Tag: anklebiters

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.

Setting the record straight

Two days ago, I referenced one of our previous game innovations in discussing the latest one, which naturally inspired the sort of individual who firmly believes their ideological opponents cannot possibly have ever accomplished anything of note to leap in with his ignorant version of events:

Vox: It will probably surprise no one to discover that the primary response of the forward-thinking futurists was to declare their opinion that First Sword was unlikely to sell enough ebooks to matter one way or the other, as if the universal adoption of 3D hardware texture-mapped acceleration that Big Chilly and I introduced in Rebel Moon, and the 16-bit color we introduced in Rebel Moon Rising, had anything at all to do with how many copies of those games were sold. 

Obvious: It’s really too bad that the game POD had full MMX support and was released a full six months before Rebel Moon Rising.

First of all, if one was to go by the publicly available information from IGN and GameSpy – which is wrong, by the way – one would learn that RMR was released by GT Interactive on December 22, 1996, which is obviously before POD was released by UbiSoft on February 28, 1997. But the fact is that both games were actually released together for the first time on the same CD by Intel on January 8, 1997. However, the following YouTube video should make it clear that not only were both of us incorrect, the entire MMX-related discussion is irrelevant as I’d forgotten that Big Chilly and I actually introduced both 16-bit color and dynamic lighting in Rebel Moon, which was released as part of the original VL bus 3D Blaster package back in November 1995.

I don’t know what possesses these people with the desperate need to denigrate everything I do, but history tends to render their efforts pointless. I have little doubt that if in-game digital sales are successful and become standard in the industry, the anklebiters of tomorrow will do their best to deny that I had anything to do with it, let alone came up with the concept. Anyhow, this sort of thing suffices to indicate how the Left’s revisionist instincts penetrate even to the pettiest micro level.

I was wondering how I’d managed to forget that we had the advanced lighting model in our first game, and I realized that I tend to think of the dynamic lighting in terms of the laser effects.  The colored lighting is so much more effective when the lasers light up the corridors as they fly back and forth, that since the first one was lacking that particular application of it, I assumed that we’d been still using the same 8-bit palette that everyone else had been until then. 

One bit of trivia that might be interesting; we were also the very first to discover the reason for the huge gap between expectations for MMX and the disappointing results.  And by very first, I mean that I was the one who had to call Intel and give the guy managing the project the bad news.  We couldn’t figure out why the game was running at about one-quarter the Intel-estimated frame rates when Big Chilly decided to simplify things as much as possible and simply blit a black rectangle.

I still remember his eyes narrowing in suspicion as he stared at the results, pointed to them, and said, “now why does that number look familiar?”  It was because it was precisely the same as the speed limit of the PCI bus.  It quickly became clear that Intel had produced a very fast CPU capable of processing graphics at four times the rate that the communications bus on the graphics card could accomodate them.  This had a huge effect on everything, because it meant that we couldn’t use the higher resolutions for which we’d been creating the art, but had to back it all down to the same resolution we’d used previously with the Creative Labs card.

The game still looked pretty enough and got a decent review from CGW, but it wasn’t anywhere nearly as graphically beautiful as it should have been, even considering that it was a 2.5D game.

And that wasn’t our only contribution to the MMX project.  I was also responsible for killing what was intended as Intel’s original marketing slogan for it: “On the
‘Net/Off the ‘Net”.  But that is a story for another time.  And on a tangentially related note that no one but Big Chilly will grasp the connection, SWEET BILLY GATES but the insanity of certain console makers truly knows no bounds.

“The new Oddworld game New ‘n’ Tasty is coming to every platform in the current generation and even the next generation but not the Xbox One.
It’s not that developer Oddworld Inhabitants isn’t porting the game.
It’s not that they hate Microsoft or the Xbox One. No, it’s that
Microsoft has taken an anti-indie dev stance with the Xbox One. While
the game industry is moving to Kickstarter and self-funded shops,
Microsoft has decided all developers must have a publisher to grace
their console.”

This Xbox One launch is reminding me more and more of the Sega Dreamcast. 

Rabbit reviews

As we saw with Dr. Helen’s new book, one can always tell when the warren is hopping mad about something, because immediately they start throwing money at charities and “reviewing” books.  Icefog, for one, has been a very busy little rabbit.  It’s really remarkable how many books she managed to read through in just one day!

It would certainly be fascinating to discover this “reviewer” is an SFWA member given Amazon’s review policies.  And it’s interesting to learn that GoodReads is even more prone to fake reviewery.  Of course, as always, I look forward to the usual suspects whining “but how do you KNOW they’re fake reviews?”

A throne of garbage

June 14, 2013

Where to begin? This is tripe by any other name. There’s really no
story, and the language is infantile. When writing this the author must
have worn out his thesaurus, as this wordy little book looks like every
sentence is gleaned from Roget. The dialogue is hopeless, and the
characters laughable. Unless you can find nothing whatsoever to do with
your time, do anything other than waste it on this book.

A waste of $2.99

June 14, 2013

Yes, I know it’s just $2.99, but surely you can find something better to
spend it on. This author, self-avowed racist and mysogynist does not
deserve you money, however paltry the sum.

Author dimentia

June 14, 2013

There is no evidence inthis book that the author is capable of writing a
book, or even successfully pretending to without significant external
support. Perhaps his writing should be taken with at least a small grain
of salt. It is not that I, and others, do view him as human, (although
genetic science presently suggests that we are not equally homo sapiens
sapiens), it is that I do not view him as being fully civilized for the
obvious reason that he is not.

Infantile writing

June 14, 2013

The quality of the writing in this weak attempt at wrting is truly
pathetic. It shows what one man with a thesaurus and an elementary
understanding of the English language can accomplish. Save your time;
save your money. Do anything other than read this trash. 

I post these here in case they are removed by Amazon, because they serve as evidence that NK Jemisin’s false and malicious claims about me have already led to real and material damages.  They also show that SFWA has abetted those claims by permitting her to break Forum confidentiality without reprimanding her in the manner that I, and other members, have previously been reprimanded for doing the same.

In addition to those damages, there is the serious emotional trauma that I have suffered due to the multiple threats of violence being directed against me, in some cases by SFWA members, as a direct result of Ms Jemisin’s breach of confidentiality.  There are even indications that certain parties are concocting an organized plot to physically assault me involving an SF author with highly trained martial arts skills, the threat of which now renders me unable to attend professional conferences and materially harms my ability to secure future book contracts.

“And there is white-hot anger, so fierce you become the eye within the
maelstrom of your own rage, calm as your pulse exceeds the beats of a
marathon runner, calm as your fingers grasp and clench, calm as you grip
your aggressor’s throat and squeeze.  This last I feel for Theodore Beale.”
 – Foz Meadows, June 14, 2013

“You are a better person than I am; I can think of another response to Beale. Because I am incapable of stripping myself of irony, it’s a solution he’d approve, because he is not as fully civilized as I am. I’m sure it would be a lively, if sparsely-attended, wake.”
– Rafe Bronx, June 14, 2013


“Ignoring it hasn’t made it go away, and it never will. That has become undeniably apparent between this and the Sarkeesian
mess in the gaming community, and I have gone past the point of anger to
disbelief to exhaustion to numbness and back to blinding white-hot
rage. Time to put on the shitkicking boots.”
– Samantha, June 14, 2013

“There is
something….spectacularly unpleasant about him. He strikes me as someone
who is just itching for a really thorough arse kicking. I think it would
actual count as a medical intervention and possibly do him a lot of
good.”
– Louis, June 14, 2013

“I also can’t wait for the day when Theo literally gets his ass kicked by
a progressive SF author / martial artist like Matthew Woodring
Stover… just wait”
– Educated Professor, June 14, 2013

“i really would just love to meet up with him and deliver my personal
feelings in a direct and nonverbal way. ugh. the bad taste in my mouth,
make it go away.”
– Mark Monday, June 13, 2013 

The very troubling thing here is that SFWA has a history of turning a blind eye to threats of violence made by its members.  Just to give two of several examples, it took no action of any kind even though I complained to the SFWA Board about the following threats, one made by one of the organization’s own board members, the other made on the SFWA President’s own blog.  I cannot post more due to the forum confidentiality rules.

“Ah, yes. Mr. Beale. When I decided to run for re-election as SFWA
South-Central Regional Director, someone asked me what I would do if Mr.
Beale won the Presidential election. I replied, “Ask my friends to
start a bail fund.”
– Lee Martindale, SFWA South-Central Regional Director, February 1, 2013

“Whever I think “alpha male”… my daydream quickly becomes a Sweeney Todd
nightmare in which I’m serving the remains to my dinner guests,
disguised as some sort of heavy-seasoned stew beneath puff pastry,
because I wound up killing said Alpha Male in sheer exasperation before
sundown and need to get rid of the body….”
– Laura Resnick, SFWA member, August 17, 2012

How you like them sour grapes?

I’ve never quite understood those who genuinely appear to believe that I have any reason to be jealous of John Scalzi.  Yes, I am presently running for the SFWA position he is vacating, and sure, I do regularly lay the metaphorical crosshairs on him, but anyone who can fail to see the vast amusement that is regularly to be had with the author of l’affaire Rapey McRaperson falls very well short of being my ideal reader.  But be that as it may, the one thing to which various observers inevitably draw attention is something I’d always assumed was at least partially true, which is the assumption that Scalzi’s blog readership at Whatever is significantly larger than mine at VP and AG.  Longtime readers will recall that fans of PZ Myers also used to make a habit of pointing this out vis-a-vis Pharyngula, although we don’t seem to have heard much of that since the establishment of FreeThoughtBlogs and the inception of the low grade civil war presently raging between the anti-feminist New Atheists and the pro-feminist New New Atheists.

So it was informative to read this post, in which the SFWA president is impressed with the growing size of his blog readership.

“[H]ere are the stats for Whatever for 2012. WordPress’ stats software recorded 8.165 million views last year, which is up from 5.409 million in 2011, which is up roughly 50% over the previous year. That’s a pretty good jump for the year; as a contrast, the jump from 2010 to 2011 was 5.4 percent. I attribute the jump this year to a number of  blockbuster posts, most notably “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is.” The month with the largest number of views was May, with 1.1 million (not coincidentally the month of the “Straight White Male” post); The lowest number of views were in February, with 436,000….  To add to the confusion, Google Analytics (which I also have tracking Whatever) consistently reports lower numbers of views than WordPress; for example, in December, WordPress has Whatever getting 749,000 views; Google has it at 718,000.”

That looks genuinely impressive at first glance.  8.165 million views!  But the last number made me do a double-take. And then it made me laugh. You see, Google Analytics also tracks Vox Popoli and Alpha Game. Those two blogs happened to combine for 719,700 views in December.  719,700, if I recall correctly, happens to be a little bit more than 718,000.  Nor is it an anomaly, as that was actually down from 745,857 in November.  This inspired me to look further into the matter of comparative blog traffic.

Interestingly enough, the lowest number of combined views all year was in June, with 570,971.  In February, Vox Popoli alone had 494,534 views; combined views were 596,181.  Not only were both numbers considerably higher than Whatever’s 436,000 WordPress views for the same month, but on the basis of the reported December ratio, Whatever’s more directly comparable estimated Google views were probably in the vicinity of 418,000.  So, prior to the monster post in May that temporarily more than doubled Whatever’s traffic, this marginal “pit of manstink” appears to have had a readership that was 40 percent larger than the Great Hutch of the Rabbit People.  Moreover, last year traffic grew at a rate of 30.3%, from 5,969,066 in 2011 to 7,777,620 in 2012.

Doesn’t quite fit the rabbity narrative, does it?  In fairness to McRapey, I have to point out that he has never once attempted to play the traffic card himself, and on one or two occasions he has even attempted to explain to some of his more imaginative fans that the readership here, for all that it supposedly dwells in “the land of epistemic closure” is not quite as inconsiderable as some of them would like to pretend it is.  The reason for the mistaken perception on everyone’s part is innocent enough, though, as it appears to be based on the fact that WordPress offers the most generous view calculations while Sitemeter’s are the most stingy, combined with the fact that I make my Sitemeter numbers public while Scalzi only reports his WordPress numbers on an annual basis.  But Sitemeter is known to be at least a little unreliable; for example, there were several days earlier this year when I saw that it recorded no traffic at all.

So, corrected for the WordPress/Google ratio, here is how the annual traffic compares on the basis of Scalzi’s reported Whatever traffic and the Google numbers for VP (2009 through Feb 11) and VP+AG (Mar 11 through 2012):

The data indicates that Whatever needed that monster post just to keep pace with the continued growth of VP+AG.  I now await with no little interest to hear how the “sour grapes” theorists will explain that I am jealous of the traffic and exposure of a blog whose readership numbers my blog appears to have first passed up more than a year ago.  Now, it must be pointed out that Whatever did end up with 50k more total views in 2012, thanks to the aforementioned blockbuster post, but it should be readily apparent that VP+AG now have a bigger and more reliable readership base than Whatever.

By the end of 2013, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to see the occasional month pushing somewhere between 800k and 900k Google pageviews.  And if the Alpha Game traffic eventually surpasses Vox Popoli’s as I have always assumed it would given the higher level of interest in intersexual relations than in economics, SF/F, and my personal ideosyncracies, the two blogs may well surpass 1.1 million/month next year without requiring any well-linked monster posts.

Mailvox: an ignorant atheist

I find it interesting to witness mediocre minds at work.  It is always fascinating when one is able to discern the exact point at which they are no longer able to follow the logic to its obvious conclusion:

I just clicked on the links at right, “atheist demotivators”. God, are they stupid. And I’m not talking about the atheists, either. Seriously, “You can trust biologists. Because Physicists get amazingly accurate results” is the dumbest thing I’ve see lately, Is this Vox’s idea of a devastating putdown of atheism?

It would appear that someone hasn’t read Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell….  Or even recognized his picture.

Bitchslapping the anklebiter

Tad tees himself up:

@Vox Day “They can’t assert that debt doesn’t matter at all anymore…”

No, they can’t assert this. But, then they never did.  Burn that straw man down!!! 

It’s hard for me to clearly communicate how much I despise anklebiting little bitches like Tad.  They’re as stupid as they are ignorant, and yet they somehow manage to act smug whenever they are “correcting” their intellectual superiors.  The fact that such a cretin is willing to publicly assert I am attacking a straw man when I am doing nothing more than citing literally TEXTBOOK mainstream economics would alone be enough to make me reject democracy.  Three points:

1)  Debt isn’t even listed in the extensive 13-page index of the most important textbook in economic history, Paul Samuelson’s Economics.  622 pages and Samuelson devotes all of a paragraph to it, mostly to explain why it’s irrelevant.

2)  In his latest book, Paul Krugman openly argues that debt is irrelevant for any nation with a central bank that borrows in its own currency because it cannot default, and since the nation cannot default, it can eventually grow its way out of debt through a combination of time, GDP expansion, and inflation.  He writes: “Governments depend on being able to roll over most of this debt, in effect selling new bonds to pay off old ones. If for some reason investors should refuse to buy new bonds, even a basically solvent government could be forced into default.  Could this happen to the United States? Actually, no—because the Federal Reserve could and would step in and buy federal debt, in effect printing money to pay the government’s bills. Nor could it happen to Britain, or Japan, or any country that borrows in its own currency and has its own central bank.”

3)  In his landmark Neo-Keynesian textbook, Paul Samuelson expressly pointed out that domestic debt did not matter in the aggregate.  He wrote: “The interest on an internal debt is paid by Americans to Americans; there is no direct loss of goods and services. When interest on the debt is paid out of taxation, there is no direct loss of disposable income; Paul receives what Peter loses, and sometimes – but only sometimes – Paul and Peter are one and the same person…. In the future, some of our grandchildren will be giving up goods and services to other grandchildren. That is the nub of the matter. The only way we can impose a direct burden on the future nation as a whole is by incurring an external debt or by passing along less capital equipment to posterity.”

So, the Neo-Keynesians have ALWAYS argued that debt doesn’t matter in the aggregate so long as it is internal.  This is a fundamental aspect of their core view of economics, and this is why they don’t understand bubbles as well as why their solution to economic depression always involves more debt and more spending.

I’ve noticed that as a general rule, if someone uses the phrase “straw man”, they are almost invariably the same sort of mindless yapping idiot that used to make a habit of pointing out “correlation is not causation” and claiming “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”.  It’s almost as if there is someone programming these morons to say demonstrably ludicrous things and inflicting them upon the public en masse.

UPDATE: Since Tad has somehow managed to conclude that economists explicitly arguing that debt doesn’t matter is evidence that they believe it does, in fact, matter, let’s add a few more Krugman quotes from “the document where this assertion was made by, say, Krugman”, namely, his latest book,  End This Depression Now!  Tad clearly doesn’t understand that the entire point of Krugman’s book is not only to convince readers that debt doesn’t matter, but to convince them that adding massive quantities of government debt to the existing debt is the actual and only solution to the speedy end of the current depression.  Here is Krugman writing in the chapter entitled “But What About the Deficit?”

“Where the harm done by lack of jobs is real and terrible, the harm done by deficits to a nation like America in its current situation is, for the most part, hypothetical….

The key thing to bear in mind is that the $5 trillion or so in debt America has run up since the crisis began, and the trillions more we’ll surely run up before this economic siege is over, won’t have to be paid off quickly, or indeed at all. In fact, it won’t be a tragedy if the debt actually continues to grow, as long as it grows more slowly than the sum of inflation and economic growth….  

Now let’s consider what all this implies for the future burden of the debt we’re building up now. We won’t ever have to pay off the debt; all we’ll have to do is pay enough of the interest on the debt so that the debt grows significantly more slowly than the economy.”

The distaste for debate

It is interesting, is it not, how fear and loathing of debate pervades the Left:

Not to put too fine a point on it, professor McKenzie looked
terrified. When this distinguished economics prof had invited me to give
a lecture entitled “Is CO2 Mitigation Cost-Effective?” at Southeastern
Louisiana University, the provost had called him in to ask why
professors worldwide had written demanding that I be disinvited.

Disinvitation is a favorite debate-stifling technique of the left. A
couple of years ago, when Prince Philip invited professor Ian Plimer to
give the annual Duke of Edinburgh’s Lecture at Buckingham Palace
explaining why global warming is a scam, the Children’s Coalition went
into conniptions. Within weeks and without explanation, Ian was rudely
disinvited.

Regardless of whether it is Al Gore, Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, or the vast and corpulent mass of feminists, the Left has an observable tendency to shun debate.  They assert many different reasons for doing so, but the truth is always revealed by their seemingly contradictory willingness to debate the incompetent and the overmatched.

Contrast with this the readiness of those on the right, even the most hapless, to publicly engage with those with whom they disagree.  I don’t think much of Gary North and his homoerotic arguments – no one actually wants to poke a “gun” in his rotund “belly” – but I do give him credit for being willing to at least attempt to engage my ideas concerning the intrinsically inimical nature of free trade.

One of the things that has been interesting to observe over time is the way that the heated attacks on me, both in public and via email, have all but disappeared even though my overall readership has never been larger.  Why is this?  My theory is this is because most of my critics, be they atheists, feminists, evolutionists, or free traders, have learned they simply cannot win in a direct confrontation.  They can’t openly criticize my ideas because they have learned, much to their surprise, that they cannot adequately defend their own.

As Aristotle pointed out more than two thousand years ago, even at the rhetorical level, the side more closely approximates the truth will tend to win out, because it is easier to argue when your arguments are based on truth rather than falsehood.  Events will always ultimately prove the arguments of the global warmers, the godless, the female supremacists, the socialists, the Keynesians, and the monetarists to be false because their ideas are false.  This is why a good memory is one of the most lethal weapons against them and why it is so easy to win debates against them, as given enough time, they are going to contradict themselves. 

Why?  Because they have no choice.  Being false, their positions have to be dynamic, which means they can never hope for any significant degree of consistency.  This is why ex post facto revision and double-talk are the hallmarks of the Left, and is why the first thing Leftists do when they are in a position of power is to erase history and attempt to silence any voices capable of calling attention to their fictions and contradictions.

People have occasionally asked me how I so readily identify the weak points in an opponent’s arguments.  It’s actually very simple.  Look for the spin.  No matter what form it takes, the spin is only there to obfuscate the falsehood.  Expose that, and you not only expose the falsity of the argument, but also strike a blow against the credibility of the individual presenting it.  If longtime readers have learned anything here, I hope it is the ability to see through the incessant spin and strike to the heart of the deceit.

Hiding the depravity

It’s always interesting to see precisely what people are attempting to hide or avoid when they utilize false equivalences or incorrect definitions:

JT: Was this man sexually attracted to boys? Was he male also? Yeah… That’s the very definition of homo-sexual.

Evil Kirk: By that logic, a man who molests a girl is a heterosexual, presumably the sexuality you identify with. So are you agreeing that molesting girls is part of your sexuality?

First, I note that Evil Kirk doesn’t understand that JT is not relying on logic, but on a definition. Resorting to the dictionary is not resorting to logic. Second, his own attempt at logic suggests an inability to distinguish between the set and the sub-set. Molesting girls cannot be an intrinsic aspect of heterosexuality because girls are also molested by women. But molesting girls is certainly an intrinsically heterosexual act if perpetrated by a member of the opposite sex, just as molesting boys is an intrinsically homosexual act if perpetrated by a member of the same sex.

What Evil Kirk is attempting to avoid through his linguistic contortions is the fact that homosexual men are disproportionately likely to molest children. Although they make up around 1.5% of the male population, they are responsible for approximately one-third of all child molestations. This is why homosexuals try very hard to falsely impute a nonexistent aspect of age to both “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality”; they are seeking to conceal the fact that a statistically significant percentage of them are inclined to prey upon children.

My question to Evil Kirk is this: Were you intentionally attempting to hide the fact that homosexual men are around 20 times more likely to molest children than heterosexual men when you took exception to JT’s statement that a man who rapes a boy is, by definition, homosexual? If not, what was the basis for your objection to JT’s statement?

Tracking the anklebiters

Because it is getting increasingly difficult to keep track of exactly which anklebiter is avoiding what question, I’ve decided to add this handy little reference link to the sidebar so that the keepers of the hammer will know whose comments to continue deleting until they either back up their naked assertions or retract them. It’s always illuminating to see who can actually support their assertions and who doesn’t even make any attempt to do so. Unsurprisingly, it is usually the mindless critics who have proven incapable of constructing the most rudimentary arguments in support of their positions.

BANNED

Beelzebub: Trolls under a variety of pseudonyms. Real name Hunt Stoddard.
Pawn Takes Queen: Aka “passerby”.
Modernguy: hates Spacebunny
Bearded Spock: Also used a variety of names. Appears to be from Finland. Markku’s evil twin?
Will: aka Dan aka Alauda: the SF/F literary troll and legendary committer of “So, what are your names, wayfarers?”
Unger: Free trader given to emotional incontinence and demonstrably false assertions.
Tad: aka “Writer Gawking”. Homosexual with affinity for Paris and 25 comments/post
Phoenician:
Whatever/Pharyngula reader and librarian who favors the term “dipshit”
and can’t tell the difference between California and Massachusetts, or
between science and ethical justifications to not use science.

THE USUAL SUSPECTS

Holla: Doesn’t know what an “anecdote” is.
George: Doesn’t know what “hearsay evidence” is. Asserts atheists get divorced less often than self-identified Christians.
Depkey: Joseph from CL’s blog. His cunning plan is to troll with what he calls a Taylor persona.
James May: Monomania about certain SFWA writers.

In which a prize is awarded

Olegt, a science professor who teaches physics to biology students, wins a Beezle for this prophetic gem which he assures us in no way indicates a blind faith in science:

“Scientific theories that are well established are with us to stay…. No amount of new research will change the age of the Earth from the current value of 4.54 billion years (plus or minus one percent). The age of the Universe won’t be adjusted much from 13.7 billion years.”
– olegt: 1/8/11 9:25 PM, Those brilliant butterfly collectors

Brave words indeed. I especially enjoyed the way in which the intrepid professor firmly asserted his immovable position with such confidence, then followed it with a fudge factor of 90.8 million years in parentheses. I can only conclude that he missed his true calling… he should be doing market forecasts on CNBC. Well-established scientific theories are immutable, stocks have reached a permanently high plateau, and the U.S. Navy is not going to be caught napping.