Dear Members, SFWA.org has been experiencing a DDoS attack since approximately 10am EST this morning. Our webstaff has been working to restore the site. Please be patient while they continue their efforts. Members may have difficulty accessing the main sfwa.org site and the content within. The forums at sfwa.org/forum are also experiencing intermittent outages as well.
This event prompted an amount of speculation that the DDoS attack might possibly be related to certain differences of opinion between the current and future presidents of the SFWA. As it happens, I had nothing whatsoever to do with it, (I was not even aware of it until after it had already been resolved), and neither did the Dread Ilk. The reason, of course, is that it is the easiest thing in the world to determine if the Dread Ilk were involved in something within 24 hours of an event taking place.
Were firearms involved?
Was the caliber larger than 9mm?
Is the body count in excess of 20?
Are the fires still burning?
If the answer to all of these questions is no, you can be absolutely certain that the party responsible was not a regular reader of this blog.
It is educational to see that when a former policeman strikes out violently at the police, he does what the police all too often do, which is target their families. This is a dangerous development I have been expecting ever since the militarization of the USA has increasingly led to family members and dogs being killed by police as a result of the dynamic entry tactics now being used on a regular basis:
In the online postings, Dorner specifically named the father of Monica Quan, the Cal State Fullerton assistant basketball coach who was found dead Sunday, along with her fiance, Keith Lawrence. Her father, Randy Quan, a retired LAPD captain, was involved in the review process that ultimately led to Dorner’s dismissal.
A former U.S. Navy reservist, Dorner was fired in 2009 for allegedly making false statements about his training officer…. Dorner complained that Quan and others did not fairly represent him at the review hearing.
“Your lack of ethics and conspiring to wrong a just individual are over. Suppressing the truth will lead to deadly consequences for you and your family. There will be an element of surprise where you work, live, eat, and sleep,” he wrote, referring to Quan and several others.
Based on what we know about the police departments, the way they treat whistleblowers, and the way they resolutely cover up the violent and criminal acts of the “one or two bad apples” that somehow never seem to be weeded out from any department, it would not surprise me to learn that many, if not most, of the allegations of LAPD misbehavior contained in Dorner’s manifesto are true.
I’m sure it will shock everyone to learn that the brave police who put their lives at risk every day are now inexplicably on edge and shooting at anything that moves. One local resident emails to tell how the media is not reporting the entire story:
I wanted to get this information to you directly because the media will squelch the parts of the narrative they don’t want aired. You know by now that a manhunt is underway for an EX COP that murdered two kids in Irvine while they sat in their parked car close to the UC Irvine campus. This guy is ex-military and was fired from the force for issuing false statements …which is all the media is revealing at this time. He is now embarking on retribution against those that got him fired and other cops. He shot two cops in a squad car that was following him and killed one of them.
Most of this is really unremarkable but the part I wanted you to know about was that they have shot up two trucks matching the description of the killers truck in the city of Torrence. The first truck had two older Asian ladies in it that were delivering newspapers,,,and they must have had it coming because they did not comply fast enough to satisfy the jittery cops. If that wasn’t bad enough… they shot up a second truck just down the street. They told the owner to turn his truck around but again, it wasn’t fast enough for the cops because they shot his truck up too!
It seems the police behave rather differently when they know that the other side is as willing to shoot as they are. This looks to be an interesting experiment in what we were discussing here a few weeks ago, namely, how effective the force wielded by the government against a single armed man truly is.
Okay, but I’ve never seen this explanation offered: successful priming studies stop replicating after awhile because they basically aren’t science. At least not in the sense of having discovered something that will work forever.
Instead, to the extent that they ever did really work, they are exercises in marketing. Or, to be generous, art.
And, art wears off.
The power of a work of art to prime emotions and actions changes over time. Perhaps, initially, the audience isn’t ready for it, then it begins to impact a few sensitive fellow artists, and they begin to create other works in its manner and talk it up, and then it become widely popular. Over time, though, boredom sets in and people look for new priming stimuli.
For a lucky few old art works (e.g., the great Impressionist paintings), vast networks exist to market them by helping audiences get back into the proper mindset to appreciate the old art (E.g., “Monet was a rebel, up against The Establishment! So, putting this pretty picture of flowers up on your wall shows everybody that you are an edgy outsider, too!”).
So, let’s assume for a moment that Bargh’s success in the early 1990s at getting college students to walk slow wasn’t just fraud or data mining for a random effect among many effects. He really was priming early 1990s college students into walking slow for a few seconds.
Is that so amazing?
I find it informative that the grand self-appointed defenders of Science Reason are always focused on the nonexistent enemy of Religion while showing absolutely no interest in real land of Woo, which is academic pseudoscience. As a general rule, it is safe to assume that if midwitted charlatans such as Malcolm Gladwell or Jared Diamond are basing conclusions upon it, the scientific aspects, to the extent that they exist at all, will be more than a little shaky.
I would go so far as to point out that the MAJORITY of what passes for science today is, in fact, nothing of the sort. It’s not experimental. It’s not replicable. Despite the credentials attached to it, it has nothing more to do with science than the proverbial PhD defecating in the woods. Science is not simply “what scientists do”.
Ireland’s government rushed through emergency legislation early on Thursday to liquidate the failed Anglo Irish Bank as it tries to secure a deal with the European Central Bank to ease the country’s debt burden….
President Michael D. Higgins will sign the bill into law later on Thursday. He cut short a state trip to Rome to ensure he could consider it. Anglo Irish and its casino-style lending were at the heart of Ireland’s financial crisis. The bank’s near collapse in 2008 pressured the government into guaranteeing the entire financial sector, sucking it into a downward spiral and in late 2010, a €67.5bn EU-IMF bailout.
Three of the bank’s former executives, including its former CEO, will go on trial next year on fraud charges. Under Dublin’s plan, the €28bn in promissory notes will be replaced with long-term government bonds, meaning that Ireland can make more gradual repayments, a source familiar with the discussions told Reuters.
So, instead of simply letting the bank go into liquidation in 2008, the Irish government saddled the Irish people with nearly $100 billion in debt, and now the bank is going to go into liquidation anyhow.
In contrast, thanks primarily to the courage of the Icelandic prime minister, Iceland let its casino banks go bankrupt and resisted the global pressure to saddle the Icelandic people with the bankers’ debts. Iceland has now put the debt bubble behind it and is growing again; the Irish can’t even make the upcoming payments on a debt that extends for another 10 years.
This is why the bankrupt US banks should have been allowed to fail back in 2008. Bank bailouts are seldom a solution, they are almost always a simple matter of delaying the day of financial reckoning long enough for the parties responsible to successfully abscond with the gains they have collected from gambling with other people’s money.
We can envision, then, a sectarian war raging across the whole of the Fertile Crescent, drawing in all the former territories of Turkish Arabia. The prospect will be a frightening one for the region’s major powers. Both Turkey and Saudi Arabia could one day find chaos rather than functioning states on their permeable borders. If Al Qaeda/Nusrah can establish a base in Jordan, Saudi Arabia will find itself threatened by Al Qaeda franchises on both north and south that will be well-positioned to resume the pursuit of Al Qaeda’s core goal of toppling the Saudi monarchy and “liberating” the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
The Saudis showed great resiliency in defeating a serious Al Qaeda insurrection in 2004-2008, but that was a strictly internal threat that lacked a real foreign base. Simultaneous Al Qaeda bases in Jordan and Yemen would pose a more serious, if not an existential, threat to Saudi rule. If watching the fall or near-fall of half a dozen regimes in the Arab Spring has taught us anything, it should be that the Arab states that appeared serenely stable to outsiders for the past half century were more brittle than we have understood. The implosion of Turkish Arabia would test those regimes to the limit, and we cannot assume that the rulers of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait would be any better equipped to defeat the potential challenge than Muammar Qaddhafi and Bashar al-Assad were.
The rulers of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran are surely not blind to this nightmare scenario. As the situation in Turkish Arabia continues to unravel, those regional powers will be compelled to become ever deeper involved in an attempt to keep the tide of war from breaking on their own lands. This conflict could very well touch us all, perhaps becoming an engine of jihad that spews forth attackers bent on bombing western embassies and cities or disrupting Persian Gulf oil markets long before the fire burns out.
And what of Turkish Arabia in the long run? One eminent scholar of the Middle East assures me that the borders drawn by the British and French were artificial, yes, but now have staying power. The people of the region are too used to the lines to erase them, even if they don’t love them. I don’t doubt him, and I am sure that whatever else happens, there will continue to be a Syria, a Lebanon, a Jordan, and an Iraq. But those countries are about to pass through a crucible, a painful test in which their peoples will be sorted by sect; driven from traditional homelands; starved, taxed, or pressed into service by warlords; terrorized by militant Islamists; forced to witness their ancient heritage destroyed by bombs; and live without the rule of law. It will be terrible to watch, and we will not be left unsullied in our watching.
If it weren’t for the oil of the Middle East, this would be a solution, not a problem. As it stands, I can’t help but wonder if the potentates of the EU are praying for just such a distraction, as it would allow them the freedom to aggressively address their own Muslim problem. The principle of Distract, Divide, and Conquer would indicate that once the war got started, there would be no coherent force supporting the Muslims of Europe, who for all their press make up less than 5 percent of the European population.
I tend to doubt that the atheists in Brussels, Paris, and Berlin are any fonder of Muslims than they are of Christians and the ideological and demographic forces of Islam are already much more troubling to the godless potentates in the various capitals than the weak and toothless version of Christianity that is perhaps best exemplified by the ex-Archbishop of Canterbury. The grandees may be afraid of conflict with the Ummah now, but that fear will likely vanish should war erupt throughout the House of Submission.
And Israel would certainly be delighted to see the Islamic world tearing itself apart; one tends to imagine it will do what it can to light whatever fuses might be on hand to help set its enemies at each others’ throats.
One attempts to move on, but they keep pulling one back in. And honestly, how can anyone not enjoy watching their tiny little rabbit minds so furiously at work?
staranise says: Asking for “debate” confuses me simply because it presupposes that it would accomplish something different from the current situation, in which any parties concerned have an unlimited personal platform to put forward their ideas and reasoning. It supposes that the parties are unfamiliar with each other’s positions and reasoning. This isn’t true, so there’s not much new to say. Nothing significant would change. Ah. Except, of course, RSHD would get happy pantsfeelings from being paid attention to. The call for debate is the same as standing outside Scalzi’s house with a boombox over one’s head. It’s not going to work! Turn off the Peter Gabriel. Go home.
John Scalzi says: Guys, I think we can give the topic of a debate a rest.
MMAH says: Oh, and look–front page at Salon this morning, too.
Yes, I’ve noticed many things confuse them. What is particularly funny about this little dialogue is that I never challenged McRapey to a debate. The challenge came from Ed Trimnell, who happens to be a critic of mine, and it would be Ed, not me, who is metaphorically standing outside in the rain.
But to return to the rabbit logic, apparently I would get “happy pantsfeelings” from Ed’s call being answered and thereby having to spend a modicum of effort to kick around McRapey in front of a few thousand blog readers, but was devastated by the brilliant way in which McRapey and Ensign Wesley banded together in order to draw attention to me in the Guardian, the BBC, and Salon, among others.
It’s rather like watching them try to add 2+2+2 and coming up with the answer “purple badger”.
Here’s how you beat the trolls: Turn their hatred into cash for charities they despise.
That’s what science-fiction writer John Scalzi has done — and in the process, he’s raised more than $50,000 in pledges for Emily’s List and the Human Rights Campaign, specially chosen to earn the ire of a blogger Scalzi calls “my racist sexist homophobic dipshit.”
Every time Scalzi’s online nemesis — a former WorldNetDaily columnist who writes under the name Vox Day – used his name or called someone by a derogatory nickname, Scalzi set aside $5 for charity — and his readers pitched in, too, raising tens of thousands for charities designed to uplift women, minorities and gays. Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network and the NAACP also benefit; Scalzi capped his own donation at $1,000 and his readers took over from there.
“The whole point of this is not to intimidate him to stop speaking. You will not get this guy to stop speaking. He sees this as a contest, as a battle of wills,” said Scalzi, in an interview with Salon. Giving money to charities like RAINN and the NAACP is, he says, “an extra stab in the eye.”
I am, of course, frothing with rage at the unspeakable generosity being shown by the dastardly Rabbit People. Oh, how the anger courses through my body, from clenched fist to clenched fist! First Emily’s List, then RAINN? It’s like a one-two punch!
This is what happens when a nation gives up its national sovereignty to authoritarians determined to destroy the social fabric:
David Cameron suffered a humiliating reverse last night when more than half his MPs rejected his 11th-hour appeals for support for same-sex marriage. On an extraordinary day in the Commons, 134 Tory MPs took advantage of a free vote to oppose the plans. Only 126 backed the legislation, with 35 abstaining.
But with the help of the majority of Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs Mr Cameron saw the measure passed easily, by a margin of 400 to 175. The first gay marriages are likely to be conducted within 12 months.
Cameron is nothing but a water-carrier for the European Union. Like the Republicans in the Senate, his role as a “conservative” is to conserve the changes that are imposed by the progressives, in this case, the dictates of the unelected European Commission. As with the other member states of the EU, the UK is no longer a democracy, not even a quasi-democracy, but a pseudo-democracy that is nominally governed from London but is actually ruled by Brussels.
The gay marriage debate has very little to do with literal homogamy, as the paltry number of “married” gays in the various states where it is legal tends to demonstrate. It is symbolic, a legal demonstration of the fact that what was once Christendom is now post-Christian, and a rejection of traditional Western civilization. It’s not a step forward, but rather, a step back into ancient pagan darkness. It is ironic that those who decry Islam as a return to the 7th century are actually complaining that the Muslims don’t go far enough; “progressives” want to take the world back more than two millennia.
I invite those who claim this act will “strengthen marriage” to consider the empirical data. Name a nation where legally legitimizing gay “marriage” was followed by a statistically significant increase in the marriage rate.
It’s a positive and encouraging first step. But every city and township in America must follow suit just in case Washington fails to come to its senses:
Charlottesville, Va., has become the first city in the United States to formally pass an anti-drone resolution. The resolution, passed Monday, “calls on the United States Congress and the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia to adopt legislation prohibiting information obtained from the domestic use of drones from being introduced into a Federal or State court,” and “pledges to abstain from similar uses with city-owned, leased, or borrowed drones.”
I imagine that liberal and conservative Americans can find common ground in not wanting death-dealing, missile-equipped remote-controlled drones flying over their heads. After all, it could be the likes of (George Bush/Barack Obama) with his evil (Republican/Democrat) on the trigger.
I don’t recall the right to fly drones everywhere being a power granted to the Federal government anywhere in the Constitution. Not even in the emanations and penumbras.
John Scalzi is the author of several books, including the Old Man’s War series and Redshirts, published in the States by Tor and the UK by Gollancz. He’s also the president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Fed up of being constantly targeted on his website by one particular individual and his followers, Scalzi decided to take action, pledging US$5 every time “the Racist Sexist Homophobic Dipshit in question posts an entry on his site in which he uses my name (or one of his adorable nicknames for me)”.
Scalzi put a ceiling on his “troll tip jar” of US$1,000, figuring that gave his bête noir 200 opportunities to abuse him over the coming year, and said he’d give the cash to four charities: RAINN, America’s largest anti-sexual violence organization; Emily’s List, dedicated to electing pro-choice Democratic women to office; the Human Rights Campaign, which works for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Equal Rights; and NAACP: America’s oldest and largest civil rights organization.
A novel enough way to tackle the trolls, for sure, but what happened next was somewhat astonishing: Scalzi’s friends, Twitter followers and readers asked if they could jump in with pledges too. Many of his friends are high-profile authors and industry types – Will Wheaton, the actor who played Wesley Crusher in TV’s Star Trek: The Next Generation, and a writer in his own right, was one of many who promised to match Scalzi’s US$1,000 pledge.
By the early hours of this morning, UK time, the pledges for Scalzi’s chosen charities had grown to US$50,000.
One of the triggers for the trolling of Scalzi seems to be a satirical blogpost he wrote in October last year attacking conservative politicians for their line on abortion control. It took the form of an open letter to them, in which he adopted the persona of a rapist….
However, the Guardian doesn’t seem to have gotten the story quite right. The reporter appears to be under the impression that Mr. Scalzi did not enjoy the attention, when we were repeatedly informed, in writing, that he did. When was it, the inquiring mind wants to know, that “the “McRapey” comments became too much”? And why were we never informed?
The headline is certainly interesting: “Troll’s comments prompt author to pledge charity donation for every insult.”
John Scalzi’s name is an insult? I suppose that’s true enough in light of his antics. But just to set a few things straight.
I have never trolled or sock-puppeted Whatever. I am not sure of the exact number, but excluding the 30 or so comments on the TIA Big Idea post, I believe I have posted fewer than 10 comments there since 2005.
I have never encouraged anyone to visit Whatever, to leave comments there, or to troll there. I have linked to various posts at Whatever; a look through the blog archives shows a grand total of 58 references since 2005.
I do not wish to have what passes for John Scalzi’s stature in the science fiction field. If I had any desire to write unoriginal and derivative takes on Heinlein, Dick, Piper, and Star Trek, I would do so. As should be obvious from my 854-page epic fantasy novel, my sights are aimed elsewhere.
Since when does “constantly targeted” mean “criticized 26 times in eight years?” Of the 11,327 posts here on Vox Popoli, precisely 58 refer to John Scalzi in any way. Of the 58 references, 32 of them are not even critical.
It was really reprehensible of The Guardian to omit to report that in addition to raising $50,000 for the noble cause of not quoting, criticizing, or even mentioning John Scalzi, Mr. Scalzi also commissioned the painting of a dancing pink rabbit.
What can we conclude from all of this? Sheldon Cooper was right. McRapey isn’t the problem. We have to fight the real enemy! Ensign Wesley must die.die.die! Now, to be fair to the Guardian, it is entirely possible that the reporter, David Barnett, attempted to ask me for a comment before writing his story, but was unable to reach me as I was much too busy laughing.
As Helen Smith demonstrated, John Scalzi likes easy and ideologically safe (politically correct) targets. This rule applies on those rare occasions when he responds to criticism, as well. Scalzi realizes that the best way to smear an entire group is to cherry-pick its worst members, and then present them as the representative norm. I noted earlier how he cherry-picks anecdotal cases of aberrant male behavior to build the case that women require his advocacy against sexism. In a similar manner, Scalzi strategically chooses which critics he responds to.
He would not respond to Helen Smith, as this would place him in the difficult situation of having a woman expose his chicanery and call his bluff. Nor does he respond even to Vox Day—who swings back and forth between moderate positions and more extreme ones. But Vox Day frightens John Scalzi not because he is sometimes extreme, but because he is consistently articulate and often insightful. Scalzi does not want real dissent; he wants either sycophants, or babbling cardboard opponents whom he can casually demolish. The more likely a critic is to debunk his methods, the less likely John is to engage him or her in open debate.
That is inarguably true, but on the other hand, John does commission rabbit paintings and solicit the burning of other people’s money in lieu of debate, which is considerably more amusing than mere rational discourse. I certainly have no complaints. I’m simply enjoying the dancing rabbits.
UPDATE II: This should be amusing. I’ve already done two little interviews with publications in the USA and Canada doing stories on the affair. Is there no end to the madness? How is he so masterfully pulling the strings of the global media?
