The ire of the irrelevant

What is it with these Canadian SFWA members?  A SF nonentity is foolish enough to call John C. Wright a liar despite the readily accessible public record:

Andrew Barton ‏@ActsofAndrewB
John C Wright is either ignorant or a liar. Theodore Beale was kicked out of SFWA for using its Twitter feed to disseminate a racist screed.

Andrew Barton ‏@ActsofAndrewB
Personally, given the evidence I have seen thus far, my own suspicion is that John C. Wright knows he is lying and does not give a fuck.

Andrew Barton ‏@ActsofAndrewB
I know this because I am one of those who sent an email to my SFWA board rep demanding Beale’s removal. Good riddance to a goddamned swine.

Andrew Barton ‏@ActsofAndrewB
Sometimes I feel like just scouring this planet of life would be the most expedient course.

Andrew Barton ‏@ActsofAndrewB
Folk’re sure confident saying things online that they wouldn’t if they said them to my face, giving me a chance to break their fucking nose.

The self-proclaimed pencil-neck geek is a real tuff guy. It’s fascinating to observe the way these SWPLs insist that it is beyond the pale to call a deceitful and obnoxious African-American “an educated but ignorant half-savage” but deem it acceptable to label Hispanics “goddamned swine”. No wonder so few writers of color, such as Larry Correia and Sarah Hoyt, have any desire to join the organization.

At this point, any SF/F writer would have to be a complete fool to think that joining SFWA will enhance his career in any way. SFWA members know that SFWA provides a writer with zero credibility with the publishers, (editors in the SFWA Forum openly joke about how only total noobs are so stupid as to mention their memberships when they are submitting manuscripts), so there is literally no professional upside that comes with the downside of paying for having one’s speech policed.

Now consider that this SFWA nobody was attacking a science fiction master on the very day that Mr. Wright’s novella was #86 on Amazon: 4,117 people downloaded AWAKE IN THE NIGHT yesterday and the day before.  Another new release from Mr. Wright has been #1 in Science Fiction History & Criticism for three straight days. It is readily apparent that Mr. Wright doesn’t need SFWA. I certainly don’t need SFWA. Neither does anyone else anymore.

It is very easy to demonstrate that Mr. Barton is a liar himself. The SFWA did not give any reason for expelling an unnamed member last year and still has issued no official statement concerning any of the reasons for its actions: “We will continue to omit the expelled individual’s name and the details of his behavior on advice of counsel.”

And as I pointed out in my response to the SFWA report concerning the various false claims about SFWA’s “twitter feed”: “the channel does not belong to SFWA, the Content did not belong to SFWA, the content was deemed permissible by the channel owner, and the personal attack contained in the blog post to which the tweet linked was fully in line with previous personal attacks made by dozens of other members of the organization in official SFWA spaces. Therefore it is incorrect to claim that an official SFWA channel was misused via the marking for inclusion of the blog post of June 13, 2013 in the @sfwaauthors Twitter feed.”

Barton is only one of many SFWA members who simply do not grasp that “@sfwaauthors” is not, and has never been, “SFWA’s Twitter feed”. That is “@sfwa”, which according to Twitter’s Terms of Usage, does not belong to SFWA either. They also do not grasp that the tweet in question contained nothing that was racist or offensive, it was a simple link to a blog post. And finally, anyone who has read either the 34-page SFWA report or my detailed response to it knows that the SFWA Board’s action was based on its active thought policing of a) me on my personal blog, b) the various commenters on my blog, and c) people with no connection to me commenting on sites with no connection to me. The SFWA President even admitted as much the other day: “Board investigation of harassment complaints may take public statements into consideration”. 


By which they not only mean public statements by their members, but also by anyone who happens to comment on a member’s blog or anywhere else on the Internet.

Mr. Wright’s view of SFWA is entirely correct. The SFWA Board has overtly and undeniably claimed for itself the right to police the public statements of SFWA members. Although the SFWA Board has done its best to bury its own report, inadvertently encouraging members like Andrew Barton to present fiction as fact, the truth is out there. Some of the sub-irrelevant SFWA members, such as the clueless wonder who keeps posting links to her blog post here on unrelated topics, would be advised to read it.

Doubling down

Nicolas Kristof has learned absolutely nothing from the reaction of Boko Haram:

Women’s rights advocates in Nigeria noisily demanded action, and social media mavens around the world spread word on Twitter, Facebook and online petitions — and a movement grew.

The #BringBackOurGirls hashtag, started on Twitter by a Nigerian lawyer, has now been shared more than one million times. A Nigerian started a petition on Change.org, calling for more efforts to find the girls, and more than 450,000 people around the world have signed it.

Nigerian women embarrassed the government by announcing that they would strip off their clothes and march naked into the Sambisa forest to confront the militants and recover the girls….

All of us can respond more directly. Boko Haram, whose name means roughly “Western education is a sin,” is keeping women and girls marginalized; conversely, we can help educate and empower women. Ultimately, the greatest threat to extremism isn’t a drone overhead but a girl with a book.

Mother’s Day is this Sunday, and, by all means, let’s use it to celebrate the moms in our lives with flowers and brunches. But let’s also use the occasion to honor the girls still missing in Nigeria.

One way is a donation to support girls going to school around Africa through the Campaign for Female Education, Camfed.org; a $40 gift pays for a girl’s school uniform.

Kristof is acting as if the young women are not legitimate military targets. But that is the entire point. He, and many others like him, have made them legitimate military targets by intentionally turning them into weapons in a cultural war. And he had better pray that Boko Haram does not follow al Qaeda’s lead in bringing the West’s cultural war on the South and East back to the West.

At Virginia Tech, one mentally disturbed immigrant managed to kill 33 college students. A small team of Boko Haram activists could probably manage to kill at least five times that number should they target an American university. And the latest news out of Nigeria makes it clear that they are at least one step ahead of the likes of Kristof et al.

Islamist insurgents have killed hundreds in a town in Nigeria’s northeast this week, the area’s senator, a resident and the Nigerian news media reported on Wednesday, as more than 200 schoolgirls abducted by the militants, known as Boko Haram, remained missing.

The latest attack, on Monday, followed a classic Boko Haram pattern: Dozens of militants wearing fatigues and wielding AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenade launchers descended on the town of Gamboru Ngala, chanting “Allahu akbar,” firing indiscriminately and torching houses. When it was over, at least 336 people had been killed and hundreds of houses and cars had been set on fire, said Waziri Hassan, who lives there, and Senator Ahmed Zanna….

Gamboru, a town of perhaps 3,000 people, “is now burned into ashes,” Mr. Hassan said. “I saw it with my own eyes, 171 dead bodies, scattered around.” At least 18 police officers were killed, but Mr. Zanna said there were no military forces in the town because all had been drafted in the search for the schoolgirls.

Perhaps the Nigerian government actually knew what it was doing when it didn’t drop everything to engage in a fruitless search for the young women, who may not even be inside the country’s borders anyhow. Regardless, in the end, there can only ever be one result between those who “fight” by public posturing and those who fight by taking arms.

UPDATE: The US military cannot get involved as it is prohibited by law from collaboration with Nigerian security forces.

A second wind

Political correctness is vital to the Left, because disqualification is the only form of argument they have left to them:

This ubiquity of “check your privilege” suggests that political correctness is now entering a second generation and gaining a second wind.  While political correctness previously concentrated on race and gender, the new focus on inequality seems to have emboldened the campus left to put class back on the list of identity politics.  Of course, using the phrase “check your privilege” to cut off debate on campus is not nearly as destructive as what communists did to people who were from the “wrong” class. Many children of privilege then were sent to reeducation camps to reflect or were even silenced never to speak again.  But it stems from the same impulse to replace reason with power.

This new form of an old disorder also shows that despite the orthodoxy on many campuses many left-liberals remain very afraid of classical liberal and conservative dissent.  Just as students who protested Condi Rice’s prospective graduation speech at Rutgers showed strength in numbers but weakness in intellectual confidence, so do those who parrot this new campus slogan.  If your underlying argument is flawed, you do need a force other than logic and evidence to sustain your position.  Political correctness is an admission of intellectual frailty.

My privilege is my intelligence. It’s hardly my fault that the other side correctly sees itself as being disadvantaged and underprivileged.

Sophisticated economics

Lest you be under the impression that the Federal Reserve is in control of anything, consider this informal Q&A with Ben Bernanke:

RUHLE: … you recently had dinner with Ben Bernanke. What went down? We didn’t get to be there.

EINHORN: Well, it was — I watched him for years in front of Congress and speaking and watched him on TV and “60 Minutes” and —

RUHLE: And what was your opinion of him before you had dinner?

EINHORN: I was — I’ve been critical. I’ve been critical of him for a very long time. And the dinner for me, in one way it was cathartic because I got to ask him all these questions that had been on my mind for a very long period of time, right? And then on the other side, it was like sort of frightening because the answers weren’t any better than I thought that they might be.

SCHATZKER: What did you ask him?

EINHORN: I asked several things. He started out by explaining that he was 100 percent sure that there’s not going to be hyperinflation. And not that I think that there’s going to be hyperinflation, but it’s like how do you get to 100 percent certainty of anything? Like why can’t you be 99 percent certain and like how do you manage that risk in the last 1 percent? And he says, well, hyperinflations generally occur after wars and that’s not here. And there’s no sign of inflation now and Japan’s done a lot more quantitative easing than we’ve done, and they don’t have it. So if there is a big inflation, the Fed will know what to do. That was kind of the answer.

RUHLE: What did you say?

EINHORN: That was it. Then it went to the next question. So then a few minutes later it came back and I got to ask him about the jelly donuts. And my thesis is that it’s like too much of a good thing. Like lowering rates and quantitative easing and these stimulative things, they help but with a diminishing return. And eventually you go too far and it’s like eating the 35th jelly donut. It just doesn’t help you. It actually slows you down and makes you feel bad. And my feeling has been that by having rates at zero for a very, very long time the harm that we’re doing to savers outweighs the benefits that might be seen elsewhere in the economy. So I got to ask him about this.

SCHATZKER: Okay, and what did he say?

EINHORN: Well first of all he says, you’re wrong. That it was good. And then he said the reason is if you raise interest rates for savers, somebody has to pay that interest. So you don’t create any value in the economy because for every saver there has to be a borrower.

And what I came back to him was I said, but wait a minute. You said for a long time we haven’t had enough fiscal stimulus, and who’s on the other side of the low interest trade? It’s the government. And so if the government — if we raise the rates, the government would have to pay more money to savers. You’d have the bigger deficits. You’d create the stimulus, the fiscal stimulus that you’ve been complaining that Congress wouldn’t give to you, right? And savers would benefit from the higher rates and because savings is spent at a very high rate in terms of interest — interest income on savings is spent at a high percentage, you’d get a real flow through into the economy.

It gets incredibly tiresome hearing these idiot Keynesians – and yes, monetarists are Keynesians – constantly reminding everyone that for every buyer, there has to be a seller. Although Bernanke’s formulation is technically incorrect, as there does NOT have to be a borrower for every saver because not all savers are lenders.

We can cut him some slack on that; it was an informal conversation and since the discussion concerned interest rates, only savers who are lenders, (which is to say depositors), were in context here. But what we cannot cut him any slack on is the idea that this statement of the obvious actually addressed the issue.

The real reason there isn’t a risk of hyperinflation is the same reason rates have been keep artificially low for years: we are in an ongoing state of credit disinflation. All that cheap credit has gone into the banks and the equity markets to prop them up, but as Einhorn has noted, the law of diminishing returns is beginning to take effect.

Karl Denninger explains the problem with quantitative easing:

The basic economic equality is MV = PQ; that is, “Money”(ness) X Velocity (times each unit of “moneyness” is spent in a given amount of time) = Price (of each item or service produced) X Quantity (number of goods and/or services sold.)

This is a fact and nothing can change it.

Now here’s the problem — we state “PQ” (otherwise known as GDP) in units of “M”.

If you don’t understand the problem that QE presents (indeed, that any borrowing presents) with this you’re not very bright.

Short-term borrowing — that is, a loan that is quickly extinguished — doesn’t change “M”.  It time shifts a transaction but economically is otherwise a non-event from a monetary perspective.  If I borrow $100 from you to buy a night at the bar, get paid on Friday and give you back your $100 (with or without interest) I have simply changed the night at the bar’s economic event from Friday to Tuesday; further, the event Tuesday now cannot happen on Friday (as well) because the $100 has already been spent.

I have not changed whether it happens at all.

QE, however, is a permanent change in “M”.  It is intended to “make up” for private borrowing for which there is either no demand or no supply.  That is, in the market today there is insufficient incentive for private capital to be loaned either because the interest rate that can be earned doing so is unattractive for the risk inherent in the loan or there is nobody willing and able to borrow at the offered rate.

But since “QE” is not “paid back” and withdrawn it permanently changes the amount of “M” in the system.  Since GDP is stated in “M” to get an accurate account of GDP you must subtract back off any permanent change in “M” from GDP.

QE, on a rolling 12 month basis, is about $1 trillion.  The US Economy is about $17 trillion.  Therefore you must subtract the amount of QE added back out, which is about 5.9% of the total economy!

In other words with the current GDP “growth” of effectively zero (0.1%) the economy is in fact in deep recession as the actual “growth rate” is currently -5.8%.

This is caused by QE.

Perhaps a ribbon is in order

Strangely enough, all the Senatorial tears and Nicolas Kristof columns don’t appear to have convinced Boko Haram to stop targeting girls:

Suspected Boko Haram gunmen kidnapped eight girls from a village near one of the Islamists’ strongholds in northeastern Nigeria overnight, police and residents said on Tuesday. The abduction of the girls, aged 12 to 15, followed the kidnapping of more than 200 other schoolgirls by the militant group last month, whom it has threatened to sell into slavery.

Lazarus Musa, a resident of the village of Warabe, told Reuters that armed men had opened fire during the raid.

“They were many, and all of them carried guns. They came in two vehicles painted in army color. They started shooting in our village,” Musa said by telephone from the village in the hilly Gwoza area, Boko Haram’s main base.

A police source, who asked not to be identified, said the girls were taken away on trucks, along with looted livestock and food.

This can only mean one thing: a ribbon campaign. That will show the anti-educationists!

Subhuman action

“Take one monkey, train it to
wear a fedora and hypnotise it in to believing it is a Towering Literary
Intellect. I give you N.K. Jemisin.”
– Damien Walter

Shocking stuff! A straight white male calling an African-American woman a monkey! I am as agog as I am aghast! Oh, wait a minute… it seems there was a minor typo there.

“Take one monkey, train it to
wear a fedora and hypnotise it in to believing it is a Towering Literary
Intellect. I give you John C. Wright.”
– Damien Walter
Upon further review, it appears the illustrious Mr. Walter was only calling a white man a monkey. That’s COMPLETELY different, of course. It is acceptable to call a straight white male what one cannot call a gay black female. Because equality. And privilege.

In any event, it is more than a little amusing to see such a complete non-entity striking a pose as the literary superior to one of the greatest living science fiction masters. I would direct you to Mr. Walter’s work for the purposes of fair comparison, but unfortunately, he hasn’t published so much as a single novel. This behavior might appear inexplicable to the rationally minded, but it is in fact entirely predictable.

Because Damien Walter illustrates the primary point made in “Restless Heart of Darkness”, the final essay in John C. Wright’s brilliant and #1 bestselling TRANSHUMAN AND SUBHUMAN:

I realized why it is that the current mainstream modern thought, despite its illogical and pointless nature, is so persistent, nay, so desperate. I realized why these Moderns never admit they are wrong no matter how obvious the error, nor can they compromise, nor hold a rational discussion, nor a polite one, nor can they restrain themselves. They can neither win nor surrender….

The unwillingness of the Progressives to discuss their beliefs is because one of their beliefs (the most outrageously false of all, and most easy to prove false) is that they are superior beings, superior by virtue of their greater intelligence, broader open-mindedness, higher education, finer sentiments, and greater compassion, surrounded by yowling and filthy yahoos. These Progressives, who have never read a word of Aristotle, much less read him in Greek, boast that they cannot discuss philosophy honestly with a psychotic yet retarded Neanderthal like me, due to my inferior nature. Well, I cannot argue with their assessment of my education, except to say ἀντικεῖσθαι δ᾽ ὁ ἀλαζὼν φαίνεται τῷ ἀληθευτικῷ· χείρων γάρ.

Tom Simon adds some not inapt comments after dealing with a different individual exhibiting very similar tendencies to Damien Walter:

I used to deal with trolls for a living (saddest job I ever had), and I can tell you that it probably isn’t masochism. More likely, he is so socially inept and so incapable of reading emotional clues from text, he actually thinks that his words are inflicting righteous damage upon us, the heinous foe, and that he is returning to his lair covered in glory after causing us all to writhe in soul-deep agony at the sudden exposure of our horrible, horrible guilt. And he is so plug ignorant of the art of dialectic that he actually believes he is winning his arguments with us.

Moreover, as a person who despises religion, theology, philosophy, and history, who knows nothing about art, literature, science, technology, or any of the useful trades, he is gloriously unequipped to appreciate any mode of thought but his own – and his own mode contains no actual thought, just an angry clashing of slogans without ground or consequent, like Nietzsche on cheap drugs. Therefore (hello again, Dunning and Kruger) he imagines that his own mental slush is superior to all our thoughts; that we disagree with him is, to him, proof of our imbecility.

At least Mr. Simon’s troll was willing to attempt to engage in discourse, however ineptly. Which does put him ahead of Damien Walters, the current president of the SFWA, the former 3x president of the SFWA, and numerous other would-be luminaries of the field.

Post-constitutional America

So much for the theory that transforming the racial and cultural demographics of America was not tantamount to turning America into not-America:

Pulitzer prize winning reporter Chris Hedges – along with journalist Naomi Wolf, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, activist Tangerine Bolen and others – sued the government to join the NDAA’s allowance of the indefinite detention of Americans.

The trial judge in the case asked the government attorneys 5 times whether journalists like Hedges could be indefinitely detained simply for interviewing and then writing about bad guys. The government refused to promise that journalists like Hedges won’t be thrown in a dungeon for the rest of their lives without any right to talk to a judge.

The trial judge ruled that the indefinite detention bill was unconstitutional, holding:

    This Court rejects the government’s suggestion that American citizens can be placed in military detention indefinitely, for acts they could not predict might subject them to detention.

But the court of appeal overturned that decision, based upon the assumption that limited the NDAA to non-U.S. citizens:

    We thus conclude, consistent with the text and buttressed in part by the legislative history, that Section 1021 [of the 2012 NDAA] means this: With respect to individuals who are not citizens, are not lawful resident aliens, and are not captured or arrested within the United States, the President’s [Authorization for Use of Military Force] authority includes the authority to detain those responsible for 9/11 as well as those who were a part of, or substantially supported, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners—a detention authority that Section 1021 concludes was granted by the original AUMF. But with respect to citizens, lawful resident aliens, or individuals captured or arrested in the United States, Section 1021 simply says nothing at all.

The court of appeal ignored the fact that the co-sponsors of the indefinite detention law said it does apply to American citizens, and that top legal scholars agree. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of the case, thus blessing and letting stand the indefinite detention law stand unchanged.

 Now, do you really think it is an accident that a post-Christian and multiracial America just happens to also be post-constitutional? Do you really think it is nothing more than pure coincidence that those who reject the strictures of the Natural Law also reject the limits imposed by Constitutional Law?

The men who wrote and signed the Constitution were, for the most part, straight white male Protestants of English descent. There is not a single straight, white, male Protestant of English descent on the U.S. Supreme Court that just granted the military and the executive branch agencies extra-judicial powers over the American citizenry. If you do not believe that the differing population demographics that distinguish European culture from aboriginal culture are irrelevant, why do you assume that the different population demographics between the authors of the Constitution and the current Supreme Court must be irrelevant?

The lethal economics of asthma

Medical malpractice is more dangerous to children in the UK than guns:

Asthma sufferers are dying needlessly because of failings by GPs and health services, a national review has found. The report, led by the Royal College of Physicians, found that two thirds of deaths from the condition — including almost all of those involving children — might have been prevented. Experts warned of “a tragic waste of life”.

The UK has one of the highest asthma death rates in the Western world — third only behind Estonia and Spain — and the number of fatalities is rising rapidly.

In 2012, 1,250 people died from asthma — a 10 per cent rise in three years. The review suggests more than 800 such deaths could have been avoided with the right care.

Considering that there were fewer than 100 gun deaths per year even prior to the UK’s ill-advised crackdown on gun ownership, the statistics suggest that the British would have done better to ban GPs than guns. It is evident that children in the UK are at least 100x more at risk from their doctor than they are from guns.

AWAKE IN THE NIGHT free on Amazon

In case you’re wondering what all the fuss is about, or despite the many excellent reviews you still have not been moved to put John C. Wright at the front of your reading list, today opportunity knocks as today and tomorrow, AWAKE IN THE NIGHT is free on Amazon.

The novella was included in the Years Best Science Fiction anthology published in 2004. It makes for an marvelous introduction to the terrors of the Night Land, as well as to the dark beauty of Mr. John C. Wright’s pen.

In not entirely unrelated news, I would like to thank you all for an astonishingly successful launch of Mr. Wright’s TRANSHUMAN AND SUBHUMAN. I expected it to be of significant interest to many of you, but I can’t honestly say that I expected this:

  • #1 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > History & Criticism
  • #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Good & Evil
  •  #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > Criticism & Theory

Tom Kratman, columnist

This should strike fear into Tranzi hearts everywhere. Tom Kratman has a new column, which he inaugurates with an argument for better service rifles:

In the last 40 years there have been a number of attempts at replacing the M16 family. All, prior to 2008, have failed or been rejected. All were too ambitious. For example, the rifle project for the 1980s, the Advanced Combat Rifle, demanded a 100% improvement over the M16. A 100% improvement? That means that we will never have a rifle that’s 99% better. I’ve read that it only cost $300 million by the time it was canceled. What a bargain.

A little aside here, when something calls for nothing less than a 100% improvement in a weapon, be very skeptical. Does that mean 25% more accurate, 25% lighter, 25% cheaper, and with 25% better aesthetics for public relations?

Would 100% better PR be enough? Or is 100% more accurate necessary? What if it were 100% more accurate, but twice as heavy? And if it cost a hundred times more? All in all, wasn’t it really just an attempt to set a goal nobody could measure? I suspect so.

In any case, in killing the ACR, the Infantry School reported that rifles had reached their peak and only exploding bullets could improve matters. Never mind, of course, that this begged the question of whether the M16 family was that peak. Also, Fort Benning wasn’t serious about the exploding bullets, actually; they’re illegal. As for rifles having reached their peak, no, they haven’t and the only way someone could claim they had was by discounting any improvement that was less than a doubling. More on that a bit later.

Someone, however, apparently took that exploding bullet idea to heart. The next attempt was the OICW, the Objective Infantry Combat Weapon, a combined rifle and (semi) smart, fairly flat shooting, 20mm grenade launcher. This effort, while not reaching the previous attempt’s stated goal of 100% improvement in the rifle, still managed to chop the length of the rifle barrel down to something that even an M4 could sneer at, while allowing for the launching an utterly and preposterously inadequate 20mm grenade, albeit with great accuracy.

On the other hand, OICW did at least manage a more that 200% increase… in the weight… before being killed… after spending… well… nobody seems willing to admit what was spent. One suspects that the sunk and lost cost of OICW was just staggering, beyond belief.

And you know what’s really scary there? This is scary: The French PAPOP-2 seems to actually do most of what OICW was supposed to, without either castrating the rifle or making it a joke in poor taste, and while tossing a 35mm grenade that is actually pretty lethal, while keeping the weight within something more or less tolerable. That’s right, the French. Savor the taste of that one for a while.

It’s just as well DoD hasn’t hired John C. Wright as a consultant. Forget exploding bullets, they’d be blowing billions on AI bullets smart enough to argue with the shooter over the windage.