Tag: freakshow

Vegetable totalitarians

Don’t feel bad about cutting a vegan out of your life if he ceases to mind his own business and starts preaching. They’re an SJW cult, they’re not just people who happen to prefer to different food.

L.A.’s vegan vortex has angrily turned on the most prominent vegan restaurant group in town this week as word has spread that its owners are not just eating meat but raising and slaughtering animals at the working farm where they live in Northern California.

Matthew and Terces Engelhart, the husband-and-wife proprietors of favored entertainment industry haunt Cafe Gratitude, tell The Hollywood Reporter they’ve been receiving death threats as part of a quickly growing, internet-bred campaign against them. It has also spawned a deluge of one-star reviews on their local outposts’ respective Yelp pages, a boycott group on Facebook that tallies 571 members at press time and plans now underway for a protest at the Larchmont Village location on Friday at 7 p.m.

“People have taken up the mob mentality,” says Matthew. “It saddens me that the choices we made in the privacy of our home would lead people to feel so betrayed that it’s elevated to threats on our lives. I’m very discouraged.”

The trouble began last week when animal rights activists discovered and then widely circulated a 14-month-old blog post written by Terces on the Engelharts’ Be Love Farm website, which mixed an announcement of their transition back into a meat diet again after nearly 40 years of vegetarianism (they had been vegan since 2003) with posted pictures of strained beef broth and a freezer full of pastured beef from their own dairy cows. Matthew tells THR they have kept chickens on the farm for seven years “for eggs only,” along with the cows for five years for milk, cheese and butter that’s for sale. (He claims they’ve “harvested,” or slaughtered, several cows in total and never sold the meat, only shared it with “our friends, neighbors and community.”)

The news has come as a shock to many vegans, who have been regular customers of the restaurants and claim the Engelharts have built their brand on not just serving vegan food but clearly wrapping themselves in the righteousness of the vegan cause — which they argue has now been undermined. “The reason we’re so upset is that veganism is a belief system,” says Carrie Christianson, who started the Facebook boycott group. “You are patronizing a restaurant that you think has that philosophy, and it turns out it doesn’t. Vegans should know that this restaurant has a farm that slaughters animals.”

“Veganism is a belief system.” That’s really all you need to know. It’s a secular religion. Since you are what to eat, my belief system says vegans are vegetables and should be treated accordingly.

SJWs strike back

In their own hapless and inimitably gamma way. First, Pedophil Sandifer makes a hash of the time-tested “I know you are but what am I” tactic and engages in the usual SJW projection in libeling the Hugo-nominated GamerGate artist Kukuruyo:

Vox Day Put A Child Pornographer On The Hugo Ballot 

For obvious reasons, I will not be providing links here, however I am happy to provide them privately to anyone with a legitimate interest in the information, including law enforcement.

It was brought to my attention today that “kukuruyo,” one of the artists that Vox Day put on the Rabid Puppies slate in Best Fan Artist and that made it onto the Hugo Ballot recently posted to his blog a commissioned drawing of comic book character Ms. Marvel in which her genitalia is clearly visible and provocatively displayed. Ms. Marvel – whose comic won last year’s Hugo for Best Graphic Story – is a sixteen-year-old girl in the comics. Under US law, this would seem to legally be child pornography.

Although the drawing post-dates Day’s placement of the artist on his slate, the hypocrisy of Vox Day endorsing the work of a child pornographer is particularly glaring given that he continues to throw childish insults like this around:

    #SJW logic: Pedophil Sandifer complains that #RabidPuppies are “bullying fucks” while declaring that they are outnumbered “3,800 to 200”.
    — Supreme Dark Lord (@voxday) April 30, 2016

and has been vocal in accusing sci-fi fandom of harboring pedophiles, including slating two works with arguments to this effect in Best Related Work. 

He then proceeded to double down and do it again. A few relevant points that collectively demonstrate the utter absurdity of Pedophil’s libel:

  1. Kukuruyo has stated that he didn’t know the fictitious age of the Marvel cartoon character, Ms Marvel, and drew her as a 20-year-old.
  2. I am reliably informed that Ms Marvel was 16 when she was introduced in 2013. That makes her at least 18 now, possibly 19. 
  3. The age of consent in Spain is 16. Kukuruyo is Spanish, lives in Spain, and US law is not relevant to his activities.
  4. The drawing cannot be child pornography regardless of what age the fictitious character is supposed to be. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that drawings and computer representations are not child pornography.
  5. Phil Sandifer has admitted that he was aware of the Supreme Court ruling when he made the accusation.
  6. The Ms Marvel drawing was drawn and posted well after I recommended Kukuruyo, who draws GamerGate Life, for the Hugo Award.
  7. SJWs always project. This is more than a little alarming in this particular case.

The most reprehensible aspect of Sandifer’s attack on GamerGate’s favorite artist is the way he is observably attempting to cast doubt on the undeniable fact that the science fiction fandom community has harbored pedophiles in the recent past, and the very reasonable suspicion that it is continuing to do so now.
In tangentially related news, while Camestros Felapton has gotten himself banned elsewhere in the Puppyverse, he’d always behaved himself here and never done worse than embarrass himself by demonstrating his inability to understand the core difference between rhetoric and dialectic, and between enthymemes and logical syllogisms. However, he’s been blatantly lying about both me and Castalia House at File 770, so he’s now permanently banned from commenting here as well.

I’ve been a fan of Gene Wolfe for a long time. I love the idea of the
work you are doing and from what I have seen the scale of work and
scholarship you have put into is impressive. However, I can’t vote for
your work when your publisher is promoting it by attempting to exploit
issues like child-sexual abuse. There isn’t some neat way of separating
‘Castalia House’ from the actions and strategies of Theodore Beale/Vox
Day and there is a qualitative difference between authors who have been
unwillingly nominated by the Rabid slate and authors who have willingly
chosen to work with Castalia House. I understand that for you it was a
matter of getting your work published and promoted and I understand why
any author would want that for their work – but in the case of Castalia
“promoted” necessarily includes stunts like slating the Hugo awards and
attempts to trash whole categories, and it includes slurs and defamation
of *other authors* people who, like you, have poured sweat &
scholarship and long days/nights into their work. However, I also get
that Vox Day perceives criticism as betrayal and that he has a tendency
to ‘punish’ what he perceives as betrayal. So I am certainly not asking
you denounce Day or withdraw from the awards or any other kind of
symbolic action, but I am saying I can’t vote for your work and I can’t
see it as a legitimate nomination because there is no way of seperating
what is published by Castalia from how Castalia promotes itself and its
published works.

 To set the record straight:

  1. Castalia is not promoting our various works by exploiting issues like child sexual abuse. Being a father as well as the acquaintance of several adults who were abused as children, I take the matter very seriously and I am committed to identifying and exposing every abuser in the science fiction community, no matter how celebrated or protected they are. I do not view the Hugo Awards as a promotion, promoting Castalia’s books is not a primary, secondary, or even tertiary objective of the Rabid Puppies campaigns, and the only book we will be promoting on the subject is the one we are publishing by Moira Greyland about her experience growing up in the science fiction community.
  2. I have not defamed any other authors, as the lawyers for John Scalzi, Samuel Delaney, and N.K. Jemisin, among others, will have informed them if they ever bothered to look into the matter. To the contrary, in the opinion of no less than three UK barristers, two of whom are experts on the subject and have won libel cases I have been legitimately and repeatedly libeled by a number of individuals in the media and the science fiction community.
  3. I do not perceive criticism as betrayal, as pretty much every reader of this blog can testify, having criticized me at one time or another. I have no problem with criticism, what I object to is blatant falsehoods. Third Law. SJWs always project.

Felapton does raise one valid point, which is that “there is no way of seperating what is published by Castalia from how Castalia promotes itself and its published works.”

However, in doing so, he only underlines Larry Correia’s original point about the Hugo Awards, which is that the awards are not given for merit, but rather are awarded on the basis of political approval. If the voters were solely, or even primarily, concerned with literary merit, as the SJWs in science fiction claim, this inability to separate the work from the publisher would not matter in the least.

But, as Felapton admits, since he can’t separate the work from the publisher, the merit of the work does not matter and he will not vote for any Castalia-published work on the basis of this genetic fallacy. That is certainly his prerogative, of course, but in explaining his reasoning, he has also proved the Sad Puppies original case about the Hugo Awards, which is that they are awards given out on the basis of political approval, not the pretense of literary merit the science fiction community presently affects.

Third, and more or less unrelated, but not meriting a separate post, Greg Hullender estimates the number of Rabid Puppies:

I’ve run the numbers using the power-law estimator, and from that I calculate that about 270 rabid puppies voted the slate this year, and that they kept fairly good slate discipline. I only get two anomalies:

“Hyperspace Demons,” by Jonathan Moeller should have been a finalist for Best Novelette. If we assume that he quietly declined the nomination, the numbers are a perfect fit.

Similarly, Bryan Thomas Schmidt should have been a finalist for Best Editor, Long Form. If we assume he too declined the nomination, those numbers are also a perfect fit.

That sounds about 60 percent too low to me, although it’s higher than Felapton’s estimate of 200, but we’ll find out in due course. My guess, and it is nothing more than a logical extrapolation from last year’s vote, would be around 650, as I thought we’d need at least 750 to run the table this year. In any event, I’ll leave Kukuruyo with the last word, because the salt must flow.

An actual conversation

Other Guy: I don’t really know anything about this Rabid Puppies thing. What’s up with that?

Vox Day: Oh, it’s just related to this science fiction award. Last year we took a bunch of nominations, so they made a big deal about it and vowed it would never happen again. Then this year, we took a few more.

OG: So that’s why they’re pissed.

VD: Yeah, pretty much. But also because we got things like “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” nominated.

OG: What?

VD: There’s this guy, Chuck Tingle, he’s a complete lunatic and he writes these crazy gay dinosaur erotica stories.

OG: Doesn’t he have a book about boyfriend who is a plane or something too?

VD: There’s one called “My Gay Billionaire Plane Boyfriend”, something like that, anyway.

OG: Yeah, I read it! It was pretty good.

VD: I’m a little alarmed to hear you’ve actually read that.

OG: Yeah, well, you’re the one who knows the guy’s name.

VD: Touche’.

A Quest for Depression in the Butt

This is just too freaking funny. From File 770:

If anyone wonders what side of the cultural divide that Chuck Tingle, author of Rapid Puppy pick “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” , falls on, he’s having Zoe Quinn, Gamergate patient zero, make his video game.

Beautiful. Simply beautiful. I very much doubt any of these SJWs have ever actually seen Depression Quest. It should be absolutely fascinating to see what Locke Valentine does with Mr. Tingle’s inimitable oeuvre, given her almost unbelievably limited skill set.

The Littlest Chickenhawk goes to war

He never bothered to enlist for any of the campaigns in the Middle East, because he was saving himself for the noblest of all callings: Milady’s arm was said to have been BRUISED:

“Corey Lewandowski is a thug and Donald Trump is a thug for backing him… This has been a verified account. There’s a report in The Daily Beast this morning that Corey Lewandowski specifically went to Matt Boyle over at Breitbart, a guy I know, and said to Matt Boyle that if he’d known it was a Breitbart reporter, he wouldn’t have done it. As though that’s justification. As though you can go after somebody who’s not a Breitbart reporter just because Breitbart is friendlier to Trump than other publications? The whole thing’s absurd.”

Shapiro added, “And the fact that the Trump campaign continues to play this game, where they put out what’s not just violent rhetoric but in this case, a campaign manager engaging in allegedly violent action, and then they won’t even step down to apologize; it’s beyond disgusting. It’s just gross.”

Kelly then turned to Wohl to defend Trump’s campaign manager. He immediately suggested that Fields could be lying: “this whole thing from the beginning doesn’t look good to me. The reality is there were dozens of people around. No one apparently saw it other than this one Washington post reporter. There were 100 cameras, none of them caught anything?”

Kelly, skeptical, asked Wohl, “Were they acting when they had that exchange on tape?”

Wohl replied that Trump was the real victim: “Trump is under attack on multiple levels. On political, economic, social and a personal level. And this is a way to get at him… if it is a real, legitimate assault or battery, you file a police report, you don’t tweet it out and then 36 hours later, you tweet out pictures of bruises and you say, ‘Lewandowski caused it.’”

Shapiro responded brutally: “This is disgusting. How repulsive are you people?”

Oh, it is well done, noble sir! Milady’s honor has been defended! I’m sure you will all join me in tipping your fedoras to him.

Seriously, this whole Michelle Fields thing is totally surreal. The way Shapiro and
Fox News are going into serial fainting fits, you’d think Donald Trump personally ripped her arm off at the
shoulder and raped her with it.

I cannot exaggerate the extent of my indifference concerning the possibility that a female reporter may have been shoved. I think all reporters, male and female, should be beaten periodically, on general principle.

Ever seen Deliverance, Mr. Beck?

“I don’t know what I would have done if I was sitting in Cruz or
Rubio’s shoes. I can’t say it that way. If I were on the
stage, I would have said, ‘have you been listening to him tonight? Have
you been listening to what I say about him? I believe these things. If I was close enough and had a knife, the stabbing just wouldn’t stop.”
– Glenn Beck

Dear Mr. Beck,

Have you ever seen Deliverance? Yeah, that’s your fat piggy ass for the rest of your life if you try to stab Mr. Trump.

Sincerely,
America

Psychologist, heal thyself

This is why therapy is reliably doomed to failure:

Confessions of a depressed psychologist: I’m in a darker place than my patients.

I am sitting opposite my sixth patient of the day. She is describing a terrible incident in her childhood when she was abused, sexually and physically, by both of her parents. I am nodding, listening and hoping I appear as if I appear normal. Inside, however, I feel anything but.

My head is thick – as if I’m thinking through porridge. I find myself tuning out and switching to autopilot. I put it down to tiredness – I haven’t slept well recently; last night I managed just two hours – but after the session I’m disappointed in myself. I’m worried that I might have let down my patient and I feel a bit of  a failure, but I tell no one.

One week later, I am in my car, driving across a bridge. Everything should be wonderful – my partner has a new job, my career as a psychologist in the NHS is going well, plus it’s almost Christmas, the second with our young child, and we’re readying ourselves for a move to London.

Yet, my mind is thick again. My only lucid thought is, “What if I turned the steering wheel and drove into the bridge support? What if I stuck my foot on the pedal and went straight off the edge? Wouldn’t that be so much easier?”

I grip the steering wheel and force myself to think, instead, of my partner and child. They are the two people who get me home safely.

It is the sort of anecdote I have heard from clients time and time again. I became a psychologist because I have a natural nurturing tendency – I never dreamt I would be the vulnerable one. But 10 years ago I found myself suffering from an extremely severe episode of depression that lasted three months, left me unable to work for six weeks and, at my very lowest, saw me contemplating suicide.

Would you go to a plumber whose toilet is overflowing? Would you hire a computer programmer who didn’t know how to use a computer? Then why would you ever talk to one of these nutjobs in order to fix whatever mental issues you might be having? In addition to the 46 percent of psychologists who the NHS reports as being depressed, “out of 800 psychologists sampled, 29 per cent reported suicidal ideation and 4 per cent reported attempting suicide.”

There is very little scientific evidence of the benefits of psychology. I read one recent study which showed that neurotic individuals actually stabilize on their own at a higher rate than those who seek therapy. This is no surprise, as the foundations of psychology are literally fiction. One might as reasonably base one’s economics on Isaac Asimov novels.

How many people do you know that have gone into therapy and never exited it? Those who advocate therapy are rather like fat people testifying to the efficacy of diet plans on which they never lose any weight.

Review fun with Sean O’Hara

So, it turns out that Sean’s got some really… interesting… reviews. I liked this one of, ahem,  Bodacious Space Pirates, of all things. Apparently if you stare too long into the abyss of hyperspace, you’ll eventually see some oversized tits.

Bodacious Space Pirates: Abyss of Hyperspace Vol. 1
Sean O’Hara’s review
Sep 14, 15

liked it
bookshelves: manga, space-pirates, space-opera, science-fiction
Read on September 13, 2015

I wish the novels would come out in English. This just isn’t a very good substitute.

I wonder why he is reading Bodacious Space Pirates if he can’t read Japanese? Sadly, Sean can’t even get the “review the editing non-review” right, and today introduced the innovative “review the non-editing non-review”:

Riding the Red Horse
Sean O’Hara’s review
Jan 04, 16

did not like it

This book claims to have been edited by Tom Kratman and Teddy Beale. This is a lie. They couldn’t edit an elementary school newsletter. To call what they did here “editing” is an insult to editors the world over. It’s more like they got their friends together and had everyone shit on a plate. And for some reason they’re inordinately proud of what they produced.

But then again, there’s a good chance a similar pile of shit will become President, so maybe they have a point. 

Fascinating. He’s attacking everyone from Jerry Pournelle to William S. Lind. While declaring that the book – the book – claims it was edited by people who did not edit it. I wonder who did? And were they bodacious?

And then there is this, which one would have thought defied description. And yet, Sean somehow manages the trick.

Princess Jellyfish, Vol. 1
Sean O’Hara’s review
Jul 20, 15

really liked it
bookshelves: manga, josei, romance
Read on July 15, 2015

How to sum up the plot of Princess Jellyfish…? Well, it’s a romance involving a love triangle between a nerdy girl, a transvestite, and the transvestite’s brother who’s a rising star of the political world. Also, real estate plays a big role, as does fashion design and of course jellyfish.

Of course jellyfish! How could there not be jellyfish when there are transvestites?

I think it goes without saying that what we have here is a gentlemen who has never, ever, kissed a real live girl. And there is more, there is literally 548 reviews more. You have to read them to believe them; they are too freaking funny!

Do we want to reconcile?

Steve Davidson of Amazing Stories informs us how the Puppies can do so, should we be so inclined.

Want to reconcile?  Here’s what puppies must do.

  1.     stop scamming the system.  If you want to recommend works that you think are worthy of the award, go ahead and do so.  But drop the political agenda (you’re dragons are imaginary) and eliminate the hateful, snarky commentary
  2.     stop attacking the very people who are offering you a bridge
  3.     please learn a little bit about the history of Worldcon and the Hugo Awards
  4.     if you want to be counted as Fans, then be Fans.  Fans who care attend Worldcon, nominate their conscience and attend the business meeting to effect change they think is needed.  They work WITH and within fandom – they do not set themselves up as a cabal that engages in fear and hate.

My response:

  1. Recommending works we thought were worthy was all we did last year. I wrote one (1) single post to that effect. Chaos Horizon even demonstrated mathematically that there was no bloc-voting by the Puppies last year. But PNH and the Tor Cabal are not imaginary. The whisper campaigns and award pimpage of the past are not imaginary. People buying memberships for their underage children so they could bloc-vote for them are not imaginary. SJWs actively pushing a political agenda in science fiction are not imaginary. The rules changes they rammed through in order to defend their turf, exactly as I predicted, are not imaginary. So, no.
  2. No. It’s not a bridge, it’s an invitation to surrender.
  3. We know far more about the history of Worldcon, Fandom, and the Hugo Awards than you want us to know. We know all about Heidi Saha and David Asimov and the Greyland siblings and Kevin Smith, and the Sri Lankan cabana boys, just to name a few, and soon the entire world will know all about what happened to more than a few children at Fandom’s hands. Or to be more precise, what is happening to them. Fandom fosters, defends, and even celebrates a tremendously sick and twisted group of criminal deviants.
  4. We don’t want to be Fans. We don’t want to be anything like you. We don’t want anything to do with you. We are entirely content to be what George Martin dismisses as mere readers, writers, editors, and publishers. And what we intend to do in 2016 is continue to liberate a literary genre from the small collection of creepy left-wing monsters, rape enthusiasts, and social justice warriors who have made it their home for decades.

The caption reads: “Eat your heart out, Isaac Asimov – Heidi has promised to wait until Forry grows up!”

Note that the gentleman in the photograph above, Forrest Ackermann, was honored with a 1939 Retro-Hugo for Best Fanzine in 2014. He was also nominated for Best Fan Writer.

I said in 2013, there can be no reconciliation. Everything I have learned over the last two years has confirmed that. Decent human beings who respect traditional morality don’t reconcile with child abusers and the amoral Fans who enable, celebrate, and associate with them.

So, I vote no to reconciliation. What do you say, Rabid Puppies? What do you say, Dread Ilk? What do you say, Sad Puppies?

Even the moderate leader of Sad Puppies 3, Brad Torgersen, sounds as if he considers the prospect of reconciliation to be a dubious one.

An analysis of the post-Hugo numbers identifies a 2,500-vote block of individuals who seemed to think the best way to annihilate the infamous forces of the Kurgan — Vox Day — was to accept Vox’s challenge to play chicken. Now, I warned everybody that chicken is the Kurgan’s favorite game. But that 2,500-vote block went ahead and played the game anyway, nuking five whole categories, and cheering themselves in the process. It was their finest moment. It was also precisely what Vox Day wanted them to do, because it gives Vox his pretext for further assaults on the Hugos in future years, while also radicalizing and alienating many people who wanted nothing to do with Vox, but who did want to see justice done at the Hugo awards proper.

As I warned Mike Glyer of File 770, I am a patient man. We didn’t fight back in the media last year, but let them take their best shot at calling us bigots, racists, neo-nazis, and so forth. Last year, I did nothing more than post a single list of recommendations.

And now that 2015 has come to an end, it’s our turn.

How can I fear my enemies…

When I have supporters like this?

By posting this video… I make no commentary on the quality… or
political implications of this video.  It is here solely for
informational purposes.

I’m not sure which is more horrifying, the video itself or the knowledge that certain SJWs will be watching it over and over again on a repeating loop.