Holiday survival guide

It’s Christmas Eve. The round of parties are reaching their climax and
the gift-giving is about to begin in earnest. It may be helpful,
therefore, to consider the how to approach the social aspects of the
celebrations from a socio-sexual perspective.

If you are a man:

  1. Remember that the women are putting in a lot of work and are feeling
    a lot of stress. This is not the time to remember things at the last
    minute or lament how things were done differently when you were a child.
    Avoid throwing curve balls.
  2. Don’t tell her to relax. She’s not going to do so anymore than you
    are during a hard fought basketball game. Holiday-hosting can perhaps be best understood as a
    competitive sport for women, even if the only competitors are in her
    mind.
  3. Ask her if there is anything you can do twice per day, once in the
    morning and once in the afternoon. Simply having someone willing to run
    out to the store for her once or twice, if necessary, can save considerable time and reduce any tensions.
  4. Pour yourself a glass of wine as soon as it gets dark. Offer her one. She’ll probably need it.
  5. Don’t let her get away with snapping at you or anyone else. The objective is to be helpful and considerate, not a doormat.

Read the rest at Alpha Game.

And with regards to #7 for the women, the most gracious response to a present I’ve ever seen was when a little child unwrapped a present and discovered a box that said it contained a potato ricer. This was not because the present was, in fact, a potato ricer, but because European retailers are considerably stingier with boxes than their American counterparts and the toy was inside the potato ricer box.

“A potato weisso? I’ve always wanted a potato weisso! What’s a potato weisso?”

An encouraging start

I was pleased to observe this morning that Quantum Mortis has officially gotten off to a better start than Selenoth. In the first month ATOB and AMB were available, they sold 957 copies. As of December 24th, 1,002 copies of QM:AMD and QM:GK have been sold. Thanks very much for all your support; I appreciate it and it is encouraging to hear that so many of you have enjoyed the books. While these numbers may sound trivial, (and indeed, they are trivial in comparison with the Kings and Rowlings of the world), keep in mind that the average midlist SF book published by a major publisher has a print run of 5,000 and sells around 3,300 copies.

So, I’m pleased to inform you that QM:2 will definitely be out this summer, most likely in company with a second novella since Steve and I are considerably ahead of schedule. Selenoth fans need not worry, however, as TAODAL Book Two is still on target for a December 2014 release.

Much to my surprise, the first translation has already been completed. The Bahasa Indonesian translation of A Magic Broken is entitled Mantra yang Rusak and I expect to release it early in the new year. If you happen to speak Indonesian and would be willing to proofread it, please let me know.

A model police murder

It is becoming increasingly apparent that some police are being intentionally trained to commit murder under the color of law:

Robert Cameron Redus was shot dead by officer Carter at 2 a.m. for nothing more than making a sarcastic remark toward the officer who pulled him over for speeding.. According to the police report, local KSAT News explains that witnesses affirmed that the cop literally “emptied his gun” into the student without warning.

“I didn’t hear him say anything like, ‘Get down on your hands and knees,’ you know?” one witness explained, “I didn’t hear him say anything. He just started shooting. He emptied the gun on him… Boom, boom, boom.Six shots — five or six.”

Mohammad Haidarasl also witnessed the murder, saying that Redus’ last words were “Oh, you’re gonna shoot me?”

Redus couldn’t believe officer Carter would actually go that far, but Haidarasl added that the cop kept yelling “Stop resisting, stop resisting,” even though it was clear Redus was offering no physical residence, only sarcastic comments.

In addition to the small problem of the cop murdering the young man for the non-crime of being disrespectful, what is worrisome is the way the cop was deceitfully and repeatedly shouting “stop resisting” even as he fired his weapon.  This is a tactic meant to allow the police to claim a shooting is justified even when it isn’t; it is so deceptive that those who are training the police to attempt to deceive the public in this manner bear a moral responsibility for the citizens who are subsequently murdered by the police.

At this point, it is abundantly clear that the police are not going to control themselves. Their refusal to submit themselves to the very laws they are employed to uphold means that only the only hope for redress for the families of the victims is to take vengeance into their own hands.

The police love to talk a tough game. But have you noticed that they significantly change their tune when the public stops respecting their badges? If the police are going to rely upon their guns instead, well, perhaps they should keep in mind that the public has a lot more of them.

The Patriarch teaches

Phil Robertson is now America’s Patriarch:

[H]e stood in front of the small class, at White’s Ferry Road Church wearing his full camouflage suit and addressed the group for around 45 minutes.

He said: ‘I have been immoral, drunk, high. I ran with the wicked people for 28 years and I have run with the Jesus people since and the contrast is astounding.

‘I tell people, “You are a sinner, we all are. Do you want to hear my story before I give you the bottom line on your story?”

‘We murder each other and we steal from one another, sex and immorality goes ballistic. All the diseases that just so happen to follow sexual mischief… boy there are some microbes running around now.

‘Sexual sins are numerous and many, I have a few myself. So what is your safest course of action? If you’re a man, find yourself a woman, marry them and keep your sex right there.

‘You can have fun, but one thing is for sure, as long as you are both healthy in the first place, you are not going to catch some debilitating illness, there is safety there.

‘Commonsense says we are not going to procreate the human race unless we have a man and a woman. From the beginning Jesus said, “It is a man and a woman.” Adam was made and Eve was made for this reason. They left their fathers and mothers and be united to become one flesh, that’s what marriage is all about.

‘But we looked at it and said it was an outdated stereotype. When you look back at the human race, the sins have always been the same: We get high, we get drunk, we get laid, we steal and kill.

‘Has this changed at all from the time God burnt up whole cities because their every thought was evil?’

Then reading from the Bible he said, ‘The acts of the sinful nature are obvious. Sexual immorality, is number one on the list. How many ways can we sin sexually? My goodness. You open up that can of worms and people will be mad at you over it.

‘I am just reading what was written over 2000 years ago. Those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom. All I did was quote from the scriptures, but they just didn’t know it. Whether I said it, or they read it, what’s the difference? The sins are the same, humans haven’t changed.

‘If you give them the bad news, they’ll start kicking and screaming. But you love them more than you fear them, so you tell them.

‘A lot of times they don’t even wait for you to finish and say, ‘But there’s a way out, do you want to hear the rest of the story or what?

‘Jesus will take sins away, if you’re a homosexual he’ll take it away, if you’re an adulterer, if you’re a liar, what’s the difference? If you break one sin you may as well break them all.

‘If we lose our morality, we will lose our country. It will happen. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all walk around without stealing from each other and killing each other?

‘Why don’t we just love each other enough that we wouldn’t want to do these things to each other?’

Robertson – who made his fortune from inventing and manufacturing hunting equipment before finding TV stardom – went on: ‘We are a bunch of rednecks from Louisiana, but I am not uneducated, I have a degree from Louisiana Tech.

‘But this week I have been called an ignoramus. This week I have been asked, “Is this the first time you have brought up sin?” I said, “Are you kidding? I have been traveling to and fro spreading this message.”

‘Then he said, “Well do you invite yourself to go and get your Bible and tell people what you are now sharing with us?” I said, “No they are inviting me.”

‘I have made hundreds and hundreds of speeches and you can pick them apart and the center has always been Jesus Christ.

‘Do many people get up and walk out? Yeah, all the time, do I hold it against them? No. Anybody can get up and stop listening. We are all just humans on this planet.’

He added: ‘Jesus Christ was the most perfect being to ever walk this planet and he was persecuted and nailed to the cross, so please don’t be surprised when we get a little static.’

The best part, however, was how he closed in prayer: “I will not give or back off from my path because you conquered death, Father, so we are not worried about all the repercussions.”

May God grant us all similar fearlessness in Jesus Christ. That spirit of fear you sometimes feel didn’t come from Him. We can always find a reason to back down, an excuse to worry about the repercussions. Phil Robertson reminds us that as Christians, we are always going to get a little static, so we may as well grow up spiritually and accept it.

VPFL Championship

74 Greenfield Grizzlies
57 Bane Sidhe

80 Fromundah Cheezheads
79 RR Redbeards

The two top teams all season are meeting in the VPFL Championship Game. Greenfield has had a banner year; as it happens, I’m meeting the White Buffalo in the MFL championship game.

National Review sharpens the blade

The sans-culottes at National Review are getting the guillotine ready again. As predicted by many, it appears Mark Steyn will be the next to follow in the footsteps of the John Birch Society, Joe Sobran, Ann Coulter, and John Derbyshire?  Jason Lee Steorts, an editor at National Review, writes:

I can’t agree with Mark that anything of value is lost when derogatory epithets go out of bounds in polite society. They tend to be bad even for humor, substituting stereotype and cliché for originality. People who used them in different times need not be regarded as monstrous, nor must the canon be censored; we could instead feel good about having awoken to a greater civility and make generous allowances for human fallibility. By way of criticizing speech, I’ll say that I found the derogatory language in this column, and especially the slur in its borrowed concluding joke, both puerile in its own right and disappointing coming from a writer of such talent.

To which Steyn responded:

I’m not inclined to euphemize intimidation and bullying as a lively exchange of ideas – “the use of speech to criticize other speech”, as Mr Steorts absurdly dignifies it. So do excuse me if I skip to the men’s room during his patronizing disquisition on the distinction between “state coercion” and “cultural coercion”. I’m well aware of that, thank you. In the early days of my free-speech battles in Canada, my friend Ezra Levant used a particular word to me: “de-normalize”. Our enemies didn’t particularly care whether they won in court. Whatever the verdict, they’d succeed in “de-normalizing” us – that’s to say, putting us beyond the pale of polite society and mainstream culture. “De-normalizing” is the business GLAAD and the other enforcers are in. You’ll recall Paula Deen’s accuser eventually lost in court – but the verdict came too late for Ms Deen’s book deal, and TV show, and endorsement contracts.

Up north, Ezra and I decided that, if they were going to “de-normalize” us, we’d “de-normalize” them. So we pushed back, and got the entire racket discredited and, eventually, the law repealed. It’s rough stuff, and exhausting, but the alternative is to let the control-freaks shrivel the bounds of public discourse remorselessly so that soon enough you lack even the words to mount an opposing argument. As this commenter to Mr Steorts noted, the point about unearthing two “derogatory” “puerile” yet weirdly prescient gags is that, pace Marx, these days comedy repeats as tragedy.

I am sorry my editor at NR does not grasp the stakes. Indeed, he seems inclined to “normalize” what GLAAD is doing. But, if he truly finds my “derogatory language” offensive, I’d rather he just indefinitely suspend me than twist himself into a soggy pretzel of ambivalent inertia trying to avoid the central point – that a society where lives are ruined over an aside because some identity-group don decides it must be so is ugly and profoundly illiberal. As to his kind but belated and conditional pledge to join me on the barricades, I had enough of that level of passionate support up in Canada to know that, when the call to arms comes, there will always be some “derogatory” or “puerile” expression that it will be more important to tut over. So thanks for the offer, but I don’t think you’d be much use, would you?

National Review doesn’t realize that its genteel world of polite dissent from left-liberal orthodoxy is over. It is no longer a significant voice on the Right; one could quite perhaps even argue that it is not even really conservative anymore. I can’t actually take a position on that, however, since I quit reading National Review after they fired John Derbyshire for failing to kowtow to liberal orthodoxy on race. National Review has long attempted to curry favor with the mainstream media by reading others out of the respectable Right. So it only seems just that increasingly people are not-reading National Review out of the relevant Right.

And it is more than a little ironic that Steorts is criticizing Steyn for his derogatory expressions when, after attacking Kathryn Lopez over gay marriage, he justified his attacks on her thusly:

So it is your view, Kathryn, that the action of democratically elected representatives, who are accountable to the citizens of the State of New York, is tyrannical in a way that justifies comparison to North Korea, a state in which an absolute ruler has burned people alive in a stadium. Okay. But now I want a new word for what “tyranny” used to mean.

I would like to see the reaction of a North Korean refugee to your claim.

It would also be nice if you troubled yourself to make an argument.

Update: I see that several commenters find my tone beyond the pale. With respect, I think y’all are way too sensitive. The harshest thing here is the sarcasm of “trouble yourself,” which strikes me as mild by the standards of polemical writing generally and writing at NRO (including posts by commenters) in particular. 

Hmmm, I’m noticing a hypocritical inconsistency as well as the fact that the conservative position on a certain subject tends to upset the manage editor… I know absolutely nothing about Steorts, but on the basis of these two pieces, it would not surprise me in the slightest to learn that Steorts is one of those putative “gay media conservatives” in the mold of Andrew Sullivan. Which, as we have come to learn, reliably indicate that he’s not conservative at all.

The World War on Christianity

Never forget that the spirit of the world hates Jesus Christ and hates the Christian for refusing to submit to it, for refusing to be a part of it.

Across the world this week, hundreds of millions of us will be singing of that
“silent night, holy night” in the town of Bethlehem. But as Christmas approaches, with its beguiling promise of “peace on earth and
mercy mild”, how many of us will reflect on the words of our great Christmas
carols and be reminded that Christianity was a faith born in the East? How
many of us are aware that, while the first Christmas took place in the
Middle East, there today that same faith is under threat?
Last week, the leader of the Catholic Church, His Holiness Pope Francis, chose
to cast light on this dark story of persecution by taking to Twitter to warn
that we “cannot resign ourselves to think of a Middle East without
Christians”. Later in the week, Prince Charles warned that “Christians in the Middle East
are, increasingly, being deliberately attacked by fundamentalist Islamist
militants. Christianity was, literally, born in the Middle East and we must
not forget our Middle Eastern brothers and sisters in Christ”.

Don’t forget your brothers and sisters in Christ in the Middle East, in North Korea, in China, and in Africa. Pray for them. Pray that their persecutors will be won over by their faith, even as the Apostle Paul was won over by Stephen the martyr.

As the A&E affair demonstrates, one day you may need them to pray for you.

Mailvox: improving dialectic

JB asks how he can improve his ability to debate:

Do you have any recommendations on reading material for improving one’s debate skills? I am aware of the most basic premise being the ability to reason, followed by a willingness to suffer defeat in repeated efforts. I am good at debating, but studying what you have posted, as well as other’s responses shows me that there is room for considerable improvement on my part. I am passably familiar with Socrates, Plato, Cicero, and Aristotle; the last of whom is cited considerably often on Vox Populi but I am interested in learning more. What do you feel are the best books to study on this? Can it even be learned through books or does one have to simply fight it out personally and learn by doing?

Given Scalzi’s inept appeals to his degree in alleged rhetoric; possibly this cannot be learned other than by doing. However if there are recommendations that you have for books on rhetoric and debate, I would be interested to hear them. After all, my default setting whenever I am interested in learning more about a subject is to buy multiple books on it; so I am hopeful that you might have some suggestions for reading material.

It’s important to distinguish between learning about something and actually doing it. Although not a basketball fan, I know a fair amount about basketball courtesy of Bill Simmons, a lifelong basketball fanatic. But nothing that I have ever read about basketball has improved my three-point shot.

As Michael Jordan once said after one of his returns from retirement, the best way to get in shape for playing basketball is to play basketball. I run twice per week in the soccer offseason in order to stay in shape, but no matter how good I am about my off-season routine, the first practice of the season is always the most painful.

Reading Cicero and Plato may provide you with some rhetorical and dialectical tools, but having those tools is not the same thing as knowing how and when to use them effectively. Indeed, reading about them while not putting them into actual practice may actually be detrimental to one’s ability to debate; as JB has seen with Mr. Scalzi, it can even contribute to a powerful sense of self-delusion in that regard.

I am a little concerned by JB’s assertion of being “passably familiar” with the four classic figures mentioned. One of the great intellectual diseases of our time is the idea that having heard of something, or knowing a little bit about it, is practically akin to having mastered the subject. So, my first suggestion is that JB actually read the Socratic dialogues, read Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Cicero’s De Inventione. Then read something more modern; here is a nice online guide to The Five Canons of Rhetoric.

This leads to one important guideline: don’t ever claim to know something that you do not, in fact, know better than your opponent expects. A skilled opponent will unmask you faster than you think possible; read my exchange with the atheist Luke for a particularly brutal example of that. On the flip side, I was amused when an online conversation between two evolutionists was brought to my attention, as one was warning the other not to be fooled by my claim to be relatively ignorant about TENS. But I wasn’t playing dumb, the simple fact is that I don’t know biology the way I know economics or the history of video games, so I have to approach the subjects differently.

In my opinion, the best way one can develop one’s debating skills is to practice by regularly taking on the most knowledgeable opponents one can find. Consider, for example, the qualitative difference between my exchanges with Nate, with Dominic, and even with Delavagus with my various run-ins with PZ Myers, McRapey, and Luke. I still disagree with all six of them on the subjects we discussed, but the former three knew what they were talking about while the latter three manifestly did not.

Here is my response to being asked a similar question about 18 months ago, which led to the “Dissecting the Sceptics” series of posts. If JB hasn’t read through it, I would recommend doing so.

“The first question I always ask myself is if the argument is primarily
factual, logical, or rhetorical in nature. The second question I ask
myself is if the author is likely to have any idea what he’s talking
about or not. And the third question is if I regard the author as being
trustworthy or not, or rather, if I believe him to be fundamentally
intellectually honest or not. These three questions determine how
carefully I read through an argument and whether I presume the author is
more likely to make a simple mistake or whether any apparent mistakes
are actually intentional attempts to sneak something past the
insufficiently careful reader in order to make a flawed argument look
convincing.

“The fourth question is what is the author trying to prove? This
question often can’t be answered initially, but I keep it in the back of
my mind for future reference. Once I identify the specific point that
the author is trying to prove, I can track back from it to see if a) his
logic is correct, and b) if that logic is soundly supported. It’s
important to keep in mind that the actual point that the author is
trying to prove is not necessarily the one that he appears to be trying
to prove in the title or introduction.”  

And for those who find McRapey’s argument by appeal to BA in Philosophy of Language from the University of Chicago convincing, it might be educational to read through “Dissecting the Sceptics” andsee what I do to “a Ph.D. student in philosophy at the University of Chicago”.

The NYT dips a toe into HBD

Steve Sailer observes that the lead science writer at the New York Times is flirting with dropping the seventh veil of science:

Fewer ideas have been more toxic or harmful than the idea of the biological reality of race, and with it the idea that humans of different races are biologically different from one another. For this understandable reason, the idea has been banished from polite academic conversation. Arguing that race is more than just a social construct can get a scholar run out of town, or at least off campus, on a rail. Human evolution, the consensus view insists, ended in prehistory.

Inconveniently, as Nicholas Wade argues in A Troublesome Inheritance, the consensus view cannot be right. And in fact, we know that populations have changed in the past few thousand years—to be lactose tolerant, for example, and to survive at high altitudes. Race is not a bright-line distinction; by definition it means that the more human populations are kept apart, the more they evolve their own distinct traits under the selective pressure known as Darwinian evolution. For many thousands of years, most human populations stayed where they were and grew distinct, not just in outward appearance but in deeper senses as well.

Interesting to see it stated so clearly: “the consensus view cannot be right”. I imagine we’re going to be seeing that phrase on a regular basis over the next few years. Let’s list a few of the obvious candidates:

Racial equality (check)
Global warming
String theory
Evolution by natural selection
Neo-Keynesian economics
Monetarism
Sexual equality

Which one do you think will survive longest? I’m going to go with Neo-Keynesian economics. I bet they’ll be able to retrofit debt in there just well enough to remain nominally viable.

Fix insufficient permissions in Windows 7

It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything about Linux. This is mostly because I haven’t been using it. Due to some development projects over the past few years, I’ve been stuck using Windows, so I’ve been using XP and resolutely ignoring every new operating system introduced by Microsoft in the meantime. Everything works fine, although I have not been able to update Skype since not long after Microsoft bought them.

This has actually been a material benefit to me, not an irritation. It works fine, and in addition to reasons that shall presently be made clear, I still enjoy all the old functionality of certain third-party programs that Microsoft has intentionally broken with its helpful newer releases. The lesson, as always: never, ever, trust Microsoft to do the sensible thing.

Apple pens in its users, domesticates them, and milks them, but at least it treats them nicely and makes them feel good about themselves. Microsoft is like a big, fat ex-boyfriend who shows up at his former girlfriend’s apartment drunk and unannounced, insists on having sex, then throws up in her bed after passing out. It’s more than just the regret one feels after being forced to deal with Windows, it’s the time one has to spend to clean everything up afterwards.

Now, Spacebunny runs Windows 7, and in the course of daily events she made the rookie mistake of allowing Skype to update itself. Naturally, the update immediately caused Skype to stop working on her machine. She tried a few things and then turned the matter over to me because I so enjoy trying to work around Microsoft’s idea of making the interface easier. The problem is a fairly common one and is described here by one of the many people who have run into this problem:

“Every time I try to download the newest version of Flash Player, I get
an error message stating that I have insufficient user permissions.  I
am using Windows 7, it’s my home computer, I am the administrator (I
know because I checked) and no one else uses my computer.  I’ve done
everything I can (including creating a new Admin account – still didn’t
work).”

None of the suggested fixes worked. So, I went through all the various suggestions I could find online, including those on the Microsoft Forum. Most of them were entirely worthless. Seriously, I want to punch the fat, self-satisfied power users who that telling people how to click through the relevant dialogue boxes is a legitimate answer. But the problem obviously isn’t people not knowing how to use the operating system, since many of the messages clearly indicate we’re dealing with people who know what administrator status is, the problem is that clicking through the obvious dialogue boxes doesn’t freaking work!

I did all the obvious things. I even downloaded a special program to unlock the folder, which unlocked the folder but still didn’t grant whatever privileges were deemed necessary to simply delete the damned file. Logging in as an administrator didn’t work, creating a new administrator didn’t work, running the installer as an administrator didn’t work, unlocking the folder didn’t work, absolutely nothing worked. Even Markku couldn’t figure out how to fix the problem within a Microsoft paradigm short of reinstalling Windows. That being said, he did come up with the ultimate answer from the start, which is often apt when one is dealing with a Microsoft product: the first step is to tell Microsoft to fuck off.

Let me explain. The core problem is that the newer Microsoft operating systems do something incredibly stupid. In order to navigate all the complex crap that now surrounds diverse aspects of the increasingly crufty operating system, many installation programs now create a virtual administrator that has control over the various files and directories being used during the installation process. This virtual administrator does not exist, and by virtue of not existing, is not synonymous with any of the actual human administrators who actually use the computer.

Perhaps you already see the intrinsic problem there. If something goes wrong during the installation or update process, the real administrators do not have access to the files that were under the control of this nonexistent administrator. The real admin can see what’s there, but he can’t do anything about it. He doesn’t have access and he can’t give himself access. And if that protected file or folder is one that is required by an application installer that has somehow gone haywire, the user is screwed and will not be able to reinstall or use that application without either restoring a previous OS state or completely reinstalling Windows.

Nice work, Microsoft. Very helpful. It’s just a brilliant system. Honestly, it’s enough to make me want to go back to DOS and stay there. Sure, point-and-click is nice, but it’s just not worth putting up with this sort of insane and totally unnecessary crap. The First Rule of Operating Systems should be this: stay the fuck out of the advanced user’s way!

Fortunately, as Markku pointed out, Linux doesn’t give a damn about all of Microsoft’s increasingly lunatic complexities. And thanks to the Ubuntu Live option, it is possible to boot the machine into Linux off a USB stick, then delete the directory reserved to the nonexistent administrator without otherwise affecting the machine or the operating system. The entire process was very easy:

  1. Download an Ubuntu desktop ISO onto your hard drive. 13.10 is current.
  2. Download Pen Drive Linux USB Installer
  3. Insert USB stick with at least 2GB free
  4. Run Pen Drive
  5. Select the downloaded Ubuntu ISO. Click start.
  6. Wait 6 mins for Pen Drive to set up the bootable Ubuntu on your USB stick
  7. Turn off computer
  8. Boot into Linux (may be necessary to hit F12 to choose boot option)
  9. Find your Windows hard drive
  10. Find the problematic file or folder and delete it
  11. Remove USB stick
  12. Reboot into Windows
  13. Run application installer again
  14. Run the application.
  15. Bask in the momentary techno joy.

The whole process took about 15 minutes, most of which involved downloading the Ubuntu ISO and installing it on the USB stick. I’m posting this here because I haven’t seen this solution anywhere on the Internet, and despite involving a second operating system, it is the cleanest, fastest, and most effective way I’ve seen to completely resolve an extraordinarily annoying situation.

Of course, you won’t find this solution on any Microsoft forum. Why not? It appears that they would rather force their users to reinstall their operating system than let them know about a fast and easy fix for a common problem they created.