Vox Popoli

A real man exits the stage:

“I have lived such a wonderful life! I’ve lived enough for two people.”

At least, that’s the case based on the results of what apparently is supposed to pass for a test of one’s subconscious racial attitude:

Average reaction time:

Black Armed:809.16ms
Black Unarmed:1037.48ms
White Armed:699.8ms
White Unarmed:782.28ms

Actually, like most of these sociological “studies”, it’s a silly test. I don’t think this measures anything but the ease with which one can detect the object in the “gunman’s” hands. The mostly black guns, wallets and cellphones are harder to distinguish in the black men’s hands, and therefore require more time to analyze the shape.

In the latest blow against the agency, court documents show a State Department employee provided personal information from passport applications for use in a credit-card fraud scheme.

As Instapundit notes, just wait until they get your hands on your medical records….

Sometimes you just have to flow with the positivity:

Overall the book is very strong. I have been following the response to it, which Vox is all too happy to publish on his blog, and have yet to see a compelling rebuttal from the New Atheists or their faithful followers. Many set out to do chapter-by-chapter reviews and end up losing interest at about chapter three. Atheists not being ones who typically like to retreat from a fight, their silence speaks volumes on Vox’s behalf. I foresee his book being the very beginning of a movement that will send the old arguments used by the New Atheists back into darkness until enough time has passed for another generation to drag them out again, as these have done. (It’s an old cycle that keeps coming around full circle, not a set of new arguments that will finally win a centuries-old war.)

While Kelly of the Rational Response Squad is certainly putting in a more manful effort thus far than any of her cowardly atheist counterparts, I have to admit that I have been quite disappointed with the pathetic showing on the part of the self-proclaimed brights. And their insistence that I should have somehow endeavored to make the entirety of my case in the first chapter is bizarre, particularly if you’ve read the first chapter of any of the New Atheist books.

The entire reply to Kelly’s critique of Chapter II is now up on the TIA forum:

Vox Day launches his tirade by attempting to confuse the reader and blur the line between scientific and non-scientific inquiry.

This is not only wrong, it is completely backward. Kelly fails to understand that the point of referencing the blatantly false claim to science by Jim Rose is to provide a simple and vivid picture of the way the New Atheist books are doing precisely the same thing. The Unholy Trinity’s attempts to argue “it is science” in support of their atheism are every bit as absurd, and as unscientific, as Jim Rose’s similar claims about nipple-piercing and lightbulb-chewing. My purpose is not to belittle science, nor confuse the reader, it is simply to clarify the line between that which is claimed to be science and is, and that which claims to be science and is not.

Also, please note that I’ve moved some of Bethyada’s comments on Kelly’s critiques to a different topic in the forums. If you want to respond to Kelly’s arguments, that’s just fine, but please don’t do so in the debate topic itself. It is too confusing and I’d like something that can be easily read through from start to finish without interruption.

Thanks in large part to you all, TIA is going into its third printing in three months. And thanks to those of you who have been pointing out errata as well as one hard-working woman at BenBella, we’ve been able to incorporate the corrections into this print-run.

Unlike the New Atheists, I don’t believe refusing to admit my errors, I’d rather correct them and improve my case.

So much for the scientists’ climatology models. There hasn’t been any global warming in ten years:

This would mean global temperatures have not risen since 1998, prompting some to question climate change theory. But experts say we are still clearly in a long-term warming trend – and they forecast a new record high temperature within five years.

Okay, science fans, who is willing to step up and put their trust in science up against my skepticism of it. The global warming experts are saying that 2013 will be hotter than 1998. I’m saying that it won’t be, based on nothing more than my distrust of the motivations underlying what passes for “global warming” science.

If, in five years, I’m proven wrong, I will publicly acknowledge that the science of global warming merits more respect than I have hitherto shown it. If you’re wrong, you will publicly acknowledge that my scientific skepticism is more reliable than this application of the scientific method as well as the scientific judgment of all the scientists who subscribe to the theories of global warming and global climate change.

There’s a bit of sob sisterhood about the terrible burden born by the modern woman in this article, but it’s still interesting to see that in order to have it all, the Compleat Women of the 1980s went about their lives rather differently than the Future Cat Ladies of America are now:

And that, it seems, is the key difference between then and now. Weldon, Kitzinger and Hughes were never conventional working women…. There was no grand plan: they simply got married, had children and worked for a living, albeit not always in the kind of high-powered office-based jobs that women undertake nowadays.

While employment and degrees will always be there, children and men interested in fathering them will not be. It is the height of illogic for a young woman to make a priority of pursuing a degree and a career if having a family is a life objective. Those who find this tremendously complex concept too difficult to accept on its face should take a look at the long-term societal objectives of those who have been encouraging education-first thinking among girls, one of which is to reduce the human population. Then, do the math. If you can.

And if you happen to be a career woman who is deliriously happy with feline companionship and didn’t never nohow need a man in the course of your barren walk to the end of your genetic line, please do us all a favor and have a nice chat with Fluffy and Mr. Tiddles instead of demonstrating your total lack of reading comprehension to everyone here. It’s called an IF-THEN statement, deal with it.

While I have a certain amount of sympathy for Ms Marcotte’s annoyance at posted “reviews” and one-star ratings by non-reading critics – note how the review of TIA rated “most useful” begins “I only managed to read the first 3 chapters of this book” – I can’t help but laugh at the unintentional irony contained in her complaint about them:

Anti-feminists who haven’t even read my book are posting negative “reviews” at Amazon. I hate to bleg, but I’d be so grateful if people who actually know what they’re talking about and aren’t motivated by a white hot hatred of women could counterbalance that.

It’s so weird how a bunch of men who’ve never met me hold me personally responsible for the fact that they’re too obnoxious to get laid or have women look at them with much besides disgust.

It’s even weirder how a woman complaining about men judging her book without reading it would simultaneously pronounce judgment upon their sexual attractiveness to women without possessing any information about them except their dislike of her book. What an interesting metric of sexual attraction! Unfortunately, with the likes of Amynda, this sort of obtuse cluelessness is not so much predictable as inescapable.

As for reviews, it’s pretty simple. If you haven’t read the book, your opinion is irrelevant and anyone who would review a book without reading it in its entirety is a ridiculous cretin. This is true of intellectual zeroes in every camp, I have no more respect for the clueless theist who writes a negative review of The God Delusion than for the autistic atheist who writes a fictional one of The Irrational Atheist. If you want to criticize something, then read it. If you can’t be bothered, then keep your yapping little mouth shut and leave the discussion to the adults.

And it’s about time:

Marking a radical departure from traditional book-publishing practices, HarperCollins Publishers says it will launch a new book imprint that won’t accept returns from retailers and will pay little or no advances to authors.

I’m excited about this, because it will give newer authors more of a fair shake. One thing that I’ve always hated about the conventional publishing model is that a publishing company tends to put its efforts behind those books that it gave the biggest advance rather than the ones that have the greatest sales potential. This tends to cause the inexpensive book with potential to disappear without a trace – since no one has ever heard of it – without doing much for to aid the success of the more expensive one. Back when The World in Shadow was published, Pocket Books put a major effort behind a really bad series of foreign novels to which they had acquired the American rights while putting no effort behind my book or the book of another insigificant author.

The foreign series flopped despite an expensive marketing campaign which included endcaps in every Barnes and Noble, while my book sold just well enough for them to sign me to another book in the series. The other guy’s book didn’t, which is why Pocket Books didn’t publish his next one, a book that just happened to be entitled The DaVinci Code.

The publishing model is simply broken, so it’s good to see that publishing companies are exploring more rational new options. And on that score, some congratulations are in order, as The Original Cyberpunk and his wife have announced their new endeavor, Rampant Loon Press.