Sounds just like SFWA

What is happening in Birmingham, England is pretty much what happened over the last 20 years at the SF/F publishers, and what is happening right now in SFWA:

Islamic fundamentalists are allegedly plotting to convert Birmingham schools so that children are taught according to strict Islamic codes by ousting teachers through a dirty tricks campaign and replacing them with radicals. The city council and the Birmingham Mail have received documents which purport to show that jihadists – or those fighting against non-Muslims – are targeting schools and orchestrating false allegations against staff, including non-Muslims, in an operation dubbed Trojan Horse.

The SFWA knows all about false allegations; it has an entire report full of them. Notice that even on Wikipedia, the SFWA action is falsely reported.

“In June, Beale used the SFWA Twitter feed to post several controversial links to his blog, in which he called an African-American author a “half-savage” and an editor a “fat frog.”. After complaints from members, in August, the SFWA Board announced that they were expelling Beale as a member due to violations of their by-laws. Beale posted a letter from the SFWA president to his blog.”

Let’s count the errors:

  1. I used the @swfaauthors feed, not the official SFWA one. They are two different Twitter accounts.
  2. I did not post several controversial links to my blog. I posted one link and it contained nothing controversial. It was the blog post that was controversial, not the Tweet.
  3. The SFWA Board did not announce that they were expelling me. They did not name the member expelled in their announcement. As Locus Online correctly noted, I was the one who announced my expulsion.
  4. The SFWA Board did not announce I was expelled due to violations of their by-laws. The SFWA Board did not give any reason for the expulsion of the unnamed member expelled.
  5. To be complete, I referred to N.K. Jemisin as “an educated, but ignorant half-savage, with little more understanding of
    what it took to build a new literature by ‘a bunch of beardy old
    middle-class middle-American guys’ than an illiterate Igbotu tribesman
    has of how to build a jet engine” and I stand by the assertion. I also pointed out that she is a liar.
  6. In addition to her resemblance to an overweight amphibian, I also observed that Teresa Nielsen Hayden is “grotesquely malformed” and does not appear to belong to the same species or phylum as my wife.

The SFWA are irreligious fundamentalists, they just happen to be softer, squishier, and more cowardly than the Islamic variety. And this is why diversity is always and everywhere doomed. Let one rabbit in, and its priority is always to get another rabbit in there with it. Once accomplished, the breeding begins. And when they feel they have sufficient numbers, they begin forcing all the not-rabbits out.

Why Putin invaded

It’s not too hard to understand once you realize that the anti-democratic coup in Ukraine had nothing to do with the Ukrainian people.

Arseniy Yatseniuk; born May 22, 1974 is a Ukrainian politician,
economist and lawyer who is the Prime Minister of Ukraine following the
parliament’s 2014 removal of Viktor Yanukovych from power. He was born to in a family of
Jewish-Ukrainian professors of the Chernivtsi University.  From September until November 2001, Arseniy served as an “acting” Minister of Economy of Crimea, and from November of the same year until January 2003, served as the official Minister of Economy of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea.

From November 2003 to February 2005, Yatsenyuk served as the first vice-president of the head of the National Bank of Ukraine under Serhiy Tyhypko. After Tyhypko left the National Bank, Arseniy Yatsenyuk was put in charge of the National Bank.

This is as if Obama was chased from the White House after a few weeks of demonstrations and it was announced that Alan Greenspan was now the president. This marks the second time in two years that a banker has been placed directly in power without being elected, first Italy and now Ukraine.

Well, this should end well. We all know how Eastern Europeans just love rich unelected Jews ruling over them. (Yatseniuk is actually Greek Orthodox, however.) I don’t know Russian or Ukrainian history well enough to know if this is supposed to be revenge for the pogroms or the sort of madness that led to the pogroms in the first place.

Stacking the deck

The mainstream media picks up on a tactic that has been utilized by left-leaning academics for years:

Neither CBS nor ABC have included a skeptical scientists in their news shows within the past 1,300 days, but both networks included alarmists within the past 160 days — CBS as recently as 22 days ago. When the networks did include other viewpoints, the experts were dismissed as “out of the scientific mainstream” or backed by “oil and coal companies.”

The networks were able to promote the myth that there is a scientific consensus for man-made, catastrophic climate change by including climate alarmists much more often than skeptical scientists and by challenging the credentials of the skeptics that they did include.

There are thousands of skeptical scientists, so it’s not like the networks couldn’t find any. Marc Morano, who runs the website Climate Depot, has published a special report listing more than 1,000 dissenting scientists worldwide who dispute man-made global warming claims made by the likes of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former Vice President Al Gore.

CBS was the worst, ignoring skeptical scientists for 1,391 days, ever since the May 15, 2010, “Evening News.” That night, CBS interviewed former NASA climatologist, Dr. Roy Spencer during an extensive profile of alarmist meteorologist, and non-Ph.D., Dan Satterfield.

It was just 22 days ago, on Feb. 12, 2014, that CBS included an alarmist physicist, Dr. Michio Kaku on “This Morning.” Kaku is a contributor to “This Morning” and that day he warned of the “heating up of the North Pole” which “could cause gigantic storms of historic proportions.”

ABC last included a skeptical scientist 1,383 days ago. During the May 23, 2010, segment of “World News,” ABC played a brief, 23-second clip of Princeton-educated Dr. Fred Singer expressing his skepticism over man-made climate change, along with clips of two alarmist scientists. Singer’s was the only opposing view in that report and his views were actually taken from a much earlier interview aired on ABC March 23, 2008.

This reminds me of the way most evolutionists and atheists are always willing to debate some random individual, but are very careful to avoid taking on their more intelligent and intellectually dangerous opponents. For example, PZ Myers has been running away from me for years, despite the fact that he openly issued a challenge and even though my readership has continued to grow steadily while his continues to shrink.

Of course, all this tactic accomplishes is to drive even more people to the alternative media, where the more intelligent and autodidactic readers are increasingly congregating.

A model comparison

A few weeks ago, I pointed out how the former president of the SFWA declared that no-advance deals were “wrong”, “a Shitty Deal”, and possibly “worse than no deal at all”. Other traditionally published writers have even described them as “unethical”.  The former president also asserted: “Advances are typically all authors make from a book.” This is important to keep in mind when one considers what SFWA presently considers to be a professional payment as per its membership requirements.

  1. Word rate: $0.05 per word, increasing to $0.06 later this year
  2. One Paid Sale of a prose fiction book for which the author has been paid $2000 or more.

As it happens, Castalia House had just released two books, one by Mr. Kratman and one by me, which allows us to compare the real world results of the traditional professional model and the no-advance model which various authors have criticized so vociferously. Mr. Kratman has generously permitted us to use his book as a general example. Let’s look at the word rate model first.

1) At 20,000 words, Big Boys Don’t Cry would have commanded a flat-fee payment of $1,000.00.  Depending upon the publisher and the publication, Mr. Kratman would have received the payment between two and eight weeks from the time he delivered the manuscript. He delivered the manuscript on February 21st, so he would have received $1,000 sometime between 1 March and 12 April. He would not have received anything more than that.

2) If he received an advance of $2,500, that would have been against a royalty of 25 percent. He would have received $1,250 about a month after signing, then another $1,250 sometime between 21 March and 21 November 21. (Having been signed to Pocket Books, I am well aware that the check is seldom delivered promptly upon delivery and approval of the manuscript.) This is actually a conservative estimate, as increasingly payments are being divided into three parts, signing, delivery, and publication.

The performance of Mr. Kratman’s book is spelled out in comparison to the traditional model on the Castalia House blog. Due to the speed with which Castalia publishes and pays royalties, Mr. Kratman can expect to receive his first payment by 18 March, 23 days after publication. And he can also reasonably expect to receive more than $2,500 in royalties several weeks BEFORE he would have been likely to receive the second part of a theoretical “advance payment”. Moreover, once the $2,500 figure has been surpassed, he will continue receiving TWICE the royalties he would have under the traditional model.

Now, publishers are not stupid. They will not continue to publish authors who regularly underperform their advances. So, logic dictates that the only advantage of advance payments is to provide a small measure of very short-term security to authors who are unsure of their ability to sell their books and are willing to give away half their future earnings in exchange for that security. Nor have book advances been the historical norm, as the New York Times noted in 2009.

“In the old days,” the novelist Henry Bech, John Updike’s fictional alter ego, once said, “a respectable author never asked for an advance; that was strictly for the no-talents starving down in the Village.”

Both math and history make it obvious. Advances are for no-talents and the no-advance model is materially beneficial to the author. So, if you are an talented author who is confident in his ability to sell books and therefore interested in working with Castalia, have a look at our Concepts page, as there are certain books we would like to publish that none of our current authors are writing.

UPDATE: Since we have had a few inquiries, please note the following submission requirements for Concept-based submissions: “While we normally require completed drafts for submissions, in the case
of Castalia Concept-based submissions, we are willing to review
five-chapter novel submissions so long as they are accompanied by a
complete and detailed outline of the book or series. Novella submissions should still consist
of complete drafts.”

The Israeli melting pot

I don’t see how the Israelis can expect anything but world condemnation for their insistence on the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state in light of how an entire generation has been indoctrinated to believe that diversity is Israel’s strength:

In
Washington this week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel
sounded two different notes about peace negotiations with the
Palestinians, which are nearing a critical juncture. In a speech to the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobby, he
enthusiastically advocated a peace agreement as a means to improve
Israel’s ties with its Arab neighbors and “catapult the region forward”
on issues like health, energy and education.

But at
other moments, a more familiar skepticism was apparent. He demanded that
Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state with “no excuses, no
delays.” In response, a senior Palestinian official, Nabil Shaath,
accused Mr. Netanyahu of putting an end to peace talks because
Palestinians have already rejected that designation. (Palestinians
recognize Israel as a state, but not as a Jewish state because they
believe that that would undercut the rights of Palestinian refugees.)

Insistence
on a Jewish state is clearly the very worst form of geopolitical
raciss. How could a Jewish state be any less raciss than insisting
America be recognized as a White Anglo-Saxon state? Or that England be
recognized as an English state? Or Nigeria be recognized as an Igbo
state?

Israel’s choice is pretty simple. No White
European state, no Jewish state. If diversity is America’s strength,
then it is Israel’s strength too.

This is why bitches need smackdowns

Ronda Rousey couldn’t even beat me. Mayweather would KO her in less than 30 seconds.

UFC women’s bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey has dominated her opponents since coming on the scene and is ready to set her sights even higher.  Rousey, who is an Olympic bronze medalist in judo, said she could beat undefeated welterweight champion Floyd Mayweather if he were ever so inclined to step into the octagon.

“I wouldn’t even stand up, I wouldn’t even be anywhere near him. I would just do like a little army crawl over there, and he would have to run away,” Rousey told Power 106 FM.

This is why it behooves some woman to have the crap kicked out of her in her youth. It prevents her from putting herself in insanely dangerous situations.

A theory of mediocrity

Sarah Hoyt ties the ongoing series of SF/F debacles to the coddling of the Millennials:

Anyway – the most important influx of these writers, who got doors thrown open for them because they were the right age/gender/upbringing – most of whom were very young and female – was about ten years ago.  Young women just out of college were getting huge offers for books that were what young women just out of college and with no life experience would write (and no, I’m not committing the error above.  This wave of what I call “red carpet acceptances” was targeted at young, just out of college and parroting the right “truths” – no life experience or rational thought wanted, or, in fact, accepted.) – very derivative, with a lot of sex and, in mystery, a lot of shoe and fashion shopping.  (I read Manolo shoe blogger, but look, there are limits to how much I care about shoes.)

Which brings us to now.  These young people, often very protected, were taken in and told they were the next best thing.  Not because of what they did, but because of what they WERE.  Success was their right and inevitable.  Like the poor kid who wrote the essay I linked, they were told they were so smart and brave and stuff for exactly parroting what they’d been taught.  And by and large – with a couple of exceptions – their stuff didn’t sell all that well, though they’ve won awards and been fetted and told how wonderfulglittery they are.

And even the ones who were successful are now shaky, because all they ever did was enter into traditional publishing and be massively supported and do fairly well within that framework.

I don’t even know if the smartest ones know all the breaks they got.  I doubt it.  First of all, because in publishing this stuff is all hidden and it’s hard to realize how much support you had, or even that other people didn’t get it.  (Unless you don’t get it, in which case you start wondering how the process broke down, then find out this is standard.)   Second because it’s human to take credit for our own success, no matter how helped.

So, you see, in their eyes, they think everyone else got this sort of magic carpet ride.

I think this may be a factor, but I think a more important one is the ideological element. As Tom Kratman and others have observed, leftist infiltrators always make a priority of bringing more of their own kind into an organization with the aim of taking it over. Talent and performance are tertiary at best, as both ideological correctness and “diversity” are deemed more important.

Add onto this the intense discomfort that the mediocre have when forced to compare themselves with their superiors and it is only a matter of time before an infiltrated organization is filled with soft, nasty, small-minded and petty mediocrities.

For illustrative purposes, compare John Campbell with Patrick Nielsen Hayden. Or contrast Louis L’Amour with John Scalzi. One doesn’t even need to read a single word, simply looking at pictures of the two individuals being compared is enough to tell you what sort of fiction they are going to publish and write.

The mediocrities brought in the clueless young women because they were the only sort of writers around whom they felt comfortable. Men writing masculine tales of technological competence and bravery? That not only made them feel uncomfortable and inferior, it wasn’t something to which they could even understand, let alone relate.

35-year employment low

The average annual labor force participation rate hit a 35-year-low of 63.2 percent in the United States in 2013, according to data from the
Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The last time the average annual labor force participation rate was
that low was in in 1978, when it was also 63.2 percent. Jimmy Carter was
president then.

What is often forgotten in the reporting of the economic statistics is that the statistics are merely an approximation of the economic situation; they are the map and not the territory. GDP doesn’t actually exist, and the “growth” that it represents was designed as a way to provide planners a means of determining how best to intervene in the economy. The decline in the labor force participation rate gives the lie to both the false GDP and false U3 unemployment statistics, both of which are heavily manipulated in a misguided attempt to provide a falsely positive perspective.

The contractionary effect of the increasing lack of participation in the labor force is compounded by the fact that the doubling of the female labor force means that many of the younger women now in it are considerably less productive than the older men they have replaced. Throw in the subsequent consequence of delayed marriage and fewer children, and it is readily apparent that the US economy cannot recover in the next 20 years.

False flag in Ukraine

It appears the neocons are elbows deep into it again with their ongoing campaign for global revolution:

Earlier today an even more shocking recording has been “leaked” this time one between the always concerned about human rights EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton and Estonian foreign minister Urmas Paet, in which it is revealed on tape that all those photos of horrifying deaths of Ukrainians by snipers during the last days of the Median stand off, were in fact caused not by Snipers controlled by Yanukovich, but that the snipers shot at both protesters and police in Kiev were allegedly hired by Maidan leaders!

Here is the key exchange, just after 8 minutes into the conversation :

Paet: “All the evidence shows that people who were killed by snipers from both sides, policemen and people from the streets, that they were the same snipers killing people from both sides. … Some photos that showed it is the same handwriting, the same type of bullets, and it is really disturbing that now the new coalition they don’t want to investigate what exactly happened. So there is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers, it was not Yanukovych, but it was somebody from the new coalition.”

Ashton: “I think we do want to investigate. I mean, I didn’t pick that up, that’s interesting. Gosh.”

Paet: “It already discreditates (sic) this new coalition.”

So first US orchestrates the Kiev overthrow, and now the new “leaders” of Ukraine are allegedly found to have fired against their own people – the same provocation they subsequently used to run Yanukovich out of the country and install a pro-Western puppet government. Of course, said pro-Western coalition has not been discreditated (sic) because Ms. Ashton has sternly refused to investigate, knowing quite well how horribly this would reflect on the new Ukraine “leadership” –  a government which shot its own people to fabricate the pretext under which it rose to power.

Still confident that it was Osama bin Laden’s terrorists who orchestrated the attacks on the Twin Towers?

To sign or not to sign

This new petition of Amazon is interesting and relates to some problems to which I’ve pointed before:

Protect Amazon.com Users and Indie Publishing Authors from Bullying and Harassment by Removing Anonymity and Requiring Identity Verification for Reviewing and Forum Participation

For the consideration of Mr. Jeff Bezos and Mr. Jon P. Fine:

The purpose of this petition is to bring to the attention of Mr. Bezos, Mr. Fine, and anyone else employed by Amazon or its subsidiaries, the lack of oversight and or control in the Amazon system regarding product reviewing—in particular book reviewing—and in the participation of the many forums on Amazon.

It is known the world over that Amazon changed the face of self publishing by implementing their Kindle Direct Publishing platform as well as their CreateSpace platform. Anyone can now quickly and easily publish a book using the tools freely provided by Amazon. Whether or not everyone who publishes through KPD and CreateSpace should is not at issue here. What is at issue is the fact that there is an incredible amount of bullying and harassment of some of these self publishing authors taking place on the Amazon platform/system.

I believe, as do countless others—many who will have signed this petition—that the reason this bullying and harassment is able to take place is because of the allowance of anonymity on Amazon. People have found ways to exploit this flaw in the system and are using it to bully, harass, and generally make life miserable for certain authors on Amazon. These people are able to create multiple accounts and then use those accounts to viciously attack and go after any author or person that they feel doesn’t belong on Amazon or who shouldn’t have published a book, made a comment on a forum post, etc. With the current system, if one anonymous account gets deactivated because it was reported for these things, it is easy for the bully or harasser to simply create another anonymous account and continue on with their shenanigans.

What I—we—would like to see happen is for Amazon to revise their policies regarding anonymity when it comes to writing product/book reviews and for participation in the forums. Reviewers and forum participants should not be anonymous. By removing their anonymity and forcing them to display their real, verified identities, I believe that much of the harassment and bullying will cease. It may continue elsewhere on the web, but not on Amazon, the largest online retail marketplace in the world, where it really counts. Buyers of products on Amazon must have their identities verified, so it should be an easy transition to implement a policy whereby reviewers and forum participants must also have their identities verified.

While I could do without the appeals to bullying and so forth, the problem of fake reviews is definitely a real one. And while I am completely opposed to the law mandating real identities, this is simply one private corporation’s policy. So, my inclination is towards signing the petition, but I’m curious to know what the other authors and readers here have to say about it.

I think I’d sign it without question if it was limited to reviews. As much as I dislike restricted forums, I dislike even more the idea that the self-published authors, who are much less accustomed to trolls and socio-sadists working out their psychological issues online than I am, are forced to put up with this sort of nonsense from the very start, especially since they can’t control the forum comments the way I can here. Here it’s no trouble to ban the likes of the usual suspects, or put the short-term kibosh on someone getting out of line, but that’s simply not possible on Amazon.

I think the author of the petition’s assumption that sunlight will deter the trolls is generally correct. I noticed that the number of fake reviews of my books on Amazon declined considerably after I tracked down the woman from Minnesota and posted her address on this blog. Even the Greatest Pensman in All Karatonitus significantly reduced his activities here after I called his place of volunteer work and made it evident that I was in possession of the email addresses of his friends and extended family members. There are few trolls so shameless that they are willing to have those around them know what they are doing and how they are behaving.

UPDATE: Upon reading the discussion and engaging in further reflection, I have decided not to sign the petition. There are more effective ways to deal with the problem and anonymity can be a vital and necessary state for people in certain circumstances.