Rights roundup

Put Not Your Trust in Men

The late Nelson Mandela possessed a perceived moral authority in the
eyes of the world that few men have ever known. His terrorist past
notwithstanding, his subsequent commitment to peace and reconciliation
as well as his gracious refusal to give in to despair and hatred made
him an icon of hope to many. Even his enemies came to admire him over
time, as he answered the perfectly reasonable doubts they harbored by
his steadfast adherence to that commitment.

The Un-American President

After five years of his occupation of the Oval Office, it is abundantly
clear that wherever Obama’s true sympathies happen to be, they are most
certainly not with America or America’s national symbols.

A Mockery of Mandela

If there is a better cure for the collection of preening gasbags who
call themselves world leaders and assembled themselves in South Africa
in order to be seen pretending to mourn for the late Nelson Mandela, it
is hard to imagine one.

The fearful fatted cows

Even if the pinkshirts in the SFWA are too dense and short-sighted to see the truck about to run them over, it appears the Author’s Guild isn’t quite so clueless. In much the same vein as James Patterson’s appeal for federal protection, they’re mooing and seeking safety in numbers. And it’s just delightful to see those who have been protected by the gatekeepers for decades openly fretting about being forced to compete on even terms with those they have so long despised.  This would seem to be just a little strange, in light of how they so often claimed that the reason they were chosen for publication was because their writing was so much better than the writing of those not permitted past the gatekeepers: 

An Open Letter to My Fellow Authors

 It’s
all changing, right before our eyes. Not just publishing, but the
writing life itself, our ability to make a living from authorship. Even
in the best of times, which these are not, most writers have to
supplement their writing incomes by teaching, or throwing up sheet-rock,
or cage fighting. It wasn’t always so, but for the last two decades
I’ve lived the life most writers dream of: I write novels and stories,
as well as the occasional screenplay, and every now and then I hit the
road for a week or two and give talks. In short, I’m one of the blessed,
and not just in terms of my occupation. My health is good, my children
grown, their educations paid for. I’m sixty-four, which sucks, but
it also means that nothing that happens in publishing—for good or ill—is
going to affect me nearly as much as it affects younger writers,
especially those who haven’t made their names yet. Even if the e-price
of my next novel is $1.99, I won’t have to go back to cage fighting.

Still, if it turns out that I’ve enjoyed the best the writing life
has to offer, that those who follow, even the most brilliant, will have
to settle for less, that won’t make me happy and I suspect it won’t
cheer other writers who’ve been as fortunate as I. It’s these writers,
in particular, that I’m addressing here. Not everyone believes, as I do,
that the writing life is endangered by the downward pressure of e-book
pricing, by the relentless, ongoing erosion of copyright protection, by
the scorched-earth capitalism of companies like Google and Amazon, by
spineless publishers who won’t stand up to them, by the “information
wants to be free” crowd who believe that art should be cheap or free and
treated as a commodity, by internet
search engines who are all too happy to direct people to on-line sites
that sell pirated (read “stolen”) books, and even by militant librarians
who see no reason why they shouldn’t be able to “lend” our e-books
without restriction. But those of us who are alarmed by these
trends have a duty, I think, to defend and protect the writing life
that’s been good to us, not just on behalf of younger writers who will
not have our advantages if we don’t, but also on behalf of readers,
whose imaginative lives will be diminished if authorship becomes
untenable as a profession.

I know, I know. Some insist that there’s never been a better time to
be an author. Self-publishing has democratized the process, they argue,
and authors can now
earn royalties of up to seventy percent, where once we had to settle for
what traditional publishers told us was our share. Anecdotal evidence
is marshaled in support of this view (statistical evidence to follow).
Those of us who are alarmed, we’re told, are, well, alarmists. Time will
tell who’s right, but surely it can’t be a good idea for writers to
stand on the sidelines while our collective fate is decided by others.
Especially when we consider who those others are. Entities like Google
and Apple and Amazon are rich and powerful enough to influence
governments, and every day they demonstrate their willingness to wield
that enormous power. Books and authors are a tiny but not insignificant
part of the larger battle being waged between these companies, a
battleground
that includes the movie, music, and newspaper industries. I think it’s
fair to say that to a greater or lesser degree, those other industries
have all gotten their asses kicked, just as we’re getting ours kicked
now. And not just in the courts. Somehow, we’re even losing the war for
hearts and minds. When we defend copyright, we’re seen as greedy. When
we justly sue, we’re seen as litigious. When we attempt to defend the
physical book and stores that sell them, we’re seen as Luddites. Our
altruism, when we’re able to summon it, is too often seen as
self-serving.

But here’s the thing. What the Apples and Googles and Amazons and
Netflixes of the world all have in common (in addition to their quest
for world domination), is that
they’re all starved for content, and for that they need us. Which means
we have a say in all this. Everything in the digital age may feel new
and may seem to operate under new rules, but the conversation about the
relationship between art and commerce is age-old, and artists must be
part of it. To that end we’d do well to speak with one voice, though
it’s here we demonstrate our greatest weakness. Writers are notoriously
independent cusses, hard to wrangle. We spend our mostly solitary days
filling up blank pieces of paper with words. We must like it that way,
or we wouldn’t do it. But while it’s pretty to think that our odd way of
life will endure, there’s no guarantee. The writing life is ours to
defend. Protecting it also happens to be the mission of
the Authors Guild, which I myself did not join until last year, when the
light switch in my cave finally got tripped. Are you a member? If not,
please consider becoming one. We’re badly outgunned and in need of
reinforcements. If the writing life has done well by you, as it has by
me, here’s your chance to return the favor. Do it now, because there’s
such a thing as being too late.

Oh, boo-freaking-hoo. Just get a real job like everyone else and write when you can. And “altruism” my fourth point of contact. I’ve lived on three continents and the only people I’ve met who are more self-serving than professional writers are international bankers. Although I slipped past the gatekeepers myself and was treated very well by the good people at Simon & Schuster, I very much disliked a lot of what I saw on the other side of the gates. Now I’m happily on the outs, surrounded by a blue-painted gang of Vandals and Visigoths, and very much looking forward to the slaughter of the fatted cows and shambling shoggoths that is about to begin. It does rather look like they’re getting their asses kicked now, and I, for one, expect to do some of the kicking next year.

Now that the playing field is being leveled by technology, it appears they’re suddenly not so confident that they’re markedly better than the competition. Amusing, is it not? In any event, with all due respect, I believe I shall politely decline the author’s invitation to join the Guild, continue to proudly fly the flag of an independent Blue SF/F author, and let my books sink or swim on their own merits.

In case you’re in any doubt about how the fatted cows really thought about the competition before they realized they were about to be overrun by it, here are just a few of their unvarnished thoughts about the unwashed and “unprofessional” masses of independent writers, which I cite here for the purposes of commentary and criticism.

“I don’t think SFWA should extend a full membership option to
self-published writers. It seems to me that the organization cannot
exist as an organization for professional writers if our doors are open
to writers who don’t meet any professional standards.”

“SFWA members cringe a bit at the idea of admitting self-published writers without some form of screening, no matter what we think about the changing realities of publishing.”


“Why would a self-publishing writer want to be a member of SFWA, assuming
they were self-publishing exclusively”


“It seems to me that the SFWA is on solid, rational, defensible ground
when it says that self-published writers are operating outside the world
that the SFWA was created to police, and thus their membership in the
organization doesn’t make sense.”


“I am categorically opposed to accepting self-published writers as SFWA
members at any level IF that is the only cedit(s) they have…. there’s a significant difference between Joe Wannabe offering his
“novel” to potential readers from his website without the benefit of any
professional-level editorial oversight and someone who’s had the chance
to run hers past an established and well-regarded author.”


“the great majority of self-published work is simply bad”


“I do not want to become an organization of aspiring writers”


“I for one am worried that if we follow your suggestion and double,
triple, or quadruple our membership by allowing self-published authors
to join, we’ll wind up with either (1) an organization that’s so divided
it can’t function or (2) two groups of members whose needs and
interests conflict as often as they overlap.”

Needless to say, I opposed this widespread anti-self publishing attitude as a part of my campaign for SFWA president. This was in direct opposition to the vociferously anti-self publishing position taken by the organization’s previous three-term president.

The legacy of Mandela

This should suffice to settle the question of whether the Hero of Mandela’s Funeral actually knows how to sign or not. He knows no more ASL than he does Advanced Squad Leader. And have genocidal threats by a head of state ever been funnier?

I especially enjoyed the dancing soldiers. If the Boers ever do rise up against the ANC and establish an independent White South Africa , I suspect they’re not only going to win, but win easily.

Lions Den VIII: Jonathan Moeller

The Pulp Writer throws Frostborn: The First Quest into the Den and takes a decidedly different approach in introducing it to everyone here. If you’re interested in being one of the book’s three reviewers, shoot me an email. You may also be interested in noting that both his Demonsouled and Child of the Ghosts are free downloads today.

Today I am going to tell you a story about the dangers of opening doors.

Long ago, before humans ever came to my world,
before humans even existed, the high elves ruled this world. We
believed that God had put us here to care and maintain this world, for
God had indeed created it for a purpose. A great darkness had been
imprisoned within the skin of the world, inside a place the humans would
one day call the Black Mountain. Our responsibility was to guard the
prison and serve as the world’s caretakers.

And so we did.

For spans of
time so vast that no human tongue has the vocabulary to describe them,
the high elves kept watch over this world, dwelling in great bliss and
splendor as they went about their task.

But for some of us, that was not enough.

Those
of us with wisdom and courage, those of us with the strength to cast
aside old ideas and grow beyond our purpose, used our spells to examine
the Black Mountain, to consider the darkness sealed within as a bored
child might pick at a scab. In time the darkness spoke to us. At first
we spurned it, but we came to see that it spoke wisdom, words of
strength and power.

And the darkness reached out and possessed one of
us, and we fell to our knees and worshipped him as our new god, the
bearer of shadow, the teacher of new ways.

The
high elves turned against us, the shortsighted fools. They called us the
dark elves, but we were the true elves, the stronger elves, for we
alone had been brave enough to cast off our shackles and make ourselves
more.

They made war upon us for millennia, and we laid the
world waste. Spells beyond the capacity of the human mind to understand
shattered the land, and mountains crumbled and deserts froze and
forests burned. Yet for all our power, the high elves had the mastery,
and drove us back mile by mile.

But the bearer of shadow walked among us, whispering
his secrets into our ears. He taught us spells of necromancy, of
shaping flesh and bone into weapons of death. And he taught us the
secret of opening doors between the worlds. For there are as many worlds
as there are stars in the night skies, and as many kindreds that live
upon them. Our wizards opened the doors between the worlds, and brought
forth new kindreds to serve us as slaves and soldiers.

The orcs were the first. They made superb slave
soldiers for our armies, and we brought hundreds of thousands of them
through the gates. Then came the beastmen and the manetaurs. They were
harder to control, but served well as shock troops. Halflings were too
weak for battle, but made useful slaves. The dwarves proved impossible
to control, and soon rebelled and sided against us, but they were a rare
error

And one day, we found the urdmordar.

We
had never seen anything like them. They wore the form of spiders, yet
wielded great dark magic. They disdained the use of tools and weapons,
yet had intellects of genius, and dominated lesser creatures with ease.
They feasted upon living flesh like any rude predator, but were so
cunning and so clever that they remained hidden and their victims rarely
knew their true foes.

What slaves they would make! With their power, we could at last crush the high elves.

And so we opened the door to their world and brought the urdmordar to ours.

Fools, fools, fools.

For the urdmordar were too powerful to control.

They
swarmed the gate, and devoured the wizards that sought to bind them. We
were the rightful masters of this world, mighty in sorcery and wisdom
without peer, but the urdmordar saw us as only one thing.

Food.

Within five years
the dark elven kingdoms had been enslaved and forced to serve the
urdmordar. Our armies of slaves transferred their allegiance readily
enough. The high elves briefly rejoiced, thinking they had found an
ally, but the hunger of the urdmordar was insatiable.

One by one the high elven kingdoms fell, until only Cathair Solas remained.

And then the urdmordar met a new kindred coming up from the south.

The
humans, the exiles of Old Earth, the heirs of Arthur Pendragon, fleeing
through a magical gate from the fall of their realm. Heedless of the
ancient conflicts of their new world, they blundered into the path of
the urdmordar.

There is danger in opening doors…but there is also opportunity.

For in the humans, after long millennia, I see the key to my freedom.

– The Warden of Urd Morlemoch

A predictable capitulation

David Stockman excoriates the House Republicans for their capitulation on the budget:

House Republicans “capitulated” in agreeing to the two-year budget deal reached last night and left the country to deal with an unsustainable fiscal situation until the peak of the presidential primaries in 2015, when nothing will get done, former federal budget director David Stockman told CNBC on Wednesday.

“First, let’s be clear—it’s a joke and betrayal,” Stockman, who served under President Ronald Reagan, said on “Squawk on the Street.” “It’s the final surrender of the House Republican leadership to Beltway politics and kicking the can and ignoring the budget monster that’s hurtling down the road.”

Stockman added that the budget deal means lawmakers would take a “two-year vacation” from dealing with the country’s fiscal situation and revisit it in 2015 at around the same time as the Iowa straw polls. Without an incumbent in the presidential race, both political parties will be too busy to touch the budget, he said. While some hailed the budget deal as a breakthrough in Washington’s political gridlock, Stockman compared the accord to “kicking the can” into “low Earth orbit.”

“There’s plenty of room, but they’re unwilling to make the tough choices,” he said. “Now, I understand Democrats doing that. The only hope of getting our fiscal situation under control is if the House Republicans stand up. And they’ve totally capitulated.”

Of course they did. With traitorous leaders like John Boehner and Eric Kantor, the House Republican “leadership” has far more in common with Obama than with the Republicans they nominally represent. They will “capitulate” on immigration too if they think they can get away with it and still preserve their political careers.

The US political system has completely failed. Many, perhaps even most, “representatives” no longer even pretend to represent anything but the interests of the financial institutions. This became apparent in 2008, and is now obvious in Washington’s every response to the financial crisis its credit money system and profligate spending have created.

The only possible way out was to let the credit money system default and collapse, but instead, the short-sighted, cowardly politicians bought the bankers’ threats to implode the economy and tied the political system to the financial system in what I expect will be a vain attempt to salvage it. And in doing so, I believe they have ensured the eventual destruction of both.

In Q1 2009, debt/GDP was 368 percent. The Q3 Z1 report came out on Monday. Total Credit Market Debt Outstanding was $58.082 trillion. The BEA reported Q3 GDP at $15.819 trillion. So, despite all of the economic pain, widespread unemployment, four rounds of quantitative easing, and two emergency fiscal stimulus plans, debt/GDP has been reduced all of 0.27 percent, to 367 percent.

(To put this in historical perspective, in 1951, debt/GDP was 132.5 percent and the government sector owed 55.9 percent of it.)

So, five years since the beginning of the crisis, we haven’t even begun the process of clearing the excess debt. And the cancer has gotten considerably worse in the meantime. In 2008, the government sector was responsible for 14.6 percent of $51.3 trillion in debt. In 2013, the government sector owes 25.7 percent of $58.1 trillion. Thanks to the capitulating Republicans, the next two years will see that grow to around 30 percent of $60 trillion… if they are successful in staving off a crash.

Look at what happened between 1933 and 1950. That’s why I believe the Great Depression 2.0 is going to be an order of magnitude worse than its predecessor.

Steve Jobs and the Case of the Donated Liver

Karl Denninger observes that his suspicions concerning Steve Jobs buying his way to the front of the donor list appear to be confirmed:

Remember my writing about how I didn’t believe, given the facts, that Jobs got his liver by pure “luck” (being registered in more than one place, for openers) and that his getting one likely meant someone else didn’t — and may have died as a consequence.

Now there’s always luck of the draw, and with a limited supply of livers (after all, we can’t wave a wand and make more of them) this is how it’s going to happen.  And if it happens via random draw and thus luck, well, that’s how it is.

But — did you know that the doctor who performed the transplant moved into a palatial mansion Jobs bought to recover in just a few months after the operation, lived in it for two years, paid the same price for it that Jobs did (no appreciation) when he bought it from Jobs and it is not clear if he rented it for those two years prior (at a market rate or otherwise) or if he literally was gifted living in the house!

It was remarkable how quickly a spare heart was found for Dick Cheney too, was it not?

I blame Howard Stern

This news report is so unbelievably awesome, it just makes me glad to be alive at such a glorious moment for humanity:

The interpreter who signed Nelson Mandela’s memorial on Thursday for deaf viewers was a fake, according to experts. The man, who signed for a portion of the ceremony including US President Barack Obama’s speech, was simply making up his own signs, the Deaf Federation of South Africa has said…. David Buxton, the CEO of the British Deaf Association, said the unidentified man, who was supposed to be signing in South African, was “waving his hands around but there was no meaning.”

I’m guessing that one of those signs had a meaning. And that meaning was “Baba Booey to y’all!”.

The Glory of Man is his instinct to take the piss out of the powerful and the self-important. About the only thing that would have been funnier would have been a U.S. drone attack accidentally ordered by Obama on the collection of “world leaders”.

That is what a hero looks like. If I were on the Nobel Committee, he’d get my vote.

Race, crime, and (r)

From Explorable:

Statistical correlation is measured by what is called coefficient of correlation (r). Its numerical value ranges from +1.0 to -1.0. It gives us an indication of the strength of relationship.


In general, r > 0 indicates positive relationship, r < 0
indicates negative relationship while r = 0 indicates no relationship
(or that the variables are independent and not related). Here r = +1.0
describes a perfect positive correlation and r = -1.0 describes a
perfect negative correlation.
Closer the coefficients are to +1.0 and -1.0, greater is the strength of the relationship between the variables.


As a rule of thumb, the following guidelines on strength of
relationship are often useful (though many experts would somewhat
disagree on the choice of boundaries).

Value of rStrength of relationship
-1.0 to -0.5 or 1.0 to 0.5Strong
-0.5 to -0.3 or 0.3 to 0.5Moderate
-0.3 to -0.1 or 0.1 to 0.3Weak
-0.1 to 0.1None or very weak

From Ron Unz:

[O]ver the last twenty-five years the weighted correlations for each of
the crime categories against the percentages of whites, Hispanics, and
“immigrants” (i.e. Hispanics-plus-Asians) have fluctuated in the general
range of -0.20 to -0.60. Interestingly enough, for most of the last
decade the presence of Hispanics and immigrants has become noticeably
less associated with crime than the presence of whites, although that
latter category obviously exhibits large regional heterogeneity.
Meanwhile, in the case of blacks, the weighted crime correlations have
steadily risen from 0.60 to around 0.80 or above, almost always now
falling within between 0.75 and 0.85.

That’s not the interesting part, however. At this point, only a complete idiot or the willfully blind will deny the relative African predilection for crime. What is interesting is his conclusions regarding how the supposedly anti-racist liberals are addressing this very strong correlation and how immigration factors into it:

America’s ruling financial, media, and political elites are largely
concentrated in three major urban centers—New York City, Los Angeles,
and Washington, D.C.—and all three have contained large black
populations, including a violent underclass. During the early 1990s,
many observers feared New York City was headed for urban collapse due to
its enormously high crime rates, Los Angeles experienced the massive
and deadly Rodney King Riots, and Washington often vied for the title of
American homicide capital. In each city, the violence and crime were
overwhelmingly committed by black males, and although white elites were
rarely the victims, their fears were quite palpable.

One obvious reaction to these concerns was strong political support
for a massive national crackdown on crime, and the prison incarceration
of black men increased by almost 500% during the two decades after 1980.
But even after such enormous rates of imprisonment, official FBI
statistics indicate that blacks today are still over 600% as likely to
commit homicide than non-blacks and their robbery rate is over 700%
larger; these disparities seem just as high with respect to Hispanic or
Asian immigrants as they are for whites. Thus, replacing a city’s
blacks with immigrants would tend to lower local crime rates by as much
as 90%, and during the 1990s American elites may have become
increasingly aware of this important fact, together with the obvious
implications for their quality of urban life and housing values.

According to Census data, between 1990 and 2010 the number of
Hispanics and Asians increased by one-third in Los Angeles, by nearly
50% in New York City, and by over 70% in Washington, D.C. The
inevitable result was to squeeze out much of the local black population,
which declined, often substantially, in each location. And all three
cities experienced enormous drops in local crime, with homicide rates
falling by 73%, 79%, and 72% respectively, perhaps partly as a result of
these underlying demographic changes. Meanwhile, the white population
increasingly shifted toward the affluent, who were best able to afford
the sharp rise in housing prices. It is an undeniable fact that
American elites, conservative and liberal alike, are today almost
universally in favor of very high levels of immigration, and their
possible recognition of the direct demographic impact upon their own
urban circumstances may be an important but unspoken factor in shaping
their views.

As an anecdotal example, consider the case of Matthew Yglesias, a
prominent young liberal blogger living in Washington, DC. A couple of
years ago he recounted on his blogsite
how he was suddenly attacked from behind and seriously beaten by two
young men while walking home one evening from a dinner party. At first
he was quite cagey about identifying his attackers, but he eventually
admitted they were blacks, possibly engaged in the growing racial
practice of urban “polar bear hunting” so widely publicized by the
Drudge Report and other rightwing websites.

Few matters are more likely to trouble the minds of our
Harvard-educated intellectual elite than fear of suffering random
violent assaults while they walk the streets of their own city. Yet no
respectable progressive would possibly focus on the racial character of
such an attack, let alone advocate the removal of local blacks as a
precautionary measure. Instead Yglesias suggested that housing-density
issues might have been responsible and that better urban planning would
reduce crime.

But consider that support for very high levels of foreign immigration
is an impeccably liberal cause, and such policies inevitably displace
and remove huge numbers of urban blacks; it is easy to imagine that
Yglesias quietly redoubled his pro-immigration zeal in the wake of the
incident. Multiply this personal example a thousand-fold, and perhaps
an important strand of the tremendous pro-immigration ideological
framework of American elites becomes apparent. The more
conspiratorially-minded racialists, bitterly hostile to immigration,
sometimes speculate that there is a diabolical plot by our ruling power
structure to “race-replace” America’s traditional white population.
Perhaps a hidden motive along these lines does indeed help explain some
support for heavy immigration, but I suspect that the race being
targeted for replacement is not the white one.

Indeed. One might reach the same conclusion when looking closely at the consequences of liberal policies on welfare and abortion. Never look at the selling points, look at the consequences. If the course is not subsequently changed in light of a divergence between the two, it is safe to assume that the consequences were planned from the start.

Remember, extrapolating current trends to predict the future is reliably a failure. In 1900, it was widely believed that the black race was inevitably headed for extinction. 100 years later, it looks like the whites are on the way out. But it’s not hard to imagine ethnic cleansing in Europe combined with ethnic strife in the Americas and ruthless Chinese colonization in Africa leading to the revival of concerns for the black race in 2100.

McRapey on rhetoric

It’s as if Aristotle were walking among us! John Scalzi instructs one of his commenters on rhetoric:

Riccola: Mr. Scalzi, while you have certainly drawn your own conclusions regarding Mr. Beale, I would say you are incorrect in stating that he is a case example of the Dunning Kruger effect. He is often humble about his ability to design games, write articles, and write books. He has never stated he considers himself great or even good at any of these things. If you are referring to rhetoric I have seen no evidence to indicate he is not skilled. All those who have fully engaged him, a good example would be the ArizonaAtheist, have actually found him to be proficient at rhetoric. From what I have observed only those who do not engage him in discussion believe he is deficient in this area.

I also struggle to see how he has failed to recognize genuine skill in others. There are a plethora of examples of him praising both those he ideologically agrees with and those who despise him. He often praises your ability to market yourself. To me, that does not sound like someone incapable of recognizing genuine skill in others.

On the third plank of the Dunning Kruger effect, fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy, I would not contest as it depends entirely on your metric and perspective.

The fourth part of the effect, recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill if they are exposed to training for that skill, there is no evidence as to this to be applicable to him. I am not aware of him being trained for anything, or his reflections on being trained.

With only one part of the Dunning Kruger effect possibly applying to Mr. Beale I would hazard that you are completely unfounded in saying that he is their favourite son. I can only guess your own contempt for the man has inhibited your ability to describe him.

McRapey:  “If you are referring to rhetoric I have seen no evidence to indicate he is not skilled.”

Speaking as someone whose degree is Philosophy of language (ie, rhetoric), I see lots of evidence to the contrary, I’m afraid. He’s not bad at sounding like he knows what he’s talking about as long as you don’t know what he’s talking about, but that’s not the same thing as being rhetorically skilled, except to the limited extent that “rhetoric” means “ability to spew bullshit.”

It’s certainly true I don’t think much of him (both in that I don’t think much of him when I don’t have to, and don’t think much of him when I do have to), but in both cases, based on my experience of having to deal with him, I’m very comfortable with my assessment. And in any event it’s not a checklist; one does not need to fulfill all possible conditions to be fully in the grips of Dunning Kruger.

Riccola:  Mr. Scalzi, I do not see why you would consider possessing a bachelors degree in Philosophy of Language would given you any indication that you are proficient or familiar with rhetoric. All it means is twenty years ago you sat in at a desk, someone taught at you, and you received a piece of paper. A degree does not make you, or anyone else, an authority on a subject. Do you think there has never been a bad engineer?

McRapey: And? As I don’t know you or know your capacity to make any sort of assessment of anything (except to the extent that you’ve asserted Mr. Beale is not unskilled, which is an assertion I find dubious for several reasons and does not put you in good stead regarding my assessment of your own evaluative skills), I would say that you not seeing why it matters really is your problem and not mine. Likewise, perhaps your school gives out bachelor degrees as if they were issued from a gumball machine. Mine doesn’t, and in particular did not in my case.

What I found so amusing about this is that McRapey clearly hasn’t changed his debating technique since at least 2005.

  1. Make an obviously questionable assertion.
  2. When the assertion is questioned, appeal to bachelor’s degree.
  3. When the appeal to the bachelor’s degree is questioned, question the questioner’s intellect and/or good will.
  4. Avoid further questions.
  5. Posture as if one has thoroughly proved one’s point.

Riccola isn’t the first to discover John Scalzi’s rhetorical limitations. In addition to my first encounter with them in 2005, Agathis had much the same experience. Not only does McRapey have no observable capacity for dialectic, his rhetoric is almost entirely limited to name-calling, argumentum ad hominem, inept satire, and the sophistic technique known as “ambiguity”. The irony of Scalzi’s position should be readily apparent when one compares his observed lack of rhetorical skill with the Dunning-Kruger effect checklist.

Dunning and Kruger proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:

  1. tend to overestimate their own level of skill; (check)
  2. fail to recognize genuine skill in others; (check)
  3. fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy; (check)
  4. recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they are exposed to training for that skill. (NA)

McRapey not only hits squarely on three of the four checkboxes, but his exhibited behavior is even worse than Dunning and Kruger conceived. He claims to have had rhetorical training, and yet he STILL doesn’t acknowledge his near-complete lack of rhetorical skill. Now, I tend to suspect this is because he genuinely doesn’t realize that he’s had no real rhetorical training, but is rather operating on the false assumption that Riccola already noted.

McRapey went on to dig himself in deeper by revealing that despite his BACHELOR’S DEGREE IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE, he was incapable of following the Latin into Greek:

You’d have to ask him; he came up with the “Vox Day” name. Note that it’s a play off of “Vox Dei,” i.e., “The Voice of God,” which is amusing for several reasons.

As for besting me in argument, well, no, not at any point I can remember. Bear in mind I haven’t engaged him in discussion for years now, so this claim is not based on anything recent. With respect to me, I am aware of him not being able to understand what satire is until it was pointed out to him and then compensating for his error by calling me “McRapey” as salve for his ego; I’m also aware that because he doesn’t appear to understand what “up to” means, that he likes to say I lie about my readership numbers here. I’m not entirely sure either of those qualify as excellent arguments, based as they are on weak foundations.

This is not to say Mr. Beale is absolutely incapable of creating a sound logical argument. But in my experience in looking at his arguments, he does it rarely, in no small part because his ground level assumptions are complete shit. If you build your arguments on shit, they’re going to topple over regardless of how you construct your edifice. It’s not his arguments’ only problem, but it’s their first problem, to be sure.

Let’s just say I am not greatly impressed by his ability to argue. Again, you are free to disagree.

Since “theos” in Greek is god, well, unlike Mr. Philosophy of Language, I suspect most of you should be able to figure out the secret etymological chain that has been lost upon so many would-be outers over the years. He’s very nearly correct about my not besting him in argument, because beyond that first encounter he has resolutely run away from debate with me, even when it was publicly proposed by third parties.

I’ve already proven beyond any shadow of doubt that John Scalzi lies about his blog traffic, which is now less than two-thirds of my own. I not only understand what “up to” means, (and “~” as well), and how it can be used to mislead people, but I also caught him when he tried to drop the “up to” on at least two occasions earlier this year. As for his claims about my inability to recognize satire, I am content to respond by pointing to the second item on the Dunning Kruger effect checklist in combination with this quote: “I’m very comfortable with my assessment.”

No doubt he is.

It is hardly surprising that McRapey doesn’t try to critique any of my arguments or show a single example of one that is incorrect, but merely waves his hand and provides a naked assertion that my “ground level assumptions are complete shit”. If called on this, no doubt he will point out that he has a BACHELOR’S DEGREE….

A scientist admits science corruption

And attacks the major science publications, or what he calls the “luxury journals”:

I am a scientist. Mine is a professional world that achieves great
things for humanity. But it is disfigured by inappropriate incentives.
The prevailing structures of personal reputation and career advancement
mean the biggest rewards often follow the flashiest work, not the best.
Those of us who follow these incentives are being entirely rational – I
have followed them myself – but we do not always best serve our
profession’s interests, let alone those of humanity and society.

We
all know what distorting incentives have done to finance and banking.
The incentives my colleagues face are not huge bonuses, but the
professional rewards that accompany publication in prestigious journals –
chiefly Nature, Cell and Science….

It is the quality of the science, not the journal’s brand, that
matters. Most importantly of all, we scientists need to take action.
Like many successful researchers, I have published in the big brands,
including the papers that won me the Nobel prize for medicine, which I
will be honoured to collect tomorrow.. But no longer. I have now
committed my lab to avoiding luxury journals, and I encourage others to
do likewise.

It should be interesting to see if the science fetishists who attack me for being “anti-science” when I point out the many problems with the science industry will do the same to this Nobel prize-winner.

This is one aspect of the problems I have been pointing out. One doesn’t have to know ANYTHING about science to know that the incentive system will lead to major problems, one only has to know about the existence of the incentives and been in contact with the occasional human being.