Mammoth hunting requires no math

Which appears to be a good thing, seeing as how David Futrelle can’t grasp the relevant rape statistics:

I thought I’d seen every variety of rape apologism known to humankind. But this is a new one for me: Fantasy author and garbage human Vox Day has decided that all claims of rape directed at white guys are suspect because … white guys don’t rape.

No, really. That’s his actual argument:

    White American men simply don’t rape these days. At this point, unless a woman claims it was committed by a black or Hispanic man she didn’t previously know, all claims of rape, especially by a college woman, have to be considered intrinsically suspect.

His, er, source for these claims? A post from the website Women For Men — founded by familiar names Suzanne Venker, Helen Smith and Christina Hoff Sommers — about a video of unknown provenance of a shouting match that involves a white woman accusing a presumably white man of rape. (There are no details on the alleged incident, and it’s not clear from watching the almost literally unbelievable video what exactly happened or if the video is even real.) Needless to say, even if the video is 100% real it doesn’t actually provide anything even remotely approaching evidence for Vox’s racist claims.

Which isn’t surprising given that they aren’t, you know, true. When it comes to rape, of course, whites and blacks are overwhelmingly — roughly 8 out of 10 times — victimized by members of their own race And in most cases, as is well-known, rapes are committed by people the victim knows, not the proverbial man hiding in the bushes.

Well, no, that’s not “my actual argument”. It’s always amusing to see how the anklebiters try to pretend rhetoric is dialectic and vice-versa, depending upon what suits their purpose at the moment. Futrelle’s posturing is nothing but pure rabbit rhetoric; statistical analysis is not apology. If he actually wants the dialectical form of the argument, it is this: all claims of rape directed at white guys are intrinsically suspect because white men in America are disproportionately disinclined to commit rape. If he wishes a dialectical debate on the merits of that argument, then let us entertain his critique, by all means.

But Futrelle has no genuine intention of contesting the dialectical level, he is merely countering rhetorically-charged dialectic with dialectic-flavored rhetoric. Nevertheless, let us take Mr. Futrelle’s pseudo-dialectic at face value. According to the FBI, there were 13,886 rape arrests in 2012. Of them, 9,027 (65%) arrestees were “white” men, and 4,512 (35%) were black men. Wow, that just completely disproves my point that white men don’t commit much rape, given that 65 percent is reasonably close to the white percentage of the population (72.4), right?

Not so fast. The FBI counts both white and Hispanic offenders as “white” for statistical purposes. But there are other ways to fill in the missing information, which is to say estimate how those 9,027 arrests are distributed between white men and Hispanic men.

While no comprehensive reports have been done, every smaller report I have read indicates that Hispanics commit rape and other sex offenses at a disproportionate rate; some even show that they do so in excess of the black rate. (It is a basic police heuristic that if it’s a financial crime, it’s a white; a violent crime, a black; a sex crime, a Hispanic.) But, in order to be conservative, we shall assume that the Hispanic proclivity to commit sex offenses is no greater than the known black rate. Since the rate of black arrests is 2.77 times the black percentage of the population, applying the same multiplier to the Hispanic percentage indicates that 45.6 percent or 4,113 of the “white” men arrested for rape were actually Hispanic.

This means that actual white men only represent 29.6 percent of rape arrests, which indicates that white men are 59 percent less likely to commit rape than the average individual and 85 percent less likely to commit rape than a black or Hispanic man. For those who think in ratios rather than percentages, this means that the risk of rape posed by the average black or Hispanic man is at least 6.76 times greater than that posed by the average white man.

Since a number of Mr. Futtrelle’s readers have foolishly assumed that I am defending white men out of self interest, I should point out that for good or for ill, none of these statistics apply to me. While there are no relevant crime statistics for multiracial individuals, it turns out there are for men who are “American Indian and Alaska Native in combination with one or more other races”. With a 0.59 arrest/population ratio, we are 1.43 times more likely to commit rape than white men.

So, while it is certainly correct to say that white men engage in an amount of rape these days, they commit such a relatively small percentage of them in comparison with their percentage of the population that if college women are reporting more rapes by white men than by black or Hispanic men, their reports must be regarded as statistically improbable, ideologically motivated, and intrinsically suspicious. But of course we all know that there are statistical outliers, given that John Scalzi is white and he has reliably informed us that he, for one, is a rapist.

As rhetoric or dialectic, the conclusion stands. Certain claims of rape are intrinsically suspect on the basis of their divergence from documented statistical norms.

Also, note in the comments this implied threat from the cyberstalker Yama. I am sure you will understand how it couldn’t help but cause me substantial emotional distress and placed me in fear of death and bodily injury.

Nequam | December 19, 2014 at 8:49 pm
Ugh. I’m starting to think of creepy indulgent revenge porn involving sharp blades and a garbage disposal (so there won’t be anything worth trying to sew back on)

yamamanama | December 19, 2014 at 8:53 pm
Is it wrong that I thought of Vox Day going through that ordeal and smiled?

Yes, Yama, it is wrong. And your public expression of that thought is also, in light of your 56 documented months of cyberstalking me, most likely unlawful.

A lesson for the non-celebrants

This is not how you respond to holiday well-wishers:

A passenger was tossed off a plane at La Guardia Airport on Tuesday after flipping out — because airline workers wished him a merry Christmas.

The man was waiting to board American Airlines Flight 1140 to Dallas when a cheerful gate agent began welcoming everyone with the Yuletide greeting while checking boarding passes. The grumpy passenger, who appeared to be traveling alone, barked at the woman, “You shouldn’t say that because not everyone celebrates Christmas.”

The agent replied, “Well, what should I say then?”

“Don’t say, ‘Merry Christmas!’ ” the man shouted before brushing past her.

Once on the plane, he was warmly greeted by a flight attendant who also wished him a “merry Christmas.” That was the last straw.

“Don’t say, ‘Merry Christmas!’ ” the man raged before lecturing the attendants and the pilot about their faux pas.

I have to admit, I not only don’t celebrate them, but I don’t even know what half the festivals represented are when people wish me “buona festa” over the course of the year. During certain summer months nary a week goes by that everyone isn’t off work for some Catholic feast or Communist-created celebration of the working class. And it has never once occurred to me to respond by explaining that I do not celebrate the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, Labor Day, or la Festa della Repubblica to anyone.

My usual response on such occasions is the same as that of my Jewish friend, who smiles and says “thank you, you too” whenever he is wished a Merry Christmas. If nothing else, it’s nice to see people who are in a good mood while out and about.

That’s the practical aspect. From philosophical perspective, it must be admitted that whether one celebrates a holiday or not, it indubitably and materially exists. One would assume that any genuinely rational atheist would understand that.

Merry Christmas

In the Year of Our Lord 2014, Christianity is under attack all over the globe. Tens of thousands of Christians have been murdered for their faith in the East and Middle East. In the West, what was once Christendom is under assault from a godless elite who fear and resent the threat that Christianity has always posed to secular authority. In the South, Christianity is growing, but it is as devoid of understanding as it is full of enthusiasm.

No ruler who is not himself a Christian will ever be entirely comfortable with subjects who do not view him as the highest and most legitimate authority. Most will be varying degrees of hostile, as we see across a broad spectrum from totalitarian dictators to democratically elected politicians. Augustus Caesar was the first, but was by no means the last, to insist that Christians accept his word as divine fiat, and future efforts in similar veins will be equally unsuccessful.

Predictions of Christianity’s eventual demise tend to strike me as little more than either fearful or wishful thinking; as the Church’s most serious enemies know, even the merest glow of an ember of faith is sufficient for the Lord God Almighty to turn it into a wildfire that scours the world. And one never knows when the winds of revival will again begin to blow.

A Time of Testing is upon us. Jesus said the world would hate us, as it hated him, but too many Christians, comfortable in the ruins of Christendom, still believe that it is possible to befriend the world, to be of it in good standing as well as in it. Soon enough, they will discover that just as tolerance of evil is not a virtue in God’s eyes, even a nominal Christian identity will be sufficient to damn them in the world’s eyes.

So choose this day, of all days, whom you will serve. If it seem to you that the world is good, a place of certain progress towards eventual human perfection, then serve those who are of the synagogue of Satan, the government, the elites, the world. Build your great global temple to Man, consecrate yourself as a human brick in the Pyramid of Progress.

But if instead you see the world as a place of evil, of corrupt men and fallen women, of darkness growing darker, of nihilism, of human liberty constrained where it is not twisted into libertinism, then the symbol of the child born in the manger will serve as a light against the darkness, a beacon of God’s Love and Man’s Hope.

Once, there was only darkness. But ever since the Star of Bethlehem shone in the night sky, the Light has been winning. That is what we celebrate today.

Merry Christmas.

Preparations for the post-holiday

If you want to get lean, lift:

According to a new study, weight training is the most effective way of keeping abdominal fat in check, compared to other activities such as running or cycling. Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health measured the activity levels of over 10,000 men aged 40-plus, monitoring their weight and waist circumference over a 12-year period.

They found that those men who spent an extra 20 minutes a day weight training
gained less abdominal weight over the course of the study than men who
increased the amount of time they spent doing aerobic exercise. Combining weight training with aerobic exerise led to even better results, the
study found.

I’m not surprised. I’ve noticed over time that lifting alone is much better than cardio alone, but the most effective program involves running once or twice per week in addition to at least three lifting days per week.

Don’t worry about your diet today and tomorrow. Eat, drink, and have a Merry Christmas. Then buckle down and address the fitness question the day after tomorrow. Any athlete will tell you that a cheat day makes no difference whatsoever.

If you’re going to face the world sober, you may as well do it with a hangover. So to speak.

Sometimes there are no good guys

ESR points out that it’s not always possible to take a side:

After Brinsley’s mini-murder-spree, the temptation for any reasonable person to weigh in on the side of conservatives and the cops is great. And yet…and yet…important distinctions are in danger of being lost. On the evidence we have, Michael Brown was a violent thug who deserved the death he got, but the live-on-video strangulation of Eric Garner was a genuine atrocity. The New York medical examiner deemed it a homicide.

But because humans are excessively tribal, it’s difficult now to call for justice against Eric Garner’s murderers without being lumped in with the “wrong side”. Nor will Garner’s partisans, on the whole, have any truck with people who aren’t interested in poisonously racializing the circumstances of his death.

I don’t have a fix for this problem. But someone needs to be pointing out that both of the pseudo-tribes that have sorted themselves around this dispute are behaving badly. “Death to cops” is totally out of line, but the New York police had innocent blood on their hands before Ismaayil Brinsley did on his. There should be an accounting for that, not by assassin’s bullets but by a trial in which justice can be seen to be done.

I’m not on the side of the Africans or the Badge Gang. One is a barbarian force, the other has devolved into a destabilizing one. Both are dyscivic. I’m on the side of civilization, but watching what is taking place in the USA is somewhat akin to watching Tutsis butcher Hutus and vice-versa. It doesn’t make any sense to cheer for either side, nor will it accomplish anything positive.

The Badge Gang must be held considerably more accountable than it presently is, for its own sake, if nothing else. Once it loses its perceived moral authority, as is increasingly the case today, it doesn’t actually have much else to fall back upon.

The temptation to choose sides is understandable, but in cases such as these it should be resisted. We live in a fallen world, a sinful world, an evil world, where often there are no good guys on either side. That’s the central point of the holiday we are celebrating tonight and tomorrow.

Astroturfing 101

Rule No. 1: Post BEFORE screencapping:

A Spacedad appears! @SuperSpacedad
Yes Gamergate, it’s clearly other people making you look bad and not your own fault. Here’s your bottle and bonnet

Exposing Jihad @XposingJihad
@SuperSpacedad Wouldve been more effective you hit post before screencapping

Isn’t it fascinating how we’re still supposed to believe #GamerGate is all about harassing a few individuals despite the fact that no one has mentioned them in weeks? The SJWs are so desperate for evidence that they have to manufacture it themselves.

Remember, rabbits always lie. They have no sense of honor or self-respect.

UPDATE: Speaking of fascinating, we have a real rabbit here. Never heard of the guy before, so he must be blocking #GamerGate en masse while simultaneously trying to spoof us.

You are blocked from following @SuperSpacedad and viewing @SuperSpacedad’s Tweets. Learn more

Three times is not the charm

The only good thing about The Hobbit III is that it means Peter Jackson and his two-woman Harem of Stank is done squatting and urinating upon the text of Tolkien.

It’s a damn shame that the three Hobbit films feature so little of the titular hobbit.

Martin Freeman has established himself as a quietly great actor with serious dramatic and comedic chops, and his scenes in these movies have consistently been the best thing about the films. Bilbo Baggins is the only character capable of eliciting genuine reactions from the audience, which is what Peter Jackson’s bloated Hobbit trilogy needed more than anything—Bilbo’s scenes form the kernel of what could have been a smaller, quieter, but ultimately more narratively successful series of films, one where Bilbo’s personal journey isn’t swallowed whole by loud Lord of the Rings-style battle sequences.

Other than Freeman’s wonderful, quiet little scenes and a bare handful of others, Battle of the Five Armies is one big two-hour-and-24-minute-long argument against splitting the book up into three films.

The disappointing thing is that Jackson actually got off to a pretty good start. He did a wonderful job bringing the scenery of Middle Earth to life. The Shire and the hobbits were excellent. The first thing he really got wrong, in my opinion, was Arwen Evensong, followed by Rivendell and Elrond. But Arwen was a harbinger for Jackson’s lack of respect for the text, which only got worse as the movies went on, culminating in the insane decision to completely vivisect and spread out The Hobbit over three cash-grabbing vehicles.

Verdict: “These movies aren’t Star Wars prequel-level unredeemable, but both as a follow up to the Lord of the Rings movies and an adaptation of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit, this new trilogy misses the mark in just about every possible way.”

The movies were not a complete loss. The first three were genuinely enjoyable despite the “improvements” to Tolkien’s masterpiece. Perhaps in another generation, a filmmaker will do the sort of justice to his books that the producers of A Game of Thrones have done to George Martin’s.

An r/K perspective on the NYC cop killings

Anonymous Conservative observes a rabbit strategy at work in the Mayor of New York City’s response to the killing of two NYPD officers:

Two NYPD cops killed in retaliation for Eric Garner’s death, while DeBlasio observes from safety. When I see this, I see the transvestite cuttlefish seizing mating opportunities, while competitors are occupied fighting each other. DeBlasio is a hard core rabbit, who no doubt dislikes the K-selected culture of aggression, competitiveness, and loyalty you find in K-selected populations such as the Police. He seeks the support of the angry and aggressive in-grouping class of the black community. At the same time, he tries to appear neutral to police, to avoid open conflict with them. Yet by his actions, he fosters acrimony, to the point that the Police even begin to out-group him.

Remember, rabbits never want to fight. They always want someone else to fight you on their behalf. That’s why Yama is trying to present himself, however impossibly, as a victim, despite the fact that he is the individual responsible for cyberstalking me for the last 56 months, in addition to many other individuals over the last 11 years.

On the periphery of Pink SF

I have been a fan of William Gibson ever since reading how Johnny was a very technical boy. Even as his novels have gotten more literary, and less coherent, I’ve always enjoyed reading them. So, I was quite pleased when The Peripheral came out recently; a new William Gibson novel is always something to be celebrated in my book.

And it’s good. The novel well-written, the plot is intricate, the sensibilities are cool (if perhaps indicative of being influenced by Hollywood’s new fascination with the rural American South), and, as always, Gibson presents a vision of the future that is somehow more plausible than the average science fiction writer’s. His skill, I think, is to present something between dystopia and the present; perhaps one might describe his perspective as dystrendic. Or in this case, dystrendic to catastrophically dystrendic, as the book spans a small spectrum of futures for reasons I would find difficult to describe even if it wasn’t a spoiler of sorts.

Gibson’s style, never florid, has become increasingly sparse as his disinclination to provide detailed description has now stripped down his dialogue. While this has the effect of making the conversations flow more realistically, the combination of the two frequently leaves the reader slightly confused as to what is going on. It’s very important to pay attention to even small details, because that’s all you’re going to get; he’s not going to go back and explain things for you. And while I rather like this approach, it’s perhaps not optimal for a book with a plot that would already be challenging to follow.

The story is about a young woman who witnesses a real murder while in a virtual environment. The story expands considerably from there, and since there is no way to reasonably do it justice in less than two or three pages, I won’t even try. As is often his wont, Gibson bring in elements of technology, art, and shadowy corporations in a sophisticated manner.

However, after a year of confronting the growing divide between Pink SF and Blue SF, it is readily apparent that Gibson is of the Pink school, and to his detriment. He is among the best of the Pink school, to be sure, but The Peripheral wind up being shortchanged by Gibson’s resort to several Pink SF conventions.

Chief among them is a mostly non-portrayal of religion that is retarded to the point of being embarrassing. We are supposed to believe that the complete collection of rural Southerners, including a number of military veterans, are as completely and utterly irreligious as wealthy elite Brits on the future arts scene. Moreover, there isn’t a single mention of football… in the American South of the 2030s. The only nominally religious individuals are the fictional version of the Westboro Baptist Church, although to Gibson’s credit, he recognizes their lawyerly activism for the financial scam it is.

However, even their nominal Christianity leads to an unfortunate demonstration of Gibson’s moral vacuity, as he literally equates silent, public, and entirely legal protest that takes a judgmental position with gassing a large group of people with lethal psychotropic drugs. Because doing the latter would make them “assholes” like the former. This was, to put it mildly, an astonishing ethical metric.

The worst aspect of the book, however, is the phoned-in characters. He gets the military aspects more or less correct, but completely fails on the Southern ones. And the female protagonist doesn’t even rise to the usual level of a man with breasts, she is little more than the book’s Macguffin, a character sans agency to whom things happen, and things more incredible than Cinderella. She is often praised for possessing attributes that she doesn’t show in any way; it’s almost Mary-Sueish at times. Throw in the fact that all the bad guys die instantly whenever shot at by the female superagent, who eventually shows up to absolutely no reader’s surprise and outperforms even the Marine veterans, and the reader occasionally finds himself dismissively rolling his eyes.

I also have to note that happy ending is so prodigiously stupid with regards to the characters that it boggles the mind. It gives absolutely nothing of interest away to note that the entire mixed-sex group, none of whom have shown ANY sexual interest in each other throughout the entire book, abruptly pair up and live happily ever after. Ye cats.

It is a pity that Gibson appears to be unable to turn his keen eye for observation towards the points where his ideological assumptions depart from reality, as it would have made for an objectively better book. if he had been able to do so The Peripheral isn’t a bad science fiction read, but it will be quickly forgotten, and William Gibson could be, and should be, better than that.

Amazing Stories reviews John C. Wright

Specifically, The Book of Feasts & Seasons. You’ll want to read the whole thing:

This week I’m reviewing a title that’s seasonal in nature, although
the seasons it deals with occur across an entire year rather than a
small part of the year. I’ve not read much of Mr. Wright’s work, but
what I have has been better written and more original than much of
what’s currently being published.

The same is true here. These stories have a great deal of depth, both
in the characters they’re about and the concepts with which they deal….Wright is an author who isn’t afraid to delve into deep topics. Some
of the themes here dealt with the nature of God, forgiveness, kindness,
racism, sacrifice, and second chances. A number of authors these days
try to deal with serious themes and issues in their fiction. Few are as
accomplished or as entertaining as Mr. Wright.

The Book of Feasts & Seasons is one of the best and most thought provoking books I’ve read in the past year. I highly recommend it.

It’s perhaps worth noting that Mr. Wright’s The Book of Feasts & Seasons has a 4.9/5 rating. But I find it a little surprising that of the six stories the reviewer deemed worthy of mention, none of them were the one I consider to be the best, namely, “The Parliament of Beasts and Birds”.