Tag: anklebiters

Mailvox: DISQUALIFY!

They just never stop. Which is fine, the important thing to keep in mind is that they never stop lying. A comment from Judge Judy & Executioner:

Vox; your late latching on to #gg and insistence on establishing yourself as a cheerleader despite the fact that the main #gg either didn’t know who you are or if the did, didn’t want you, has made me realize your sigmaness is less about being an alpha with no interest in playing the game and more about being a gamma who’s figured out how to.

Maybe that analysis is wrong, but this who thing has been very gammay of you

This is interesting because it not only demonstrates the usual SJW dishonesty and inability to understand the other side, but also shows how #GamerGate is now perceived as having status that must be denied to opponents deemed dangerous.

As to the “late latching on to #gg”, I merely note the obvious:

  • On August 20th, Vox Day posted Another Purge? about the purging of 4chan and wrote: “My purging from SFWA was, as I warned at the time, a small harbinger of
    much bigger things to come. Don’t think you’re safe simply because
    you’re not controversial. It’s not only the controversy they hate, or
    even the open resistance, it is the mere fact of failing to kowtow to
    their dogma.”
  • On August 21st, Vox Day posted “Kotaku and the Quinnspiracy”. 
  • On August 27th, Vox Day posted “A female dev on the Quinn debacle”.
  • On August 27th, actor Adam Baldwin posted a tweet linking to Internet Aristocrat videos along with the hashtag #GamerGate. 

Also, gammas don’t turn into sigmas. It is omegas that do so. The gamma mindset can never transform to the degree required; they care too deeply about the social order.

PZ admits he’s wrong

And then promptly proceeds to dig the hole deeper. Based on his National Merit status, he’s got to have the raw cognitive capacity to do better, but it’s sometimes hard to believe because he so regularly renders himself functionally stupid. It’s as if he’s got some sort of religious derangement syndrome that handicaps his intellectual faculties. 

“The other day, I said that his book, The Irrational Atheist, was self-published. I was wrong. He actually bamboozled a publisher into taking it on.”

As one might expect, PZ is characteristically gracious about admitting his error. TIA was originally headed for publication by Crown Forum when a bigger name, David Berlinski, proposed a similar book just as Crown was on the verge of sending me a contract to write it. The editor decided, reasonably enough, that one book on the topic would be sufficient for their needs and chose Berlinski over me. I gave Glenn at BenBella a call to see if he was interested and he snapped it up right away. No bamboozling was required. It seems strange to have to explain this, but most publishers are very happy to receive book proposals on interesting subjects from popular bloggers. I’ve had standing offers from publishers who are pretty much willing to publish whatever non-fiction I want to write for years.

One of the few remaining Pharyngulans is so desperate to try to DISQUALIFY me that he suggested I paid BenBella Books to have it published. Never mind the obvious fact that I had previously contributed to several BenBella anthologies. Or the 100+ reviews and the fact that after six years, the Kindle ranking for TIA is still respectable at  “#28 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Religion & Spirituality > Atheism” 

The Devil’s Delusion, on the other hand is at  #42 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Religion & Spirituality > Atheism. But it has 237 reviews, so one has to conclude that Jed made a reasonable call in going with Berlinski. I suspect TIA might have done even better than TDD did with the benefit of Crown’s marketing muscle behind it, but I can’t criticize the decision, even in in retrospect. Remember, the call had to be made prior to either book actually being written.

“I said it was ridiculous for him to claim that he was cited in scientific publications, when what he was really doing was claiming that people who didn’t cite him at all were actually citing him. It’s bizarre, but he’s doubling down. He claims that Scott Atran was using his ‘data’ about the number of religious wars, which he had to have gotten from his book. I think we can safely lay this one to rest: Vox Day/Theodore Beale is not the source of any data or hypothesis published by Scott Atran in Nature.”

Who said anything about Scott Atran in Nature? PZ brought up Atran, not me. Look, I don’t read Nature. I don’t follow Scott Atran. I don’t hunt for references to my historical proof that religion doesn’t cause war. People simply happen to send me news about things they think might be of interest to me on a regular basis. The only reference I ever noticed myself was the recent one in the New York Times. Anyhow, as was brought to my attention two years ago, I was the original
source of the data Atran cited in a 2012 article called “God and the
Ivory Tower”.

Moreover, the chief complaint against religion — that it is history’s
prime instigator of intergroup conflict — does not withstand scrutiny.
Religious issues motivate only a small minority of recorded wars. The
Encyclopedia of Wars surveyed 1,763 violent conflicts across history;
only 123 (7 percent) were religious”
– “God and the Ivory Tower”, August 6, 2012

“He claims to have inspired other studies…. Strange. I am not autistic to any noticeable degree, and have never been diagnosed as such. That makes it odd to claim I am the inspiration for a “hypothesis”.”

It’s a little more noticeable than PZ thinks. Self-awareness is not his strong suit. From a 2007 post entitled The socially autistic atheist: “Based on Wired Magazine’s observation that atheists tend to be
quarrelsome, socially challenged men, to say nothing of the unpleasant
personalities of leading public atheists such as Richard Dawkins,
Christopher Hitchens and Michel Onfray, one could reasonably hypothesize
that there is likely to be a strong correlation between Asperger’s and
atheism. It’s by no means a scientific test, but it is interesting to
note the coincidence that 59 of the virulent atheists over at Dr. PZ
Myers place report an average score on the Asperger’s Quotient test of 27.8. And this does not include the two individuals who actually have Asperger’s but did not report any test results.”

As PZ himself said: “I took the test and scored a 24, an “average math contest winner.” You need a 32 to suggest Asperger’s, and a 15 is the average. So there. I don’t have Asperger’s, I’m just cruel and insensitive.”

Hence the term “socially autistic” rather than “autistic”. The adjective modifies the noun. It’s not surprising PZ’s AQ score is higher than the norm on the autism spectrum because he is observably a “quarrelsome, socially challenged” man. I scored 14, by the way. Unlike PZ, I possess empathy, athletic experience, and social skills that help temper my high intelligence. I’m not as literal and pedantic as one might conclude from reading the blog, that is just an artifact of having had scores of people like PZ scouring my every written word looking for something, anything, to attack and use to DISQUALIFY for over a decade.

“Most importantly, there is no citation of Theodore Beale, or Vox Day, or The Irrational Atheist, or ‘that misogynistic asshole on the internet’. You’d think this would be rather obvious: you don’t get to count it as a citation if you aren’t cited.”

I was curious when I saw a report of the study in the news, so I emailed one of the authors and asked her if her team had derived the hypothesis from TIA or from this blog. She emailed me back, confirmed that they had in fact gotten it from TIA, and asked if I would like to be cited. I thanked her and told her it wasn’t necessary because I was merely curious if it was sheer coincidence or not. I’m not a scientist and I’m not at all concerned about petty scientistic credential games. I’m certainly not concerned with their little rules about who get to take credit and how. The facts are what they are. I deal in reality, not scientistry.

“And the final damning straw: the much vaunted paper by Hooker that claims a vaccination/autism link, that was promoted by Vox Day, has been retracted. He’s basically wrong about everything.”

No. I have not been wrong about anything he’s addressed here. I am smarter than PZ Myers and one reason he hates me is that I demonstrate this so easily every single time he pushes his godless corpulence up from the ground long enough to get slapped down again. The reason Dr. Hooker’s paper was retracted was not because it was flawed, but because he obtained much more conclusive proof of his claim that the CDC was hiding apparent evidence of a specific vaccination/autism link.

On the very same day that PZ was erroneously claiming I was wrong about this “final damning straw”, Dr. William Thompson, a senior scientist at the CDC, issued a statement through his lawyer proving that I was right to take Dr. Hooker’s assertion about statistical fraud at the CDC seriously.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE-AUGUST 27,2014

STATEMENT OF WILLIAM W. THOMPSON, Ph.D., REGARDING THE 2004 ARTICLE EXAMINING THE POSSIBILITY OF A RELATIONSHIP  BETWEEN  MMR VACCINE AND AUTISM

PZ Myers must be a remarkably dishonest man on the basis of his long-held, oft-expressed opinion that I am prone to dishonesty. One would think that after all these years of nipping at my ankles, he would have learned by now that while I do occasionally make mistakes, and I do occasionally take at face value reports that turn out to be false, I do not lie when I am writing on the blog. Not because I’m perfectly honest, but because I’m not perfectly stupid.

I also make a habit of doing the sort of look-before-you-leap research with which PZ never bothers. Which is why when he’s saying one thing and I’m saying another, the very safe bet is on the latter.

On the sweetness of ankles

I have to admit, just when I think the old Fowl Atheist has bottomed out, (the last time he managed to publicly demonstrate his embarrassingly poor grasp on human genetics), he manages to dig himself in deeper. It is vastly amusing that he didn’t even hesitate to plunge right into this one. Remember when he didn’t want to debate me because it would be punching down? Now Richard Dawkins’s former fartsniffer and failed successor is so desperate to be relevant again that he’s swinging wildly at shadows:

Wait, what? I did a search; no, neither Vox Day nor Theodore Beale have published anything in Nature, or any other science journal, and they also haven’t been cited anywhere in the scientific literature. Weird. How can he make this claim?

As it turns out, his claim is so tenuous and absurd that you have to laugh.

Here is his ‘hypothesis’, which is his: Religion doesn’t cause wars. He said this in his blog, and he also says it in his self-published ‘I hate atheists’ book, both of which hardly anyone reads, and which aren’t exactly popular with scientists.

However, he now claims that anyone anywhere who even says something vaguely like that (for instance, Scott Atran, who has argued that religion is not the primary causative agent in terrorism), is “citing” him, even if they don’t mention his name or his source, or explicitly acknowledge other sources. It’s all him. It is entirely his idea. It’s not as if people have been making excuses to exonerate religion from all blame for centuries, it was his idea.

As we have learned to expect from him, PZ can’t even get the simplest facts right.

  1. The Irrational Atheist is not self-published. It has never been self-published. I’m sure Glen Yeffeth, who is an atheist himself, and all the good people at Ben Bella books will very much appreciate the attempted insult. I say attempted insult because anyone who isn’t locked into the dying publishing model recognizes that independent publishing is not merely the future, it is the now. As for hardly anyone reading it, it’s still selling well enough that when I asked Glenn if I could have the rights back so that Castalia could sell it, he laughed and told me no.
  2. Scott Atran and others are, in fact, citing me, whether they realize it or not. It is very easy to prove it. They are taking it from this Wikipedia page, which took it from a Christian site which took it from TIA. The reason I know this is that the numbers that everyone is citing are not the numbers that appear in the Encylopedia of Wars. As it happens, no such numbers appear in the encyclopedia at all. They are the numbers that I used the encyclopedia to calculate and appeared in The Irrational Atheist.
  3. It is all me, as it happens. It was an entirely original idea, as evidenced by my 2004 WND column published prior to the publication of the encyclopedia, entitled God, George Bush, and War. The metric for disproving the hitherto common atheist claim, a claim that some atheists still make today, is obvious only in retrospect. Nor, as it happens, is it the only way to disprove the mistaken idea that religion causes war, as I came up with another metric that works equally well, but is less numerically quantifiable, which is why it was not cited by Wikipedia, Atran, and others.
  4. It’s not an excuse. The fact that religion does not cause most war is a historical fact of military history, of which PZ is obviously ignorant.
  5. You don’t hear much about religion causing war anymore. Not even PZ is dumb enough to try to directly push the canard. You don’t hear much about the Red State argument anymore either. In both cases, TIA is why.

It’s a bit ironic that PZ is so intent on claiming that I am not a scientist, when he was the original inspiration for my hypothesis, successfully tested in a study by Boston University scientists, that atheists are not neurotypical and that there is a positive correlation between atheism and autism.

This shabby attempt by PZ to deny historical reality, by the way, is one reason I make a habit of including some very minor information that is original, such as the “k”s in Psykosonik, in most things that I do. Doing so makes it very easy for me to see who is actually getting their information from me and who is not, regardless of what they pretend. I don’t usually bother to point it out, as the important thing is the propagation of the information, not the credit. But I always know.

Petty little anklebiters like PZ don’t bother me in the slightest. After 13 years of them nibbling at my ankles, I’d probably find the sensation unsettling if they ever stopped.

Wishful thinking

To say nothing of projection. It’s always interesting to see how people who write about me, of whom I’ve only heard because they are writing about me, almost invariably claim that if I respond to them in any way, this indicates I am obsessed with them. It’s less interesting how they frequently imagine that I must be sock-puppeting in order to pretend that fewer people visit here than, in fact, do read the blog.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
Gorblimey guv’, the sad old men who read Vox Day’s blog are literally obsessed with me. It’s like every day is Damofest over there.

Michael Grey ‏@Mikes005
@damiengwalter Not to rain on your parade, but I’m pretty certain it’s just Beale posting under aliases. Too much syntax repetition.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
@Mikes005 That’s a waaaay less creepy thought! I think about 50% of the comments are Beale, and they’re obvious, yes.

As it happens, I post under two, and only two names. VD in black text most of the time, Vox in blue text when I am logged in and forget to use Name/URL. But most critics like this don’t genuinely believe what they’re saying; they’re not so stupid that they can’t click on Sitemeter and see the panoply of different IP addresses from all over the world appearing seconds apart. For example, in the same minute there were visitors from: New York (USA), Bourgogne (France), Trabzon (Turkey), Reading (UK), Oregon (USA), Washington (USA), and Israel, in addition to the majority of IP addresses that were not location marked.

This is just the usual left-wing performance art, where one person publicly strikes a pose and the others pretend to believe what he’s saying. The purpose seems to be an attempt to render small a prospective threat to the warren. However, it appears some of them are either stupid or self-absorbed to such an extent that they truly  have no idea about the reality of the situation. Being able to tweet this in response to one clueless wonder’s tweet rather amused me:

“Who listens to Vox Day? I mean – is there any real following?” That same day: 52,447 Google pageviews.

Keep in mind that is someone from the very community that believed John Scalzi was one of the most significant figures in SF because he was claiming UP TO 45,000 daily readers per day at a time when he was actually averaging 13,604 Google pageviews per day. Set aside VP. Alpha Game alone is now averaging more daily pageviews than that: 15,179 every day this week.

I realize I am extremely fortunate to have such an enthusiastic and high-quality readership. Just this morning, I received a Chinese translation of QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted from Tiger. Last week, Emilio sent me Spanish translations of that and of QUANTUM MORTIS Gravity Kills, which will be forthcoming as soon as I finish the corrections to two other books. Two brave souls are even taking on the translation of the 850-page A Throne of Bones. Very few authors are so fortunate to have readers who are willing to do so much, and I am deeply appreciative of the community here for its ongoing support and active involvement.

And do you know, it occurs to me that my writing has now been translated into nine languages. Do they also feign to think I’m doing all of that myself when I’m not busy sock-puppeting my own blog? Anyhow, it’s nothing new. People have been trying the same thing since my WND column first began attracting attention back in 2001. It didn’t matter then. It doesn’t matter now. As for the “sad old men” comment, I don’t think they have any idea how many younger readers there are. For example, I received this email from a college student yesterday:

My philosophy professor wrote your blog down as one of the four blogs we
need to pay attention to, and I’ve been reading regularly for a couple
of years now.

I emailed him back to learn the names of the other blogs, and was rather pleased that my surmise concerning one of them was correct: Edward Feser.

VP’s First Rule

1. You will be addressed in the style you choose. If you come in here
slinging insults and acting disrespectfully, you will be treated with a
contemptuous and derisive disdain that will, based on past experience,
probably upset you. This is particularly true for visitors who are
under the impression, mistaken or not, that they are far more
intelligent than the average individual here. If instead, you elect to
offer substantive and civil criticism, then you will meet with a
similarly civil response.

I understand that some would-be rhetoricians mistakenly think that it is effective rhetoric to inappropriately apply labels that I have created specifically to describe certain things to me, to this blog, and to my readers. This is a false claim, moreover, a claim that can only be made in the full knowledge that it is not true.


So, be advised that if you describe this blog as a warren or its readers as rabbits, I will respond to you as if what you claim to believe is actually true. Which is to say that you will be expelled from the so-called warren in precisely the same manner you would be if it were a real intellectual warren.


If you wish to criticize, then criticize. You are free to do so. I have no objection to straightforward and honest criticism. But do not lie. Do not bear false witness. Do not engage in dishonest childish rhetorical tactics. And keep the First Rule in mind.

More fun with fake reviews

Dave O’Neill is just tired of all those “sorcerer in a monastery discussing theology” books that so permeate SF/F today:

Overwritten and felt derivative
To be fair, I was interested because of the Hugo nomination and was
curious about the general worlds involved. I made it about 5% into this
on my Kindle before grinding to a halt. Nothing was all that
interesting and didn’t drive me to read more. If you’re looking for
something to read while waiting for more George RR Martin, keep looking
would be my advice really.

I suggest that if you’re looking for something to read while waiting for more George RR Martin, perhaps it would make more sense to try the 854-page A THRONE OF BONES rather than a Hugo-nominated novelette. Good or bad, it’s just not going to take long, not even if you move your lips when you read. What I find amusing about all these hit reviews is that they know they need a few descriptors to justify the one-star rating, but they are seldom smart enough to choose any that actually sound relevant.

So far we’ve seen “incoherent and unconvincing non-story” as well as “adolescent theology”. And now “derivative”. Derivative of what? The Name of the Rose? A Canticle for Leibowitz? Monk literature isn’t what one would call a massive subgenre. What’s next, complaints about how lame the sex scenes are?

You can read better fake fake reviews right here on this blog. Consider Kyle’s: “Why can’t these critics at least be competent enough to complain about
this story in a manner that, while not necessarily hitting the mark, at
least lands in the same galaxy as the dartboard? If I was going to
criticize this (excellent) story then I’d whine about how it was maudlin
and sentimental, a fantasy Thomas Kincade painting, exposing the evil
crimethink purveyor Vox Day as actually being a sentimental wimp hiding
beneath his grandiose bravado projected on the blog.”

Broken and lesser beings

You may think that we exaggerate the craven wretchedness of our enemies. You may think that my boundless contempt for the r/selected, Larry’s muscular backhands for his craven adversaries, and John C. Wright’s withering scorn for the wormtongues is fueled by either a) a sense of offense at being opposed or b) an oversensitivity to criticism.

It is not. It is fueled by our clear-eyed view of what these creatures are. It is our awareness that they are, like the soul-destroyed abhumans roaming the Night Lands, broken and lesser beings who seek to pull others down into the mire that torments them.

By way of evidence, consider their own words about themselves. Here, for example, is Damien Walter:

I was 30 and, by any measure, deeply unhappy. I’d been pushing down a lot of horrible emotions from a damaging childhood, grief from many losses, and had trapped myself in a life I didn’t fit in to from a desperate need to fit somewhere, anywhere. I had no kind of spiritual practice at all. I was a standard issue atheist, and any encounter I had with religion was edged with inherited and unexamined scorn. Consequentially, I really had no tools to process the pain I was feeling. Today, my argument with the radical atheist rhetoric of people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett – both of whom I had read heavily at university – is that it leaves the bulk of its believers utterly amputated from their own emotional reality. It certainly had me. I was miserable, and in trying to escape from the causes of the misery I’d driven myself, repeatedly, to the borders of emotional collapse where I had, at long last, collapsed.

This is why they preach equality. This is why they preach tolerance. This is why they seek to disqualify and destroy those who stand above them, immune to the manifold terrors that haunt their empty chests. They are damaged people, broken individuals, fallen souls.

They live lives of lies and self-deceit. They lie about others; they lie about themselves:

I am by nature a non-political person. I tend to see both sides of most arguments, and there are merits and faults with any position in any political debate. Extremism is always wrong. Beyond that, who is right is mostly a matter of your tribal, partisan allegiances.

No doubt that is why he didn’t link to Larry’s piece he was criticizing and why David Barnett intentionally and admittedly evaded The Guardian guidelines in his hit piece aimed at me, lest I defend my position in a convincing manner.

But no matter what lies Damien and his broken kind tell, they will find no comfort whatsoever in confronting the likes of Mr. Corriea and Mr. Wright. They will find no peace through confronting me. They will find nothing but emotional collapse in this lifetime and damnation in the next as a result of their rejection of the Way, the Truth, and the Life that we do our feeble best to serve.

At least Damien has taken one step forward in abandoning the intellectually bankrupt world of the radical atheist. He knows there is something else out there. But he is still caught in the soul-sucking mire, he is still lost in lies and desperately lashing out at the likes of Larry and me in a vain attempt to find fulfillment in the approval of those he foolishly seeks to emulate.

But he will not, because there is no fulfillment to be found there. There is none to be found in telling lies, in making-believe, because even if he manages to convince others of his falsehoods, he will never be able to convince himself that they are true.

What Damien does not realize is that our strength, our being whole, does not come from within, but from without. The Earth-Current flows through us; we are empowered by the Master of the Master-Word. It is not enough for a man to reject the nonsensical teachings of the self-proclaimed wise, it is necessary to repent and to humble himself before God, after which he can stand again, washed in the sacred blood of His Son, unafraid, unbowed, and unbroken.

Setting the record straight… again

I have to admit that I do not understand how lying about my easily confirmed CV is supposed to serve as a substantive form of criticism.  Do these critics imagine that denying history is a valid and convincing form of rhetoric? I recently mentioned that when critics attempt to dig through my words in search of a disqualifying quote, they tend to forget that I started as a nationally syndicated columnist. In other words, unlike the average person blithely expressing himself on the Internet, I have always been aware that my statements are public and will be carefully examined for critical purposes.

This prompted the following response:

You
mean “World Net Daily? LOL….. You know, they’ll give a column to
anyone with a heartbeat and a willingness to say nasty things about
black people. Not really something to brag about . Especially since your daddy got you the job, he having been on the board of directors.

No, I did not mean WND. This should be obvious, given that WND is not a national syndicate. I began writing a column for the St. Paul Pioneer Press in 1994. This column was picked up for national syndication by Chronicle Features, the syndicate arm of the San Franscisco Chronicle, in 1995. I was the sixth columnist in the Pioneer Press’s 145-year history to be syndicated. The syndicated column was picked up by the Boston Globe and the Atlanta Journal/Constitution, among others. My favorite was the North Bay Nugget. During this time I also wrote several major reviews for Computer Gaming World and Electronic Entertainment, such as those on Heretic, Dark Forces, and TIE Fighter.

I did not begin writing for WND until 2001. It soon became the third most-popular weekly column there after Ann Coulter’s and Pat Buchanan’s and was nationally syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate two years later. My father did not get me the job there. Nor can that column even be reasonably be described as a job, as I never took money from WND for any of those columns.

Another critic asserted a non-existent double standard.

The point is that Vox’s double standards is funny. He gets a little
uppity about people taking him out of context, but has no problem doing
the same. It’s funny. Even funnier though is his touting of his “column”
at WND that his daddy insisted he be given. And it was so meaningful.
People still talk about the amazing insights he offered. We know the
import of his views based on the many offers he’s had to recreate this
column elsewhere.

First, I don’t take people out of context. Second, my daddy didn’t insist that I be given a “column” at WND; Joseph Farah asked my father if I would be willing to write a column there. Third, I am contacted by various news sites inquiring if I might be interested in contributing to them on a fairly regular basis. And then there was this pair of individuals who questioned my veracity concerning a pair of game advances that were each worth more than 60+ times an advance that Mr. Scalzi bragged about:

“Ha, there is no way this is true. What was the advance for and when?”

“$2.4 Million in advances in one year. Not bad….RIGHT…….And yet, still no game from Vox Day. You
just have to wonder how far the guy will go to soothe his envy of
another writer who outpaces him so consistently. It’s a little vulgar.”

As it happens, the two advances that year were rather more than $2.4 million combined; there is an article in the Star Tribune which specifically discusses a $1.8 million advance that Fenris Wolf received for one of the two contracts mentioned. I’m not envious of a writer who brags about $20,000 advances. I’m not even envious of one of my European friends who received an advance more than ten times bigger than that on his most recently published novel. I don’t want to receive advances from anyone.

Those are the facts. The publicly available and undeniable facts. It is true that many are not familiar with them as I don’t often discuss these things, and in fact, I would not be inclined to mention them at all if they were not already public information. But they are what they are, as anyone can readily determine for himself. The problem, I suspect, is that when facts get in the way of the favored narrative, these critics prefer to reject those facts instead of modifying their narrative accordingly.

Obsidian cries raciss

I’m only surprised it took him this long to get around to it. I’ve been waiting for him to take a public shot at me ever since I humiliated him when he was strutting around boasting about “chin-checking chumps” or however it was that the Jive talk went:

Following up on my question above, I note that you cite two very well known bloggers in the Manosphere, who would be considered to fit Kimmel’s characterization like the proverbial hand in glove: Chateau Heartiste, formerly known as Roissy, and Vox Day, of the blog Alpha Game. Both have been cited for their racist views of people of color, and neither seem particularly interested in being inclusive of Men of Color under their tents (in fact, I would go so far as to say that they are both actively hostile to such inclusiveness – I say this based on direct observation and experience of both). As noted above, their astute observations and the like, many of which I do agree with, are utterly undermined by their racism, and gives folks like Kimmel, et al a smoking gun with which to discredit the entirety of the MRM cause.

My response is at Alpha Game. But suffice it to say that my deep and abiding concerns for the African-American community are only exceeded by my dedication to the plight of the Heian Japanese. Of course, I am hostile to “inclusiveness”. As an open and avowed elitist, it tends to come with the territory.

I actually find it vaguely surprising that people are still trying to play the race card in 2014. Hispanics quite openly hate Blacks and are actively driving them out of their most archetypical communities. Whites and Jews are “gentrifying” them out of their historic homes, which is the genteel way to say “financial ethnic cleansing”. I mean, who is still pretending that desegregation is even remotely viable? Who is still dumb enough to pretend that the Civil Rights Movement wasn’t a fundamentally wrong-headed failure?

It’s even stranger that they still attempt to play it on me. First, I can trump it with my own Man of Color card. Second, I should think I have made it abundantly clear that I am not in the least bit afraid of being labeled anything from Toddler Slayer to RSHD.

“All men are created equal” cannot possibly apply in a material sense in any world where all men are not even equally homo sapiens sapiens.

Mailvox: you talking to ME?

Serge Tomiko is a rather strange anklebiter who enjoys informing me that I know absolutely nothing about economics, which statement is inevitably followed by an economics-related assertion that indicates he has read the appropriate material, but he hasn’t understood it. He’s very much like Kevin Cline in A Fish Called Wanda; the last time he showed up, he failed to understand that the graph he was citing to dispute my contention was charting the data from the very same Federal Reserve report I had cited in the first place.

This time he felt the need to “correct” my factual statement that deposits are unsecured loans from the depositor to the bank:

Once again, Vox shows he is absolutely clueless about how banking functions. Deposits are NOT loans to the bank. Banks do not in any way require deposits. It is a service they provide.

Banks create money by the authority of the government, which is given to entities in exchange for interest payments. They do not lend money. In this case, the banks are being perfectly honest. It doesn’t matter in the slightest whether or not they have deposits. In fact, this kind of policy is intended to discourage deposits. 

Because beating up on Serge feels rather like kicking a toddler in the head, I thought I should give him the opportunity to retract his foolish “correction”.  I wrote: “Serge_Tomiko, I humiliated you the last time you tried to correct me.
Fair warning: I’m going to prison-rape you on this one, brutally, if you
don’t retract this. You have until tomorrow to think this over.”

Not being the brightest bulb on the planet, Serge proceeded to double-down.

What more can one say? It should be blatantly obvious. How could banks charge negative interest rates if their lending was at all dependent upon deposits?

This is a complicated issue, but Vox has it completely wrong.

This would a good, recent work that not only demolishes Vox’s common, yet ill informed idea of banking, it explains the origin of his error. Will he read it? I doubt it. 

As it happens, I did read it. I could have written it. And not only do I completely agree with it, but I note that it has precisely NOTHING to do with my original contention. The article deals with what bankers do with the money they are loaned by their depositors and says absolutely nothing about the nature of that money or the nature of the legal relationship between the depositor and the bank. Regardless of what Serge thinks, the central message of Buddhism is not every man for himself.

On the other hand, the 1848 Foley-Hill case in the English House of Lords said everything that one needs to know about both.

Edward Thomas Foley,–Appellant; Thomas Hill and Others,-Respondents

(1848) 2 HLC 28
English Reports Citation: 9 E.R. 1002
July 31, August 1, 1848.

Mews’ Dig. i. 42, 1007; ix. 76; xi. 988. S.C. In 8 Jur., 347; 1 Ph. 399; 13 L.J. Ch. 182. On point as to relation between banker and customer, considered in St. Aubyn v. Smart, 1867, L.R. 5 Eq. 189; A.-G. v. Edmunds, 1868, L.R. 6 Eq. 390; Moxon v. Bright, 1869, L.R. 4 Ch. 294; Summers v. City Bank, 1874, L.R. 9 C.P. 587; Marten v. Rocke, 1885, 53 L.T., 1948. Distinguished on point as to limitation (1 Ph. 399; cf. 2 H.L.C. pp. 41, 42) in In re Tidd (1893), 3 Ch. 156, and in Atkinson v. Bradford Third Equitable, etc., Society, 1890, 25 Q.B.D. 381.

EDWARD THOMAS & FOLEY, – Appellant; THOMAS HILL and Others,–, Respondents [July 31, August 1, 1848].

Banker and Customer–Accounts not complicated, subject for action, and not for bill.

The relation between a Banker and Customer, who pays money into the Bank, is the ordinary relation of debtor and creditor, with a superadded obligation arising out of the custom of bankers to honour the customer’s drafts; and that relation is not altered by an agreement by the banker to allow the interest on the balances in the Bank.

The relation of Banker and Customer does not partake of a fiduciary character, nor bear analogy to the relation between Principal and Factor or Agent, who is quasi trustee for the principal in respect of the particular matter for which. he is appointed factor or agent.

Is that sufficiently clear? The relationship between the depositor and the bank is the normal one between a creditor and a debtor. Because it is a loan from the former to the latter. In case the Old English legalese is too complicated for you, we can go from 1848 to 2013 and make it even simpler. Last week, the investor Jim Sinclair explained the same thing on Market Sanity:

I think that our listeners need to understand that when they make a deposit in a bank, they don’t have an asset. They become an unsecured lender to the banking institution, that goes back to British law in the 1850s and present law in North America and elsewhere. In fact, it’s universally accepted that once you make a deposit in a bank you’re lending the money to the bank. When you hear that the bondholders and lenders will have to undertake the rescue of any banking institution that faces difficulty to the listener, you are the lender. You are a lender without collateral. You are in a very junior financial position.

And if you’re still in doubt, it is right there in US law, specifically 12 USC § 1813 – Definitions

The term “deposit” means—
(1) the unpaid balance of money or its equivalent received or held by a bank or savings association in the usual course of business and for which it has given or is obligated to give credit, either conditionally or unconditionally, to a commercial, checking, savings, time, or thrift account, or which is evidenced by its certificate of deposit, thrift certificate, investment certificate, certificate of indebtedness, or other similar name, or a check or draft drawn against a deposit account and certified by the bank or savings association, or a letter of credit or a traveler’s check on which the bank or savings association is primarily liable:

What is an “unpaid balance of money received?” It is a loan. As it happens, it is an unsecured loan, albeit one that is nominally guaranteed by the FDIC, at the FDIC’s sole discretion. Which is exactly what I stated in the first place. Banks are nothing but middlemen, which is why they require loans from their “depositors” in order to make new loans and profit from the difference between the interest they pay and the interest paid to them. The real service they provide is collecting all of the many smaller deposit-loans into a single large credit pool that can then be borrowed from more efficiently in larger loan packages. This is a legitimate function, perhaps even a necessary one, but hardly one that rationally justifies nearly 30 percent of all the operating profit in the country being devoted to it.

As it happens, the ability of the banks to create money is not completely dependent upon receiving loans from the general public. They can also receive loans directly from the Federal Reserve. And, as per the previous post, that $2.5 trillion injection of credit from the Fed is what has produced the $2.1 trillion nominal increase in bank assets since 2008.

The amusing thing about this particular failure to grasp the obvious is that Serge is a self-avowed fascist who flatters himself with the idea that he understands the English Common Law. It appears he is still stuck on the Magna Carta and hasn’t reached the 19th century yet.