Trolls are not a problem

I found no little amusement in this article in the New York Times about dealing with online trolls. It always surprises me when I learn that other bloggers are genuinely upset by the weird little creatures who occasionally infest their blogs:

ANYONE who has ever been online has witnessed, or been virtually walloped by, a mean comment. “If you’re going to be a blogger, if you’re going to tweet stuff, you better develop a tough skin,” said John Suler, a professor of psychology at Rider University who specializes in what he refers to as cyberpsychology. Some 69 percent of adult social media users said they “have seen people being mean and cruel to others on social network sites,” according to a 2011 report from the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project.

Posts run the gamut from barbs to sadistic antics by trolls who intentionally strive to distress or provoke. Last week, Zelda Williams, the daughter of Robin Williams, said she was going off Twitter, possibly for good, after brutal tweets by trolls about her father’s death. Yet comments do not even have to be that malevolent to be hurtful. The author Anne Rice signed a petition a few months ago asking Amazon.com to ban anonymous reviews after experiencing “personal insults and harassing posts,” as she put it on the site of the petition, Change.org. Whether you’re a celebrity author or a mom with a décor blog, you’re fair game. Anyone with a Twitter account and a mean streak can try to parachute into your psyche.

In the virtual world, anonymity and invisibility help us feel uninhibited. Some people are inspired to behave with greater kindness; others unleash their dark side. Trolls, who some researchers think could be mentally unbalanced, say the kinds of things that do not warrant deep introspection; their singular goal is to elicit pain.

The singular goal of the troll is to elicit pain? I don’t think that is entirely correct, but that is certainly one reason why we haven’t seen all that much troll activity here despite the considerable growth of traffic here. With the exceptions of the homosexual Tad and the literary critic Andrew Marston (who doesn’t have a job per se, but volunteers regularly at the New England Wildlife Center if you ever feel like giving him a call and discussing literature with him), most trolls have discovered that they can’t elicit anything more mild annoyance from me and thereby give up. Tad, Marston, Pox, and Obvious are a different variety, they are various forms of what might be described as the crusader-troll.

The crusader-troll attempts to DISQUALIFY DISQUALIFY the blogger by presenting alternate narratives to the blog readers. Hence we have Tad always trying to reframe the narrative with Vox as Pure Evil, Marston going to blogs far and wide to declare that Vox, Larry Correia, and Dan Simmons(?) are Terrible Writers, Pox/Ann openly trying to pick off readers in order to limit the extent of my baleful intellectual influence, and Obvious attempting to portray the mysterious “blogger” or “host” as Hypocritical, while the Scalzi fanboy Phoenician spent over a year attempting to show Vox as Inferior to the Object of Adoration. The fact that their disqualification attempts have obviously failed, as the blog traffic grew from 612,136 pageviews in August 2012 to over 1.5 million in August 2014 doesn’t ever seem to register with them. Perhaps they’re not trolling hard enough?

Of the crusading variety, I tend to find Marston the most amusing because I am aware I cause him far more pain than he causes me. (To say nothing of his fascinating attempts at fantasy fiction which are much more entertaining than all the 2014 Hugo winners combined. I even offered to publish Nocturne; it is guaranteed Hugo-Award winning material.) Every new Twitter follower I get, every additional 100k pageviews of traffic, and every new SF award for which I am nominated causes him pain. In fact, if he hadn’t gone on such an insane literary-snob rampage a while back and annoyed so many people, I very much doubt that Sad Puppies 2 would have been such a big success. Science fiction can thank Luscinia/Marston for the fact that Larry and I, among others, are bona-fide Hugo-nominated authors from now until the end of time. My author’s bio has been burnished thanks to the blog troll.

That, my friends, is what you call backfire. Well done, Andrew. But he will never learn because he is too neuro-atypical to grasp normal human psychology. He will continue to poke the bears because he has deemed the bears to be Evil, never understanding the wisdom implicit in the notion of letting sleeping grizzlies lie.

(That being said, it’s also amusing to me that my shadow troll, Ann Morgan aka Pox Vay, gets more traffic and comments than many blogs, and even has her own meta-troll, Obviously. This comment by her was downright funny too: “I also confess to being immature in some ways, mainly I lack confidence,
patience, and sometimes have poor control over my temper.” You don’t say.)

There will always be trolls. There are too many immature, attention-seeking, emotionally unstable individuals sans audiences for there not to be. But they are no reason for concern. Quite to the contrary, they are a material testament to the fact that you matter, that you are making a difference. I wouldn’t worry about trolls if I were the average blogger. I would worry more about having such a small audience, or so little of import to say, that the trolls feel no temptation to show up.

Kids know they’re smart

The smart guy from Khan Academy appears to be taking some unnecessary precautions:

The Learning Myth: Why I’m Cautious About Telling My Son He’s Smart

My 5-year-­old son has just started reading. Every night, we lie on his bed and he reads a short book to me. Inevitably, he’ll hit a word that he has trouble with: last night the word was “gratefully.” He eventually got it after a fairly painful minute. He then said, “Dad, aren’t you glad how I struggled with that word? I think I could feel my brain growing.” I smiled: my son was now verbalizing the tell­-tale signs of a “growth­ mindset.” But this wasn’t by accident. Recently, I put into practice research I had been reading about for the past few years: I decided to praise my son not when he succeeded at things he was already good at, but when he persevered with things that he found difficult. I stressed to him that by struggling, your brain grows. Between the deep body of research on the field of learning mindsets and this personal experience with my son, I am more convinced than ever that mindsets toward learning could matter more than anything else we teach.

Considering that his son started reading two years later than me, most of my high-IQ friends, and most of our children, I suspect Salman Khan can relax a bit. Anyhow, I always find this issue of “telling kids they’re smart or not” to be amusing. It’s exactly like debating whether to tell a kid he’s tall or not.

I mean, do you seriously think the kid is not going to notice? Especially if he is, in fact, actually smart? My parents never told me I was smart. It was just kind of hard not to notice when I was sitting there in kindergarten reading the Encyclopedia Britannica while the other kids were eating paste, licking the doorknobs, and urinating on themselves.

If Khan wants to make sure his son struggles, that’s easy enough. Throw some long division at him. Make him read in another language. Give him Cicero and Plato to read. In fairness, I don’t tell my son he’s smart, I just tell him to keep a straight face when his teammates lament the long division problems they’re struggling with, to help them out if they ask for it, and avoid ever letting them see the collection of alien hieroglyphics that pass for his math problems. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sight of his face when I introduced him to the “silent gh”.  He loved the “silent e”, but I’m 100 percent certain he thought I was screwing with him until I showed him a list of numbers that included a spelled-out “eight”.

The important thing is to teach the highly intelligent not to coast on their capabilities, not to mistake potential for achievement, and to show them how to respect the less-intelligent. Intellectual arrogance in a child is as natural and as innocent as athletic arrogance. It must be kept in check, but one can’t do that by pretending there is no reason for it to exist in the first place.

We don’t pretend that children don’t come in different shapes and sizes, and we shouldn’t pretend that they don’t come with different cognitive capabilities as well. I also find it rather amusing that a guy with a five year-old thinks he has discovered secret of raising smart kids. Come back in thirteen years, sport, and we’ll see what you think you know.

Africa belongs to them

It is becoming increasingly obvious that all of the international do-gooder efforts in Africa for the last 100 years have not only been pointless, but were actually counterproductive:

Mob Destroys Ebola Center In Liberia Two Days After It Opens

A mob descended on the center at around 5:30 p.m., chanting, “No Ebola in West Point! No Ebola in West Point!” They stormed the front gate and pushed into the holding center. They stole the few gloves someone had donated this morning, and the chlorine sprayers used to disinfect the bodies of those who die here, all the while hollering that Ebola is a hoax.

They ransacked the protective suits, the goggles, the masks. They destroyed part of Tarplah’s car as he was fleeing the crowd. Jemimah Kargbo, a health care worker at a clinic next door, said they took mattresses and bedding, utensils and plastic chairs.

“Everybody left with their own thing,” she said. “What are they carrying to their homes? They are carrying their deaths.”

She said the police showed up but the crowd intimidated them.

“The police were there but they couldn’t contain them. They started threatening the police, so the police just looked at them,” she said.

And then mob left with all of the patients.

“They said, ‘The president says you have Ebola, but you don’t have Ebola, you have malaria. Get up and go out!’” Kargbo said.

The West is going to pull out of Africa sooner or later. Sooner, if the current Ebola epidemic is any indication. This means that Africa will be right back where it was in the 1940s, only now the African nations are unable to feed themselves because their populations have been massively inflated beyond what their maintainable infrastructure is able to support.

The only thing that the Western aid workers have been able to accomplish in the current crisis is bringing Ebola back to their native lands.

The end of comparative advantage

As I have repeatedly pointed out for several years, David Ricardo’s Law of Comparative Advantage has been shown to be based upon false assumptions. Now the mainstream economists are beginning to recognize this:

David Ricardo’s Theory of Comparative Advantage has broken down after 200 years, or so I learned at the Lindau forum of Nobel laureates in Bavaria.

The theory published in 1817 has been a guiding principle of free trade, taken as a given by every student of economics in the modern era. It has served us well, but just as Newton’s theories ran into limits and were overtaken by Einstein’s relativity, comparative advantage no longer explains the world.

Under Ricardo’s model, inequality was supposed to narrow within countries as globalisation accelerated exponentially in the Nineties. Instead it is getting wider….

Ricardo described a world where free trade in goods was opening up, but
labour markets remained largely closed. This is no longer the case.
Globalisation bids up the wages of high-skilled engineers or software
analysts towards international levels wherever they live.

The Nobel laureates at Lindau aren’t willing to give up on globalization yet (although they should), but the cracks in the economic wall are showing as they express their fears that it is “going horribly wrong”. But it’s not going wrong. It’s going the only way it could possibly have gone.

Free trade is incompatible with national sovereignty. International
labor mobility is incompatible with the very existence of nations. And the heterogeneous populations are economically detrimental and a material barrier to the growth of capital and national wealth. I shall repeat my core argument against free trade, which I first articulated in 2012 following a quasi-debate with Gary North:

1. Free trade, in its true, complete, and intellectually coherent
form, is not limited to the free movement of goods, but includes the
free movement of capital and labor as well. (The “invisible judicial line” doesn’t magically become visible when
because human bodies are involved.)

2. The difference between domestic economies and the global
international economy is not trivial, but is substantive, material, and
based on significant genetic, cultural, traditional, and legal
differences between various self-identified peoples.

3. Free trade is totally incompatible with national sovereignty,
democracy, and self-determination, as well as the existence of
independent nation-states with the right and ability to set their own
laws according to the preferences of their residents.

4. Therefore, free trade must be opposed by every sovereign,
democratic, or self-determined people, be they American, Chinese,
German, or Zambian, who wish to preserve themselves as a free and
distinct nation possessed of its own culture, traditions, and laws.

What is this, hockey?

Ender came home from soccer practice the other day with mixed news. On the plus side, he was the youngest player to make the team at the elite level for which he is now eligible. Most of the players from his last year’s team are now out of the sport or transferring to lesser clubs. On the downside, he reported that he’d lost his first fight, although besides being slightly wild-eyed he didn’t look any the worse for wear to me.

I don’t tend to get worked up over the occasional fracas since there is a definite “boys will be boys” attitude here, but I was furious when he told me the details, as he was jumped before practice by a bigger kid two years older, who kicked him in the face from behind while Ender was passing the ball back-and-forth with a teammate. A second kid, also older, then grabbed him around the neck when he whirled around and tried to hold him back for the first kid to punch. Ender took a few shots to the face and got a bloody nose out of it, but in the process he managed to bloody the first kid’s nose by kicking him in the face, and messed up the second kid’s leg by raking his shin and kicking his knee with his heel.

The kid with whom Ender had been passing the ball tried to intervene, but was flattened for his trouble, until finally the star of the team, who is more than a bit of an athletic specimen, jumped in and punched the two kids off Ender to break things up. The strange thing is that the two kids are new to the club and Ender didn’t know either of them. So, my suspicion is that they were trying to assert themselves by picking on the youngest kid, who unfortunately carries himself with misleading body language that tends to lead aggressors to believe he is an easier target than is in fact the case. Alternatively, there are some girls who have made it eminently clear that they like him, and I’m wondering if that might have something to do with it.

Anyhow, as I pointed out, it was much more of a draw than a loss, because the second kid’s knee was too badly hurt to permit him to practice, so he went home, and then after practice, the first kid challenged Ender in front of the others, then, when Ender indicated his willingness to reopen hostilities on equal terms, backed down. Besides being fairly tough after three years of judo, Ender is now as tall as I am, and while he doesn’t have much mass to him yet, the kid is ripped. However, he doesn’t have much in the way of strike training yet, which is an oversight I intend to rectify.

Ender was vastly amused, however, by my initial reaction, as well as the reaction of the two Dragons I told about it, as we were uniformly focused on the tactical situation. Besides ambuscades and kicking high, the kid apparently likes to grab the neck with his left, pull his victim forward, and then throw punches with his right hand. So, we went over obliquing and arm bars, as well as the catch, lift, and twist routine for dealing with kickers. If the kid does manage to close, rather than trying to pull away, move in, cover up with one elbow, and work the ribs until he pulls away, then switch to elbows and knees. It’s with some difficulty that I’m going to leave matters up to Ender at his request rather than complain to the club, but if the kid is dumb enough to attack Ender again, I very much doubt he’s coming out of it without a broken arm and possibly a few broken ribs.

One of the hard things as a father is learning when you can step in and take care of a problem for your son and when you have to step back and let him take care of his own business. As much as I’d love to put the fear of me into the little bastard (as in The Dark Knight and “SWEAR TO ME”) and I have no doubt that I could, I have to step back here.

Now, I think turning the other cheek is important. I have even done it on occasion, once when I was perfectly within my rights to break the other individual’s jaw. And Ender has been very good about making peace with past assailants; he’s quite friendly now with the oversized kid who caused him trouble last season. But there is a time for peace and there is a time for war. This would appear to be one of the latter.

On a happier note, Ender is beginning his professional refereeing career this weekend, and I’ll have the opportunity to be there since my team will be one of the two sides playing. I have already explained to him that it is bad form, and more than a little unwise, to blow the offsides whistle on any attacking player who has the power to decide the referee’s bedtime.

Two TIA reviews

Because it has been a long time since The Irrational Atheist was published, because my refutation of the “religion causes war” argument has been widely accepted, and because Richard Dawkins has increasingly rendered himself a parody of his former public persona, it’s easy to forget that the core arguments remain timeless. Here are a pair of recent reviews of the book, the first by a Christian, the second by an atheist. If you haven’t read it yet, you might want to consider picking up a copy sometime. 

Trench Warfare. Acerbic and Funny

I bought this the first time I saw it on a shelf in hardcover. I rarely ever buy books on impulse, but this was one of those times. It sat on my shelf for about six years, however. Finally, I had the time to delve into it. The Irrational Atheist is a direct response to “new” atheism that is unlike most other responses (most other significant responses being quite a bit more respectful than Day’s). If you enjoy reading about theological, moral and social issues AND sarcasm, well this book is for you.

Day focuses his arguments in the very thick of the new atheist’s claims. Christian apologists and philosophers have rarely taken these guys seriously, mostly because none of them (except Dennett) deserve to be taken seriously in the realm of philosophy. And while the response of the apologists has been necessary for the churches to hear, none have really focused on some of the “lower” issues. By this I mean issues such as whether or not atheism is gaining converts in the U. S., whether or not religion ‘causes’ war, whether atheists are smarter than non-atheists, whether religion stifles science, etc.

From knowing nothing of Vox Day other than what he has written in his book it’s very obvious that he’s an intelligent man. Imagine Dennis Miller writing a book in response to the new atheists and you will kind of get a glimpse at the wit and humor that comprise this work. These issues of history and social issues seem to be his strong point and he handles them with brilliance. The heart of the book includes detailed chapters into his personal beefs with each of these writers. My guess would be he has the least respect for Sam Harris and the most for Dennett, but Hitchens would be neck and neck with Harris.

The last few chapters discuss various other related issues: the Holocaust, Spanish Inquisition, Crusades, human sacrifice, atheism’s responsibility for the destruction of millions of lives, a chapter on some of the theological arguments used by these writers and an appendix of a discussion between the author and Socrates concerning the Euthyphro dilemma.

If this topic interests you I heartily recommend this be on your shelf. As I said, most Christian apologists or philosophers answer via way of philosophy or theological correction or biblical defenses, all of which are very important. Day prefers to get down in the trenches and battle them head-on, via some literary lex talionis. Not for the faint of heart.

This atheist loves the book. Logical refutations (finally!) of atheist talking points.

I am an atheist, and I really like this book. Vox Day’s style is a
direct and a refreshing relief from wheelbarrow loads of empty
platitudes. To summarize the book: “God loves you, but I don’t. Here’s why blindly following the high priests of atheism is stupid.”

The author says (paraphrasing, don’t remember exact phrasing): “This
book isn’t to convert you or argue in favor of God. I don’t care at all
if you believe or not. This book is to demolish the atheist arguments.”

Although
there is no chance I’m going to be converting to Catholicism, or any
other sky deity religions, I have to applaud the hard logical reasoning
and fresh insights as Vox takes a hammer to the arguments of Hitchens,
Dawkins & Harris. It’s a refreshing change from all the arguments
that boil down to “God exists, therefore God exists”.

That’s a fair summary. And before the Churchians leap in to wag their fingers, I will readily admit that my failure to love everyone is indicative of my imperfect Christianity. I’m also not particularly good on turning the other cheek, avoiding impure thoughts, and avoiding the use of rough language. But I fail to see that blatantly lying and erecting a false veneer of superficial spiritual perfection would be an improvement upon the open and honest expression of my thoughts and feelings on various matters.

The terrible cost of equality

It is becoming abundantly clear that immigration from outside Europe is not only dyscivic, but dysgenic as well. The Men of the West are becoming literally stupider as a result of opening their nations to various orcs, trolls, and goblins combined with the widespread adoption of a feminist philosophy that significantly increases the probabilities that the West’s most intelligent women – and many of its most intelligent men – will never have children:

An IQ test used to determine whether Danish men are fit to serve in the military has revealed scores have fallen by 1.5 points since 1998. And standard tests issued in the UK and Australia echo the results, according to journalist Bob Holmes, writing in New Scientist.

Tests carried out in 1980 and in 2008 showed that the average 14-year-old was two IQ points cleverer in 1980, according to a study published in 2009. Scientists found that performance dropped the most dramatically in teenagers in the upper half of the intelligence scale, The Telegraph reported. Brighter teens who took part in the study in 2008 were on average six IQ points less intelligent than their counterparts tested 28 years earlier.

The most pessimistic explanation as to why humans seem to be becoming less intelligent is that we have effectively reached our intellectual peak….

Some have even contentiously said this could be because educated people are deciding to have fewer children, so that subsequent generations are largely made up of less intelligent people. Richard Lynn, a psychologist at the University of Ulster, calculated the decline in humans’ genetic potential. He used data on average IQs around the world in 1950 and 2000 to discover that our collective intelligence has dropped by one IQ point.

Westerns have lost 14 IQ points on average since the Victorian age, according to a study published by the University of Amsterdam last year. Jan te Nijenhuis thinks this could be because intelligent women tend to have less children than women who are not as clever, The Huffington Post reported. The perceived link between IQ and fertility is a very contentious one. Dr Nijenhuis studied the results of 14 intelligence studies conducted between 1884 and 2004 to come to his conclusion.


Each study measured peoples’ reaction times – how long they took to press a button after being prompted. It is claimed that reaction time mirrors mental processing speed – so it reflects intelligence.They found that visual reaction times averaged 194 milliseconds in the late 19th Century, but in 2004, they had increased to 275 milliseconds….

It’s amazing what equality-indoctrinated scientists are willing to throw out as hypotheses rather than even consider the totally obvious. It hardly seems likely that the intellectual peak of Man would roughly coincide with the release of “Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ‘Em”, among other things.  Not convinced because you’re one of those geniuses who “doesn’t see race” (or more properly, doesn’t understand the consequences of genetic science) or “doesn’t believe in IQ” (or, more properly, didn’t score very high on intelligence tests)? Then it should be interesting to hear your explanation for the simultaneous rise in deformed penises in Sweden, which also began happening recently “for reasons unknown”:

A condition which causes baby boys to be born with deformed penises
is becoming more common in Sweden, for reasons unknown to scientists. Researchers in Sweden assessed data collected on Hypospadias between
1973 and 2009. They found that before 1990, only 4.5 boys out of every
thousand had the condition known as hypospadias. But after 1990, the
figure had risen to 8 per 1000 boys. In an attempt to explain the
rise, the experts from Stockholm’s Karolinksa Institute considered
factors known to cause the defect, including low-birth weight, being
born a twin, and parents who used IVF treatment to conceive. However,
scientists could not link the rise to any previously known causes, and
instead concluded that an unknown factor was behind the trend, The Local reported.

Whatever might have happened after 1990 in Sweden that could possibly explain the increasing appearance of this birth defect at the same time average intelligences are decreasing and crime rates are rising? This “unknown factor” is a great mystery indeed. So congratulate yourself that you manage to avoid seeing race in the same way that Swedish scientists manage to avoid seeing basic cause and effect. Because, in a few dysgenic generations, your descendants won’t have any need to willfully ignore the readily apparent the way you do, they’ll be too stupid and deformed to see much of anything at all.

The costs of the fictitious progressive dogma of equality are real and material. Equality does not exist, it is not a positive ideal, and it must be rejected if Man is not going to continue his degradation into Orc. I don’t know Hebrew, but it strikes me that equalitarian dogma is the exact opposite of tikkun olem, the uplift of the world. Anti-nationalism is the degradation of Man. Equality is a lie. Even the historical icons of equality are lies. Consider the words and actual sentiments of The Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln:

“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

Was Lincoln correct about the prospects for social and political equality? 156 years later, consider the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, and think about the gerrymandered political districts carved out on racial lines. Then tell us how many more years will be required to reach that nominal ideal.

A Hitlerian purpose

I missed this Goldman column the last time around, which is probably just as well. It is historically false, morally bankrupt, and should be deeply offensive to a broad range of people across the political, racial, and religious spectrums:

The essay below appeared in Asia Times Online on April 8, 2008. Apropos of the Ferguson riots it is reprinted below. It should make no-one happy. The crippling failure in American culture, I argue, is our refusal to come to terms with our own Civil War. This failure afflicts the conservative movement. For example: Last June I had the privilege to teach a course at the annual Acton University in Grand Rapids, MI. One of the keynote speakers was Judge Andrew Napolitano, whom I admire and whose remarks in the main I applauded. But Napolitano argued in passing that Lincoln had done a terrible thing by fighting the Civil War: surely, the judge said, he could have found a better way to end slavery than by tearing the country apart. That is utter nonsense for two reasons: the first is that a large part of the South was willing to die to preserve slavery, and the second is that the European imperial powers were already conspiring with elements of the South to expand slavery through Cuba, Mexico and Central America. If Lincoln had not fought the Civil War in 1861, the French invasion of Mexico in 1862 would have established a link with the Confederacy and prevented a Northern blockade.

Perfectly intelligent and well-motivated men like Napolitano ignore the obvious about the Civil War because it is still too horrible to contemplate. More broadly, the conservative movement continues to tolerate a revolting form of nostalgia for the slave era euphemistically called “Southern Traditionalism.” ISI’s middle-brow list of “Fifty Greatest Books of the 20th Century” includes a biography of Gen. Robert E. Lee, labeled “The tragic life of a great Southern traditionalist beautifully chronicled by a great Southern traditionalist.” The ISI list is mostly mediocre, but this is offensive in the extreme.

Below I demand of Americans “a higher threshold for horror.” 

An uncanny parallel links the fate of young African-Americans today and that of the young white men of the slave-holding South in 1865. Both cohorts have lost a terrifying proportion of their number to violence. One third of black Americans between the ages of 20 and 30 passed through the criminal justice system in 1995, according to the Sentencing Project, a prisoners’ advocacy group. Nearly a third of military-age Southern men military age were killed or wounded during America’s Civil War.

It is a measure of the inherent good-heartedness of Americans that they evince a low threshold of horror. Three hundred thousand Confederate dead and millions of ruined African-American lives are too awful to contemplate. Some part of Senator Barack Obama’s appeal derives from America’s revulsion over the destruction of a generation of young black men; electing an African-American president would assuage part of the guilt.

From this great suffering arise two genres of American popular culture, the Gone With the Wind ilk of Civil War epic, and the “Get Rich or Die Tryin’” brand of gangsta tale. Both try to take the edge off the revulsion and placate the dishonored dead by turning them into folk-heroes. That is understandable, but also unfortunate, for America still has a great deal of killing left to do around the world, and might as well get used to it.

“Get Rich or Die Tryin’” would have been a good epitaph for the Confederate dead, who fought for land and slaves, not for “states’ rights” or the sanctity of their soil. Slave-owners along with want-to-be slave-owners had it coming. The Union general William Tecumseh Sherman who said after he burned Atlanta, “I fear the world will jump to the wrong conclusion that because I am in Atlanta the work is done. Far from it. We must kill three hundred thousand, I have told you of so often, and the further they run the harder for us to get them.”

Given the sad history of racial oppression in the South for a century after the Civil War, the only thing to regret is that Sherman didn’t finish the job. I stopped watching the film version of Gone With the Wind after Scarlett O’Hara saved her plantation from the tax-collector. I wanted her to pick cotton until her back broke.

I don’t think it would be a big surprise if there were more than a few blacks and Southerners who read this grotesque nonsense that did not conclude that perhaps it was not Sherman or the American justice system, but Adolf Hitler who didn’t do enough killing. Remember, this is the same individual who asserts that because the Chinese harbor such instinctive respect and admiration for his people, China and the Jews “share a common purpose, to transcend tribalism through a unifying civilization”.

In other words, what Spengler is saying is that the purpose of the Jewish people is to crush all nationalism through slaughter.

But to be clear, it is obvious that not all Jews agree with him, least of all the Israeli who brought it to my attention.

Come back, he cried. I didn’t mean it!

John Scalzi, the leading light of science fiction’s Social Justice Warriors, appears to have belatedly realized that he is increasingly despised by the very people who bought most of his earlier books. This “twitter rant” is, of course, appropos of nothing at all and is TOTALLY UNRELATED to the fact that he a) has a new book out and b) recently embarrassed himself with a pair of Twitter rants about Larry Correia and me. So let’s pull a page out of Larry’s pocket and examine each of Scalzi’s claims:

Those who’ve seen me punt assholes here who happen to be conservative may be shocked to know there are conservatives I like/love/admire.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) August 20, 2014

It is probably true that there are conservatives he loves and admires.
Based on his past statements, he is married into a predominantly
Republican family. But that doesn’t change the fact that he frequently punts people
merely for the crime of disagreeing with him and asking him questions that he
doesn’t want to answer. In fact, he undermines his own case here with
the implicit claim that all the people he has ban-hammered or kittened or muted or otherwise punted in the past are assholes. A number of those people are now regular readers here and will be able to dispute his claim about them.

    In fact, there are many conservatives I like/love/admire, including much of my family and community, and many friends.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) August 20, 2014

Thereby demonstrating my immediately preceding point. Although I suspect there are not actually “many” conservatives and his relationships with those “many friends” are not anywhere nearly as friendly as Scalzi likes to pretend. He’s not even as close to some of his fellow Social Justice Warriors in the SF community as he affects to pretend in public. They are usually too polite not to play along.

    I am not one of those people who believes that opposing someone politics means you can’t like/love/admire them in other ways and areas.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) August 20, 2014

 He’s blatantly lying. There are many, many cases of him openly describing
various people he has never met, and whose character he does not know, as assholes on the sole basis of their
political views. He has also described certain political views as being
intrinsically bigoted and hateful in and of themselves.

    The reason you see me punting a lot of assholes who are conservative on Twitter is because they’re assholes first, conservatives second.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) August 20, 2014

This is observably untrue. It also shows that he was lying in his previous tweet. Scalzi
simply can’t credit that those “asshole views” are genuinely held
political beliefs that have nothing to do with the individual’s
character. He does not permit the questioning of most politically correct dogmas on his blog, which is one reason why there are now so few comments there.

    And it’s true that some people who are assholes use their conservatism as a rationalization/justification for being terrible people.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) August 20, 2014

Is it true? Have you ever known anyone to use his conservatism as a rationalization for being a terrible person? Does that even make sense to you? I interpret this to mean that Scalzi is again inadvertently showing that he does, in fact, equate political conservatism with being a terrible person. Don’t forget that the guy isn’t particularly bright, Bachelor’s Degree in Philosophy of Language notwithstanding, so it’s far from improbable that he would inadvertently sabotage his own argument in the process of presenting it.

        But the fact is, they’re just assholes. They’d be assholes if they were centrist, liberal or arnarchists. Some people just suck.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) August 20, 2014

I find it telling that Scalzi somehow never
seems to be able to identify these “centrist, liberal or arnarchist”
assholes, much less attack them.

    (And indeed there are asshole liberals, centrists, anarchists, etc. I don’t like them, either.)—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) August 20, 2014

When has Scalzi ever publicly attacked a feminist asshole? Or a
homosexual asshole? It may be that he secretly doesn’t like them, but he
observably gives them a free pass. He certainly hasn’t had much to say about the various child molesters and anti-white racists in SFWA.
 
 If you’re a conservative, be aware I don’t hate you for your politics, even though we have many points of contention, politically.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) August 20, 2014

He’s lying again. He does hate conservatives for their politics, unless
he has some other reason to look past them. However, he’s concerned about
the fact that his blog traffic has declined by 25 percent by his own
account (35 percent would be more accurate) and more and more
conservatives have, quite reasonably, declared that they have no
interest in buying books from an author who doesn’t conceal his contempt
for them and their beliefs.

    Likewise, I assume you won’t hate me, even thought you think I’m completely wrong on many things regarding politics.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) August 20, 2014

This is projection. Scalzi doesn’t understand that no one ever hated him for his politics. Conservatives actually tend to be fairly tolerant in that regard; they are accustomed to friends and acquaintances being more left-leaning, and it is the left that socially rejects those with whom they do not agree. What conservatives and libertarians actually despise him for is his cowardice, his unmanly passive-aggressiveness,
and his unrelenting attempts to deceitfully spin the narrative in his
own favor. As he is doing now. And evidence for this contention can be seen in the way that it is not only conservatives and libertarians who harbor contempt for him, but increasingly, leftists and liberals as well.

    But if you’re an asshole who happens to be conservative, I’m might let you know I think you’re an asshole. Who happens to be conservative.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) August 20, 2014

The reality is that if you’re a conservative who expresses his views in a
straightforward manner and asks Scalzi any question he can’t or doesn’t
want to answer, he will insult you and attempt to silence you.

    And if you’re an asshole who hides behind conservatism to cover your basic lack of humanity, I will like you even less.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) August 20, 2014

Scalzi again reveals that he fundamentally equates conservatism with a basic lack of humanity. And I’m sure we all fear him liking us even less than those he already publicly declares to be assholes. Apparently there is a Scale of Evil Right-wing Evil that runs from asshole to dudebro to bigoted shitheel and all the way up to Racist Sexist Homophobic Dipshit.

    Conservatism, although I disagree with much of it, deserves better than to be ill-used by you.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) August 20, 2014

I’ve seen better concern-trolling of conservatives by the New York Times and the Washington Post.

    (Conservatives, feel free to sub in “Liberals” there for your own taste, etc.)—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) August 20, 2014

Again, when has Scalzi ever publicly attacked a feminist, a socialist, or a homosexual and personally attacked her character? Other than Sarah Palin, I’m not sure I’ve ever even seen him attack a woman’s character.

    Bottom line: If you’re a conservative, don’t assume I dislike you. I probably don’t. Your character as a human will show no matter what…—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) August 20, 2014

The truth is that if you’re a conservative, Scalzi probably does dislike
you, considers you evil, and bigoted, and an asshole. But he is willing
to hide that dislike if you may be of potential use to him. So there is that.

    ..and that’s the thing I’m going to respond to, first and foremost. Even when you tell I’m completely wrong about politics.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) August 20, 2014

As this latest Twitter epic demonstrates, the one thing John Scalzi actually responds to, first and foremost, is losing control of the narrative. Look how he repeatedly responds, however indirectly to everything I write about him. He has to, because I have successfully punctured the false narrative of John Scalzi, massively popular blogger, leading SF writer, and all-around great guy. As a quintessential Gamma male, the one thing he cannot bear is to have his carefully spun delusions methodically punctured and exposed, especially where others can witness it.

As I have stated previously, John Scalzi is a liar and a fraud. He lies relentlessly in order to market himself. He lies about everything. This belated pitch to conservative readers is no different from the way he repeatedly tried to make nice with the Baen gang after attacking Toni Weisskopf, or the way he tried to repair relations with John Ringo after Ringo rightly derided Scalzi’s Redshirts winning the Hugo Award in 2013. As it happens, I have considerably more information on the man than I have revealed, and I can assure you that his “warmly charming witty little man” persona is no more real than the two million monthly pageviews he publicly claimed in the interview with Lightspeed Magazine. He’s more accurately described as a narcissistic con artist with an unusual talent for self-promotion.

What Scalzi is trying to do with this rant is to spin the narrative and reverse the customary order of events. For nearly a decade, Scalzi has publicly attacked people he does not know specifically due to their political views, and labeled them assholes, or assbags, or bigoted shitheels, and so forth. Consider the first time he publicly attacked me, in response to a syndicated political op/ed I’d written, on March 2, 2005. Keep in mind I had never heard of the man at that time.

From what I know of Beale’s politics, he’s a jackass, and a fairly ignorant jackass at that. I feel pleased that my own politics, to the extent that they play any role in Nebula selection, are likely to counteract his (indeed, inasmuch as I sat on the short fiction jury this year, and we nominated a story by Eileen Gunn, it’s more than likely). Were you to join SFWA, provided you meet the entrance requirements, at the very least you could take pride in knowing you are also diluting the influence of this jackass on future Nebula Awards. 

Notice that it is my politics, and nothing else, that made me a jackass in his eyes. He knew nothing about me or my character, obviously, or he would have done as many more sensible people who disagree with me have done and either a) kept the discourse on an impersonal level or b) stayed the fuck away from me. (As Bill Simmons once wrote about Steve Smith: Don’t talk to him, don’t look at him, don’t even make eye contact
with him. If he approaches you in the warm ups, act the same way you
would if you were hiking in the wilderness and a grizzly bear approached
you — don’t move, don’t react, don’t do anything until it walks away.)

It should be obvious to anyone with a three-digit IQ that John Scalzi is simply attempting retroactive damage control. So, to paraphrase what I wrote two days ago, perhaps he is entirely correct and he doesn’t equate conservatives with assholes, I am both “a real bigoted shithole of a
human being” and “an undeserving bigot shithole”, my Hugo-nominated
novelette is “to put it charitably, not good”, and Larry Correia is
“whining about how [he] totally MEANT to fail spectacularly at the
Hugos” while trying to “RATIONALIZE [HIS] HUMILIATING DEFEAT”.

Or perhaps he is not, and he is simply lying about these things as he has been observed to lie about other things. In closing, I found this exchange on the post immediately preceding the rant to be amusing:

Todd: “Your chief opponent (who is not be named in this space) has definitely lost sales because of his political screeds.”

Scalzi: I don’t have a chief opponent, actually. I have some people who like to yell in my direction, however.

As I said, he lies about everything. He doesn’t have a single reader who doesn’t know precisely to whom Todd is referring. More importantly, I was under the impression that people didn’t read my books or give me awards because I am a terrible writer. Hmm, perhaps I would sell more books if I wrote an epic Twitter rant about how much I really love left-liberals….