This is what diversity looks like

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UPDATE: More blessings of diversity in Paris today:

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

The costs of scientistry

A scientist laments the loss of scientific credibility:

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

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

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

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

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

Such a viewpoint is dangerous from our point of view.

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

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

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

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

The three laws of behavioral genetics

JayMan explicates them:

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

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

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

The decline of science fiction

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

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

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

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

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

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.