Increased demonization cycles

Sarah Hoyt has a theory concerning the increasingly rapid appearance of Pink SF’s Two-Minute Hates:

The funny thing, though, is that they are not only completely ignorant about us, and so unaware of it that the dime never drops, but that these demonization cycles seem to be coming closer and closer and get more hysterical. The next person who disagrees with them or pokes the tiniest bit of fun at them will be declared “worse than Hitler” and they’ll call for his hanging.

I think I know why.  Part of the reason the episodes are coming closer together and getting crazier is that they’re losing power and they know it.  They convinced an entire generation of women that Heinlein should not be read.  This was because “all the right thinking people know that.”  This is breaking.  There are enough blogs, and enough of us female Heinlein fans ready to tell them they’re idiots and then describe exactly in what part of their anatomy their head is lodged.

With Resnick and Malzberg the backlash was faster and louder and even a lot of their number thought (privately) that they were off their rocker.  With Card, I think only the choir thinks he’s “a fascist.”

And with Larry…  There is no word for this.  It’s like a Chihuahua trying to hold onto a car by the back bumper.  They have not only bit off more than they can chew, they’ve bit off more than they can… bite.  In tactical terms it’s getting involved in a landwar in Asia or going up against a Sicilian when death is on the line.

But wait, there’s more.  The other reason they’re getting crazier and crazier and trying to enforce group conformity more and more is that they are no longer in possession of the bully pulpit.

That’s definitely part of it. As Hugh Howey showed in the report to which I linked earlier today, independent publishers now sell more daily units in the three primary genres, Mystery/Thriller, SF/F, and Romance than the major publishers do. But the loss of the bully pulpit and the declining power of the gatekeepers has done more than drive them crazy, it has all but eliminated their targets.

Consider how much static I took for a few months from the moment I ran for president. But I’m gone now. They can’t purge me twice. They can’t purge Sarah or Larry, they’re already out of the little club. They can, in fact, they regularly dig up the corpse of Robert Heinlein in order to ritually attack him, but nobody cares, least of all REH.

So, like rats, the rabbits are on the verge of devouring themselves. They have no one else left to attack. We’ve already seen Dave Truesdale and a cohort of elderly members publicly launch a salvo at Stephen Gould and the lowlives of the Board; it won’t be long until those Very Serious and Concerned Individuals strike back with a series of point-and-shrieks directed at various petition signers.

If you’re a young writer on the right half of the political spectrum, you would have to be insane to decide to join the SFWA at this point. I mean, is it going to help you get published by Baen? Is it going to impress anyone at Castalia House? Or, for that matter, Random House, after the way they were attacked by the SFWA worthies? And do you really think the lunatics at places like Tor are going to harbor any interest in your story about spaceships and space battles if it lacks the requisite tri-gendered queer transcultural warrior princess who defends abortions in space from the evil Bible-misquoting raciss white Christian bigot?

We have achieved ideological segregation. Now the wolves can compete among themselves and laugh as we watch the rabbits frantically shrieking “not-rabbit” at their fellow rabbits as they devour each other.

Lake-freeze denialism

It’s interesting to observe the difference between the science fetishists’ demands for evidence where the supernatural is concerned, and their ability to completely ignore it wherever their pet hypotheses are jeopardized by observation:

Lake Superior hasn’t completely frozen over in two decades. But an expert on Great Lakes ice says there’s a “very high likelihood” that the three-quadrillion-gallon lake will soon be totally covered with ice thanks to this winter’s record-breaking cold. The ice cover on the largest freshwater lake in the world hit a 20-year record of 91 percent on Feb. 5, 1994. Jay Austin, associate professor at the Large Lakes Observatory in Duluth, Minn., told CNSNews.com that he expects that record will be broken this winter when the most northern of the Great Lakes becomes totally shrouded in ice….

Austin attributes the large amount of ice on the lake to the “extraordinary cold winter we’ve had,” pointing out that Duluth recently experienced an all-time record of 23 straight days of below-zero temperatures. The previous record of 22 days was set in 1936 and tied in 1963, according to the National Weather Service.

Of course, if we observational rationalists were to operate like the global warmists, we would immediately take a poll of everyone to decide if they believed Lake Superior would freeze over or not, then trumpet our consensus as irrefutable scientific fact.

I suggest we wait a month to see if the lake actually freezes over or not. Even if doing so makes me a lake-freeze denialist.

Of Amazon and author earnings

You may recall that last year, I pointed out that John Scalzi was not only doing authors a serious disservice by denigrating self-publishing, attacking publishers who mitigate their risk by not paying advances, and throwing a public hissy fit over Random House moving into the 21st Century with its Hydra imprint, he was actually doing himself a disservice by throwing away more than half his revenues for the privilege of being able to say he is approved by the gatekeepers at Tor. Scalzi, of course, pretended that I had no idea what I was talking about, because he is a special snowflake who has a totally unique publishing contract that bears no similarity to any other publishing deal in the industry or something like that.

After all, who are you going to trust on such matters, the economics writer who correctly predicted both the bull market in gold and the 2008 financial crisis or the Bernie Madoff of science fiction with his “50,000 DAILY READERS”?

I mention this because Hugh Howey, the massively successful SF self-publisher, just released a fascinating report on the current economics of publishing and what he learned pretty much confirmed everything that I’ve been saying on the subject for the last two years. It also very clearly demonstrates that the current and past leadership of the SFWA consist of individuals who did not, and who do not, understand the electronic train coming down the tracks that is already in the process of crushing the traditional publishers.

Here is what our data guru found when he used sales per ranking data and applied it to the top 7,000 bestselling genre works on Amazon today: Looks good for the Big Five, doesn’t it? When it comes to gross dollar sales, they take half the pie. Remember, they only account for a little over a quarter of the unit sales. Also keep in mind that they only have to pay 25% of net revenue to the author. By contrast, self-published authors on Amazon’s platform keep 70% of the total purchase price.

 Let’s now look at revenue from the author’s perspective: It’s a complete inversion. Indie authors are earning nearly half the total author revenue from genre fiction sales on Amazon. Nearly half. This next chart reveals why: Blue represents the author. You can clearly see that for Big-Five published works, the publisher makes more than twice what the author makes for the sale of an e-book. Keep in mind that the profit margins for publishers are better on e-books than they are on hardbacks. That means the author gets a smaller cut while the publisher takes a larger share. This, despite the fact that e-books do not require printing, warehousing, or shipping. As a result, self-published authors as a group are making 50% more profit than their traditionally published counterparts, even though their books have only half the gross sales revenue.

But here is the money bit:

You may have heard from other reports that e-books account for roughly 25% of overall book sales. But this figure is based only on sales reported by major publishers. E-book distributors like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, the iBookstore, and Google Play don’t reveal their sales data. That means that self-published e-books are not counted in that 25%. Neither are small presses, e-only presses, or Amazon’s publishing imprints. This would be like the Cookie Council seeking a report on global cookie sales and polling a handful of Girl Scout troops for the answer—then announcing that 25% of worldwide cookie sales are Thin Mints. But this is wrong. They’re just looking at Girl Scout cookies, and even then only a handful of troops.

In other words, any statistics you read concerning the publishing industry are even less credible than the fiction produced by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. That being said, I believe Howey is right. I believe “the world of literature has its brightest days still ahead” and part of that is going to be the result of the destruction of the gatekeepers who have been methodically destroying science fiction and fantasy for the last 30 years. The gatekeepers cannot sustain their inflated prices, they cannot foist their favored authors on unsuspecting readers, and they can no longer pretend their books sell any better or are of any higher quality than those being produced by the myriad of other active publishers for much longer.

“It turns out that 86% of the top 2,500 genre fiction bestsellers in the
overall Amazon store are e-books. At the top of the charts, the
dominance of e-books is even more extreme. 92% of the Top-100
best-selling books in these genres are e-books!”

This doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. In 13 months, ebooks have comprised 94 percent of the sales of A Throne of Bones. And keep in mind that Howey’s statistics probably don’t include the distribution of free ebooks. My free/sold ratio is 5/1. This is why Castalia House is only producing print books in hardcover for the hard-core fans who enjoy collecting as well as reading; if it’s not electronic, it’s no longer really relevant.

I should mention that another serious problem for the traditional publishers I predicted during my campaign for SFWA president has already surfaced, and it has done so even sooner than I said it would. Dreamworks Interactive recently announced that it will no longer be licensing the publishing rights to its works, but will publish its own ebooks. This means that the very lucrative media tie-in model that is keeping many of the larger genre publishers afloat is about to disappear. That means no more paying sizable advances to award-winning authors of terrible romances in space on the basis of Halo tie-in sales. It will be interesting to see which of the major genre publishers goes down first.

The Darth Vader dilemma

The more they squeeze, the more regulatory resistance slips through their fingers like sand:

Consider what administration officials announcing the new exemption for medium-sized employers had to say about firms that might fire workers to get under the threshold and avoid hugely expensive new requirements of the law. Obama officials made clear in a press briefing that firms would not be allowed to lay off workers to get into the preferred class of those businesses with 50 to 99 employees. How will the feds know what employers were thinking when hiring and firing? Simple. Firms will be required to certify to the IRS – under penalty of perjury – that ObamaCare was not a motivating factor in their staffing decisions. To avoid ObamaCare costs you must swear that you are not trying to avoid ObamaCare costs.

Welcome to the USSA. You can’t understand leftist reasoning until you grasp that everything they do is based on a static universe. From evolution to health care regulation, their policies inevitably involve the Ricardian Vice of reducing the situation down to the simplest possible binary choice, then being mystified when their actions inspire a reaction.

Followed, of course, by their futile attempts to use force to demand compliance.

The biggest problem won’t be firms laying off workers to get into the preferred class, but rather, all the firms that will no longer grow out of it.

Famous last words

“We have been watching closely the recent volatility in global
financial markets. Our sense is that at this stage these developments do
not pose a substantial risk to the U.S. economic outlook.”
– Jane Yellen, Fed Head

She even sounds like Bernanke back in 2008. And, just in case it wasn’t completely obvious, we have the reassurance that the desperate money pumping will not end until the entire system collapses too.

“The Committee has emphasized that a highly accommodative
policy will remain appropriate for a considerable time after asset
purchases end.”

I’ll bet it has. After all, we’re only looking at a $29 trillion credit demand gap. The thing is, even from a Keynesian perspective, one should be able to discern that we are in a giant economic contraction. Here is the old Econ 101 question: highly accommodative monetary policy is prescribed when the economy is a) growing, or b) contracting?

The abolition of America

Norway is already showing signs of following Switzerland’s lead to shut down the economic and societal castastrophe of mass immigration.

Mazyar Keshvari, immigration policy spokesman for the
anti-immigration Progress Party, told the VG newspaper that he believed
Norway should follow Switzerland’s example. “Norway should also have a referendum on immigration,” he said. “I am
quite sure that there is majority support for tightening immigration
across Norway’s political parties. The polls show that.”

No doubt this is one reason why. It simply IS NOT TRUE that mass immigration is good for the economy. It is an absolute lie.

The report, Sustainable Immigration, was put together by some of the party’s most vehemently anti-Islamic and anti-immigration figures, such as deputy leader Per Sandberg, and Oslo politician Christian Tybring-Gjedde. It cites figures that show that each non-Western immigrant costs the equivalent of 42 years of an average Norwegian’s tax payments, and calls for immigration from non-Western countries to be sharply reduced from from close to 20,000 a year to about 1,500 a year.

Meanwhile, the most retarded “economist” on the planet, an evil little man who makes Paul Krugman look like a paragon of coherency and decency, managed to further embarrass himself in response to the Swiss vote:

The Swiss just passed a referendum to restrict immigration from the EU.  Tyler thinks this shows that open borders is a hopeless cause.  When immigration gets too high, public opinion naturally turns against immigration.

“In my view immigration has gone well for Switzerland, both economically and culturally, and I am sorry to see this happen, even apart from the fact that it may cause a crisis in their relations with the European Union.  That said, you can take 27% as a kind of benchmark for the limits of immigration in most or all of today’s wealthy countries.  I believe that as you approach a number in that range, you get a backlash.”

But there’s a major problem with Tyler’s story: Swiss anti-immigration voting was highest in the places with the least immigrants!  This is no fluke.  In the U.S., anti-immigration sentiment is highest in the states with the least immigration – even if you assume that 100% of immigrants are pro-immigration.

The natural inference to draw, then, is the opposite of Tyler’s: The main hurdle to further immigration is insufficient immigration.  If countries could just get over the hump of status quo bias, anti-immigration attitudes would become as socially unacceptable as domestic racism.  Instead of coddling nativism with gradualism, we can, should, and must peacefully destroy nativism with abolitionism.

This is Hitlerian logic and it makes clear the evil objectives of the pro-immigrationists like Caplan. Switzerland already has a non-native born population pushing 30 percent, most of which lives around Zurich or in the French-speaking cantons. It is those previously naturalized immigrants, combined with the international business class, that supported open immigration, just as a pair of Jewish and Irish third-generation immigrants were primarily responsible for pushing the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act that demolished the USA’s demographics and made the dissolution of the union inevitable.

It’s the Denny Green syndrome writ large. Just as women always want to hire more women and blacks always want to bring in more blacks, immigrants always want to bring in more immigrants to make themselves feel more at home. I see this all the time, in fact, I’m one of the very few expats who doesn’t primarily socialize with people from my home country.

The voting phenomenon Caplan is observing is simply the national equivalent of “white flight”, and what he is advocating is nothing less than the invasion and demographic destruction of European nations.

Facebook fraud



How shocking that a thief like Zuckerberg would have built a massively fraudulent empire that rests on third worlders impersonating first worlders utilizing real products. If 1999 was tragedy, 2014 is pure financial farce.

The entire “social media” edifice is a giant variant on a Ponzi scheme. It’s Madoff economics.

SFWA petition

Well, they really can’t say I didn’t warn them…. I added my name to the petition as “Vox Day – Former life member of SFWA” but I assume they won’t want to add it. I find this more than a little amusing, considering that none of them other than Brad Torgersen were willing to speak out when the SFWA President, ex-President, and Board targeted me for purging. As I said at the time, there was never any chance that the shambling shoggoths of Pink SF were ever going to stop with me.

In light of the preceding correspondence we, the undersigned, object to the new SFWA requirements for editor of the SFWA Bulletin, as set forth on the SFWA website. Specifically, we have the following objections:

A “review board” implies a group of persons, as yet unnamed, who can veto content submitted by members if the board deems it “offensive” to a sub-group of SFWA. This opens the door to censorship of opinions that do not jibe with the personal beliefs of those on the review board, whereas SFWA should be open to the airing of many varieties of opinions, especially on such sensitive subjects as sexism, racism, religion, and politics.

The proposed requirements are so vague that they leave many critical questions unaddressed. Several among them: Given that it is our strong belief that there should be no “advisory” or “review” board, who would hypothetically sit on this board and how would they be chosen? Would advertising copy (book or magazine covers) be subject to review as well, especially in the high dollar advertising rates the Bulletin charges for its special Nebula issue?

The editor of the Bulletin should have discretion over its contents; that is why he or she is chosen as editor. There should be no advisory or review board. In view of these considerations, we ask that SFWA (1) withdraw this slate of requirements for the Bulletin and (2) open a discussion where all viewpoints can be considered on this matter before drafting any further sets of guidelines for SFWA publications.

It cannot be emphasized too strongly that the issue here is most decidedly not one of Left vs. Right. The only issue here is a First Amendment issue that both those on the political Left and Right should without hesitation embrace as one. What may happen to the Bulletin and SFWA as a viable organization if the current SFWA President has his way is unthinkable, especially as an organization of writers.

One thing the Bulletin should do is provide an outlet (its Letters column) for anyone to express his like or dislike with anything printed within its pages. This is the true essence of free speech. “Political correctness is tyranny with manners.― Charlton Heston, (actor, early civil rights activist who marched with the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King.)

It is our hope hope others will add their names to this call for SFWA President Steven Gould to kill any proposed advisory board or any other method designed to censor or infringe on any SFWA member their First Amendment right to freedom of speech in the pages of the SFWA Bulletin. Active or Associate SFWA members wishing to support this effort may send email directly to SFWA President Steven Gould at: president@sfwa.org.

Active or Associate SFWA members wishing to add their names to this petition may do so by sending an email to Dave Truesdale at: tangent.dt1@gmail.com. Signatories will be added to the list below.

Signed by
Cyd Athens
Gregory Benford– Nebula winner
David Brin– Nebula winner, Past SFWA Secretary
Amy Sterling Casil
C. J. Cherryh
Lillian Csernica
Jack Dann– Nebula winner, former Bulletin Managing & Asst. Editor, past memberof the Publicity Bureau, Nebula Rules Committee, and Grievance Committee; current member of the Anthology Committee
Harlan Ellison– Nebula winner, SFWA Grand Master, past SFWA V.P.
Sheila Finch– Nebula winner, past SFWA V.P, and Western Regional Director
David Gerrold– Nebula winner
Nancy Kress– Nebula winner
Mercedes Lackey
Dr. Paul Levinson– Past SFWA President
Barry N. Malzberg– Five time Nebula finalist, appearances in six of the annual Nebula volumes, editor of the Bulletin in 1969, Eastern Regional Director for two years in the late 70s and Grievance Committee 1980-1984.
Jack McDevitt– Nebula winner
Larry Niven– Nebula winner
Dr. Jerry Pournelle– Past SFWA President
Mike Resnick– Nebula winner, past SFWA ConAlert (8 yrs.) and Anthology Chairman (6 yrs.)
Chuck Rothman– Past SFWA Treasurer
Susan Shwartz– Five-time Nebula nominee, member of Nebula Jury (2 years); on
committee exploring reinstatement of film Nebula
Robert Silverberg– Nebula winner, SFWA Grand Master, Past SFWA President
Norman Spinrad– Past SFWA President (twice)
Allen Steele– Three time Nebula nominee, Past Eastern Regional Director
Brad R. Torgersen– Nebula nominee
Harry Turtledove– Double Nebula nominee, Past SFWA Treasurer
Gene Wolfe– Nebula winner, SFWA Grand Master

Of course, the idea that the SFWA has any commitment whatsoever to free speech after purging a Life Member of Color for a Twitter link to a perfectly reasonable blog post that gave its SWPL-heavy membership the fainting fits is risible, to say the least.

Forthcoming

I have not forgotten that I said there would be fewer Castalia House announcements here and more over there, but this one is simply too big to resist sharing with the Dread Ilk. Castalia House is pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of a Tom Kratman novella entitled Big Boys Don’t Cry, which is scheduled for release on 1 March 2014 and will be available in Kindle and epub format for $2.99.

If you are a Kratman fan and a native speaker of a non-English language, we will be very interested to hear from you and talk to you about translating Mr. Kratman’s work and thereby terrorizing the non-English speaking peoples of the Earth as well. I expect you will understand that the novella contains the occasional difference of opinion, settled, as one might anticipate, in the most civilized and peaceable of manners.

An irrationality of atheists

I find it encouraging that more of the concepts I introduced in TIA six years ago, like the argument that religion does not cause war and the hypothesis that atheism is a mild form of neurological abnormality, have gradually percolated into the mainstream discourse. In this New York Times article, the philosopher Gary Gutting interviews Alvin Platinga:

GG: Especially among today’s atheists, materialism seems to be a primary motive. They think there’s nothing beyond the material entities open to scientific inquiry, so there there’s no place for immaterial beings such as God.

AP: Well, if there are only material entities, then atheism certainly follows. But there is a really serious problem for materialism: It can’t be sensibly believed, at least if, like most materialists, you also believe that humans are the product of evolution.

GG: Why is that?

 AP: I can’t give a complete statement of the argument here — for that see Chapter 10 of “Where the Conflict Really Lies.” But, roughly, here’s why. First, if materialism is true, human beings, naturally enough, are material objects. Now what, from this point of view, would a belief be? My belief that Marcel Proust is more subtle that Louis L’Amour, for example? Presumably this belief would have to be a material structure in my brain, say a collection of neurons that sends electrical impulses to other such structures as well as to nerves and muscles, and receives electrical impulses from other structures.

But in addition to such neurophysiological properties, this structure, if it is a belief, would also have to have a content: It would have, say, to be the belief that Proust is more subtle than L’Amour.

GG: So is your suggestion that a neurophysiological structure can’t be a belief? That a belief has to be somehow immaterial?

AP: That may be, but it’s not my point here. I’m interested in the fact that beliefs cause (or at least partly cause) actions. For example, my belief that there is a beer in the fridge (together with my desire to have a beer) can cause me to heave myself out of my comfortable armchair and lumber over to the fridge.

But here’s the important point: It’s by virtue of its material, neurophysiological properties that a belief causes the action. It’s in virtue of those electrical signals sent via efferent nerves to the relevant muscles, that the belief about the beer in the fridge causes me to go to the fridge. It is not by virtue of the content (there is a beer in the fridge) the belief has.

GG: Why do you say that?

AP: Because if this belief — this structure — had a totally different content (even, say, if it was a belief that there is no beer in the fridge) but had the same neurophysiological properties, it would still have caused that same action of going to the fridge. This means that the content of the belief isn’t a cause of the behavior. As far as causing the behavior goes, the content of the belief doesn’t matter.

GG: That does seem to be a hard conclusion to accept. But won’t evolution get the materialist out of this difficulty? For our species to have survived, presumably many, if not most, of our beliefs must be true — otherwise, we wouldn’t be functional in a dangerous world.

AP: Evolution will have resulted in our having beliefs that are adaptive; that is, beliefs that cause adaptive actions. But as we’ve seen, if materialism is true, the belief does not cause the adaptive action by way of its content: It causes that action by way of its neurophysiological properties. Hence it doesn’t matter what the content of the belief is, and it doesn’t matter whether that content is true or false. All that’s required is that the belief have the right neurophysiological properties. If it’s also true, that’s fine; but if false, that’s equally fine.

Evolution will select for belief-producing processes that produce beliefs with adaptive neurophysiological properties, but not for belief-producing processes that produce true beliefs. Given materialism and evolution, any particular belief is as likely to be false as true.

GG: So your claim is that if materialism is true, evolution doesn’t lead to most of our beliefs being true.

AP: Right. In fact, given materialism and evolution, it follows that our belief-producing faculties are not reliable.

Here’s why. If a belief is as likely to be false as to be true, we’d have to say the probability that any particular belief is true is about 50 percent. Now suppose we had a total of 100 independent beliefs (of course, we have many more). Remember that the probability that all of a group of beliefs are true is the multiplication of all their individual probabilities. Even if we set a fairly low bar for reliability — say, that at least two-thirds (67 percent) of our beliefs are true — our overall reliability, given materialism and evolution, is exceedingly low: something like .0004. So if you accept both materialism and evolution, you have good reason to believe that your belief-producing faculties are not reliable.

But to believe that is to fall into a total skepticism, which leaves you with no reason to accept any of your beliefs (including your beliefs in materialism and evolution!). The only sensible course is to give up the claim leading to this conclusion: that both materialism and evolution are true. Maybe you can hold one or the other, but not both.

So if you’re an atheist simply because you accept materialism, maintaining your atheism means you have to give up your belief that evolution is true. Another way to put it: The belief that both materialism and evolution are true is self-refuting. It shoots itself in the foot. Therefore it can’t rationally be held.

I’ll have to think more about that argument before I accept that it holds any water. But I was disappointed that Platinga readily ceded so much ground on “the so-called problem of evil”. He wrote: “The so-called “problem of evil” would presumably be the strongest (and
maybe the only) evidence against theism. It does indeed have some
strength; it makes sense to think that the probability of theism, given
the existence of all the suffering and evil our world contains, is
fairly low.”

However, the observable existence of evil is not even the smallest problem for the varient of theism that is Christianity. Indeed, as I have pointed out repeatedly, the existence of real and material evil is an absolute prerequisite for Christianity.