Throwing out the bait

John C. Wright explains why Sam Harris’s latest crusade is misplaced; empiricism is useless with regards answering non-empirical questions, thereby rendering the derivation of “ought” from “is’ impossible:

Here is my proof.

  1. Do you agree that the international scientific community has
    reduced all empirical entities to certain basic constants, namely mass,
    length, duration, temperature, current, candlepower, moles of substance,
    such that any empirical subject (such as the acceleration due to
    gravity of a cannonball or color defined as light-frequency) can be
    expressed in terms of these measurable quantities or some calculated
    derivation of these quantities?  (I do note that for subatomic
    particles, some additional fundamentals are needed, but these are also
    quantities, and not qualities, and therefore do not effect the
    argument.)
  2. A quality is a judgment concerning an imponderable entity, such as
    true or untrue, valid or invalid, comely or ugly. A quantity is a
    multitude of magnitudes, or in other words, a quantity can be measured
    against a standard or counted with numbers or both. Do you agree that no
    quality can be reduced to quantity by any means whatsoever?For example,
    do you agree that counting the number of vowels used to express a given
    sentence written in ink in Esperanto will not necessarily tell you
    whether the sentence is true or false, fairminded or slanderous,
    self-evident or self-contradictory, lovely poetry or ungainly prose?
    That also measuring with utmost care the jots over the small I’s and
    small J’s even to the extend of counting every ink molecule will not
    give you sufficient information to make these judgment?
  3. If all empirical statements can be reduced to measured fundamental
    quantities, and no statements about imponderables such as good and bad,
    valid and invalid, fair or foul can be reduced to measurable fundamental
    qualities, then they have no overlap whatsoever in topic or probative
    value, Ergo no imponderable can be proved or disproved by purely
    empirical statement, no matter how numerous or complex.

To head off an obvious objection, the quantities facts about the
molecules and atoms in a man’s brain have some sort of unknown relation
to his ability to make qualitative judgments. Drunkenness or drugs or a
blow to the head can, for example, impede the operations of memory and
judgment and other cognitive powers, or drive him mad, or kill a man
altogether. There is, however, not a single iota of evidence showing a
relation between the imponderable cognitive content and any quantitative
facts about brain molecules.

WRF3, you are now formally invited to do your thing.  But if you don’t mind an observation, this “Rolf Andreassen” at Mr. Wright’s site is presenting arguments that sound remarkably similar to those you have made here in the past.

This should be interesting.  “How much does a thought weigh?” has always struck me as being a question akin to “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” or “why does purple?”  But perhaps we shall be convinced otherwise.

The dangerous fragility of debt

As long as we’re on the subject of debt, this interview with Nassim Taleb seems fitting. He explains to REASON why the credit money system is intrinsically delicate and prone to fracture and collapse:

reason: Most people would say when you have a system and if there’s a contagion in it, if there’s a cancer in it, if there’s some kind of stressor that starts taking over, it’s going to spread to the whole system. This is what we hear about the banking system, the financial crisis. You’re arguing that a robust or an antifragile system is capable of seeing this part of the system being cancered and learning from it.

Taleb: To cite the great Yogi Berra, a good antifragile system is a system in which all mistakes are good mistakes. And the bad system is one, again to paraphrase Yogi Berra, where you tend to make the wrong mistakes. Let’s compare the banking system to, say, transportation. Every plane crash makes the next plane crash less likely and our transportation safer. Now, with the banking system, [a failure] leads to increased probability of failure of an entire system. That’s a bad system.

reason: What’s the best way to stop that so you’re not allowing the problem to replicate throughout the system?

Taleb: What fragilizes an overall system? Three things: One, centralization. Decentralization spreads mistakes, makes smaller mistakes. Decentralization is where we converge with libertarians. A second one is low debt. The third is skin in the game.

reason: Paul Krugman, one of your great friends or nemeses, just recently wrote that these trillion-dollar deficits don’t matter.

Taleb: All these economists, let’s put it this way: Risk is not their thing.

Debt leads to fragility. We’ve discovered since the Babylonians that debt has systemic consequences whereas equity doesn’t. Let’s say that you have two brothers. One of them borrowed and they both had predictions about the future—forecasts. One brother borrows. The other issues equity. The one who borrows will go bust if he makes a mistake. The one who issues equity will fluctuate but will be able to survive a forecast error.

reason: But is it also true that the brother with equity can never really have that big payday?

Taleb: For him! But overall the system is well distributed. There’s an accounting equality. Debt traditionally has blown up systems and has been very good for governments to wage war. I’m not against credit. I’m against leverage.

reason: So you give me a loan and I say I’m going to pay you back and that gives me the ability to get something in the short run that will help me produce more in the long run. That’s OK?

Taleb: Banking started [like this]: You’re going to Aleppo, Syria, and Florence and you’re going to send me some silk. You trust me, and my correspondent in Aleppo would pay you the minute I get my silk—that kind of transaction. That’s called letter of credit, where you have debt conditional on some commercial transaction being completed. And it also allows people to finance some inventory, provided the buyer is a committed buyer. That kind of facilitation of commerce is how it all started—the letter of credit—and it developed very well.

Before that we had debt in society and it led to blowups in Babylon, and then they had to have debt jubilees. Then of course the Hebrews also had debt jubilees. And of course, they say neither a borrower nor a lender be. The Romans didn’t like debt. The Greeks didn’t like debt, except for a few intellectuals. Intellectuals for some reason, like Mr. Krugman, like debt.

Later on debt came back to Europe with the Reformation and it was mostly to finance wars. The industrial revolution was not financed by debt. California was not financed by debt; it was financed by equity. So debt is not necessary. You can use it for emergencies. Catholic societies—Aquinas was against debt and his statements were stronger than the Islamic fatwa against debt.

We have learned through history that debt in the form of leverage can blow things up. Debt fragilizes. Now what we have had in this economy is a growth of debt mostly financed indirectly by governments. Because if you blow up, we’re going to be behind you.

The current system isn’t capitalism, which is decentralized and equity based.  This is a centralized, debt-based economic system, which as Taleb notes, is extremely vulnerable in a structural sense.

B&N totters

It was interesting to notice during the recent SFWA campaign how
completely clueless most of the authors were about the present state of the publishing industry.  They
genuinely believed that the status quo remains viable, which was part of why
Random House was accused of creating Hydra simply because they are obviously wicked and evil.

Nor did they rethink their position when Nightshade Books went under.  As I said at the time, it would probably take the bankruptcy of Barnes & Noble and the concomitant effects on the genre publishers to get them to realize that the traditional publishing game is all but over.  But that could happen sooner than even a skeptic like me had imagined:

Barnes and Noble has not had an easy go of it. The brick-and-mortar stalwart has seen its revenues and profits steeply decline as we’ve entered the age of the e-book. In fact, profits haven’t just shrunk; they’ve disappeared. During the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2013, the company suffered a net loss of $118.6 million, down significantly from the already poor showing it posted in 2012 when it lost $56.9 million in Q4. For the year, that put Barnes and Noble’s losses at $154.8 million — more than double what it lost in 2012.

It’s somewhat of a pity, as some of my favorite memories include spending Friday evenings wandering through the stacks with Spacebunny.  The only book signing I ever did was at Barnes & Noble and I was told it was one of the most successful ones that branch had ever had.  When I first graduated from college, I used to set myself a $50 monthly book budget that I would spend there; I’d usually manage to spend it by the second or third week.

But then, I still recall my last visit there, and walking out without buying anything.  The SF/F section was full of media tie-in novels and fantasy novels with badly Photoshopped covers, the history section had all but disappeared, and most of the remaindered hardcovers were picture books.  So perhaps the structural rot that is now apparent had already set in.

I imagine the executives at Barnes are already trying to figure out what sort of pitches they can make to Amazon and Google.  Anyhow, if you’re an SF/F writer who writes actual SF or epic fantasy, feel free to contact me about publishing through our in-game store.  We’ve already got some excellent original works of fiction, including a few set in Selenoth, but we’re looking for about 20 more.

Inflation vs deflation XI

I’ll start off this last round in
the debate by pointing out that I have most certainly not claimed that
federal spending somehow doesn’t count as inflation. I was simply
pointing out that the Federal Reserve’s attempt to inject money into
the economy has been effectively limited to one delivery vehicle because
the banks and households have proven to be surprisingly ineffective channels for doing so.
Again, Nate inadvertently shows how his refusal to accept the intrinsic relationship between credit and money renders his analysis
incorrect.
I very much agree that “for the
purposes on inflation it doesn’t matter who’s spending the new
money”. And I agree that “government spending is merely the
delivery method for injecting it into the economy”, but what Nate
is failing to mention here is that government spending isn’t the only, or
even the primary, delivery method used by the Federal Reserve. The
significant thing is that government spending is the only delivery method of the
four the Fed has been attempting to utilize for the past five years
that has worked at all. Despite the larger part of the Fed’s efforts
being directed at the financial sector, that credit sector has
continued to shrink. So has the household sector despite the
attempts to replace the housing sector bubble with an education
bubble. The corporate sector has responded, a little, but the $1.8
trillion increase since 2008 is barely more than half the contraction in
the financial sector.
Nate claims that prices are rising
everywhere across the board and that it doesn’t matter where the
government spends the new money. Both assertions are incorrect. Gold
prices are down 24 percent since the start of the year. Home prices
are up 1.1 percent in that same time frame, but are still down 29
percent from their 2006 peak. Gasoline prices are up from January,
but have been trending down since the spring of 2012. And the
inflated stock market is showing every sign of a steep, long-overdue
price correction. But these are merely symptoms, and short-term
symptoms at that. I see them as reflections of the credit
disinflation, Nate sees them as signs of incipient hyperinflation.
Only time will tell who was correct, so there is no point in further
belaboring the price issue.
Nor do I see any point in providing an
extended explanation of why Ben Bernanke appears to be signaling an
end to the quantitative easing program, or the significance of the
initial indications that Shinzo Abe’s massive attempt to print money
in Japan is failing, because Nate took things in a rather different
direction with his focus on the idea that hyperinflation is a
psychological phenomenon rather than a material one. Those who are
interested can find effective summaries of those two
not-insignificant events on Zerohedge. Nate wrote:
Hyperinflation is what happens when
people decide that the fiat money they have in their pockets and in
their accounts is no longer going to be honored in the future and
start spending it as quickly as possible.  That is the
unstoppable train of inflation.  The printing presses cannot be
stopped because the people will not stop spending the money as soon
as they get it.
But this perspective on hyperinflation again fails to
account for credit, which is how most people are spending most of
their money these days. Even when literal credit cards aren’t
involved, they are paying their bills with direct bank debits and
debit cards that draw from their credit money account. If one
considers the recently reported fact that 68 percent of Americans
possess less than $800 in savings, it should be clear that they
simply don’t have any fiat money in their pockets. To quote the
report: “After paying debts and taking care of housing, car
and child care-related expenses, the respondents said there just
isn’t enough money left over for saving more.” Emphasis added.
Nate’s unstoppable train simply doesn’t have enough of an engine to
leave the station, especially when the credit money that is in those
accounts begins vanishing in the inevitable bail-ins. 
In considering the possibility of hyperinflation versus the likelihood of deflation, it is important to do something we have not yet done in this debate, which is to examine the differences between the present situation and the most famous historical hyperinflation. As has been previously noted, in the USA, L1 total credit has remained very close to flat since 2008, increasing only 11.2 percent in five years. By contrast, in the period leading up to the Weimar hyperinflation, the Reichsbank debt increased from 3 billion to 55 billion marks between 1914 and 1918, and to 110 billion by 1920.  
“Businessmen found it very profitable to borrow money from the bank and buy up goods, shares and companies. Their debt was wiped out within weeks by the rapid inflation, and the businessman remained holding the valuable assets he had bought. The net result was a huge “private inflation” caused by the rapid expansion of credit…. By October 1923, 1% of government income came from taxes and 99% from the creation of new money.”
It should be readily apparent that Weimar represented a very different scenario than the one we observe today.  We are not seeing an increase in private borrowing, but rather, a net contraction. This means the only way
hyperinflation can even theoretically begin in the present circumstances is if
the Federal Reserve elects to permit the debtors in the various debt
sectors to pay off their debts rather than encouraging them to default by raising interest rates, and uses the
government to begin electronically injecting dozens of trillions of
dollars into the economy through the mainstream equivalent of food stamp
cards.
Is it possible? Theoretically. Is it
improbable. I think so, which brings this entire debate back to the
beginning, which is that one’s opinion on hyperinflation versus
deflation depends entirely on one’s belief that the Federal Reserve
is willing and able to choose the former over the latter. Setting
aside the fact that there are already those who believe that Bernanke
has followed the Depression-era Fed’s lead in choosing the latter on
the basis of his cryptic remarks concerning “tapering”, it is my
contention that the Fed is not only unable to massively inflate, but
that it is totally unwilling to do so.
Nate will have the last word, but since you’ve indulged his
imagination concerning the widespread abandonment of the dollar,
perhaps you’ll indulge mine concerning the motivations and mindset of the Federal Reserve in the present environment. Inflation and hyperinflation benefit
borrowers. Deflation benefits lenders, as they are repaid in
increasingly valuable currency. Default also benefits lenders as long as the collateral backing the loan exceeds the value of the outstanding debt.
So, in closing, I will simply ask you one simple question: at this point in time, is the
Federal Reserve a net borrower or a net lender?
By way of example, let me propose a hypothetical scenario that is perhaps a little outlandish,
if not completely in the zone of economic science fiction. The Ciceronian
political cycle predicts aristocracy, not tyranny, as the post-democratic political system. And what would be a more effective way to legally
establish a wealthy aristocracy with a relative minimum of societal disorder
than to encourage vast indebtedness, then trigger mass defaults by raising interest rates,
which then results in the acquisition of title to all of the defaulted collateral?  Even the most hard core libertarian couldn’t find anything to complain about such an action; (merely the idiocy of the centralized structure that permitted it to happen), and it would be a damn sight more legal than three-quarters of the activities with which the administration’s agencies occupy themselves these days.

Mailvox: on Scalzi the author

Patrick is curious about my opinion of John Scalzi as an SF/F author:

Vox, his politics aside, what is your assessment of the Chief Rabbit as a novelist? China Mieville, for example, is a Marxist lunatic, but I read one of his novels and found it creative–if a little dull.  Do
you think that Scalzi’s would be more or less successful as a novelist
if he stopped blogging, or if he merely stopped the political posts?

My assessment is that Scalzi is a one-book writer of modest literary talent who has prolonged his writing career through a combination of a) unusually good self-marketing skills, and, b) stunt writing.

In the recent history of publishing, there are a lot of one-book writers, by which I mean writers who have one genuinely good book in them and nothing more regardless of how many books they write.  Dave Eggers is a very good example of this while Jay McInerney is another.  I think David Foster Wallace would have proven to be one too; I even suspect the painfully self-aware Wallace knew this and the knowledge may have played some role in his suicide.

In most cases, the reason is simple: the writer is writing about his life.  Very few of us have lives so interesting that they are capable of supporting multiple books about them, so once the writer has finished his book about himself, he literally has nothing else about which to write.  Now, that’s not the case with Scalzi; Old Man’s War is obviously not about his life. But although it’s a pretty good science fiction novel, (you may recall I reviewed it favorably), in hindsight it can be seen to contain the seeds of Scalzi’s subsequent decline as a writer.  First, there was the transparently silly bit about the atheist who rebukes the bigoted Christian by – you’ll never guess – quoting John 8:7.  How totally new and creative and different than anything that had ever been done before! That little scene was a hint concerning his intellectual laziness as well as the ideological inclinations that have increasingly taken over his public persona. Second, and more importantly, there were the heavily derivative aspects that briefly caused everyone to wonder if a new Heinlein had appeared upon the scene.

Not so much. What we didn’t realize at the time is that the Heinlein elements were only there because Scalzi is insufficiently creative. He’s essentially a fan-fic writer whose derivative works are publishable, not unlike EL James.  This isn’t necessarily a bad strategy if you want to sell books, just ask Terry Brooks or every post-Laurell K. Hamilton author of urban fantasy.  But it’s the exact opposite of being a good storyteller, much less a great science fiction writer like Heinlein.  I am not the anti-Scalzi, China Mieville is, their political kinship notwithstanding.

Scalzi sent me The Android’s Dream when it came out and I also read The Ghost Brigades.  And that was when I stopped reading his books, not because I had anything against him, but because the former was abysmally unfunny and the latter was uninteresting. I didn’t review them here because I didn’t have anything positive to say about either book and I didn’t wish to poison relations that had improved after our initial encounter.  It didn’t surprise me when he went on to publish books like Fuzzy Nation and Redshirts, since by that time I’d already pegged him for a derivative stunt writer.

Now, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with stunt writing.  It requires an amount of cleverness and can definitely sell books, as AJ Jacobs has shown.  The problem is that you can’t repeat the stunt, but have to continue coming up with new ones in order to stay relevant.  Scalzi’s latest stunt, the serial ebook, was a good one, but has already worn thin.

I suspect Scalzi knows his limitations better than anyone, which is why he has been attempting to move on to television, movies, and games.  If he is successful in making any of those moves, it wouldn’t surprise me if he stopped writing novels because he obviously doesn’t write for the love of it or because he has so many stories to tell.  He’s a true professional in that he writes to earn money, and he does an exceptionally good job in that regard at a time when it is difficult to do so. I don’t think even his biggest fans grasp how gifted a self-marketing BS artist he is; had he gone into Internet technology rather than writing, he would be a very wealthy man on his fourth failing VC-backed venture by now.

I actually have great respect for Scalzi’s ability to make bestselling soup out of what is very thin literary gruel.  If Tor knew anything about business beyond scooping up genre awards and paying for one-week bestseller list placements, they would hire him as an editor and turn him into a James Patterson-style book factory churning out three or four books per year. It’s an absurd waste of talent for Scalzi to spend time writing his derivative mediocrities when he could be marketing them.  There are 500 SFWA members who could write them as well and at least 150 who would produce better books.

In answer to the final question, I think Scalzi would be far less successful as a bookseller if he stopped blogging, and I think it would be a huge mistake for him to stop the political posts because they are an important part of his appeal to his most loyal fans, the great majority of whom are SF/F readers.  Nor do the political posts appear to hurt at all him with the right. Conservatives and libertarians have always bought left-wing fiction because they are accustomed being offered little choice in the matter.

A novel excuse

The SFWA’s Damien Walter has produced a novel excuse for not being able to defend his beliefs in public:

You’re only as intelligent as the cretin you’re arguing with on the
internet. Remember that the next time you’re tempted to debate Vox Day.

His excuse makes no sense at all. If one is arguing with a cretin, it is very, very easy to demonstrate that he is a cretin and to point out the flaws in his arguments.  And it is even easier for unbiased third parties to not only observe whose arguments are better, but which of the two interlocutors is more intelligent.

This ease of observation, in fact, is why most people, including more than a few who are not terribly well-disposed towards me, readily acknowledge that I am extremely intelligent.  Not so much because I can successfully defend my own positions, but because I am usually able to demonstrate that I understand my opponent’s position much better than he does himself.  That’s one of the things that has rendered the inflation/deflation debate so interesting in comparison with past debates; both my opponent and I are reasonably well-versed in most of the arguments on both sides.

People like John Scalzi and PZ Myers don’t run away from public debates with me because I am insufficiently intelligent, but because they know, on the basis of their past encounters with me, that I can easily shoot down their arguments while they cannot even scratch mine.  Such individuals are intellectually careless and their positions are largely emotion-based, which makes it very easy for any logically-minded individual to detect the flaws in their argument and exploit them.

Remember, it was only last week that I publicly humiliated PZ in his very own field of biology, and moreover, did it in passing.  Although I have to admit, that was a surprise to me.  As as low as my opinion is of the man, it never occurred to me that anyone with a PhD in biology could possibly fail to recognize that “human” and “homo sapiens sapiens” are not perfect synonyms.

The “crackpot” excuse doesn’t hold up well in the eyes of anyone who has read my blog for more than a week. And, of course, the “platform” excuse rings increasingly hollow because my own platform is already considerably larger than most of my critics. So it’s interesting to see this has resulted in new and increasingly nonsensical excuses being produced by the likes of Walter.

Notice that for all the posturing and shrieking of the crowd that Mike Resnick described as “screamers”, not a single individual, not a single white knight, has dare to even attempt to defend their equalitarian position or substantively address my inequalitarian one.  They have a growing panoply of absurd excuses, but the real reason is they don’t because they know they can’t do it successfully.

UPDATE: It’s amusing how the Left is so convinced that their views must be the popular perspective that they retreat to delusional positions rather than admit the obvious:  “I think a half decent data analyst could also prove that most of VDs followers are sock-puppets as well.”

He most certainly could not.  First, I have no followers, I have readers.  Second, none of them are sock-puppets.  Unlike numerous lefties, I have no need to sock-puppet because a fair number of people enjoy reading my opinions, and some of them, over time, come to agree with a few of them. But neither my readership nor my wife are fictitious. Just deal with it. Denial only makes one look insane.

Post-Christian pagan revival

You may recall that a pan-European pagan revival was something I predicted a few years ago ago.  Secularism is not an option because it has nothing to offer philosophically or spiritually; that’s precisely why the humanists are always producing manifestos as well as books attempting to explain why it is possible for someone to square a circle even though no one has managed it yet.  This petty Greek paganism is insignificant today, but if they are successful in marrying it to the powerful nationalist revival represented by Golden Dawn, it could prove surprisingly popular.

In the last few years, though, some have come to
distrust that prism, and to say so in public. While Church membership
is still extremely high (more than 95% of all Greeks are at least
nominally Orthodox) and the leadership is still highly involved in
state affairs, there has been a resurgence of popular interest in the pre-Christian
past. With it has come a small explosion of pagan groups, philosophical
societies, Spartan schools, “Hellenist” magazines and
performances of classical theater….

One of the most visible facets of the revivalist movement has
been the campaign for recognition for the Dodecatheon, or “Religion
of the Twelve Gods.” The campaign has hardly been successful: polytheists have twice applied to the
Greek religion ministry for official status, and twice they have
been ignored. Coverage of the movement in the popular press has
not been flattering. (The word many Greeks use when asked about
the pagans is “funny.”) But the movement has been attracting attention. 

Paganism looks funny from the perspective of the post-Christian, who has the benefit of more than a thousand years of Christian civilization.  It’s not quite so funny if you happen to be sufficiently well-educated about historical paganism; there is a reason why “the Dark Ages” historically refers to the time before the coming of Jesus Christ, The Light of the World.

(The so-called “Enlightenment”, like all Satanic inspirations, is nothing more than a cheap and perverted knock-off of the original concept.)

In any event, the history of the 20th century should demonstrate that pagan nationalists, particularly those with pan-European ambitions, are no laughing matter.

Fear of a grounded helicopter

Paul Krugman is feeling stabbed in the back by Ben Bernanke and his signals that the Fed is going to begin “tapering” the quantitative easing that is the only thing presently propping up the markets:

Lately, Fed officials have been issuing increasingly strong hints that
rather than doing more, they want to do less, that they are eager to
start “tapering,” returning to normal monetary policy….
So what do they think they’re doing? One answer might be that the Fed has quietly come to agree with critics
who argue that its easy-money policies are having damaging side-effects,
say by increasing the risk of bubbles. But I hope that’s not true,
since whatever damage low rates may do is trivial compared with the
damage higher rates, and the resulting rise in unemployment, would
inflict. 
In any case, my guess is that what’s really happening is a bit
different: Fed officials are, consciously or not, responding to
political pressure. After all, ever since the Fed began its policy of
aggressive monetary stimulus, it has faced angry accusations from the
right that it is “debasing” the dollar and setting the stage for high
inflation — accusations that haven’t been retracted even though the
dollar has remained strong and inflation has remained low. It’s hard to
avoid the suspicion that Fed officials, worn down by the constant
attacks, have been looking for a reason to slacken their efforts, and
have seized on slightly better economic news as an excuse….
It’s sad and depressing, in both senses of the word. The fundamental
reason our economy is still depressed after all these years is that so
many policy makers lost the thread, forgetting that job creation was
their most urgent task. Until now the Fed was an exception; but now it
seems to be joining the club. Et tu, Ben?

When I published The Return of the Great Depression back in 2009, many readers found it hard to believe that the Keynesians, and the Neo-Keynesians, paid absolutely no attention to debt.  But it is now 2013 and the leading Neo-Keynesian, the Nobel prizewinner, is STILL paying absolutely no attention to it despite the fact that the Fed’s Z1 statistics quite clearly underline what the Fed has been doing and why it is going to stop doing it sooner or later.

It doesn’t even make sense to claim that the reason the economy is depressed is because many policy makers forgot that job creation is their most urgent task.  What does that even mean? Government policy doesn’t create productive wealth-producing jobs; the most it can do is create incentives to move such jobs from one place to another.

But that’s a tangent to be explored another time.  For me, the most remarkable thing is that Bernanke is practically pointing to the giant credit pyramid and the leading lights of the mainstream media are STILL pretending that the vast, crumbling edifice is of no significance whatsoever… even as they openly express their concerns about the damaging effect of rising interest rates.  Krugman’s position isn’t merely wrong, it’s entirely incoherent.

Conservatives are still stupid

John Hawkins took a poll of right-wing bloggers concerning the immigration bill. They mostly had enough sense to oppose it, but this was the pair of questions that revealed the irrational position of conservatives on immigration:

6) On the whole, which of these sentiments best describes your thoughts about illegal aliens?
B) They make America a worse place to live? 88.6% (31 votes)
A) They make America a better place to live? 11.4% (4 votes)

7) On the whole, which of these sentiments best describes your thoughts about legal immigrants?
A) They make America a better place to live? 88.6% (31 votes)
B) They make America a worse place to live? 11.4% (4 votes)

Most conservatives genuinely believe that the legality of an action determines the qualitative nature of it.  This is why they so often blithely support whatever evils that the previous generation of progressives have managed to slip past previous conservatives.

It doesn’t matter if 100 million Nigerians and 300 million Chinese enter the country legally or illegally next year, they will substantially change what America is by virtue of their entry.  The legality or illegality of that entry will have no effect whatsoever on the impact they will have over time on American society.

For all their supposed reverence for the Founding Fathers, conservatives have forgotten their wisdom on these matters:

“The opinion advanced in the
Notes on Virginia [by Thomas Jefferson] is undoubtedly correct, that foreigners will
generally be apt to bring with them attachments to the persons they have
left behind; to the country of their nativity; and to its particular
customs and manners. They will also entertain opinions on government
congenial with those under which they have lived; or if they should be
led hither from a preference to ours, how extremely unlikely is it that
they will bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential
to real republicanism?”

A different kind of awesome

It may strike some as ironic, but I have to confess, I very much enjoy reading through the book reviews/rants by the rabid lady reviewer known as Requires Only That You Hate. The fascinating thing is that despite her ability to detect misogyny in a gust of wind and racism in a blade of grass, she’s actually less inclined to give the mediocre writers of the SF/F field a pass on the basis of their sex and color than most readers and reviewers are. 

Consider her review of one ignorant half-savage’s ludicrously overpraised work, the condescending plaudits for which are more intrinsically racist than most historical KKK pamphlets.

As I speed-read through The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, I couldn’t get rid of the nagging suspicion that I’ve read this before. At first I thought Laurell K. Hamilton, because some of the sex descriptions are very silly, but that’s not it. Then I thought that the obligatory dark-haired bishounen Nahadoth shares several qualities with a certain breed of demon lovers from trashy paranormal romances or possibly Edward Cullen.

It wasn’t until I read a review that gushes something along the line of “fans of Anne Bishop’s Daemon won’t be able to help being just a bit in love with Nahadoth” that it finally clicked: this is the Black Jewels trilogy sans the giant Mary Sue, horrible writing, and creepy pedophilia….

Jemisin is much like Bishop in that she doesn’t give a shit about her
setting or, if she does, lacks the life to breathe into it. You might
wonder: what does the world/country/land look like? No clue, beyond that
Sky is white and pearly. What’s their technology level? Who knows (the
author answered this in an interview, but if you can’t tell by reading
the book alone, well then). The setting’s a cardboard backdrop
that might fall over and crumble any minute. One of the novel’s selling
points is that it supposedly veers from a typical medieval European
culture and the protagonist is dark-skinned, but frankly, you can’t
tell. When I said Borgias on steroids, I meant it: the Arameri is one
big lump of implied incest, sadism, corruption, and loads of other
things that would have impressed the Lannisters except every single one
of them–except for Yeine’s mother–is a blithering idiot. They behave in
exactly the way you would expect from my description. Their customs are
as generic fantasy as they come….

Easily the most overrated thing ever to come out recently, and I’m going
to assume that people who gush over how groundbreaking it all is have
only ever read Tolkien and Eragon.

I think this may be the woman against whom R. Scott Bakker was so desperate to set me when he was being hit from both sides for his unseemly fascination with raping every female character that so much as twitched in his novels.  Regardless, aside from her ideologically driven preferences, RH has reasonably good taste in SF/F, as she thinks well of Tanith Lee, Joan D. Vinge, and China Mieville, while turning up her nose at overrated mediocrities like Jemisin, Sheri Tepper, Jasper Fforde, and Saladin Ahmed. 

She’s a bit harsh on Jim Butcher, but for some of the right reasons as she correctly identifies the psychosexual development of his characters as being stuck at the teenage level and Harry Dresden being an idealized stand-in for his gamma male creator.  She accurately nails Joe Abercrombie for writing primarily for effect. And she’s uncommonly observant with regards to Neil Gaiman, whose fans will likely never be able to regard his work in quite the same way after reading her adroit demonstration of how Gaiman keeps writing the same book over and over and over again.

After a certain point it’s no longer fun and you ram up against the realization that they are all the same fucking story.

Oh sure, the characters have different names. They have different tones–Stardust is, I think, meant to be young adult. But observe this:

  • gutless, spineless everyman-loser protagonist with limited personality, intelligence, and no charm: hereafter known as Mr. Cliched Stock Type
  • the woman who henpecks Mr. Cliched Stock Type
  • Mr. Cliched Stock Type discovers a hidden magical world
  • Mr. Cliched Stock Type discovers a special destiny, either prophesied, part of his secret magic heritage, or both
  • Mr. Cliched Stock Type fulfills special destiny

Now you’re going to go BUT HERO’S JOURNEY JOHN CAMPBELL and I’m going to go SHUT THE FUCK UP. Setting aside for a moment that I’m willing to punch anybody who cites Campbell’s “monomyth” as an excuse for shitty writing, lack of imagination, and all around inability to write–setting aside that, it’s not only the similarity in structure. It’s that Neverwhere, Stardust, American Gods and Anansi Boys are written by the exact same man. It’s that Mr. Stock Type shows up for all four, each iteration as dull and insufferable as the last, distinguishable only faintly by his name.

Leaving American Gods and Stardust alone for now, this isn’t so much a matter of “oh you could do this to any fantasy book,” itself an asinine proposition, because not all fantasy books feature a timid Londoner devoid of ambition who has relationship troubles with a demanding sweetheart/fiancee. The sweethearts in question(respectively Rosie Noah, Jessica, and Victoria Forrester) are likewise identical: thinly written, demanding, henpecking, and not the brightest. Really Gaiman kind of sucks at writing women, and apart from this one incredibly tertiary character in American Gods I don’t think he’s particularly comfortable with gay men–certainly not enough to write them as protagonists. Similarly, the catalyst to “finding the secret magic world” is always more or less the same: through colliding with one of said secret world’s inhabitants.

It does tend to raise certain questions about Mr. Gaiman’s past relationships, does it not? And although she doesn’t quite grasp the point of Mieville’s excellent Embassytown, (nor is she able to grok either his Kraken, or City and the City), she does at least recognize that it is an unusual and highly intelligent work.

Given her pure and burning hatred for all things civilizational, I suspect it would be more than a little hilarious if she were to review A Throne of Bones.  RH, if you happen to read this, I should be absolutely delighted to send you an ebook and discover what panoply of horrors you are capable of discerning there.