The results

Apparently everyone expects Jerry Pournelle to produce the best story in the forthcoming RIDING THE RED HORSE. The results of both polls were as follows:

  1. Pournelle 108
  2. Day 45
  3. Torgersen 28
  4. Nelson 17
  5. Raymond 14
  6. Kennedy 4
  7. Nuttall 7
  8. Rzasa 5
  9. Mays 3
  10. Filotto 3
  11. Cheah 1
  12. Carr 1

As much as I hate to disappoint my most hard-core fans, I regret to inform you that neither my story nor the story I contributed in collaboration with Steve is likely to be regarded as the best, or even the second-best story. It’s not that the stories are bad, in fact, they are among the best I have ever written. It’s just that the quality of the stories, even from the lesser-known names and newcomers, is remarkably high.

I changed my mind about doing a poll on the non-fiction, because, with the possible exception of Mr. Lind, it’s too hard to guess what the author could possibly be writing about.

In any event, if you’re a New Release subscriber, you can now decide for yourself.

UVA rape hoax gets even weirder

The hoaxette’s friends have come forward to explain that Rolling Stone did not cover their story accurately:

The college students described as friends of the alleged rape victim Jackie in an explosive Rolling Stone article revealed their identities to ABC News today, and said that some of the magazine’s story is false.

“The text was so divergent from what we said that evening,” said Alex Stock, who said he’s identified as “Andy” in the article.

The magazine article describes a violent, three-hour gang rape that left a University of Virginia student identified as Jackie bruised and bloody when she escaped a house on fraternity row, right near the university president’s office.

When her friends, identified by Rolling Stone as “Randall,” “Andy” and “Cindy,” arrived that night, the article says they urged Jackie to keep quiet to keep their social lives intact.

That is not the scene described by Jackie’s friends to ABC News. They said at the time they believed a “traumatic” sex assault had occurred. But the two males friends said they were told that night — Sept. 28, 2012 — that Jackie was forced to perform oral sex on five men while a sixth stood by.

But their story is just the tip of the iceberg; it’s becoming apparent that they don’t believe her anymore either. Mostly because she appears to have been MAKING UP the very fraternity guy she was pretending to be seeing the night of the “rape”. One of Dalrock’s commenters summarizes the apparent sequence of events:

1) Jackie falls in crush with Randall.
2) Randall LJBFs Jackie
3) Jackie doesn’t understand that “no means no”
4) Jackie invents an imaginary boyfriend “chem guy” , complete with fake photos and phone number
5) Jackie boasts with chem guy in front of Randall to make him jealous. She even gives “chem guy’s phone number” to Randall, Andy and Cindy and, impersonating chem guy, insinuates to Randall that she loves him.
6) Randall remains unimpressed.
7) Jackie goes to date with chem guy.
8) Few hours later Jackie gives Randall a “damsel in distress” call.
9) Randall arrives and she hysterically tells him that chem guy lured her into a gang rape of clinton-levinsky variety.
10) Instead of falling in love with her, Randall calls reinforcements: Andy and Cindy.
11) They try to console her and convince her to go to police, but she refuses.
12) After that night chem guy still sends texts to Randall singing praise to Jackie.
13) Randall still doesn’t want to fall in love with Jackie.
14) Jackie is heartbroken and gets depressed.
15) Jackie finds out campus anti-rape activists and activities. Here she get attention, she didn’t get from Randall.
16) In next two years Jackie gets obsessed with anti-rape activism. Her story of that night gets newer and newer juicy details.
17) Two years later, Rolling Stone femipropagandist Sabrina Rubin Ederly is combing campuses nationwide to find THE perfect person for “campus rape culture awareness poster girl”.

In other words, the Rolling Stone article was based on a gang rape that didn’t happen at a fraternity party that never took place, orchestrated by a college student who doesn’t exist.

Forget rape. This story is grounds for never believing a single word that comes out of a college girl’s mouth.

AC explains why misery loves company

This is an interesting, even ingenious explanation for what strikes so many of us who are sane as inexplicable: why are the rabbits always so hell-bent on attacking those who have nothing to do with them and are not harming them in any way?

As things get worse, the stimulus required to irritate them to action
will grow ever less. Since the rabbit is too cowardly to attack their
enemy themselves, their go-to strategy will be to try and make everyone they see unhappy, and turn any threat they can find in our populace upon the successful.

This strategy is an outgrowth of something innate to the undeveloped amygdalae – a fundamental, penetrating sense of helplessness. If your amygdala is developed, it has been developed through experience. When it encounters adversity, it scans your brain for a solution, finds it stored in memories of prior experiences, and it will then drive behaviors to address your adversity. As a self-sufficient non-rabbit, your amygdala will drive you to fix your own problems.

If, however your amygdala is not acclimated to adversity, then you will not be able to find a solution stored in your amygdala, and you will feel helpless. Once you are helpless, and your amygdala is applying aversive stimulus to drive you to take action, your focus will direct itself to making others solve your problems for you. Then, rather than fixing your problems yourself, you will focus on making everyone else miserable, in the hopes that to alleviate their misery they will solve your problem for you. Suddenly you are laying down in the middle of a freeway, basically telling other people that unless they fight your enemies for you and fix your problems on your behalf, you will stop traffic, and prevent them from getting home.

One can observe signs of this even in their customary language. “This is a problem.” “Don’t you see how that is a problem?” “I find it troublesome.” “That is problematic.” “I have a real problem with that.” What they are really saying is “I have a problem: I am scared and unhappy. I want you to fix it for me.”

But because they are entirely irrational and less than entirely sane by any reasonable measure, the very last thing they are going to do is listen to you or permit you to address their actual problem. Instead, they’re going to try to control you, so that you will obey their inept direction in fixing what they perceive, wrongly, to be the problem. And even if the problem doesn’t get fixed – and it won’t – at least they get the satisfying relief of feeling that they are no longer helpless, because they are ordering you around.

Why the US embraced torture

After reading the various defenses of the CIA’s torture program by various commenters yesterday, I can only conclude that Noah Millman has correctly diagnosed not only why the U.S. government embraced the use of torture, but also its endorsement by many of the very proponents of limited government who should have known better than to do so:

Willingness to torture became, first within elite government and opinion-making circles, then in the culture generally, and finally as a partisan GOP talking point, a litmus test of seriousness with respect to the fight against terrorism. That – proving one’s seriousness in the fight – was its primary purpose from the beginning, in my view. It was only secondarily about extracting intelligence. It certainly wasn’t about instilling fear or extracting false confessions – these would not have served American purposes. It was never about “them” at all. It was about us. It was our psychological security blanket, our best evidence that we were “all-in” in this war, the thing that proved to us that we were fierce enough to win.

I am astonished by the fact that those who are capable of grasping that government control of guns in the name of crime will inevitably be used against the people do not recognize that the government use of torture in the name of fighting terrorism will also be used against the people. And Millman’s observation that support for torture is more a public statement about one’s self-perceived toughness than anything else is particularly astute, and is supported by the language observed to be used by many of those who endorse torture.

At this point, I suspect the average American who does not travel to the Middle East runs a greater lifetime risk of tortured by his fellow Americans, or killed by them in a targeted drone strike, than he is to be killed by a jihadist.

It’s remarkable that anyone is still willing to defend the use of government torture, especially at a time when opposition to government gun control is at a two-decade high, having recovered 7 percentage points from the post-Sandy Hook dip. The libertarian rule is pretty simple. Don’t permit the government anything you don’t permit the citizenry. And don’t permit the government to do anything you don’t want it doing to any of its citizens.

There may be times when torture is deemed absolutely necessary by an individual. And in such cases, if it is so vital, then the torturer should be proud to accept the punishment for his civil disobedience without protest or complaint, and do so with a clear conscience. Many of us would torture a kidnapper who was concealing the location of a kidnapped child who was at risk of starving without a single moment’s hesitation. And I suspect most of us would do so without the slightest concern for whatever the legislated punishment subsequently awaiting us would be.

A question of anticipation

UPDATE: I changed the poll software because the other one was screwing with the blog. You don’t need to vote again since I saved the previous results, which had Jerry Pournelle in the lead with 31 votes, followed by Brad Torgersen with 13.

One of my favorite things about anthologies is seeing how the unknowns fare in comparison with the more established figures. And, of course, it’s always wonderful to discover new writers, new or established, who one hasn’t previously read. Given that many of the contributors to RIDING THE RED HORSE have their own fan bases, I think it will be interesting to see which stories are most anticipated, and which end up being perceived as the stronger ones once the anthology comes out.

In case you’re wondering where familiar names such as William S. Lind and Tom Kratman are, I’ll run another poll tomorrow addressing the non-fiction pieces.

How to raise a gamer

This guy went about it much more systematically than I did, but to somewhat similar effect:

My son Eliot was born in 2004 — the year of Half-Life 2, Doom 3, and the launch of the Nintendo DS. By the time he was born, video games were a $26B industry.

I love games, and I genuinely wanted Eliot to love and appreciate them too. So, here was my experiment: Start with the arcade classics and Atari 2600, from Asteroids to Zaxxon. After a year, move on to the 8-bit era with the NES and Sega classics. The next year, the SNES, Game Boy, and classic PC adventure games. Then the PlayStation and N64, Xbox and GBA, and so on until we’re caught up with the modern era of gaming.

Would that child better appreciate modern independent games that don’t have the budgets of AAA monstrosities like Destiny and Call of Duty? Would they appreciate the retro aesthetic, or just think it looks crappy?

And this, for me, is the most interesting impact of the experiment.

Eliot’s early exposure to games with limited graphics inoculated him from the flashy, hyper-realistic graphics found in today’s AAA games. He can appreciate retro graphics on its own terms, and focus on the gameplay.

The lo-fi graphics in games like VVVVVV, FTL, or Cave Story might turn off other kids his age, but like me, he’s drawn to them.

Ender didn’t play enough video and computer games to have turned into a super-gamer like Eliot, but I’ve noticed that he does enjoy playing older games like Warlords and Fantasy General rather than clickfests and twitch games. He’s also a good ASL player and a decent, though not superlative wargamer, as well as being deep into the mod scene.

The skill that Eliot has developed from his early exposure, to such an extent that he’s much better than his father is fascinating though, especially when I consider how Ender was similarly exposed to more military theory and strategy than the average West Pointer.

Another Republican cave-in

At this point, can anyone even pretend to be surprised?

IMMIGRATION:
The bill only funds the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees most immigration policy, until February. But negotiators gave new money for immigration programs at other federal agencies. There’s $948 million for the Department of Health and Human Service’s unaccompanied children program — an $80 million increase. The program provides health and education services to the young migrants. The department also gets $14 million to help school districts absorbing new immigrant students. And the State Department would get $260 million to assist Central American countries from where of the immigrant children are coming.

AFFORDABLE CARE ACT:

The law is still
funded, but there’s no new money for it. There’s also no new ACA-related
funding for the Internal Revenue Service and the Centers for Medicare
and Medicaid Services, the two agencies most responsible for
implementing the law. The bill also would cut the budget of the
Independent Payment Advisory Board — what Republicans have called “the
death panel” — by $10 million.

OVERSEAS MILITARY OPERATIONS:

There’s $1.3
billion for a new Counterterrorism Partnership Fund; $5 billion for
military operations to combat the Islamic State, including $1.6 billion
to train Iraqi and Kurdish forces; $500 million for a Pentagon-led
program to train and equip vetted Syrian opposition fighters; $810
million for ongoing military operations in Europe, including
requirements that at least $175 million is spent in support of Ukraine
and Baltic nation

SEXUAL ASSAULT IN THE MILITARY:

There’s
$257 million for the Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response
programs, including $25 million more to expand the Sexual Assault
Victims’ Counsel program. But Democrats, led by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand
(D-N.Y.), are expected to make a final push to expand the program this
week.

As Drudge puts it: “REPUBLICAN BETRAYAL: OBAMACARE FULLY FUNDED AMNESTY TOO!”

But no doubt Republican lawmakers will hasten to point out that there is no ADDITIONAL money for Obamacare. By Washington standards, that counts as a severe budget cut.

They’re not the good guys

The Senate report on the useless brutality and deception involved in the CIA’s interrogation program tends to support what those of us who opposed torture from the start have been saying all along:

In January 2003, 10 months into the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret prison program, the agency’s chief of interrogations sent an email to colleagues saying that the relentlessly brutal treatment of prisoners was a train wreck “waiting to happen and I intend to get the hell off the train before it happens.” He said he had told his bosses he had “serious reservations” about the program and no longer wanted to be associated with it “in any way.”

The bitter infighting in the C.I.A. interrogation program was only one symptom of the dysfunction, disorganization, incompetence, greed and deception described in a summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report. In more than 500 pages, the summary, released on Tuesday, paints a devastating picture of an agency that was ill equipped to take on the task of questioning Al Qaeda suspects, bungled the job and then misrepresented the results….

The report said the agency had evidently forgotten its own conclusion, sent to Congress in 1989, that “inhumane physical or psychological techniques are counterproductive because they do not produce intelligence and will probably result in false answers.” The Democratic Senate staff members who studied the post-Sept. 11 program came up with an identical assessment: that waterboarding, wall-slamming, nudity, cold and other ill treatment produced little information of value in preventing terrorism.

The report spends little time condemning torture on moral or legal grounds. Instead, it addresses mainly a practical question: Did torture accomplish anything of value? Looking at case after case, the report answers with an unqualified no.

I’m not exactly surprised. You may recall I wrote the following on WND back in 2006:

Consider the words of Winston Churchill, a man not well-known for shirking confrontation or combat, written after World War I while he was secretary of state for war:

All the horrors of all the ages were brought together, and not only armies but whole populations were thrust into the midst of them. The mighty educated States involved conceived – not without reason – that their very existence was at stake. Neither peoples nor rulers drew the line at any deed which they thought could help them to win. Germany, having let hell loose, kept well in the van of terror; but she was followed step by step by the desperate and ultimately avenging nations she had assailed. … When it was all over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and they were of doubtful utility.

It is those last words that most completely damn the Bush administration as barbarians unfit for leadership of the free world. Few would find appeals to national security very compelling if the president insisted that victory in the War That Dare Not Speak Its Name required feeding the armed forces on the flesh of fallen Iraqis, and yet there is very little evidence, historic or current, that indicates torture will be of any use in turning back the forces of expansionist Islam.

Enthusiastic use of the most brutal torture did not help the French hold Algeria against Islamic rebels, nor did it bring victory to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Debates about whether “water boarding” is more acceptable than the rack or thumbscrews are meaningless; the point is that civilized societies do not indulge in such activities since they are evil and effectively useless.

Hunt the trolls

Or the trolls will hunt you:

“I wanted to work towards a tech industry that exhibited true tolerance of everyone and allowed free expression, but Shanley and people like her have made it impossible,” Dickinson says. “The people in the tech industry who actually contribute to innovation need to realize that if they don’t fight back against the Shanleys of the industry, they’ll be allowing people like her to kill the goose who lays the golden eggs.

“[Former Mozilla CEO, forced out of his job for his objection to gay marriage] Brendan Eich is the canonical example. If they can force him out they can force anyone out, no matter their technological contributions.”

There are problems not only with Shanley Kane’s brand of feminism, which is sociopathic and divisive in the extreme, but with her approach to argument, too. It’s not just that she doesn’t like men discussing women’s issues. She doesn’t even like other women discussing them, complaining when she is not treated as the de facto authority on women in the technology industry, despite her loathsome treatment of everyone around her.

Another good article from Nero. Of course, it is pretty easy to deal with SJWs. You simply have to refuse to give them any ground. Don’t accept their assumptions, don’t allow them their assertions for the sake of argument, don’t accept their appeals to fairness or equality, and above all, don’t give them the inch that permits them to take the mile.

No matter how much they hate you, they will soon go in search of easier, weaker prey. Look at how every single SJW who used to attack me regularly has fallen almost entirely silent where I am concerned, despite there being considerably more people who read me now.

Vibrant romance

One guess why you haven’t seen much about this young white woman being burned alive in Mississippi:

Police are hoping that the final words said by a 19-year-old woman who was burned alive may lead them to her killer. Jessica Chambers was covered in flames when she was found on a road near to her home in the tiny community of Courtland, Mississippi on Saturday after leaving to get a bite to eat.

A passerby called 911 after seeing her car alight and when first responders arrived at the scene and found her covered in flames, she whispered a few words that detectives believe could lead them to her killer, WTOC reported.

Police have not disclosed what Chambers said or tried to say, but her father, Ben Chambers, told the channel she told them who was responsible for the horrifying crime. ‘She told them, she told them, told him who done it,’ he said.

She was walking along Herron Road, near Highway 51, and covered in flames when she was found, and was flown to Region One Health in Memphis but later died. Authorities said initial autopsy results reveal the girl died from severe burns that covered 98 per cent of her body.

Panola County Sheriff Dennis Darby said she had been doused with a flammable liquid and set on fire. Her father also said she had ‘a big gash on her head’.

‘They squirted lighter fluid down her throat and in her nose, and apparently they knocked her out,’ added Mr Chambers, a maintenance worker for the sheriff’s department.

Perhaps it was the KKK who were just so ANGRY that this white girl was involved with black men. Or a secret elite white fraternity at the University of Mississippi enacting a horrific pledging ritual. That’s probably why the mainstream media isn’t touching it. Probably. Regardless of who did it, I suspect there won’t be many who will fault that father if he slaughters every single member of the extended family of every single individual involved.