Relax, McRapey

John Scalzi looks back over the last ten years of his literary career and devotes nearly one-third of the article – 31.6 percent – to his critics:

Any discussion of my career over the last decade needs to include the antipathy of me by a certain cadre of right-wing SF writers and fans, a group which overlaps (considerably) with the “Sad/Rabid Puppies” who publicly shat themselves so dramatically during the middle bit of the decade with regard to the Hugo Awards and other aspects of the business and community of SF/F literature. I noticed the first real push of the antipathy after Redshirts won the Hugo, and certain dudes suggested that Redshirts won because I had sucked up to the Social Justice Warriors sufficiently, rather than because, say, it was a popular book riffing off a beloved science fiction franchise in a clever and affectionate way, written by a writer who’d been nominated for Best Novel a few times before.

In the full bloom of the Puppy beclownery there was more of the same, a fair amount of snide discussion of my sexuality and gender, and general allegations that my sales numbers were inflated and/or propped up by bulk purchases by my publisher, which, by the way, was doing terribly and would soon be out of business. My personal favorite bit of this was when there was a long discussion about how my 2014 novel Lock In had been a massive sales failure and that Tor was about to drop me as an author; this discussion was happening simultaneously with me negotiating with Tor for my multi-book, multi-year, multimillion-dollar contract (which included not one but two sequels to Lock In). When the contract was announced, the narrative shifted to how much more I would have made self-publishing, and then later how I’d never really make as much money as the public figure of the contract. Which, well, okay, dudes. In time most of them have left off this nonsense, but there are a few of them still out there on this bullshit — why, I was chucklingly misgendered just this week!

What is it about me that bugged and in some cases still bugs these dudes? If you ask them they will give you all sorts of reasons, but having dealt with this nonsense for a better part of a decade I’ll tell you it’s mostly envy, and frustration about the state of their own careers, which they feel should be better because they write the sort of science fiction they’ve always loved and assume others still love as well. And which I also do, so why the hell do I get the big contracts and they’re (mostly) left to scrape by? There has to be something else involved — thus the secret cabal of SJWs, bulk purchases, also I’m gay and/or trans and thus not a man at all, hur hur hur. Add to this the fact that at least a couple of these dudes legit dislike me for other reasons (most of which boil down to the fact they can’t argue their way out of a paper bag and at one point or another I pointed that out to them in public), and some of them just happen to be bigoted as fuck, and you’ve got a fairly toxic mix of resentment and complete bullshit.

This hasn’t affected my career in any meaningful way — see the summary earlier in the piece — but on a personal level it could be tiresome. I’m guilty of taunting some of these dickheads on occasion, because they deserve the taunting and because I know my successes irritate the shit out of them. But mostly I’m glad it’s largely done and over with, save a few stragglers. I think after a certain point it just became difficult to argue that I was a failure, and that their doing so just accentuated their own relative positions, which they preferred not to do. And also, after a certain point you do just have to get on with your life and write your things. To the extent that some of them are doing that, good for them. Those that aren’t, well. Bless your hearts, dudes.

As always, Ol’ Johnny is lying and attempting to retroactively spin the narrative when he thinks no one is going to call him on it. No one was ever saying that he was a failure – quite to the contrary, he is almost certainly science fiction’s most financially successful grifter of the last fifty years.

What we said, and still say to this day, and what we can prove, is that he is a serial liar, a fraud, and a literary mediocrity. That’s all there ever was to it. And the reason no one even bothers to criticize him any more is because it is obvious to everyone that he is over and done. He can relax now. The hounds, like everyone else, have lost interest in him.

Let Scotland go

Boris Johnson and the Tories are making a massive blunder if they fail to support the Scottish National Party and embrace Scottish independence:

Already this morning the Twittersphere buzzes with talk of a renewed Scottish independence campaign, while the SNP yesterday announced its support for another referendum if a “material change in circumstances” arose between Scotland and the greater union. Surely a landslide victory by the Tories — who are widely disliked by the Scots — and a flashing green light for a deeply unpopular Brexit represent exactly such a change.

Scotland and England are not magically joined at the hip. If the Scots don’t want Brexit, don’t want Boris Johnson, and don’t want the Tories, who says the current political makeup of the UK is forever and unchanging? Political arrangements are not something to impose on reluctant, disbelieving people. If we favor independence and political self-determination only when we like the results, the only liberty on offer is the liberty to agree. But political universalism is an abstraction, and an arrogant one at that.

If Scots choose Holyrood over Westminster, or even Brussels over Holyrood, who are we to object?

Given the way in which the Scots have been the primary engine of left-wing power in the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson can secure not only the restoration of British sovereignty, but a multi-generational defeat of the Labour Left by excising the Scottish nation from the British crown.

This will, of course, mark the penultimate stage in the end of the British empire, but the empire has been shrinking steadily since the beginning of WWII. And there is absolutely no point fighting the nationalist trend in favor of a dying and discredited imperialism.

The Scots deserve to rule themselves. Let Scotland go!

Mailvox: Kurgan-Dyer debate

I will wait to read the transcript before even attempting to develop an opinion of the recent debate between Jay Dyer and The Kurgan, but this was a summary sent to me by one witness to it:

It was an interesting watch for me as an Ilk that has consumed a sizable amount of Dyer’s content and appreciates his niche.  Similar to you, my church background has been American Protestant Evangelical. Lately I’ve been studying the Orthodox faith, due in no small part to Jay’s content.

Kurgan has accused Jay of being a lying gamma sperg. What I witnessed today went a ways toward confirming two out of three. I simply don’t know enough about Catholicism to follow verbally what was flying around (especially from Jay), much less sedevacantism. So I have no idea if Jay is lying or not about Catholic law. He could simply be accurate or inaccurate.

But Jay’s performance was demonstrably gamma sperg. He was clearly triggered. For long stretches it felt like he was channeling Shapiru. I don’t watch a lot of debates, so I’m not sure shouting ‘You just lost the debate!’ is a validated method. Kurgan’s demeanor was consummate adult. And by the end seemed like an adult managing a child’s temper tantrum.

The chat was funny from a certain standpoint. It was like an audience of homeless people and junior highers having to sit through a theology debate. They just started giving each other wedgies and complaining about boredom. Can’t say I’m happy about it. But it probably needed to happen.

If you happened to watch the debate and would like to express your opinion about it, please feel free to do so. But be judicious and specific, as the sort of fanboy posturing one sees on Twitter will not be permitted. And neither of the two participants will be permitted to comment here on their own performances.

This isn’t how it was supposed to go

Democrats are quite literally losing Democrats due to the impeachment charade:

Anti-impeachment Democratic Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New York has confirmed that he will switch parties and become a Republican, following a lengthy meeting with President Trump, according to Politico. Van Drew is one of two Democrats who voted ‘no’ on opening the impeachment inquiry in the first place, and has been a vocal opponent of the effort, according to the report.

I think we can start using the “debacle” word to describe it about now. If they’re actually losing elected officials over this, imagine what is happening in the electorate.

Never believe the pollsters

Audacious Epigone makes the common mistake of believing the available evidence just because it is available:

From the GOP’s perspective, Texas and Georgia are terminal but the party’s electoral winter need not necessarily set in during the 2020s. If the party is able to sustain its 2016 gains in the upper Midwest while additionally picking off a couple of small New England states like Maine and New Hampshire, Republicans could continue to win presidential elections into the 2040s.

  • 368 Biden
  • 170 Trump

Polling up to this point shows Trump not only getting crushed in Michigan and Pennsylvania but also beaten in Ohio, so seeing the path to continued electoral relevance and managing to walk down it are two very different things.

  • 328 Sanders
  • 210 Trump
  • 293 Warren
  • 239 Trump

Polling is incomplete for the rest of the Democrat field. Several states also have results for Buttigieg, but a few do not. He falls in between Sanders and Warren in how he fares against Trump in the states he’s included in.

This is a complete non-issue. The pollsters haven’t suddenly improved their performance since getting it wrong in 2016. To the contrary, they have doubled down on their demoralization campaign, attempting to meme their imagination into reality. But it won’t work.

Think about this: do Democrats appear to be confident about their prospects the next presidential election? Or do they appear to be desperately casting about for someone, anyone, who might have at least a ghost of a chance of beating the god-emperor?

Trumpslide 2020.

Don’t spiral

Posting will be light today. We’ve got friends coming over for holiday drinks and whatnot, so I will leave you to contemplate where you’ve heard this before, more or less, prior to encountering Pascal’s PENSÉES.

Imagination—It is that deceitful part in man, that mistress of error and falsity, the more deceptive that she is not always so; for she would be an infallible rule of truth, if she were an infallible rule of falsehood. But being most generally false, she gives no sign of her nature, impressing the same character on the true and the false.

I do not speak of fools, I speak of the wisest men; and it is among them that the imagination has the great gift of persuasion. Reason protests in vain; it cannot set a true value on things.

This arrogant power, the enemy of reason, who likes to rule and dominate it, has established in man a second nature to show how all-powerful she is. She makes men happy and sad, healthy and sick, rich and poor; she compels reason to believe, doubt, and deny; she blunts the senses, or quickens them; she has her fools and sages; and nothing vexes us more than to see that she fills her devotees with a satisfaction far more full and entire than does reason. Those who have a lively imagination are a great deal more pleased with themselves than the wise can reasonably be. They look down upon men with haughtiness; they argue with boldness and confidence, others with fear and diffidence; and this gaiety of countenance often gives them the advantage in the opinion of the hearers, such favour have the imaginary wise in the eyes of judges of like nature. Imagination cannot make fools wise; but she can make them happy, to the envy of reason which can only make its friends miserable; the one covers them with glory, the other with shame.

The ride never ends

Owen Benjamin was deplatformed by Instagram today. Discuss amongst yourselves.

UPDATE: Mmmmm. What’s that? Smells like tortious interference….

Owen Benjamin, a right-wing comedian who regularly shares and creates hateful and anti-Semitic content online, was suspended from Instagram and Facebook Friday “following multiple violations of our policies,” a Facebook spokesperson told Right Wing Watch. Benjamin’s ban from Instagram and Facebook follows his permanent suspension from YouTube, reported earlier this month.

The suspension came after Right Wing Watch shared a collection of more than 170 racist and anti-Semitic posts Benjamin had shared on his Instagram page with Instagram and requested comment from the company. In the posts, which were assembled by a source and provided to Right Wing Watch, Benjamin spread hate against Jewish people and other minorities and perpetuated asinine conspiracy theories including claims that dinosaurs never existed and that the world is flat.

Awfully nice of them to openly confess to the crime like that.

Corporate junk science

It’s observably even worse than the coin-flip that is professional peer-reviewed science:

Three years ago, I put my faith in a 23andMe DNA test and got burned.

While most of my results initially checked out — about 50 percent South Asian and what looked like a 50 percent hodgepodge of European — there was one glaring surprise. Where roughly 25 percent Italian was supposed to be, Middle Eastern stood in its place. The results shocked me.

Over the years, I had made a lot of the Italian portion of my heritage; I had learned the language, majored in Latin in college, and lived in Rome, Italy, for my semester abroad. Still, as a rational person, I believed the science. But my grandmother, whose parents moved from Sicily to Brooklyn, where she was born and grew up speaking Italian, refused to accept the findings.

Fast forward to this summer, when I got an email about new DNA relations on 23andMe and revisited my updated genetic results, only to find out that I am, in fact, about a quarter Italian (and generally southern European). But it was too late to tell my grandma. She’s dead now and I’m a liar.

Nonna was right to reject the “science”. The science, as is all too often the case, was flat-out wrong. Logic and evidence now dictates that if the science smells off, that’s probably because it is.