#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
It’s official. I have seen EVERYTHING. A GAY JEWISH WEDDING WHERE THEY RODE IN ON A HORSE DRESSED AS A UNICORN
Or rather, proof of the lack thereof. But nevertheless, I think it’s an exaggeration to say that America has reached the depths of Roman depravity. Only when one of these drama queens is the elected President and the marriage-parody is consummated in public, on the horse, can we reasonably say it has reached that level.
It’s so terribly frustrating to SJWs when they can’t find any scary threats to point-and-shriek about that they have to go and manufacture their own imaginary ones. Either these people are lying for effect or they are literally, clinically and medically insane.
Ann Somerville on June 20, 2015 at 10:29 pm said:
I really fear for Irene Gallo and Moshe Feder. GGaters have no boundaries, and it’s beginning to look as if the Puppies of either kind don’t either.Matt Y on June 20, 2015 at 10:59 pm said:
It’s not their jobs I’m worried about. It’s that small portion of the hyper-reactionary crowd that flock to some of these assholes get obsessed with trying to personally cause damage or harass people as if it’s some sort of game. Like GGs obsession with Quinn, Anita, and so on. I don’t know if that is what Anne is talking about but I’ve thought about that, which is really depressing that it’s even a potential concern.Stevie on June 20, 2015 at 11:39 pm said:
Thank you, Anne and Matt. I was obviously being far too privileged to take on board the real physical dangers confronting them; I will try to do better.Laura Resnick on June 21, 2015 at 1:02 am said:
I, too, have started wondering about Irene Gallo’s physical safety. Is she being cyberstalked or receiving threatening messages? Will the vitriolic rhetoric against her escalate to a level where she’s at risk from doxxing and physical stalking?The apologies she and Tor issued should have resolved the matter. (And I assume Tor and Macmillan have remained silent since then because those apologies eliminated any legal exposure the corporation might have been concerned about.)
The bizarre, inexplicable ESCALATION we have seen over Gallo since then indicates that the Puppies and whoever else has joined this anti-Gallo hysteria are functioning so far outside the boundaries of rational behavior that their anger is self-feeding and could keep escalating, especially if the ringleaders keep feeding it. Which does lead me to wonder if unstable individuals in the group will harass and endanger Gallo, in the way that people like Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn, Briana Wu, and others have experienced in the past year or two.
I, too, have thought, oh, maybe I’m overreacting to what I’m seeing, maybe this is just Puppy Fatigue and not a realistic worry… But the very first person I mentioned this to, a few days ago, is probably my most level-headed anti-dramatic friend–and that person’s reaction was that this is a realistic concern and she’d been thinking about it, too. I see from the comments here that others were also thinking about it but thinking, “Oh, that’s probably just me.”
No, I guess it’s a bunch of people by now seeing some indicators in the Puppy mess of a pattern that we’ve already seen in GamerGate, and it’s alarming.
I’ve wondered much less about Moshe Feder, John Scalzi, or PNH’s safety than Gallo’s, partly because the angriest Puppies and boycotters seem so focused specifically on Gallo (and she’s the one whose apology, instead of being accepted by these people and ending the matter, has been reacted to with irrational escalations of rage), but also because they’re men. Yes, men also get doxxed, threatened, stalked, and harassed, of course, and these men could be in potential danger… but “movements” like this tend more toward stalking women than men. So I think that after Gallo, the next likeliest target is Teresa Nielsen Hayden. Plus, the Puppies have been heavily focused on her at times, and a number of them have already “unpersoned” her with nasty nicknames like the “Toad of Tor.”
Anyhow, nothing may come of it. But it seems like it’s something that probably many people are wondering about by now. Perhaps also at Tor.
Octavia on June 21, 2015 at 1:43 am said:
I agree. The vitriol of the puppies, especially against Irene Gallo seems to be spiraling completely out of control. Just like the narrative (comments instead of one comment with subsequent apology, attack against everyone and their dog, etc.).Since some of the puppies/puppy-supporters own guns and a few have no problem with throwing all kinds of threats around, it does get really worrisome. Especially as none of the supposed “puppy-leaders” is even pretending to try and reign them in. Or call for some moderation. Instead they pour gasoline in the fire.
I hope Irene Gallo has a strong support network and people who can help her with the vitriol. I’m pretty sure that she’s receiving all kinds of threats at least on her work-email, maybe also on facebook.
First, the only person who has been doing any cyberstalking is Irene Gallo. She started following me on Twitter after this whole thing erupted and only stopped after I sent an email to the Compliance Officer at Macmillan informing them of her actions. And before anyone is stupid enough to point out the Facebook screenshot I posted, let me remind you that while I have a Facebook account, I have not utilized it in well over a year.
Second, Laura Resnick’s feigned concern over nonexistent violence is ridiculous given her own fantasies about sexually attractive men.
Laura Resnick says:
August 17, 2012 at 1:12 pm
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….
Imagine her reaction if I said I daydreamed about killing and eating Tor employees. The fact is that no one in the Sad or Rabid Puppy camps wishes any physical harm to come to Irene Gallo, Moshe Feder, or Patrick Nielsen Hayden. No one has suggested or even hinted at the desirability of them being physically harmed in any way. We merely expect them to receive pink slips as a reasonable consequence of their unprofessional and abusive actions.
In any event, it should be obvious that it is not our side that contains the mentally unstable. Ergo the Third Law of the Social Justice Warrior: SJWs always project
UPDATE: Sweet Mendel, but these people are stupid.
Jim Henley on June 21, 2015 at 9:23 am said:
I stand foursquare against taking a baseball bat to anyone. But when it comes to defending the honor of one’s spouse, I have been dwelling on this:Brad Torgersen’s wife, as everyone keeps telling us, is black. In VD’s attack on NK Jemison, he asserted that “genetics tells us not all of us are equally homo sapiens.” This says “Brad Torgersen’s wife is not fully human according to Science!” far more explicitly than, for instance, anything Moshe Feder said about the Tor boycott applies to either Wright or Lamplighter. But other than saying, generally, “I’m not Vox Day,” Brad Torgersen refuses to repudiate VD or criticize him in specific. The guy who, not just by Puppy logic but any commonsense reading, called his wife subhuman.
I have a hard time squaring that with any concept of “personal honor” that means anything.
He obviously hasn’t been dwelling anywhere nearly hard enough. Brad understands what Jim quite clearly does not, which is that pointing out the INCONTROVERTIBLE GENETIC FACT that all of us are not equally Homo sapiens sapiens is not tantamount to calling his wife subhuman. My statement is not controversial nor any more debatable than “2+2=4” or “a fish is not a tiger”. Nor does it say, “Brad Torgersen’s wife is not fully human according to Science!”
Anyone can be uninformed. But only an idiot attempts to inaccurately summarize things he does not understand rather than simply ask for clarification. Jim literally does not understand the plain English of what I wrote. And neither Brad Torgersen nor his wife are going to criticize me for that statement because they are not scientific ignoramuses.
You’d think the morons would learn to start looking before they leap. But they never do.
UPDATE 2: And even when they’re explicitly told they’re being morons, they STILL jump in:
Paul Weimer (@princejvstin) on June 21, 2015 at 2:59 pm said:
My “translation of Beale” seems to be on the fritz. He updated his post with a reply to Jim with an explanation that I don’t grok. As far as I can make it (and that’s not far) means that Nora is subhuman, but Brad’s wife is not, because I said so that’s why.FungiFromYuggoth on June 21, 2015 at 3:27 pm said:
You’re missing Beale’s dodge – he’s not arguing that black people are sub human, just that the people-he-likes are more evolved than baseline human. He thinks he’s being clever, and it speaks ill of the intellect and character of anyone who is impressed by that dodge. Especially if they’ve read his entire tirade. This is the essence of Beale – to weasel and imply while building a half-assed trick, and then to point and laugh at the people who understand what he’s actually saying, trying to claim that he’s the truly smart one.
Keep in mind when reading this, that these are people who genuinely believe they are more intelligent and better educated than we are. Because science. Also, vaccines. I’m not claiming to be smarter than them, I’m publicly DEMONSTRATING it.
You have to admire Milo’s dedication to investigative journalism. Talk about suffering for your job! He reviews Mattress Girl’s latest attempt to extend her 15 minutes of fame so we don’t have to see what cannot be unseen:
In preparing for this review, my researcher had to watch Emma Sulkowicz, a.k.a. “Mattress Girl,” perform fellatio on an overweight man eleven times. He tells me that he is now seriously considering homosexuality…. Naturally, Sulkowicz has become a feminist icon. But the activists and bloggers who supported her will be feeling a little uneasier this week, after she peeled back a few more layers on her own deep psychological dysfunction and apparently limitless ego by resorting to that age-old remedy for waning stardom: the sex tape. . . .
It’s telling, I think, that in Sulkowicz’s purported college dorm room there are no books. She has the same lack of interest in aesthetics as she does in intellectual enrichment: both in her choice of sexual partner (apparently satisfactory member notwithstanding) and the grim, bare walls with which she surrounds herself. Though I expect the austerity of her room reflects her barren emotional interior really rather well. You can tell “dad bods” are in fashion because both of the people in this video have one. But you do at least have to give an actress credit for doing nude scenes with a man who has larger breasts than she does. Sulkowicz’s size queendom apparently extends to love handles and leave the viewer sympathetic to the travails of her infamous mattress.
It’s revealing of her vanity that she insists on being filmed from four angles. Every crevasse of her unappealing naked body must be considered. Her congressional interlocutor is a gruesome sight in three dimensions, chosen, probably, to make young Emma look thinner. Which doesn’t work, I’m sorry to say.
All in all, it’s a tawdry, miserable encounter that tells us nothing about sexual assault or sex itself but quite a bit about the quasi-demonic inner workings of one Emma Sulkowicz.
My chief takeaway from all this? DO NOT ACCEPT AN INTERNSHIP AT BREITBART. You might end up working for Milo and who knows what depths of degradation and horror that may involve plumbing.
Also, Mattress Girl may singlehandedly have accomplished what legions of church leaders, upstanding citizens, priests, and moral scolds could not do, and killed Internet pornography. I hear Mercedes Carrera was so scarred by watching the tape that she has retreated to a nunnery and is seriously considering vows.
A comment at File 770:
The funny thing there is that, although I’ve been hanging out at Making
Light for years, this is the first year the Hugos have been a Thing
there. (There have been many more threads on food than on Hugos.)
The Campbell-Delany divide pretty well sums up the two sides in the science fiction culture war. To translate how the New Republic describes it, it is scientagic realists against child-molesting pedophiles and their defenders in the science fiction community:
To outsiders, the struggle over the Hugos can be confusing. It involves the arcane details of a complex nomination procedure and factions named Sad Puppies 3 and Rabid Puppies. But the ruckus makes a lot more sense in the context of science fiction’s historical lack of diversity, and there’s perhaps no better illustration of that problem than the career of Samuel R. Delany…. John W. Campbell, Analog’s editor, claimed that he enjoyed shaking up his audience with outrageous ideas, but [Delany’s] “Nova” proved too much for him. According to Delany, Campbell called the author’s agent and said that while he liked the novel, “he didn’t feel his readership would be able to relate to a black main character.” Campbell’s contention that fans weren’t ready for a book like “Nova” was belied by the fact that it was shortlisted for a Hugo in 1969.
Campbell used his audience as a cover for his own racism. He had published editorials arguing that slavery was a perfectly sensible system for pre-industrial societies, championing the racial theory that whites have a fundamentally higher level of intelligence than blacks and asserting, “One of the major reasons the Negro people are having so much trouble gaining acceptance is, simply, that the Negroes are not doing an adequate job of disciplining their own people, themselves.” Campbell was no fringe kook. He was the most influential science-fiction editor of the last century, whose vision of rule-based, scientifically informed fiction shaped the careers of such canonical writers as Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon and Frank Herbert.
Amid the strife of the 1960s, which polarized science fiction no less than the rest of culture, it was easy to cast Campbell and Delany as diametric opposites: Campbell as the old reactionary apostle of heroic, manly tales of space cowboys, and Delany as the young subversive practitioner of cutting-edge speculative fiction that challenged certitudes about identity.
We have called for a Cambellian revolution in science fiction; to a certain extent, that’s what Blue SF is. And “subversive speculative fiction that challenges certitudes about identity, morality, religion, sexual orientation, and tradition” is about as good a way as any to describe the Pink SF we oppose. Campbellian SF vs Delanyite SF. Science vs Subversion. White Male Racists vs Gay Child Rapists.
One thing you’ll note that the mainstream media never does is to dig up and expose the evil that lies at the heart of Pink SF. They love to point-and-shriek at the late Campbell’s racism, never mind that he was, and is, absolutely correct, as whites have been reliably observed to possess a higher average intelligence than blacks. One would expect a top science fiction editor to be up on the relevant science, after all. Here is a quote from William Saletan, a writer of whom Delany himself cites respectfully:
Among white Americans, the average IQ, as of a decade or so ago, was 103. Among Asian-Americans, it was 106. Among Jewish Americans, it was 113. Among Latino Americans, it was 89. Among African-Americans, it was 85. Around the world, studies find the same general pattern: whites 100, East Asians 106, sub-Sarahan Africans 70.
So, are we all East Asian supremacists now? Is science intrinsically racist and therefore anathema? In the meantime, both the media and the science fiction community resolutely avoid looking into the likelihood that good old “Chip” Delany is a criminal pedophile, like Walter Breen, like Marion Zimmer Bradley, like Ed Kramer, like David Asimov, and like other members of the science fiction community whose sex crimes the science fiction community has either ignored or defended for decades.
The New Republic article quoted Delany talking about Campell; what a pity they didn’t quote Delany talking about himself.
“I read the NAMBLA [Bulletin] fairly regularly and I think it is one of the most intelligent discussions of sexuality I’ve ever found. I think before you start judging what NAMBLA is about, expose yourself to it and see what it is really about.”
– Samuel R. Delany, June 25, 1994.
“Since I spent eighteen years of my life as a child, and nine years of that life as a pretty sexually active gay child, my complaint against the current attitudes is that they work mightily to silence the voices of children first and secondarily ignore what adults have to say who have been through these situations. One size fits all is never the way to handle any situation with a human dimension. Many, many children—and I was one of them—are desperate to establish some sort of sexual relation with an older and even adult figure.”
– Samuel R. Delany, Wednesday, July 9, 2014
“Adults hurting children is my notion of a bad thing, whether it is through corporal punishment or in any other way. Children hurting children is equally bad. Pain is not a good teaching tool. So that’s where I tend to stop.”
– Samuel R. Delany, Wednesday, July 9, 2014
That last quote is particularly problematic, as contra his self-appointed public defenders’ claims, Delany is clearly referring to physical pain, not sexual contact, when he says “hurting children” is his “notion of a bad thing”. Most people assume that sexual contact is intrinsically harmful to children. Delany actively denies this.
Delany has admitted to being in sexual contact with adult men since the age of 6 and considers himself to have been sexually active since the age of 9. He has attacked the idea that children cannot consent to sexual activity with adults and only opposes children being hurt in the sense of physical pain, and has even quoted a Carlin joke in claiming that it is less harmful to a boy to receive oral sex than be spanked. He has written, repeatedly and at great length, about his fantasies of pre-adolescent boys and girls being raped and otherwise sexually molested by men in a number of his novels, most particularly Hogg: A Novel, which was published in 2004 and is described as follows by Publishers Weekly:
Hugo-and Nebula Award-winner Delany – whose early books were fascinating but whose recent efforts have grown increasingly obtuse – has been trying to get this pornographic novel published since 1973. The main narrator here is an 11-year-old boy who joins up with a raping, murdering pederast named Hogg. Coprophiliac Hogg violates women for pay. He enlists the help of other pedophiliac murdering rapists – Nigg, Dago and Denny – and the group sets off to perform acts of hideous violence. After the attacks, a biker friend of Hogg’s sells the boy into sexual slavery to dockyard slum resident Big Sambo, who keeps his 12-year-old daughter for prostitution and his own perversions. The traumatized little girl is gang-raped by Hogg’s crew as well. Meanwhile, teenaged Denny goes on an insane mutilating and mass-murder spree, eludes the police and finally returns to Hogg and the hopelessly confused narrator, who has been “rescued” after Hogg murders Big Sambo. Gang-rape attacks and criminal sex orgies are detailed at excruciating length, with photographic realism. This potent emetic is all the more disturbing for want of modulators of honest outrage.
If one can reasonably declare John W. Campbell a racist on the basis of his essays and reported words, then one can absolutely, and with utter certainty, declare Samuel R. Delany to be a child-raping pedophile on the basis of his own stated beliefs and published fantasies. This is true despite our limited information about his actual historical actions. Whether or not Delany is a literal child rapist, he certainly has child rapist views. And as for his past actions, we certainly know a hell of a lot more about the SFWA Grand Master pedophilic inclinations than we did about Marion Zimmer Bradley’s only eleven months ago. Is anyone going to even pretend to be surprised should evidence be uncovered that good old “Chip” acted on his criminal fantasies at some point in the past?
Here are two questions for Samuel R. Delany. If the media or SFWA continue to avoid asking them, you’ll know they’re simply afraid to receive the answer; even Will Shetterly, who otherwise addressed the issue in a forthright manner, failed to ask the obvious and important question. I will say one thing for Mr. Delany, he is alarmingly forthcoming, he hasn’t been afraid to answer difficult questions posed to him in the past, and one can’t blame him for not answering questions that were never asked. So here they are:
Until those two questions are answered honestly by Mr. Delany, anyone who denies that good old “Chip” Delany, SFWA Grand Master has ever behaved inappropriately is doing so dishonestly on the basis of no information at all and in the face of considerable evidence to the contrary. What a pity that Delany didn’t throw a few spaceships into Hogg or it might have made the Hugo shortlist too.
On a lighter note, this quote from George R.R. Martin cracked me up:
“We’re SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY FANS, we love to read about aliens
and vampires and elves. Are we really going to freak about Asians and
Native Americans?”
Well, George, judging by the continuing series of articles about Sad Puppies and the Hugo Awards, to say nothing of your own copious posting on the subject, you certainly appear to be freaking out about this Native American.
Coming on the heels of Arthur Chu’s jokes about rapes and bomb threats, Reaxxion reports the purported outing of the oft-quoted #GamerGate enemy as a freakish sex deviant:
At approximately 7:30 PM Eastern time yesterday, @BroTeamPill Tweeted out links to several web pages potentially associated with Arthur Chu, white-knight extraordinaire and notorious GamerGate detractor. These sites were found by locating different accounts registered to the same email. Among the sites were an embarrassingly juvenile LiveJournal, a Flickr account from 2006, and, most interestingly, an active Tumblr account bearing his signature name “AbstractArthur” The Flickr primarily consisted of photos from Mr. Chu’s college years and clearly belonged to him.
Among a number of photos of his friends rendered in now-antiquated Demotivational Poster format, a slew of pictures he took for his old student paper The Phoenix at an extracurricular event, and an exceedingly poor attempt at webcomicking, were at least a few rape jokes, statutory rape jokes, and candid photographs of a female friend sleeping. This is already terribly compromising to Arthur’s image, since he tries to portray himself as a “defender of women” and opponent of “rape culture.”
The Tumblr, on the other hand, resembled the private hoard of a sex fanatic: someone obsessed with shemale transgenders and being seen as a “sissy-boy” whom men would screw. Updated as recently as last Sunday, it was a glimpse into a truly disturbed mind. It appeared, in fact, to be a hoax. The blatant ArthurEffect label and sheer horror of the content seemed like something a prankster would slap together to make it look like Chu was a bizarre deviant.
Warning: do NOT click on the archive links at Reaxxion. I’m not kidding. In fact, my initial thought was that it had to be some sort of vicious dark op meant to humiliate Chu, until I read this part:
As word of the compromising Flickr photos and uploads sluiced through the veins of Twitter, word reached the ears of their owner. Almost immediately, the Flickr account was closed, presumably with the intent of limiting the damage. But the Internet never forgets, and archives of the content had already been made. What is worth noting, though, is that the Tumblr was also deleted, at the same time.
Now, it’s entirely possible that these hypothetical dark operators were clever enough to anticipate Chu’s foolish attempt to belatedly delete the damaging Flickr account and thereby making it look as if he was also responsible for shutting down the Tumblr account that was closed at the same time, but we will have to wait to hear if Mr. Chu denies responsibility for one or both accounts. Regardless, if he is responsible for either of them, it would appear to be time for Mr. Chu to abandon his public posturing as a white knight attempting to save women by attacking #GamerGate.
UPDATE: Apparently Mr. Chu has denied responsibility for the Tumblr account, and admitted to the Flickr account. Of course, this does not mean that he is not responsible for it; given that Mr. Chu is a self-professed supporter of playing dirty and being dishonest, one cannot simply take him at his word. Nero has more:
Yeah, that’s not going to happen. We’re not going to leave you alone, Arthur. You didn’t leave us alone, after all.
Words don’t suffice to describe how intrinsically harmful the evil, unscientific nonsense of “transition” is to the children of the psychological freaks involved:
My biggest concern at age nine was how to keep my daddy’s secret, the one he revealed to me as we sat alone on a hill near our home. In a sense, I lost my dad that day, when he told me he wanted to become a woman. As I tried to process that revelation, he blindsided me with another. He told me he never wanted to have children. To him, my siblings and I were mistakes, because we did not align with his desires.
His confessions left me confused and hurt. After all, I just wanted a dad who would love and cherish me, who would make me feel special as a daughter. I felt rejected and abandoned by my own father. By the time I was eleven, my dad had begun to abuse me emotionally and sexually. Even so, I continued to keep my dad’s secret locked away, deep down in my heart.
My dad created a home environment that made me feel as if I was walking on pins and needles. His resentment over my possession of what he so deeply desired for himself—a woman’s body—turned into anger and abuse. As his desires intensified, he began to borrow my clothing. Many times I discovered my underclothes and tops under bathroom towels, or in the attic—often in places I had not been. I learned to organize my clothes just so, in order to know if he had been in my dresser drawers. When I confirmed that he’d worn an article of my clothing, I simply could not bring myself to ever wear that item again.
The thing that is so ridiculous about “transgenderism” is that it flies completely in the face of both science and religion. You have to be an indoctrinated moron to take the concept seriously; most people that make a big production about saying “she” where “he” is the genetically appropriate pronoun obviously know better. As Orwell pointed out, the more ridiculous the concept in which you are willing to feign belief, the more complete your intellectual submission.
To look at a man and say “she is a woman” is on the level of insisting that 2+2=5. It’s all about control of the narrative. Never, ever, submit to it.
Nor should it be any surprise that those who are so transgressive as to mutilate themselves in order to pretend to be something they are not are going to be inordinately inclined to maltreat and abuse others. Including their own children.
Parody is the homage rhetoric pays to dialectic:
Star Wars is getting its first lesbian character. Paul S Kemp has revealed that he is adding the mystery woman to his upcoming novel Lords of the Sith, the next instalment in the official sci-fi canon due out on 28 April.
Little is known about her, but “nerd news” blog Big Shiny Robot has dropped a few hints about what fans can expect.
“Moff Mors is an Imperial who has made some very serious mistakes, but she is an incredibly capable leader and spends much of the book working hard to prevent absolute failure,” a recent post reads. “She also happens to be a lesbian.”
Shelly Shapiro, editor of the Star Wars books, explaining that including a lesbian character “just makes sense”.
“There’s a lot of diversity…there should be diversity in Star Wars,” she said. “You have all these different species and it would be silly to not also recognise that there’s a lot of diversity in humans.
And yet, we won’t find any Muslims in Star Wars despite there being a billion of them. We won’t find any Christians in Star Wars despite there being nearly two billion of them. How many Chinese, serial killers, and Green Bay Packers fans will we find? But More Muff (how very clever) just happens to be a lesbian.
It certainly didn’t take Disney long to gay it up. I’m very glad that I lost all interest in Star Wars about ten minutes into The Phantom Menace. If there is one thing you can count on, it is that once SJWs get involved in something, it’s just a matter of time before it is ruined. At this rate, they’ll have Han Solo transitioning in the second new film and we’ll learn that Luke and Leia got married despite knowing they were brother and sister.
As if being a self-confessed rapist who associates with men accused of sexually battering women wasn’t enough of an indication, reading Michael Trust’s fascinating work on malignant narcissists tends to indicate that there is something seriously off about John Scalzi. Consider these various points from the book:
Competitive/Relative Inferiority
Narcissists are weirdly competitive and strangely envious over seemingly insignificant details, from how the salary they earn compares to other’s, to the respectability of the shampoo they use, compared to the shampoos that others use. It is a shielding mechanism, designed to protect their ego, and their amygdala, from confronting their own insecurity.
You can sometimes spot this trait in a narcissist, by how they will try to verbally downplay their competitiveness in realms where they can’t compete, as a way of creating a false reality where they don’t care about their competitive inferiority. If your narcissist, out of the blue says, “Other people are obsessed with how much money they earn, but I really don’t care about things like that,” then you know they were just obsessing over exactly that subject. They are trying to establish a verbalized reality where their not caring, will allow their brain to relax over their abject failure in that regard.
McRapey on weightlifting (or practically any other subject, for that matter. To take all his various protestations about not caring at face value, you’d have to assume he was a Stoic of an emotional flatness to put the Romans to shame.)
Last week, as part of my general “try to lose weight and get a little healthier because you’re middle-aged now and you don’t want to die” thing, I started going to the local YMCA to use its weight room and indoor track, with my daughter as my workout partner. She’s been on the powerlifting team at her school for the last three years, so she’s knowledgeable about the weights in a way I am not, and is thus a good person with whom to work out. At the end of our first session, I tweeted the following:
Let it be known that my daughter can lift more than I do. Because she’s on her school’s weightlifting team, and also because she’s awesome.
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) June 30, 2014
This naturally aroused the derision of the hooting pack of status-anxious dudebros who let me live rent-free in their brains, prompting a predictable slew of tweets and blog posts about how this is further proof of my girly-man status, hardly a man at all, dude do you even lift, and so on. I am delighted in all the ways that they are the best, and also, better than me.
Diminution of Stature/Humiliation
The narcissist needs to feel as if they have power, so as to pacify their insecure amygdala. It is only when everyone around them reflexively supplicates, that the narcissist can let their amygdala relax. For this reason, narcissists often build a perception of themselves as superiors, and they demand that others treat them this way.
McRapey on running for SFWA President for the fourth time
I have decided to step forward once more (last, last very last time I swear)
as a candidate for President, a position to which I was first elected
in 2010. I had originally intended to step down at the end of this term,
but on reflection decided there were still some things I wanted to
accomplish in the role, and it made sense to try them over the course of
an additional year. Whether I get that year will be up to SFWA members,
of course; they may be tired of me and my management style. In which
case I hope they elect someone else, rather than, say, stabbing me
Caesar-style at the Nebula Awards. Please, SFWA members: No stabbing.
That’s pointy and hurts.
Insist on Arguable Untruths
Narcissists who do this will insist on an untruth, especially one which would impede the attainment of a goal important to the group, and then they will refuse to acknowledge the falsity of the untruth. I fully believe narcissists who practice this technique do it knowingly. They know that what they are asserting is false, they enjoy seeing you upset over the fact that they are so unable to accept logic, and they refuse to give in purposely, to watch you grow increasingly agitated and frustrated. To these narcissists, truth is immaterial, the group’s goals are meaningless, and your upset emotional state is blissfully amusing. As a result they have one goal – to see your frustrated.
McRapey on the lack of women writing hard science fiction
I have a degree in philosophy from the University of Chicago
(specializing in the philosophy of language), and therefore have ample
training in rhetoric, so I doubt that rhetorical deficiencies on this
end are the issue. I read your column Vox, and I grasped your
obvious rhetorical device. It doesn’t impress me. As continually stated,
your rhetorical device is obviously bad: Poorly stated, poorly
supported, and rheorically incoherent. To restate: Your thesis is wrong
and you lack the rhetorical skills to present your thesis in a coherent
fashion. Your latter-day attempt to brush off your sexist and ignorant
statement as sarcasm is baldly transparent as backtracking; even if it
were true, it shows that your use of such devices is appallingly clumsy.
Again one wonders how you got your columnist gig, or, alternately, if
anyone bothers to edit you, as you so clearly need.
Being a Central Information Hub
Two things narcissists try to do to irritate is to invade privacy, and control and guide the flow of all information. This is probably due to some deep perception that their entire self-worth is defined by the group’s beliefs and perceptions (ie, it’s acceptance of their false reality), combined with an assumption (erroneously assuming that everyone else thinks like them), that everyone else’s self-worth is as well. Thus, to a narcissist, control the information flow, and you control everyone’s self-assessments of their own self-worth. To the narcissist, that information is pure power over not just everyone, but in the narcissist’s mind, the very (false) reality that everyone inhabits.
1. McRapey on all controversial subjects of the last 10 years
Comments off on this
2. McRapey on all people who might disagree with him
You are blocked from following @scalzi and viewing @scalzi’s Tweets.
Out-grouping
When interacting socially, narcissists are snakes in the grass. One of their major objectives when dealing with those they dislike is to alienate their targets from any social group to which they belong. They do this because they themselves require social validation to support the false reality that they construct to shield their amygdala from stimulation. As long as the group accepts the narcissist and their false reality, the narcissist can cling to the belief that they are somehow normal, or even superior. It is this social validation which serves as a crucial psychological crutch, shielding them from the pain that would result from an honest self-assessment of what they are. Projecting this psychology on others, the narcissist will assume that group-affiliation is just as vitally important to you. As a result, they will seek to disrupt your group affiliations as a way to both, try to disrupt the group-validation of the false reality they assume you have, and preserve this vital psychological crutch for themselves.
McRapey on August 14, 2013, after I announced my expulsion from SFWA
For No Particular Reason At All, This Song Seems Strangely Appropriate Today…. On an entirely unrelated note, today I renewed my SFWA membership. Seems I forgot to do it earlier. Oh, well, an easily corrected oversight, and it was.
Privacy Invasion
The narcissist will intrude into their private spaces, and then feign ignorance of why they should care that he is there.
McRapey
Ask McRapey about this one. He knows what he did. This was the bizarre behavior that made it evident Scalzi’s behavior isn’t merely that of a normal self-centered individual, but more akin to that of the malignant narcissists described in the book. One would do well to keep these things in mind before one too quickly accept McRapey’s retroactive claims concerning his “satirical” practices at face value.
I’d add one more red flag in addition to those mentioned in the book. It’s what I would call a “probing” style of communication. Everything is two steps forward and one step back; if resistance is met, then it’s all only a joke, ha ha ha, and the individual retreats. If not, the breakthrough is quickly reinforced and a new narrative is established. It’s basically a deceptive tactic used to control the narrative while concealing the narcissist’s objectives. The joke about not wanting to be stabbed at the Nebula Awards is a good example of that; what is the point of the joke in the first place given that it’s not even remotely funny. It is to keep things lighthearted and distract from the fact that the narcissist is dead serious about seeking what he perceives to be power again.
How to Deal with Narcissists is a remarkable book. And it’s astonishing how well it describes the behavior of certain trolls known to infest these parts, as well as explain the reasons for that behavior. My completely unprofessional opinion is that John Scalzi is not a full-blown malignant narcissist, but merely has some observable tendencies in that regard and is rather less psychologically normal than most of his fans and his critics would tend to believe. These tendencies are most clearly seen in his habitual dishonesty and complete inability to admit the truth even when caught out publicly in a lie.
The only place my Australian fan’s famous dialogue took place was in her head:
Confession time. In my Facebook status, I editorialised. She wasn’t sitting next to me. She was a bit away, towards the other end of the carriage. Like most people she had been looking at her phone, then slowly started to unpin her scarf. Tears sprang to my eyes and I was struck by feelings of anger, sadness and bitterness. It was in this mindset that I punched the first status update into my phone, hoping my friends would take a moment to think about the victims of the siege who were not in the cafe.
I spent the rest of the journey staring—rudely—at the back of her uncovered head. I wanted to talk to her, but had no idea what to say. Anything that came to mind seemed tokenistic and patronising. She might not even be Muslim or she could have just been warm! Besides, I was in the “quiet carriage” where even conversation is banned.
By sheer fluke, we got off at the same station, and some part of me decided saying something would be a good thing. Rather than quiz her about her choice of clothing, I thought if I simply offered to walk her to her destination, it might help.
It’s hard to describe the moment when humans, and complete strangers, have a conversation with no words. I wanted to tell her I was sorry for so many things—for overstepping the mark, for making assumptions about a complete stranger and for belonging to a culture where racism was part of her everyday experience.But none of those words came out, and our near silent encounter was over in a moment.
Another day, another media fraud perpetrated by SJWs eager to believe the word of a mentally unstable woman.