The yellow art of pygmies

Sarah Hoyt explains both the short-term triumph of the SJW pygmies and their eventual return to insignificance, particularly in science fiction:

No elite that is as schizophrenic as they are can long stay in power. Their narrative being so anti-reality requires those seeking to join them to abase themselves to such a degree (like some gang members who have to commit a heinous murder to join) that the only the most craven will do so. These are also, for whatever reason, often not the most competent at whatever the field is.

They’re not often, like Chelsea Clinton, so guppy-stupid that even all the attempts to advance them and hand them “accomplishments” for existing fall flat (as did her career in TV.) But as generations go by and each generation picks the new luminaries based ONLY on loyalty to the party line, the quality of performance and competence keeps going down.

Take New Wave in our field. Its practitioners often held strange views of life, strange enough to repel the hoi polloi and those who bought the bulk of the books, but by and large, I challenge you to read them and not see the craftsmanship and the talent (with a few exceptions, of course.)

However those who came after them were a little less talented and trained. This was the period back in the nineties when I considered myself fortunate for finding writers who weren’t actively off-putting, and could only ever find one or two that I considered to rise above . And the current crop of establishment darlings, particularly the young ones (again with one or two exceptions) are cringingly bad or at the very best cringingly trite (which would be endurable without the encomiums to their Earth shattering originality.) Even the establishment can find no better reason to shower awards on them than the oft-repeated claims of vague discrimination and saying that women are overdue for recognition.

Like any elite that is incompetent at what its supposed to do, this means that they create a crisis that invites their replacement. In science fiction, where I’m concentrating because I know it better, (though arguably parallel processes are taking place in all other fields) they might have tottered on another generation or two, with each selling less, until the advances for first novels were zero and publication meant nothing except to the academics who need publication.

Fortunately Kindle intervened. Because indie publishing came into a vacuum and served underserved readers, it’s blooming against the wilting of traditional publishing.

The New Wave writers were intentionally pissing on their forebears, but in the process they were creating yellow art in the snow. Their work was, of course, ephemeral, insignificant, and devoid of any meaningful commentary on the human condition or long-term value, but the pictures were pretty enough until the snow melted, at least if you ignored how they’d been created.

Their descendants only saw that their forebears were urinating, and quite wrongly concluded, “hey, I can do that!” They promptly did the literary equivalent of unzipping, cutting loose, and shouting “look at me, I can haz pee!” Or in the case of McRapey, “look at me, I can haz blow job! Because ground forces!”

The diversity crowd is even more pathetic. They can’t even manage the literary equivalent of unzipping first, instead they just wet their pants then give each other awards for their incontinence, crowing: “I is womyn! I is black! I is queer! I make water too!” And, as John C. Wright notes, they actually take pride and pleasure in taking their golden autoshowers:

If you are looking at a landscape covered with a thin gruel the hue of oatmeal, gray, tasteless, neither cold nor hot, dripping over telegraph wires, leafless trees, dusty lanes empty of traffic, collapsed houses, and the corpse of a small dog, and seeing a group of deformed pygmies and midgets decreeing immense victories and accomplishments in the fields of civic engineering and architecture, you would assume them to be an enemy of whoever once lived in the now ruined landscape. You would not assume they lived in that landscape and wanted it gray. And your assumption would be wrong.

There are few things that I find more amusing than looking at the Amazon rankings for the award-winning SF novels of the recent past and comparing them to the winners from 30 years before. Guess which novel was published in 2013 and is the most-awarded novel in science fiction history, and which one was published nearly 50 years ago.

  1. Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
    #14,910 Paid in Kindle Store
  2. Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
    #1,757 Paid in Kindle Store

Book 1 is Ancillary Justice, “a story about pronouns and modern feminist piety, utterly unimaginative and bland”. Book 2 is Dune, “a story about messianic politics, ecology, expanded consciousness, genetic destiny and the role of man in the universe.”

And just because I am a cruelty artist:

  1. Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
    #16,680 Paid in Kindle Store
  2. Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
    #19,115 Paid in Kindle Store

One is the recently published sequel to the landmark, award-winning novel, that was described by one enthusiast as “the most important book Orbit has published in ages.” The other is the recently published Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War.

Mrs. Hoyt is absolutely correct about the pygmies’ poor long-term prospects. No one outside their weird little cult wants to bathe in their stinking urine.

Presidential prosecutorial discretion

Obama leads the way in developing a useful tool. Republicans, take note:

President Obama completely fumbles when George Stephanopolous asks him how he’d respond if a future president takes the same action on taxes that Obama has taken on immigration. Incredibly, Obama responds as if he’d never heard or thought of this argument before, stumbling blindly along immigration talking points without answering the actual question.

Stephanopolous asked: “How do you respond to the argument, a future president comes in and wants lower taxes. Doesn’t happen. Congress won’t do it; so he says ‘I’m not going to prosecute those who don’t pay capital gains tax.’”

“The truth of the matter is George,” said the President, haltingly, “The reason that we, have to do.. uhm prosecutorial discretion in immigration, is that we know, that we – are not even close to being able to deal with the folks who have been here a long time…” Obama then pivoted to immigration talking points, without addressing the original question.

“The vast majority of folks understand that they need to pay taxes, and when we conduct an audit, for example, we are selecting those folks who are most likely to be cheating,” said Obama. “We’re not going after millions and millions of people who everybody knows are here and were taking advantage of low wages as they’re mowing lawns or cleaning out bedpans, and looking the other way.”

“So you don’t think it’d be legitimate for a future president to make that argument?” Stephanopoulos said.

Obama: “With respect to taxes? Absolutely not.”

Now that the President of the United States of America has declared prosecutorial discretion in immigration to be an executive power, it is obvious that any future president will possess similar prosecutorial discretion in taxation. This is a weapon that any small government party should be able to wield with a considerable degree of effectiveness.

If it is genuinely a small government party…. The Republicans certainly can’t pretend they don’t have the power to starve the beast anymore, not once they reclaim the White House.

It’s always fascinating to see how SJWs have absolutely no ability to grasp logical consequences. Which tends to demonstrate the fundamental illogic of their thinking. It reminds me of the gay “marriage” proponents who genuinely couldn’t figure out how redefining the legal nature of marriage once would likely lead to future legal redefinitions of marriage.

The least surprising leak ever

It is being reported that a leak in the prosecutor’s office indicates there will be no indictment of the police officer responsible for shooting Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

From a source inside the Prosecutor’s Office – NO INDICTMENT in the Michael Brown case.

Frankly, I’m a little puzzled that anyone ever thought there might be one. I’m about as dubious of the American police as anyone, and I never thought it appeared to be an even questionable shooting.

Anyhow, if the announcement does come tonight, this is an open thread to discuss it and any related events.

Casualty in the Cabinet

Obama fires his Secretary of Defense:

Chuck Hagel has been fired as defense secretary. We were critical of his appointment, and opposed his confirmation by the Senate. But let’s be clear: Hagel has done what he was asked and what was expected of him at the Pentagon. To the degree he has deviated from the Obama White House line, he’s been more right than wrong (e.g., on the threat the Islamic State poses).

So why has he been fired? Because the Obama White House needs a scapegoat. President George W, Bush fired Don Rumsfeld in connection with a change in strategy (the surge) and to bring in someone of independent stature. That’s not the case today. President Obama continues to want a Pentagon with weak leadership and little independence. There’s therefore no reason to expect the next two years of Obama foreign and defense policy to be any better than the past two.

He’s fired an awful lot of generals too, come to think of it. I don’t know if there have any bigger purges among the brass since pre-WWII Stalin.

Unrest across Europe

Mass migration and third world invasion is being violently protested by Europeans everywhere from the south:

On the gritty, long-neglected outskirts of Rome there was continuing tension outside a centre for refugees, which was repeatedly attacked by local residents during the week. A group of 36 teenage migrants had to be evacuated from the centre in Tor Sapienza, a working-class suburb, on Thursday night after the authorities said the area was no longer safe for them.

Locals had hurled stones, flares and other missiles at the migrant centre, smashing windows, setting fire to dumpster rubbish bins and fighting running battles with riot police during several nights of violence. They demanded that the facility be closed down and claimed that the refugees from Africa and Asia were dirty, anti-social and violent.

To the north of the continent:

The Swedish police recently released a map of 55 areas where they publicly admit to having surrendered control to the criminal gangs. These areas have long had problems with mailmen, fire trucks and ambulances being attacked when trying to enter, which has led to them routinely requesting police escort. Now it’s the police being attacked outright.

These no-go zones are primarily so-called “exclusion areas” which is the politically correct term for the 186 ghettos that have sprung up around Sweden in the past two decades. These areas are predominantly populated by immigrants from muslim countries with low education and even lower employment rates. The exception being the enthusiastic entrepreneurs in the fields of drug dealing, protection rackets and robberies…. This development would have been inconceivable only 20 years ago, and one would think this official surrender by the police would have made big headlines. This is not the case; the most attention it seems to have received in mainstream media is an opinion piece in national paper Svenska Dagbladet.

It can be speculated that this is due to the fact that any reporting on this could be seen as “support” for nationalist party SD that wants to restrict the vast inflow to these ghettos, which is an absolute no-no amongst the journalists and could cost them their jobs.

It’s not going to be long before the Swedish Democrats are the ruling party in Sweden. And it’s not going to be long before the Swedish military is going to be entering those ghettos with tanks and machine guns. That’s why the current left-wing Swedish government is trying to increase immigration even up to the end, this is the equivalent of the pre-WWI governments setting their mobilization plans in motion. The anti-Western European Left wants to fight a civil war by proxy, but as Anders Breivik demonstrated, the European Right knows perfectly well who its real enemies are.

I suspect that the younger generation of Native Europeans is going to make the Nazi-era Germans look moderate by comparison. Europe belongs to them. And they know they are going to have to fight for it if they don’t want to go the way of the Native American.

PZ Myers sabotaged an investigation

It’s vastly amusing to see how the alleged sexual harasser/adulterer/rapist PZ Myers responds when he is treated the way he frequently treats others. And it is also worth noting that he has ignored five of the six examples cited that show him, by his own standards, to be a sexist. Not only has his story about being falsely accused of rape, among other things, changed multiple times, but it amounts to a public confession that, in the words of one commenter, he “deliberately sabotaged any chance of any investigation being conducted in line with official university policy.”

PZ Myers has responded to part of my recent post about what would happen if he judged others’ sexism as he judges himself. He responded in a comment on his blog, complete with his now familiar personal abuse (he calls me a fuckhead, an asshole and a demented fuckwit) and misrepresentations of what I have written (he mistakenly says that my report of his own words on his own blog were “straight from the slymepit”, and he mistakenly says that I claimed what he did was sexist).

In his response, PZ ignored five of the six examples that I gave of behaviour by him that other people might consider sexist if they used PZ’s own standards — telling a conference host to do her belly dance and to get off his stage as he has work to do, linking to pornography involving women and octopuses, writing about a dream in which he turned his students into mermaids, publicly joking about rape, and endorsing a pornographic book that includes rape fantasies.

Instead he has focused only on my report of his own story about a student threatening to make a false rape allegation against him. He has written several times about this since 2010, and I am assuming that everything that he has written about it is true. He has now made two new assertions about the incident.

Firstly, PZ now says that he went to the chair “to invite an open investigation”, not to prevent one. Previously he had written that he “had to work fast” because “it could get dragged out into an investigation that would easily destroy my career,” and also that the woman had not gone to the authorities because he had brought in witnesses “to make her effort futile.”

Secondly, PZ now describes the investigation and says that he followed proper procedure. Previously he had written that this involved only the student, and not PZ himself, being questioned for only ten minutes about the severity of her accusation. I compare this below with the University of Minnesota’s official procedures for dealing with incidents of sexual assault and sexual harassment.

The inconsistencies in the various accounts are telling, although not necessarily damning of anything but shameless hypocrisy. As I have repeatedly observed, PZ Myers is simply not very intelligent. You may recall how he did not know that not all human beings are equally Homo sapiens sapiens despite his PhD in biology, now he can’t even recognize when his own words are being directly quoted back to him. No wonder his readership has been consistently falling; he has nothing intelligent to say, he can’t take the heat of criticism, he has a confirmed inability to engage in discourse at the dialectical level, and he lined up behind the SJWs of Atheism+ against most of his fellow atheists.

It is, of course, not at all surprising to see PZ misrepresenting what someone else has written, although I no longer think it is safe to assume that he is doing so intentionally. These days, it is more logical to conclude that he’s simply not smart enough to correctly understand and summarize what someone else has written.

One former Pharyngulan has an interesting theory:

I remember how he’s described his father and grandfather and how
behaves very much the same. Different core values. But the behavior
is extremely similar to the behavior of those two role-models he has
castigated in the past. In any case, I washed my hands of him and his blog years ago. I’m
not interested in being part of a toxic ‘in-group’ that has abandoned
skepticism, rationality, manners and the ability to think for oneself.

One would think an evolutionary biologist, of all people, would recognize the limits of one’s willpower to surmount the limits of one’s genetics and upbringing. And finally, just to observer the Fowl Atheist’s shameless hypocrisy, consider the following statements:

“asshole Nugent is happily embracing slymepit lies and distortions to claim that what I did was sexist? Disgusting. He’s become a demented fuckwit.”
– PZ Myers

“Actually, I hate the word ‘moron’ used as an insult, thank you very much…. I don’t like the word “moron” and wish we would all use something else
non-ableist to express our disbelief at a person’s sheer wrongness.”
– PZ Myers

So, “demented fuckwit” is non-ableist?

VPFL Week 11

67 Mounds View Meerkats (6-5-0)
59 King (5-6-0)

71 Clerical Errs (2-9-0)
49 Greenfield Grizzlies (8-3-0)

64 Bane Cornshuckers (7-4-0)
60 Favre Dollar Footlongs (5-6-0)

54 RR Redbeards (7-4-0)
52 Boot Hill Bogs (2-8-1)

80 Texas Chili Eaters (6-4-1)
45 Gilbert Gamma Rays (6-5-0)

I’ve got 36 more points than any other team and I’m in 5th place. This is all too typical of my fantasy football seasons. Not a bad performance by the Vikes, respectable enough to avoid too much mocking from the Packers fans, anyhow.

In which Mr. Wright addresses a Gossip

And proceeds to flay him, slowly, in his inimitable style, before rolling him gently in finely ground sea salt.

A yahoo who does not give his name but calls himself Vunderguy is asking a Houyhnhnm named John C Wright what is my emotional reaction to a man who calls himself Vox Day but whose real name is Theodore Beale.

    “Speaking of flights and fancy, what’s your take on your publisher, Vox Day?”
Despite the bouncing gaiety of the question, I answered it soberly, saying this: I think he has too high an opinion of me and my work, frankly. This is based on private communications with him, where he grants me more praise than I think just. While it is right and proper, as a matter of professional courtesy, for an editor to flatter a writer he publishes, I am afraid in this case he overestimates my talent, albeit I am grateful for the flattery, because I am quite vain.

Vunderguy answers with this indirect comment:

    “While that insight is a bit humanizing of him, I meant in regards to his more… ‘fringe’ views.“

I was not aware that Mr. Beale needed ‘humanizing’ whatever that word means. As a Houyhnhnm, the process sounds painful and dangerous and much to be avoided.

Growing mildly impatient, in my unemotional way, I remarked: “Fringe views? Is this a guessing game where you act like a coy schoolgirl and do not say what you mean, while I act like a man and speak in complete sentences?” And I mentioned some of Mr Beale’s unusual views, for example on drug legalization and other libertarian issues, which are not mainstream.

After that, Mr. Guy (as I shall hereafter call the anonymous accuser) finally agreed to speak plainly and ask his question, or, rather, his accusation disguised as a question.

I say ‘his’ because in English, when the sex of the antecedent is unknown or undetermined, this is the proper pronoun. The delicate indirectness with which Mr. Guy asks his questions, however, is more typically seen in women, or was, back in the day when women practiced feminine delicacy.

Since it is an accusation and not a question, in a properly lawyerly fashion, let me answer point by point:

Mr. Wright also asked the Gossip why he was so strangely incurious about his other editors, including Messrs. George R.R. Martin, Gordon van Gelder, David Brin, Gardner Dozois, and Glenn Yeffeth. My question to those who would attack Castalia’s authors on the basis of their editor is this: Tor editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden is, unlike me, a self-admitted racist. Do you similarly inquire all of his authors their “take” on his hurtful and offensive statement: “I’m a racist. Or some kind of bad guy, at any rate. I’ll live. Worse things happen to the victims of actual racism.”

Like having their land stolen and being put on reservations, just to name one, for no particular reason at all.


I find it rather amusing that people think they know my “fringe views”. I mean, the stuff they think is fringe is merely what I’m willing to openly state and defend in public. That is hardly the outer limit of my thinking.

The paradox of international aid

A longtime NGO enthusiast belatedly discovers that international development programs are an invasive species that change the targeted societies in unexpected, and often negative ways, and reliably fail to achieve the results intended.

This is the paradox: When you improve something, you change it in ways you couldn’t have expected. You can find examples of this in every corner of development practice. A project in Kenya that gave kids free uniforms, textbooks, and classroom materials increased enrollment by 50 percent, swamping the teachers and reducing the quality of education for everyone. Communities in India cut off their own water supply so they could be classified as “slums” and be eligible for slum-upgrading funding. I’ve worked in places where as soon as a company sets up a health clinic or an education program, the local government disappears—why should they spend money on primary schools when a rich company is ready to take on the responsibility?

My favorite example of unintended consequences comes, weirdly enough, from the United States. In a speech to a criminology conference, Nancy G. Guerra, the director of the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Delaware, described a project where she held workshops with inner-city Latina teenagers, trying to prevent them from joining gangs. The program worked in that none of the girls committed any violence within six months of the workshops. But by the end of that time, they were all, each and every one, pregnant.

“That behavior was serving a need for them,” she says in her speech. “It made them feel powerful, it made them feel important, it gave them a sense of identity. … When that ended, [they] needed another kind of meaning in their lives.”

The fancy academic term for this is “complex adaptive systems.” We all understand that every ecosystem, each forest floor or coral reef, is the result of millions of interactions between its constituent parts, a balance of all the aggregated adaptations of plants and animals to their climate and each other. Adding a non-native species, or removing one that has always been there, changes these relationships in ways that are too intertwined and complicated to predict.

But it should be kept in mind that this dynamic works both ways. Mass migrants are also an invasive species, and they change the “ecosystem” they are invading every bit as much, and as “unexpectedly”, as the development programs do.

I need to see if I am still a member

Before I resign from IGDA:

In a sign of how frenzied, panicky and intolerant the games industry establishment has become over the legitimate concerns of ordinary gamers, the International Game Developers’ Association branded some 10,425 Twitter accounts, including those of journalists, as harassment “offenders” in a humiliatingly ill-conceived attempt to provide a “blocking tool” to its members.

The blocking tool, which has been widely mocked online for its lack of sophistication and “blanket ban” approach, was assembled by Randi Harper, a persistent online agitator. The tool prevents users from seeing not only the tweets of users Harper has decided are implicated in harassment, but also many accounts who simply follow those users, by blocking a list of thousands of users with the use of an automated “bot.”

So indiscriminately has the block list been compiled that the IGDA’s own staff appear on it. Roberto Rosario, chair of the IGDA in Puerto Rico, is named on the list. In an acutely embarrassing moment for the Association, Rosario, who is not a GamerGate supporter, publicly threatened to resign unless his name was removed or the bot was disavowed.

It turns out that I, too, am on the block list. I was asked to join IGDA by its then-president at a big European games conference some years ago, which I subsequently did. I’m pretty sure that he’s not the president now, because he didn’t strike me as a complete idiot. I know I’m a member of  a European GDA, but it’s a different organization than IGDA, so I don’t know what my current membership status is with them. Expired, I assume, but I’ll have to check on Monday.