Tag: books

A Robot doubles down

The remarkable thing about these leftist idiots is how shameless they are.  It doesn’t matter how badly they are caught out, or how completely they are shown to be wrong, they will double-down without hesitation, as A Robot does in defense of his “review” of Men on Strike:

In reviewing scientific literature, which Men On Strike purports to be,
one must review the source material which the author uses to support the
claims and assertions of the author. The source material is the basic
evidence that the author uses to show the person reading the book, “hey,
these things that I’m writing? They’re supported by facts, evidence,
and research. You can trust me and my work because a lot of time and
effort has gone into reviewing this material and making sure the most
accurate depiction of the facts of the matter at hand is presented.”

You
cannot separate reviewing the source material from reviewing the book
at hand, because the source material is the entire reason that one
should believe the assertions of the book. If you’re reading a book that
seriously studies any natural, social, or scientific phenomenon, you
have to check the source material. Theodore Beale is just one of many
sources not worth trusting that are liberally sourced in Helen Smith’s
book: Vox Day taken as a serious source of unbiased, well-researched
material is just the most egregious example and the one that could be
most easily demonstrated due to the great deal of material Beale puts
online.

That said, even without the contributions of Vox Day, Men
On Strike suffers greatly from a serious lack of actual research. The
vast majority of claims that it makes about men and women
(psychologically, socially, or otherwise) are not based on verifiable
data, instead relying on the anecdotes of whoever Smith could find that
supported the view she puts forth in Men On Strike. The book has not
gone through the peer review process that scientific literature goes
through to ensure accuracy. I’ve been totally unable to find any amount
of literature written by Helen Smith from any sort of peer-reviewed
journal or database. The only things I’ve been able to find written by
Helen Smith appear on her personal web site, and on the web sites of
people or organizations who share her political beliefs.

Real
scientists write and research for the purpose of scientific advancement,
and a big part of doing that is making sure that their research stands
up to peer review. The acknowledgements make no mention of any person
who reviewed Men On Strike to make sure it was scientifically accurate.
She mentions “friends and colleagues who have helped and encouraged”
her, but that is the only thing close to acknowledging scientific peer
review. Helen Smith intentionally decided not to bring her book to the
attention of the scientific community while presenting her book as
supported by scientific research and scrutiny. Her footnotes are filled
with references to her own research, and there are more citations of
blogs and of political organizations than of real scientific literature
on any subject even ostensibly related to the subject of sexual
inequality.

Men On Strike is, above all else, a compilation of
anecdote and political bias. It has no basis in research or verifiable
evidence beyond the quotations in her book having actually existed. 

The amusing thing is that this defense proves, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that he didn’t read the book.  Dr. Helen directly addresses this line of criticism in the book, pointing out that she is being held to a standard to which no female writer attacking men is ever held.   Men on Strike isn’t “scientific literature”; it doesn’t pretend to be.

Ironically enough, in his attempt to keep people from reading Dr. Helen’s book, he’s only brought new people to the blog, such as KC:

I just stumbled upon your blog yesterday, ironically through the
1-star Men On Strike review that pointed me to your site.  (“Nobody can possibly be as
wacked-out as this person is saying,” I thought to myself, intent
on verification.) So far, I’ve found your site by turns
interesting, thought-provoking, and mildly infuriating.  (Thanks
for all the fantasy and SF links, by the way.) I just have one
question.  Since your views on Christianity are, well, not the
most mainstream, I’m wondering if you came by them on your own or
if there are any particular theologians or books you’ve drawn on
for inspiration.

KC, didn’t you know you’re always supposed to accept the claims of a leftist, no matter how absurd, without verifying them?  How are they supposed to be taken seriously if you’re actually going to look into what they are saying?  Anyhow, in answer to KC’s question, GK Chesterton and CS Lewis are the two Christian writers I have found most inspiring.

Mailvox: Clive Staples award

I was under the impression that I was more likely to be nominated for
both the Nebula and the Hugo than for any Christian fiction award, but
apparently I was wrong.  I received the following email concerning the
Clive Staples award for Christian Speculative Fiction:

Greetings,

As
you may know, the Clive Staples Award for Christian Speculative Fiction
has been revived, with Speculative Faith hosting it, and one or more of
your books has been nominated by a reader. We’re also happy to announce
that the new Realm Makers writers’ conference is partnering with us to
announce the award winner at the Friday dinner (August 2) and to provide
a modest cash prize.

The CSA is entirely a readers’
choice award, from nominations to final selection (which means that
authors associated with Spec Faith or Realm Makers ARE eligible).
However, we are opposed to popularity-contest awards, which makes the
request I’m about to make a little tricky.

We need
readers to know about the award and their opportunity to vote, but we
also need to communicate the need to honor good writing, not just
popular authors. To achieve this, we’ve put a minimal requirement on
voters: they must have read at least two of the nominations. I’ve also
written several posts at Speculative Faith (see links below) explaining
the standards we want readers to use when voting.

My
request is that you would help your readers know about CSA and our
goals, their opportunity to vote, and the requirements to do so. Without
voters, a readers’ choice award is not possible. But to appeal to you
to bring in readers, risks the possibility of the award devolving to a
popularity contest. In reality, whether this award works depends on how
widely we can spread the word and how determined the readers are to vote
for quality stories. Whatever you can do to help achieve this would be
greatly appreciated!

Below is a list of the books that
have been nominated and the links to the Spec Faith articles about the
award. Congratulations on your book(s) being included! And thank you for
any help you can give in notifying readers about the award.

I
believe I have been abundantly clear about my skepticism concerning
literary awards, but since I was asked to notify readers about the
award, I am doing so.  I’m not asking you to vote for A Throne of Bones, and I would request that anyone who is interested in voting for any of the nominated books on the list
to please be sure to follow the voting guidelines.  I’m a little
surprised, to be honest, given that I’ve actually been expressly banned
from being nominated for at least one Christian fiction award, but
apparently that was a different one.

Men on Strike: the ultimate review

An Amazon reviewer makes the quixotic choice to “review” Dr. Helen’s important new book by discussing my idiosyncracies, mostly inaccurately:

The first chapter of this book includes a section on why video games (in conjunction with porn) are a driving force behind men making the decision to not get married (it is because they cost less money than dating). It gives a description of “pickup artist theory:” a theory of how interaction between the sexes works by breaking men up into several categories (all of which are represented with Greek letters to make it sound more scientific than it is) and then ranks those categories by the sexual desirability of each category. The highest category, Alpha, is fully described as “the male elite, the leaders of men for whom women naturally lust.” It actually made it into print that the lowest men, the Omegas, are “the losers… most never surmount the desperate need to belong caused by their social rejection. Omegas can be the most dangerous of men because the pain of their constant rejection renders the suffering of others completely meaningless in their eyes.”

You read that right. Sociopathy is just a symptom of being a loser. Get over it, Lecter!

Here’s the thing, though: that particular version of “pickup artist theory” was created by Theodore Beale, who has no accredited training of any kind in psychology, behavioral science, or any other field that would lend him any amount of credibility. His blog, Vox Popoli (where he writes both as himself and his pseudonym, Vox Day), has two characters he invented named of McRapey and McRacist. Proudly displayed on the front page is a picture of a scared anthropomorphic pink rabbit, wearing a shirt that says “Rapey McRaperson” on it. Whenever someone says that racism exists, McRacist makes a blog post about how white men have it tough. Every time someone acknowledges the glass ceiling, McRapey posts a tirade about how every woman trying to live her own life is just insecure about how tough it is to get a man to do it for them.

Theodore Beale is the man that Helen Smith has trusted to help write a book on social interaction between men and women. Theodore Beale is a man who trivializes rape for a hobby. Theodore Beale is an unapologetically racist white man who literally wrote a blog post (please do not read this if you are capable of rational thought:[…] ) on female privilege, using a department store and a credit card with no credit limit as a metaphor for the fantastic life that women have by virtue of their race and sex. He began this blog post by trivializing rape and asserting that women who “threaten not to have sex with anyone” are wrong to choose not to have sex with anyone. Women are to blame not only for their female privilege, but also for their white privilege, which Beale dismisses as a non-issue whenever it affects white men.

We are only in the first chapter of this book that a publisher somehow decided was worth printing, where it is revealed that Helen Smith’s most basic assertions about modern romance are filtered through the lens of a man who proudly and openly claims that racism and sexism are tools of oppression used mostly against whites and men. One of Helen Smith’s primary research sources on the subject of men and male psychology invokes McRapey whenever he writes about men being “oppressed,” and we are expected to take this man seriously as an intelligent advocate for the dismantling of feminism as a whole.

No, this is seriously the message conveyed by Men On Strike. We are supposed to believe that Theodore Beale is an intelligent and well-reasoned man who is arguing in favor of sexual equality. We are supposed to believe that Beale’s categorization of men, arbitrarily assigned to letters of an alphabet for a language he does not speak, is an accurate portrayal of society and social interaction. We are supposed to believe this because Helen Smith presents this information alongside nonsensical statistical evidence, such as the suggestion that roughly 24% of men are Alphas who get to choose their sexual partners from the 76% of women who refuse to go a lower rung on the social hierarchy’s ladder. The logical conclusion, Smith argues, is that the remaining 76% of men are forced to compete for the remaining 24% of women. The existence of the hierarchy is not questioned: it is taken as a given truth that an outspoken misogynist has correctly identified what women universally and instinctually find attractive in men.

Helen Smith has not just written a book that is aggressively wrong on a broad range of topics: she has literally been assisted in writing this book by a man who actually believes that American society systematically oppresses men because women have the right to not have sex with someone they don’t want to have sex with. Men On Strike is not worth reading. It is not worth considering as a source of information. It is one of the most mangled attempts at statistical analysis and critical thinking that I have ever been witness to.

It is a certainly a strange sort of notoriety that triggers this sort of rabid, mindless reaction in one’s critics.  And I wish I had invented McRapey and McRapist, but as it happens, they are real, award-winning science fiction writers and fellow members of the SFWA.

As for the legitimacy of the socio-sexual hierarchy, the reason it has been adopted by more and more people as a useful means of understanding intersexual relations is that it reflects the reality they observe on a daily basis.  Credentials are irrelevant; I find it hard to think of anyone less likely to correctly identify what women instinctually find attractive in men than a highly credentialed academic of either sex.  Also, neither intersexual relations nor the socio-sexual hierarchy can be reasonably be described as “pickup artist theory”, as it is not limited to picking up women.

Anyhow, Dr. Helen can be pleased that she has clearly hit a sore spot among the defenders of the Female Imperative with her new book, as these people only attack the individuals and ideas they believe to be dangerous to their pernicious ideologies.

The Gatekeepers know the gates are crumbling

One of the chief beneficiaries of the crumbling system, James Patterson, makes a ludicrous pitch for a bailout of the publishing industry that is quite rightly ripped apart by Kenton Kilgore:

Recently, mega-author James Patterson took out an ad in the New York Times Book Review asking for the government to bail out libraries and the book publishing/selling industry….  In his ad, Patterson asks, “If there are no bookstores, no libraries, no serious publishers with passionate, dedicated, idealistic editors, what will happen to our literature?  Who will discover and mentor new writers?  Who will publish our important books?”

So, the three-headed serpent that is Big Authors + Big Publishing + Big Distributors–the same serpent that made Patterson and his partners rich by cranking out about 10 of his books every year–is eating itself.  Well, we can’t have that!  What would be our society be without the ”important books” that Patterson lists in his ad–as well as his splatterfests named after lines from nursery rhymes (Along Came a Spider, Kiss the Girls, Pop Goes the Weasel)?  And what about Twilight?  And the collected masterpieces of Danielle Steel?

It’s more than a little amusing to me that while a brilliant businessman – if shameless literary hack – like Patterson can see what is taking place in the publishing world, the idiot parasites who have taken over the SFWA remain totally clueless about those changes and are more concerned about chainmail bikinis and the fact that Mike Resnick and Barry Malzburg referred to a woman they knew forty years ago as a “lady” rather than as an editor in the SFWA Bulletin. 

(Believe it or not, that is the urgent DEFCON 1 situation to which Rapey McRaperson was referring and pledging his name, fame, and fortune to address this weekend.  That’s right; the SFWA is going to deal with its “problem” of the old guard by silencing them and ensuring that no new dissenting voices are permitted to arise.  You will RESPECT fat old women writing dreadful books about warrior women and necrobestial love triangles or you will be SILENT!)

It is going to be so much fun to watch these awful people shriek and scream as the cold equations of the publishing business gradually penetrate their thick, empty skulls.  I’ve been asked, on occasion, why I remain a member of the SFWA considering that only about ten percent of the active membership appears to share my perspective on the ongoing developments and the majority of the membership can’t stand me or the intellectual liberty for which I stand.  To which I can only respond: “Give up my front row seat to the auto-bonfire of the witches?  Are you mad?”

Simply reading the litany of sob stories and complaints that make up the greater part of the SFWA Forum makes for a pure and unadulterated pleasure for anyone with a sense of either justice or humor. And it is only going to get more entertaining as the economy implodes and the more publishers go the way of Night Shade Books. It will be a delight to see proud editor/authors forced to resort to the very independent publishing they once scorned as being intrinsically inferior… and then watch them flounder and fail as they belatedly discover that their “popularity” was artificial and mostly the result of superior access to the chief distribution channel.

As one who was briefly permitted entry by the gatekeepers through a side entrance, I perhaps have a more accurate perspective on the situation than most who are either purely insiders or outsiders.  I still have access to a number of executives at several major publishers, although, as it happens, none at the genre publishers.  And I can testify that the mainstream executives understand very well that their conventional business appears to be terminal, as increasing ebook sales at steadily falling prices are not be able to make up for the combination of a) declining print sales, b) vanishing print outlets, c) competition from independents.  It should get very interesting indeed when Barnes & Noble either files for bankruptcy or is acquired by Amazon.

The Gatekeepers are desperate because they are standing on walls that are turning to sand beneath their feet.  But do not miss the confession that is implicit in Patterson’s corrupt appeal; without their structural advantages, “serious publishers with passionate, dedicated, idealistic editors” cannot compete on a level playing field with independents writing books of which they do not approve.

Note, in particular, the adjectives “dedicated” and “idealistic”.  Dedicated to what ideals?  Patterson’s plea is an implicit admission of the very bias that Standout Authors such as Sarah Hoyt and Larry Correia have been describing, and which those who have benefited from it have so staunchly denied.

When A GAME OF THRONES was great

Although we bitch and moan about GRR Martin, and deservedly so, I think it is important to remember how very, very good Martin was in his first three novels.  Let’s face it, the reason we complain – or write successor works – is due to the intensity of our disappointment with the last two works in light of the previous three.  It is enlightening to see The Red Wedding again through the eyes of someone who is not familiar with the books:

What’s most interesting to me as this third season of Game of Thrones bleeds out all around us is the way its creators — Martin, certainly, as well as his able adaptors, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss — are playing with more than just television storytelling conventions. They’re playing with storytelling itself. Robb and his family aren’t just cursed for believing in fairy tales — disembowled dreams like justice and happy endings — they themselves are fairy tales. Robb was the young prince boosted by righteousness and romance. Sansa was the beautiful innocent with visions of love and lemon cakes dancing in her pretty, untroubled head. And Arya — so painfully close to her family, thankfully not quite close enough to die alongside them — was the stereotypical tomboy who dreams of becoming a warrior. Once again it fell to the Hound to disabuse a Stark of her idyllic prentensions. Arya’s idea of a “real” killer isn’t a scarred pragmatist like Sandor Clegane — who, despite the little lady’s constant proclamations, has always struck me as a pretty nice guy, all things considered! — it’s a fantasy fulfillment machine like Jaqen H’ghar. You remember him, right? He’s the face-changing Lothario who granted Arya three wishes last year then vanished in a puff of smoke. That’s not a real killer. That’s a genie. Can you imagine Martin’s version of Snow White? The wicked Queen would reign supreme while the heroine would wind up crucified in Littlefinger’s brothel.

Fans of Westeros can, and should, be critical of Martin. But they should not forget the reason they became fans in the first place.  Whether you like what he does or not, no one has done it better.  My own Arts of Dark and Light are neither a ripoff of Martin nor a homage, but they are quite obviously influenced by him.

And who knows, perhaps he’ll pull a dragon or two out of a hat and The Winds of Winter will be more akin to the earlier books.  At least until it is published, we can hope.

The gatekeepers strike again

I’d previously made some allusions to the interest of a European publisher in putting out the Arts of Dark and Light series in audiobook and paperback next year, however, after being informed this morning that the publisher changed their mind about publishing it, it has become clear that I have reached the point where I am officially unpublishable by conventional publishers.  C’est la vie.

It’s the usual political gatekeeping of course.  I was told that some of my public statements would make it hard for them to defend the decision to publish with me, despite how much they liked the first book in the series.  The annoying thing is that this is the SECOND time this has happened with this particular publisher; I was assured that this time, my idiosyncratic opinions would not be an issue….

What it comes down to in the end is that I haven’t sold enough books or built enough of a readership to be deemed worth the criticism that comes with my level of notoriety.  The risk/reward balance is too high. Orson Scott Card’s views are every bit as offensive to the gatekeepers as mine are, but Tor Books isn’t about to stop publishing their bestselling author on that basis.  At a mere one million pageviews per month and paltry sales of around 12,000 ebooks annually, the controversy that comes with my name simply isn’t worth it to the publishers.  Now, once I reach 5 million pageviews, I expect they’ll suddenly start sniffing around again.  At 10 million and a top 100 Amazon rank in the Fantasy category, even the most liberal gatekeeper will magically cease to have any problem with my public statements.

Will it take a while for me to get there?  Sure.  But I will.  Fortunately, this is precisely the “that which does not kill me makes me stronger” sort of thing that gives me the motivation to surmount my natural laziness and get things done.  Whether I’ll still see any benefit to working with conventional publishers is a question I’ll consider when the situation arises. In the meantime, my first order of business is to find a reader for the audiobooks I will be publishing next year.  My second order of business will be to begin finding authors who would like to publish electronically through in-game stores with direct access to millions of players.  And my third order of business will be to formally announce the new games we are presently developing.

I would have preferred to take the easy way and turn the book distribution aspects over to a publisher so that I could focus entirely on the writing and game development.  But that’s no longer an option for me due to the political correctness that pervades the publishing industry throughout the English-speaking world.  Since the traditional channels are closed, I’ll simply have to create new ones.  Necessity, after all, is the mother of invention.

I’m not whining or complaining; this is the path I chose.  I’m not looking for sympathy or support.  And I’m not upset with the publishers; they are certainly free to make their own choices and render themselves increasingly irrelevant to various demographics if they like. Yes, it’s certainly irritating to AGAIN find out that a publisher who knows perfectly well how controversial I am when they start talking to me, and who assures me that my notoriety isn’t a problem, ends up getting cold feet before the deal closes.  (Or, in two cases, AFTER it closes.) Still, other than being a minor waste of time, it’s not an actual problem. I’m only irritated with myself because I should have known better; Spacebunny was openly skeptical from the start.

But this isn’t merely a problem for me. The suspicions that publishers have a political agenda and refuse to publish writers solely due to their politically incorrect views are well-founded and are based in absolute, well-documented fact.  Most writers won’t talk about this because they hold out hopes for one day being allowed through the gates and they don’t want to burn any bridges.  However, one advantage of discovering one has already inadvertently nuked all the bridges is that one has carte blanche to speak the truths that would otherwise remain unspoken.

To quote Standout Author Sarah Hoyt: “Like most pioneers, you’re being forced onto it by circumstances and
by the status quo becoming untenable.  But it doesn’t mean you can’t
take the opportunity to build something better. Now go and do it.”

And that is exactly what I intend to do.

The infernal Dan Brown

I have never read what passes for a Dan Brown novel, and it seems that this is probably for the best.  But I should note that the vast success of writers who write for idiots doesn’t bother me any more than the success of sixteen year-old pop stars who perform for teen girls does.  Given MPAI, it stands to reason that the writer whose primary goal is to sell as many books as possible should always cater to the lowest nominally literate consumer.

However, it is a bit much to be expected to also accept the intellectual pretensions of a man who is manifestly writing for the ignorati.  For not only is Brown’s “research” obviously incorrect, the fact that he confuses the ascents of the Purgatorio with the circles of the Inferno tends to suggest that it is entirely nonexistent.  I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn he’d never even read the entire Inferno, let alone the rest of La Comedia.

Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, having written what
for lack of a mightier term we must call a novel, a novel that proved that John
the Apostle was a girl, Mary Magdalene a helpless goddess, and a hypotenuse an
African water buffalo—having revealed for millions the lavish colors of the
frescoes in Notre Dame de Paris (there are no frescoes in Notre Dame de Paris),
the grim austerity of Spanish Cathedrals (Spanish Cathedrals are notorious for
baroque exuberance), and the deep mystery of the Golden Ratio (every schoolboy
knew about the Golden Ratio)—having shown the world that he could write a novel
about art, theology, and Christian history while knowing nothing about art,
theology, and Christian history, except what he could glean from the covers of
matchbooks and obiter dicta from Cher—having shown how much
you can do if you do not bother to open an ordinary encyclopedia, this Dan
Brown, I say, this man of our time and of no time, has now written a novel about
the greatest poet who ever lived, Dante.

Only it doesn’t have
a damned thing to do with Dante, just as The
Da Vinci Code didn’t have anything to do with Leonardo.  Dante is just
a quick needle used to inject the “story” into the reader’s head.  This
time, Mr. Brown has opened a lot of encyclopedias, deluging the reader with 400
pages of material that belongs in Michelin guides to Florence, Venice, and
Istanbul, none of it to the point.  Even at that, he gets details wrong as
soon as he veers away from something you might find in a guide book, especially
when he engages in an exceedingly rare moment of telling us something about
Dante’s poem.  He says it was called a Comedy
because it was written in the vernacular, “for the masses.”  No, a comedy,
according to the medieval definition, was a poem in which a character moves
from misery to happiness, regardless of what language it is written in, and
there were no “masses” to read it, since books were still costly to produce and
scarce.

He says that Dante’s
Purgatory has nine circles of ascent; no, there are seven, one for each of the
deadly sins.  He says that Purgatory is the only way to get from the
Inferno to Paradise.  No, it isn’t; nobody but Dante visits Inferno and
leaves the place, and plenty of people do not have to ascend the
mountain.  Essentially, Dante’s poem is about the resurrection of a human
soul, by the grace of God, to turn from the lie of evil to the truth and beauty
of goodness.  Brown doesn’t get any of that, because he doesn’t care about
any of that.

What’s this book
about?  It’s 462 pages of bad prose.  Portentous sentence
fragments.  Italics, for somber
emphasis.  J—–, there are childish profanities!  Even childish
punctuation?!  Anticlimaxes, a good dollop of Most Favored Bigotry, for
sales; one dimensional characters, most of them pallid even in their one
dimension, and a message with all the sophistication of Sesame Street. 

I understand that Eco isn’t for everyone, let alone Calvino and Borges.  But it would be nice if someone in Brown’s position would be responsible enough, if not to actually bother reading Dante, to at least hire someone to read it for him and ensure that he isn’t actively misinforming the sort of people whose only exposure to the culture Brown is mining are his books.

SE+ is shipping

I’ve been informed by Marcher Lord that the new Summa Elvetica hardcover is now shipping to the preorders.  If you receive it, please let me know how it looks; it will be a while before my copies get to me.

Reviewing Men on Strike

Dr. Helen Smith’s Men on Strike was released today.  I reviewed it at Alpha Game.  An excerpt:

With the publication of Men on Strike, Dr. Helen Smith
fires an important shot in the ongoing cultural war for the soul, and
indeed, the survival, of Western Civilization.  It is a shot she fires
in defense of the defenders, in defense of the barricades, in defense of
the gates, against the lawless barbarians marching under the banner of
the Female Imperative.

If the horror stories and red pill realities she chronicles will not be
unfamiliar to those who are regular readers of the androsphere, they are
nevertheless particularly effective when presented, largely
dispassionately, one after another in succession.  Dr. Helen does an
competent job of drawing clear links between a legal regime biased
towards women and the fearful behavior of men who no longer see
sufficient incentive to perform the roles that society has long expected
and required of them.

Read the rest at Alpha Game.