“Trust me” said the liar

No wonder nothing the Tories and Labour have said ends up harming UKIP’s electoral appeal. All of the accusations are coming out of the mouths of confirmed liars:

David Cameron has appealed to “frustrated” voters not to back Ukip on Thursday, promising to salvage Britain’s relationship with the European Union just as he said he has overhauled the UK economy.

As Britain votes in European elections, the Prime Minister made a last-ditch attempt to stop voters deserting his Conservatives for Nigel Farage and the UK Independence Party.

The Conservatives face finishing third in the European elections when results are declared late on Sunday. Mr Farage said on Wednesday that his party would win the poll to elect MEPs.

The narrative, coming from the same people who said UKIP would never amount to anything, will be that this is merely a “tantrum”, an electoral ephemera that will disappear by the time the real elections roll around. I suspect the truth is precisely the opposite; I have long felt that UKIP is the coming force in UK politics and even told a friend who was recruited as a UKIP candidate last year as much.

Sadly, he didn’t heed my advice and accept the recruitment offer, otherwise he would be one of UKIP’s Members of the European Parliament later today. I very much wish he had.

Here is to hoping that UKIP finishes a strong first in the European elections today and is able to translate that electoral momentum into the next Parliamentary elections. Because the single biggest priority in Europe is the extrication of the English people from the third coming of the Franco-German Empire.

If you live in the UK, vote UKIP today. I know the European elections are nonsense, but that’s not the point. UKIP is the way out. Take it while you can.

SF/F Thought Police strike again

Or, why Uncle Timmy was disinvited from Archon:

I’m going to tell you a little story about a good man who has been slandered and libeled by one individual who is hiding behind the anonymity of the Internets. That good man? Tim “Uncle Timmy” Bolgeo.

You see, a pathetic troll whose name I’m not going to bother typing (because it’s a nickname that the individual hides behind because they’re afraid of owning up to their actions) has, after taking random snippets of conversations and tacky jokes that Uncle Timmy publishes on something called “The Revenge”, managed to get Uncle Timmy uninvited from Archon this year. Archon, apparently, is “listening to the fans” (the one who has slandered and committed libel, but we won’t get into that at the moment) and decided that it was in their best interest to not have Uncle Timmy as their Fan Guest of Honor this year.

Let’s ignore, for the moment, the forty years that Uncle Timmy has dedicated to fandom in the South and Midwest. Let’s forget that he started and ran Libertycon for 25 years, which is one of the more popular “small cons” around. Let’s ignore the fact that the man is extremely smart and is an engineer who has a sterling reputation (except when he’s playing spades. He’s a jerk when he plays spades). Heck, let’s even ignore the fact that Uncle Timmy is an old, fat white dude who started a scholarship for a fan and friend (a black man) after he died tragically while trying to help someone.

Oh, wait. No. Not only no, but hell no. All these facts are pertinent to the lie being spread that Uncle Timmy is one big old Southern racist redneck who hates science.

I told you none of this was about me, none of it ever had much to do with me. But now you know why I have never backed down to the petty pinkshirted grotesqueries. SFWA, Archon, Rutgers, Smith, Brandeis, Haverford, it’s all the same. It’s all about control of the narrative, control of the organization, and control of the lines of communication.

That’s why toleration is not an option. That’s why preening oneself on refusing to take a stand is moral cowardice. Those are merely slow forms of surrender and submission. Sad Puppies was the first time the pinkshirts have been punched in the mouth in decades and they reacted like a vampire to Holy Water. But it was a mere splash, when what is needed is an inexhaustible firehose.

On a related subject, Sarah Hoyt addresses the triumphant vaginalism of the SFWA, which celebrates the fact that its membership did not vote an award to a single white male this year.

UPDATE: Apparently I am wrong and the Nebulas were all about me.

It’s so heartening and amazing that so many women authors won! I know
there has been a lot of drama about sexism and racism in science fiction
circles lately and I feel like all of these women winning such a high
prize is just awesome. The Vox Days of the world are going to be nearly
apoplectic with anger but they can go fuck themselves. Women in sci-fi
for the win!
– trynewideas, ULauren Davis Monday 12:11pm

Apoplectic? Quite the contrary, I am VASTLY amused. I hope they are successful in setting up the multicultural Matriarchy of their absurd fantasies. I love the fact they actually gave an award to Swirsky’s ridiculous dino-porn revenge fantasy and I wish they’d gone one step deeper into self-marginalization and only given awards to gay black women writers. They are actively killing off the market for pink science fiction and they don’t even realize they are doing it. These women are in sci-fi the same way a cancer cell is in the human body. The only victory they will find is self-extinction. They can hand themselves hundreds of awards, thousands, but they will never receive the respect they so desperately crave.

Because the map is not the territory.

A troublesome defect

Fred Reed has read Nicholas Wade’s book too, and while he identifies a similar flaw to one that I observered myself, he has a different take on it.

A minor defect of the book, understandable since Wade works for a very PC newspaper and may want to keep his job, is that he dances away from the conclusions to be drawn from what he says. Differences among people are actually small, he asserts, and only in cumulative effects on societies do they really count. Yet he puts the mean IQ of Sub-Saharan Africans at 67, of Europeans at 100, and of Jews at 115. He also says that four of every thousand Europeans have IQs in excess of 140, but 23 Jews. These are huge differences and, if real, have equally huge implications.

As is the case with high-IQ atheists versus high-IQ theists, the implications of the various sizes between the populations that possess different average intelligence is seldom considered. Take the numbers Fred cites: 0.4 percent of Europeans have 140+ IQs but 2.3 percent of Jews do. But first, I suspect this is erroneous and that 2.3 percent of Ashkenazi Jews are actually indicated. Further research indicates that I was correct, as Wade actually wrote:

Average northern European IQ is 100, by definition, and 4 people per 1,000 in such a population would be expected to have IQs above 140 points. But among Ashkenazim, if the average IQ is taken as 110, then 23 Ashkenazim per 1,000 should exceed 140, the Utah team calculates, a proportion almost six times greater than that in northern Europe. This helps explain why the Jewish population, despite its small size, has produced so many Nobel Prize winners and others of intellectual distinction.

This reasoning doesn’t hold up. The global Jewish population is 13,854,800. This would seem to indicate 318,660 Jews with 140+ IQs.  However, since Ashkenazim account for 74 percent of the global Jewish population and “enhanced cognitive capacity is confined to the Ashkenazic branch of the Jewish population”, the likely number of high-IQ Jews around the world is 235,809 Askenazim plus 14,409 non-Ashkenazim for total of  250,218. A very conservative estimate of the global European population is 680 million. This indicates 2,720,000 Europeans with 140+ IQs around the world.

Therefore, crediting Jewish success to their high level of intelligence when there are at least 11 high-IQ Europeans for every high-IQ Jew isn’t logically credible. Especially because there are at least 48 high-IQ Han and 5 high-IQ Japanese to factor in as well.

How to vote No Award

Hugo voters are instructed in the most effective way to use the No Award vote by the Weasel King:

More so this year than most years, it’s important to understand how voting “No Award” works.

The Teal Deer: If you want to vote No Award over something, put No Award at the end of your ballot and DO NOT list the things you’re voting No Award over.

Basically, if you put something on your ballot AT ALL, you risk your vote going to that thing, especially since “No Award” is most often the first thing eliminated. The reason it works that way is a little counterintuitive, until you realise that No Award is just another candidate on the ballot.

For an example showing the problem, let’s take perennial No-Award-voting favourite category, “Best Doctor Who Episode Written By Stephen Moffat”. In 2012, the candidates were Community, some dude having a meltdown at the previous year’s Hugo awards, and three largely indistinguishable Doctor Who episodes written by Stephen Moffat, Neil Gaiman aping the style of Stephen Moffat, and Tom MacRae.

Let’s imagine your ballot. You are a sensible person of good taste! You want Community to win and all the other options to die in a fire.

You SHOULD vote:
1. Community
2. No Award

The naive model of Hugo voting that a great many people have might make this mistake, though: Because they want the other options to die in a fire, but ESPECIALLY hate that one dude’s meltdown and the particularly bad Stephen Moffat episode, they might vote like this
1. Community
2. No Award
3. Some dude having a meltdown onstage
4. Stephen Moffat.

And, y’see, that’s bad. Because of how the vote counting works, many people THINK they’re “leaving off” Tom MacRae and Neil Gaiman but making extra sure to “downvote” Moffat and Some Dude, when actually they’re voting *for* Some Dude and Stephen Moffat *over* MacRae and Gaiman.

Because the voters in this category historically have poor taste, let’s imagine the first-round of ballots runs:

Gaiman:50
Moffat: 40
MacRae: 30
Some Dude: 30
No Award: 10
Community: 1. You are the only person with taste this hypothetical year, hypothetical Hugo Voter.

So, Community is eliminated, and all the first-place Community votes (yours) now go to their second choice: No Award. Which is now last and *it* is eliminated, which dumps all the votes for it (including yours) to the next choice down. In your case, Some Dude.

Let’s pretend the 10 people who stuck No Award first really did mean it and didn’t list anything, so their votes now vanish. This leaves the current voting as:

Gaiman:50
Moffat: 40
Some Dude: 31
MacRae: 30… and MacRae is now last, and is eliminated.

Congratulations, Hugo Voter. You just eliminated Tom MacRae by throwing your support to Some Dude, when you *meant* to say that Some Dude was so terrible that the only person he should lose to this year is Stephen Moffat and you were actually somewhat okay with Tom MacRae even if you didn’t think Doctor Who should be mistaken for “best of the year”.

More so than most years? Duly noted. I shall be certain to provide my Hugo recommendations once the Hugo packet has been released and I’ve had the chance to read it. I have a feeling No Award is going to do very, very well across the board this year.

He’ll surely beat this guy: Charles Stross showed a complete lack of class in claiming his rival Larry Correia’s Best Novel-nominated WARBOUND “is on the ballot as a protest nomination, not a real contender” for the award. I’ve read the work of both men, I like the work of both men, and I can say WARBOUND is better than any full-length work Stross has published except the excellent ACCELERANDO. Of course, voters may not be able to read Mr. Stross’s work anyhow since, unlike Mr. Correia’s publisher, Mr. Stross’s publisher has refused to include the complete novel in the Hugo packet.

Stross writes: “My point about Correia is that he and V* D* allegedly engaged in
ballot-stuffing — jointly advancing an example shortlist and
encouraging their fans to vote for the party line. To the extent that
this happened (and we’ll probably find out after the awards when the
usual nomination breakdown is released) then he and V* D* both picked up
votes from one another’s clan, thereby amplifying the volume of their
nominations.”

The point is totally false. Unlike Stross himself, who explicitly declared he was engaged in a “shameless campaign” for specific Hugo nominations this year, I neither campaigned nor ballot-stuffed anything. The fact is that I put up a single post with my own recommendations, which differed at least somewhat from Larry’s, just like dozens of other writers in the field. If I happen to have more loyal readers than other authors, well, it is a popularity contest, isn’t it?

Kicking out Cantor

The Republican Party needs to rid itself of one of its traitorous “leaders”:

Sources tell PJ Media that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s long-time top consultant, Ray Allen, has “angrily” stated to multiple individuals that he intends to bankrupt the Republican Party of Virginia (RPV), to install his own people throughout all levels of RPV’s State Central Committee, and to rebuild the RPV with money from Eric Cantor’s donors.

Ray Allen is considered the “brain trust” of Eric Cantor’s Young Guns, which has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and has hired staff with the intention of retaking control of the RPV at all levels. (Eric Cantor and Ray Allen lost control of the RPV in 2012, when Tea Party/conservative candidates won seats at all levels of the party, taking majority control from Cantor allies.) In this effort to reclaim the majority, Ray Allen has helped orchestrate the parliamentary procedure of “slating” at several RPV conventions this season.

Slating involves disenfranchising all properly registered delegates at a district convention in favor of a vote by only a few dozen handpicked delegates. This tactic was employed to protect the incumbent chairmanships of some Cantor allies: hundreds to thousands of Tea Party/conservative delegates have been forcefully ejected from VA RPV conventions over the past few weeks and months.

However, the ejected delegates and others opposed to Team Cantor have since had success appealing the slating attempts, leaving Allen and Cantor with little to show for their hardball tactics other than alienated constituents, a terrible local public relations problem, and worse, a rapidly gaining primary opponent in challenger Dave Brat.

Eric Cantor seems to think that he is some sort of monarch, not a democratically elected official with no inherent right to the office he holds. Here is hoping that his challenger sends him home and ends his disastrous political career. The Republican Party of Virginia should be actively pressuring him to resign.

40 years of declining wages

I’ve been pointing out this wage stagnation for years; many people even used to argue with me about whether it was real or not. Perhaps in another decade, the US Census Bureau will also admit that these declining wages are the result of a) 2x more women in the post-1950 workforce, and, b) post-1965 immigration:

The real median income of American men who work full-time, year-round peaked forty years ago in 1973, according to data published by the U.S. Census Bureau. In 1973, median earnings for men who worked full-time, year-round were $51,670 in inflation-adjusted 2012 dollars. The median earnings of men who work full-time year-round have never been that high again.

In 2012, the latest year for which the Census Bureau has published an estimate, the real median earnings of men who worked full-time, year-round was $49,398. That was $2,272—or about 4.4 percent—below the peak median earnings of $51,670 in 1973.

Why 1973? Two reasons. The consequences of the 1965 change to immigration law was beginning to take effect and it marked the year that the number of old men leaving the work force stopped balancing the number of young women entering the work force. Essentially, the system was structurally rebalanced to substitute inexpensive young women of child-bearing age in the work force for expensive old men of retirement age.

Which means that young women have been forgoing families so that they can be taxed to pay for old men sitting around collecting social security checks. It was a system structurally and mathematically doomed to eventual failure. When the financial and social security systems collapse, it will be important to remember that it was the encouragement and embrace of careers over marriage that was the necessary factor. Middle-class educated young women were not liberated, they were enticed to enchain themselves to feed the corporate mills in lieu of marriage.

Keep in mind, too, that this only accounts for men who work full-time. If the nonexistent wages of the additional men no longer in the labor force were included in the calculation, the comparison would look even worse. Perhaps one of these days I will bother to work out the numbers, but off-hand, I’d estimate that the 4.4 percent decline from peak median earnings would increase to about 15 percent on the basis of the 10-point decline in the 40-year male employment-to-population ratio.

Women can get as upset as they like about how they should have the right to choose what they want to do and so forth. That doesn’t change the facts. It doesn’t change the math. And it won’t undo the incredible societal damage that has been done by four decades of lowering working men’s wages and producing too few children.

Sedition in the USA

Washington, we may have a problem:

“The causes and motives of seditions are, innovation in religion; taxes; alteration of laws and customs; breaking of privileges; general oppression; advancement of unworthy persons; strangers; dearths; disbanded soldiers; factions grown desperate; and what soever, in offending people, joineth and knitteth them in a common cause….

“Above all things, good policy is to be used, that the treasure and moneys, in a state, be not gathered into few hands. For otherwise a state may have a great stock, and yet starve. And money is like muck, not good except it be spread. This is done, chiefly by suppressing, or at least keeping a strait hand, upon the devouring trades of usury, ingrossing great pasturages, and the like.”
– Francis Bacon,  “Of Seditions And Troubles”

  • Innovation in religion, check.
  • Taxes, check.
  • Alteration of laws and customs, check.
  • Breaking of privileges, check.
  • General oppression, check.
  • Advancement of unworthy persons, check.
  • Strangers, check.
  • Dearths, check.
  • Disbanded soldiers, check.
  • Factions grown desperate, not yet.

And as for suppressing the devouring trade of usury, well, the economy may be in the doldrums and the employment/population ratio is down, but at least the stock market and the big banks are doing well.

VP’s First Rule

1. You will be addressed in the style you choose. If you come in here
slinging insults and acting disrespectfully, you will be treated with a
contemptuous and derisive disdain that will, based on past experience,
probably upset you. This is particularly true for visitors who are
under the impression, mistaken or not, that they are far more
intelligent than the average individual here. If instead, you elect to
offer substantive and civil criticism, then you will meet with a
similarly civil response.

I understand that some would-be rhetoricians mistakenly think that it is effective rhetoric to inappropriately apply labels that I have created specifically to describe certain things to me, to this blog, and to my readers. This is a false claim, moreover, a claim that can only be made in the full knowledge that it is not true.


So, be advised that if you describe this blog as a warren or its readers as rabbits, I will respond to you as if what you claim to believe is actually true. Which is to say that you will be expelled from the so-called warren in precisely the same manner you would be if it were a real intellectual warren.


If you wish to criticize, then criticize. You are free to do so. I have no objection to straightforward and honest criticism. But do not lie. Do not bear false witness. Do not engage in dishonest childish rhetorical tactics. And keep the First Rule in mind.

An interview with Nicholas Wade

Social Matter interviews the author of A Troublesome Inheritance: 

In writing A Troublesome Inheritance, what response did you expect to receive? What has been your impression of reviews so far?

I feared the book would be condemned out of hand and have been delighted that the preponderance of reviews so far have been favorable.  The two main themes of the book – that race is biological, evolution continuous – are not so hard to accept, and I hope that I’m pushing on an open door. 

In your book you write “The rise of the West is an event not just in history but also in human evolution.” How much do we miss in our understanding of the rise and fall of civilizations by not incorporating the role evolution plays in human populations?

A thesis of the book is that social institutions rest on human social behavior, which is shaped by evolution.  Institutions have a large cultural component, so it’s hard to know at present how important evolution has been.  But I think we should look out for it in all major social transitions, such as the foraging-settler transition, the escape from tribalism, and the Industrial Revolution, and if one accepts that the natural selection has been active here then all major societies probably have been shaped by evolution to some extent.

I think Wade’s reference to “evolution” is considerably broader than that customarily utilized by biologists when referring to evolution by natural selection, (for example, Wade occasionally uses “natural selection” to encompass selection that does not appear to be based solely on environmental pressures), but among other things, his book points to one obvious point of logical tension in the progressive dogma. If TENS is true, then a lot of progressive dogma is not merely false, but completely impossible. And if TENS is not true, then a lesser, but still considerable amount of progressive dogma has, contra to progressive assumptions, no greater basis in science than many competing non-progressive dogmas.

Which is precisely why most progressives attempt to avoid thinking about such matters. The relative silence with which Wade’s book has met from its anticipated critics is a strong indication that they at least suspect they are not merely outgunned, but scientifically outdated.

Pale Moon will stay DRM-free

Since many of you who have made the switch from Firefox to Pale Moon wanted to know if Mozilla’s embrace of DRM meant that Pale Moon would follow suit, I shot the responsible party an email and received the following note:

“I’ve researched the topic and I believe it goes straight against what FOSS
stands for, so I will keep Pale Moon DRM-free.”

It would be hard to describe the issue more succinctly than that. If you’re still using Firefox and you don’t support DRM, give Pale Moon a try.