Pink vs Blue: An Applied Breakdown

At Castalia House, Daniel breaks down two SF works according to the ten principles I laid out in order to distinguish Pink SF/F from Blue SF/F:

Sometimes, distinguishing  Pink Science Fiction from Blue can be difficult, so I thought a simple comparison of two very similarly themed science fiction tales might help.

There is some required reading involved, but it will only take you a few minutes:

The first is Rachel Swirsky’s Hugo-nominated short story “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love”

The second is Gene Wolfe’s “Build-A-Bear”

Have you read them? Good.

Now let us take a look at the two stories through the now-standard rubric to determine a story’s status as Pink or Blue.

1. It is written in conscious reaction to, and rejection of, the classic genre canon.

“Dinosaur” is published in a science fiction magazine, was nominated for an award that features a rocket ship, and yet contains only a meta-speculation as its science fiction element. There is no science behind the transformation of the man into a microtyrannosaur. The entire story is merely the conscious and unfulfilled wish of a dissatisfied woman. Look no further than: “all those people who—deceived by the helix-and-fossil trappings of cloned dinosaurs– believed that they lived in a science fictional world when really they lived in a world of magic where anything was possible.” Pink.

“Build-A-Bear” does not explain the science, or even the purpose behind a cruise ship being equipped to generate customized living creatures. Yet this is very much within the classic canon: AI, genetic engineering, the unusual consequences of high tech wish fulfillment in a quotidian environment all harken to such classic stories as “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long” or Astro Boy. Furthermore, the name of the entertainer who guides the construction of Viola’s bear is Bellatrix, a fairly obvious allusion to both the star and the original Latin meaning: “female warrior.” Unlike the stereotypical modern application of the term, this is an early indication that the feminine war arts in the story will in no way resemble masculine combat techniques. The story is about the nature of feminine social status, conflict and self-defense. Blue.

2. It is politically correct.

Dinosaur – the villains quite literally employ nearly every politically incorrect slur in the arsenal. Pink.

Build-A-Bear – The sociosexual hierarchy is represented without qualification, the male (bear) hero’s maleness is an intrinsic element of his heroism. Blue.

Wolfe vs Swirsky. Yeah, that works. Two award-winning SF writers and they don’t get a whole lot more opposite than those two.

The internal invasion

The parasites are fleeing their self-made hellholes and are busily engaged in recreating them in their new residences:

Californians have moved to Colorado and Nevada. Massachusetts natives have moved to New Hampshire. New Yorkers have moved to North Carolina and Virginia — and, of course, have continued moving to Florida.

Over the last few decades, residents of many traditionally liberal states have moved to states that were once more conservative. And this pattern has played an important role in helping the Democratic Party win the last two presidential elections and four of the last six. The growth of the Latino population and the social liberalism of the millennial generation may receive more attention, but the growing diaspora of blue-state America matters as well.

The blue diaspora has helped offset the fact that many of the nation’s fastest-growing states are traditionally Republican. You can think of it as a kind of race: Population growth in these Republican states is reducing the share of the Electoral College held by traditionally Democratic states. But Democratic migration has been fast enough, so far, to allow the party to overcome the fact that the Northeast and industrial Midwest contain a smaller portion of the country’s population than they once did….

Since 2000, the blue-born population in red states has grown by almost a quarter, to 11.5 million, or 12 percent of the states’ total population. These changes aren’t happening simply because the national population has grown over the same period, either. In fact, the red-born population in blue states shrank, to 7.3 million from 8.4 million, between 2000 and 2012.

And thus ends the grand experiment of the laboratories of democracy. This is why the right to free association, also known to its critics as segregation, is an absolute must for any democratic society that wishes to retain its character. In an age of mobility, any system that functions will be rapidly swamped by the invading denizens of those systems that don’t work.

It should never be forgotten that most of the 18th century political principles were developed prior to the age of mass global transportation. It should not be a surprise that not all of them are capable of surviving it.

Don’t read the citations

I always find it intriguing how science posers always assume no one is actually going to read the links they provide, so they can get away with saying whatever they want. Brett Williamson posted this comment:

“Way before this debate took place Dr, Gorski laid out why the Hooker report is wrong (twice):

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/did-a-high-ranking-whistleblower-really-reveal-that-the-cdc-covered-up-proof-that-vaccines-cause-autism-in-african-american-boys/

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2014/08/22/brian-hooker-proves-andrew-wakefield-wrong-about-vaccines-and-autism/#comment-346695

Both blog posts make valid, well articulated points. Puts a different light on the twitter exchange I would think.”

So, naturally, I read the first link. David Gorski begins with no less than four paragraphs of an ad hominem attack on Brian Hooker, concluding with this statement: “Of course, just because Brian Hooker has demonstrated many of the
characteristics of an antivaccine crank doesn’t mean that he might not
have a legitimate criticism this time. Does he? Let’s find out.”

After complaining about Hooker mentioning past scandals of medical science in a video that has nothing to do with the published paper, Gorski goes on to point out that Hooker has not proved something that his paper doesn’t even address. He finally gets around to making one legitimate point when he notes that: “He analyzed data collected for a case-control study as a cohort study.”

That’s questionable, to be sure. But does this exonerate the CDC? Well, no, according to Gorski: “So is Hooker’s result valid? Was there really a 3.4-fold increased risk
for autism in African-American males who received MMR vaccination before
the age of 36 months in this dataset? Who knows? Probably not, though.”

Seriously, that’s Gorski’s big takedown. “Who knows? Probably not, though.” Well, obviously, in that case, the science is settled! What this demonstrates is exactly what I told Gorski at the start: statistical review is not science. What people are doing on both sides of the vaccine debate is playing statistical games in order to generate rhetorical ammo; they are not doing much in the way of actual science. And they harder they work their statistics, the more they amplify their rhetoric, the less credible they look to concerned parents and moderate parties alike.

As I’ve pointed out previously, the debate is not going to end until a large-scale double-blind study on the current US vaccine schedule is done with an unvaccinated control group. Pro-vaxxers can hide behind how that would be unethical and so forth all they want, but that is what it is going to take to convince those who are, quite reasonably, skeptical about vaccines due to the behavior of those who profit from the production and administration of them.

“Follow the money” may not be sound science, but it has historically proven to be reliable logic. 

VPFL managers

Still waiting on Simon and Slamdunk to email me. You have until the end of day tomorrow, and then I’ll need to draft replacements. So, if either of you still want into the league, please email me with VPFL in the subject.

When egos collide

I thought you all might find this Twitter exchange to be as amusing as I did. Surgeons are notorious for their arrogance, while your humble host is not exactly known for being devoid of confidence.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
A published study appears to have detected vaccine fraud in a CDC study of autism and the MMR vaccine.

David Gorski ‏@gorskon
@voxday No, not so much. But your swallowing that codswallop whole shows just how little you know about science.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
@gorskon Amusing. You clearly don’t even understand the difference between statistical review and science. You’re science-illiterate.

Sebastian Armstrong ‏@spikesandspokes
@voxday @gorskon Hilarious, he is a cancer surgeon who has been part of breast cancer research, and YOU think HE is science-illiterate!

Vox Day ‏@voxday
@spikesandspokes @gorskon He observably is science-illiterate. Statistical analysis is not science. Neither, for that matter, is surgery.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
@spikesandspokes @gorskon We’re getting ready for our fantasy football draft. Or, as you science-illiterates would call it, “doing science”.

David Gorski ‏@gorskon
@voxday @spikesandspokes Says the guy who has never published in the scientific literature and thinks he knows science.

David Gorski ‏@gorskon
@voxday @spikesandspokes As opposed to
someone (me) who has actually published multiple scientific papers,
including one coauthor in Nature

Vox Day ‏@voxday
@gorskon @spikesandspokes No, says the guy whose scientific hypotheses have been turned into multiple published papers and cited by Nature.

David Gorski ‏@gorskon
@spikesandspokes Don’t worry. @voxday amuses me with his arrogance of ignorance with respect to science, particularly vaccine science.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
@gorskon @spikesandspokes You’re the one dumb enough to claim statistical review is science, not me.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
@gorskon @spikesandspokes BFD. Nature has also cited one of my original hypotheses. And it doesn’t erase your basic blunder re statistics.

Vox Day ‏@voxday 2h
@gorskon @spikesandspokes But your logically fallacious appeal to credentials does amuse me. Now, I’ve got to get back to my draft science.

 David Gorski ‏@gorskon
@voxday @spikesandspokes Also, hypotheses are a dime a dozen. Hypotheses that stand up to scientific scrutiny are what matter, silly boy.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
 @gorskon @spikesandspokes They did, Mr. Doctor Scientist. That’s kind of the point.

Vox Day ‏@voxday @gorskon @spikesandspokes I’m not worried.
Your insecurity is hilarious. Nobody gives a damn about your
credentials, Mr. Doctor Scientist.

David Gorski ‏@gorskon
@voxday @spikesandspokes Who’s more insecure, the guy w/ actual scientific accomplishments (me) or the guy who brags about hypothese (you)?

Vox Day ‏@voxday
@gorskon @spikesandspokes I don’t brag about it. You’re the one who rushed to cite Nature, not me. I simply pointed out: BFD. So, you.

David Gorski ‏@gorskon
@voxday @spikesandspokes And you’re the one who bragged first about a hypothesis cited in Nature.

Vox Day ‏@voxday now
@gorskon @spikesandspokes Wrong again. I responded at 2:59 to your mention of Nature at 2:57. Science illiterate and can’t tell time either?

One thing I’ve noticed about scientists is that they never seem to understand that their expertise in one particular area doesn’t translate very well, if at all, into unrelated areas. That’s why it is so easy to trip them up; their rush to defend their wounded intellectual vanity leads them from one error into another.

And, of course, they always retreat to their credentials and citations in lieu of being able to actually argue their way out of a paper bag. It’s probably a character flaw, but I do love it when this sort of situational moron decides to take a crack at me.

UPDATE: To be fair to the guy, I was the first one to mention Nature. And, since apparently none of my would-be critics are smart enough to search the blog, the hypothesis referenced is obviously my argument demonstrating that religion does not cause war, which has been cited everywhere from Foreign Policy to Wikipedia to Nature to The New York Times. And as for anyone who wants to resort to the obvious dodge of crediting The Encyclopedia of Wars, well, I will simply laugh at you and observe that while I have it, and have read it, you obviously haven’t ever even laid eyes upon it.

Why history matters

Over at Alpha Game, there is a discussion of a new survey showing that marrying a non-virgin indicates a 21 percent reduction in the likelihood of HER marital satisfaction compared to a woman whose sexual experience is limited to her husband. And marrying a promiscuous woman (defined as 10+ premarital partners), reduces her marital satisfaction by 58 percent. This should settle, once and for all, any question concerning the observable fact that men strongly prefer to marry women with less experience.

And before any female readers resort to their usual “but what about the mens” response, do read the survey.

This is an interesting test of whether feminism actually concerns itself with what is observably good for women or whether it is more concerned with defending the sub-optimal decisions of certain women.

The wrong battleground

Roger Simon needs to stop worrying about other men’s pants and start looking at the consequences of the idiot interventionist and immigrationist policies he has advocated in the past:

In other words, it’s time for libertarians to put on their big boy pants and give some serious thought not just to national defense but to global defense, because I have some news for them: The Pax Americana was the real deal. It worked for decades, saving myriad lives, and now it’s almost gone.   We have seen that writ large for us in the last few years  as never before. Obama’s non-existent, feckless, reactionary, confused, absurd (or whatever other adjective you want to pick) “leading from behind” foreign policy has brought the world to the brink of madness as nothing since WWII.

These days the man carrying the libertarian mantle most prominently — Senator Rand Paul — is off curing  Guatemalans of eye disease. Laudable an enterprise as that is, I am less interested in what Paul can do for a few indigent Guatemalans as I am how he would respond to that other ophthalmologist/politician Bashir Assad. And not just Assad, of course, all of them.

It’s not enough to say we would respond as necessary.  We live in a peanut-sized globe.  What happens in Singapore redounds in San Diego and so forth. Paul has been a captivating candidate so far with some original ideas and approaches, but given the way the world is headed he is going to have to pull on his big boy pants and start articulating how he will deal with this escalating era of jihad.

And as for those libertarians who still prefer an isolationist approach, I can first remind them of Reagan’s advice about the necessity of a strong defense in order to have peace.  If they don’t believe that, then I can promise them they will meet head on the famous prophecy of that same Comrade Trotsky: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”

Simon doesn’t stop to think that the reason the USA is in such a parlous state is the direct result of a) American military interventions, and b) America’s quasi-open immigration policies. It’s always interesting to see naive commentators ignorant of basic military history babbling about war, because the Clausewitzian center of gravity is NOT in the Middle East, Syria, or even Iraq. It is in the West. The war in the East cannot be seriously fought until the war in the West is won; contra the insistence of the WWI-era generals, offense is not the way to win a war.

UPDATE: To say nothing of the fact that this is the same guy who wanted the USA to remove Assad from power last year, which would have assured that ISIS was even better established in the region than it is now.

Vaccine fraud at the CDC?

Despite the vaccine makers thinking they had put the Wakefield controversy safely behind them, another researcher has uncovered an apparent link between the MMR vaccine and autism, and from the CDC’s own data:

Background
A significant number of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder suffer a loss of previously-acquired skills, suggesting neurodegeneration or a type of progressive encephalopathy with an etiological basis occurring after birth. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effectof the age at which children got their first Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) vaccine on autism incidence. This is a reanalysis of the data set, obtained from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Protection (CDC), used for the Destefano et al. 2004 publication on the timing of the first MMR vaccine and autism diagnoses.

Methods
The author embarked on the present study to evaluate whether a relationship exists between child age when the first MMR vaccine was administered among cases diagnosed with autism and controls born between 1986 through 1993 among school children in metropolitan Atlanta. The Pearson’s chi-squared method was used to assess relative risks of receiving an autism diagnosis within the total cohort as well as among different race and gender categories.

Results
When comparing cases and controls receiving their first MMR vaccine before and after 36 months of age, there was a statistically significant increase in autism cases specifically among African American males who received the first MMR prior to 36 months of age. Relative risks for males in general and African American males were 1.69 (p=0.0138) and 3.36 (p=0.0019), respectively. Additionally, African American males showed an odds ratio of 1.73 (p=0.0200) for autism cases in children receiving their first MMR vaccine prior to 24 months of age versus 24 months of age and thereafter.

The troubling thing here is that the author of the paper, “Measles-mumps-rubella vaccination timing and autism among young african american boys: a reanalysis of CDC data” reached his conclusions by examining CDC data that reached the opposite conclusion and served as the basis for a CDC doctor’s testimony before Congress. Bill Sardi writes on Lew Rockwell:

There is evidence of an intentional cover-up as it is alleged that data
from children who did not have birth certificates (not a pertinent
factor) was removed from the study to reduce the statistical power of
the study and claim there was no significant association between autism
and the MMR vaccine…. Dr. Hooker notes that the CDC used children under the age of 3 for a
comparison (control) group, which is an intentional way of skewing
results of its studies involving any alleged link between vaccines and
autism.  Symptoms of autism generally don’t emanate among children till
after age 3 and the control group was too young to have received a
diagnosis of autism, he notes.

Not only does this “reanalysis of CDC data” reopen the possible MMR-autism link, but it calls into question the integrity of the entire field of vaccine research. If Hooker is correct and CDC doctors such as Dr. Colleen Boyle have engaged in vaccine fraud, it will entirely explode the basic assumption that vaccines are safe because it will render all of the CDC’s data and assurances suspect.

A few things

This isn’t actually the correct cover, but Emilio has translated both A Man Disrupted and Gravity Kills into Spanish and I just finished the ebook formatting for QUANTUM MORTIS La Gravedad Mata. So, if you speak fluent Spanish and would like to read over the two books and pass on any suggestions for improvement, I would appreciate it. I should have Un Hombre Disperso ready in a week or two as I’m hoping to release them in the company of another book or three come Labor Day Weekend. Shoot me an email with SPANISH in the subject if you’d like me to send you QM-LGM now and QM-UHD when it is ready.

In completely unrelated news, the six new members of the VPFL, as determined by RANDOM.ORG will be:

  1. Daniel
  2. Simon
  3. Vincent Castrillo
  4. Slamdunk
  5. Drew Deuce’s
  6. Jartstar

Please email me with VPFL in the subject so I can assign you a team and send you the league invitations.

Restoring Christendom

Lest you think it is not necessary to end the ill-considered concept of religious pluralism and repatriate the adherents of the religion of peace:

“If norwegian soldiers can take planes to Afghanistan, then Osama and Mohammed can also take planes to Norway, inshaAllah. Now, the government must wake up and assume responsibility, before this war spreads to Norway. Before the counterpart reacts. Before moslems take the step necessary.

Do not confuse the moslems’ silence with weakness. Do not profit from the moslems’ patience. Do not force us to do something that can be avoided. This is not a threat, only the words of truth. The words of justice.

A warning that the consequences can be fatal. A warning about a 9/11 on norwegian ground, or larger attacks than the one carried out on 22 july. This is for your own good and in your own best interest.’

We do not want to be a part of norwegian society. And we do not consider it necessary either to move away from Norway, because we were born and grew up here. And Allah’s earth belongs to everybody.

But let Grønland become ours. Bar this city quarter and let us control it the way we wish to do it. This is the best for both parts.

We do not wish to live together with dirty beasts like you.

Likewise. But Grønland is not theirs. Norway is not theirs. Does the West belong to them? Or does it belong to the Men of the West? Whether Norway realizes it or not, they are now actively engaged in a war of invasion and conquest. So is the rest of Europe. As is America. This is not a war that can be fought “over there”, it is a war that will have to be fought in every nation and every city across the West.

The War on Terror was a proxy and a cheap, cowardly one. The problem is that secular pluralism will not survive this challenge from Muslims. There is absolutely no point in appealing to secular pluralism, as it was always a fundamentally incoherent concept. It is only a matter of time before it is abandoned, and the sooner we return to the concept of Christian European nations, including the USA, the better off everyone will be.

Maximizing liberty does not encompass violence enforced partition and Sharia. We already know from the Israeli-Palestinian example what the results of that sort of partition will be. And we already know what the eventual solution will be.

Call to strip British citizenship from ‘traitors’ who fight for Isil. Britons who fight for Isil in Iraq and Syria should be considered traitors and stripped of their British citizenship, the former shadow home secretary has said. 

As the Norwegian example indicates, such actions will only be the start, which will eventually culminate in an eventual ban on Islam in most Western countries. There is already widespread support for such action, and it will grow rapidly with each new atrocity. Remember, the first Reconquista took 700 years. The second one won’t take as long, but it probably won’t be complete in our lifetimes either.