at all. Extreme hubris frequently impacts outcomes on the battlefield. This was the case at Debaltsevo.

Most people outside of Eastern Europe aren’t paying much attention to this, but the fact of the matter is that Russia is militarily obliterating Ukraine and they are mostly doing so by the same sort of war-by-proxy in which the USA is engaged. The DPR is a Russian proxy, but then, the Ukrainian army is a US proxy, and so far, the Russian proxies are winning.

That’s why you’re not seeing much about it on the US news.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there is soon another coup and the US puppet Poroshenko is thrown out of power, whether it is by Right Sector or someone else. The Russians have won on the moral level and now their Novorossiyan proxies are winning on the material level as well. Poroshenko’s failure to withdraw his troops from the Debaltsevo Pocket was a strategic mistake of the sort one usually only sees labeled Fuhrerbefehl; to the left is an image of what the Pocket looked like back on 25 January when 8,000 troops still had the chance to retreat from within that yellow peninsula in the middle.

From Reuters: The loss of Debaltseve is so huge only because Kiev turned it into a symbolic redoubt, said Gustav Gressel, a specialist on Eastern European defense policy and a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin. Poroshenko’s biggest mistake was not to withdraw earlier, according to Gressel. The battle for Debaltseve is reminiscent of the futile struggle for the Donetsk airport, which Ukrainian forces finally gave up in January after months of bitter fighting.