Tag: freakshow

The Wangst that Comes After

I am beginning to conclude that SFWA President-For-Life John Scalzi needs to sit Mr. R.S. Bakker down for a remedial lesson in handling criticism. I’m not saying Bakker is quite as wangsty as the hapless Laurell K. Hamilton, as was most famously exhibited in her post-Incubus Dreams meltdown, but he’s definitely beginning to show serious indications of having the potential to go critical.

Consider, compare, and contrast the two.

Hamilton: I’m sure there are other books out there that will make you happier than mine. There are books with less sex in them, God knows. There are books that don’t make you think that hard. Books that don’t push you past that comfortable envelope of the mundane. If you want to be comforted, don’t read my books. They aren’t comfortable books. They are books that push my character and me to the edge and beyond of our comfort zones. If that’s not want you want, then stop reading. Put my books away with other things that frighten and confuse or just piss you off.

Bakker: (1) “These guys are strictly bush league in comparison. There’s nothing anybody’s said that has prickled enough to jarr me from my experimental mindset–yet…. And as far as the books go, I actually think this stuff demonstrates that my writing, for better or worse, is rich enough to support a wild, wild variety of competing interpretations. And most important of all, that it’s actually reaching people who can be outraged.”

(2) “Reading Theo’s review, and you would think someone was being raped every other page (rather than every other other page)! Not only did the sex really, really, really stand out for him, but it really, really, really offended him as well, apparently enough to overpower what he did like about the books. Fair enough, I suppose, but given that the first book is called The Darkness that Comes Before (!), and given that the irrational springs of human action are a primary focus of the book, and given that sex is one of those springs (history and appetite are everywhere: if anything there’s far more ‘history porn’ in the books than sexual porn), you would at least think that he would reference this connection… I guess he missed it.”

You really have to have read Incubus Dreams to appreciate the full humor of Hamilton’s rant. How hard does she believe people have to think in order to keep straight who is putting what where? But first, oversensitive, self-important authors, GET OVER YOURSELVES ALREADY! To quote the immortal words of Robert Anton Wilson, “Nietzsche masturbates too much.” Here is an important guideline for the author who is disappointed with a review: if your response to criticism of your work contains the words “comfort zone”, “interpretation”, or “push”, or if you write more words in response to a review than were contained in the actual review, you are officially engaging in authorial wangst. Cease and desist. It is unseemly and neither enhances your reputation nor improves the content of your books.

Second, Bakker is demonstrating an increasing degree of delusion in repeatedly claiming that no one has presented any arguments to him. He has required basic factual correction about nearly everything he assumed about me, all of which was part of a totally irrelevant ad hom response anyway. (One wonders what his response would have been if I’d actually ripped his three books as I have in the cases of Jordan and Goodkind.) Bakker is too parochial – and I mean that in the original sense of the term, as he is quite literally a provincial and for all I know still lives with his mommy in his childhood Canadian home – to grasp that the scope of my international perspective absolutely dwarfs his “I went to grad school in America and my professors told me all this neat stuff” point of view. What Bakker has only imagined and theorized and read about second-hand is part of my actual experience; the most remarkable thing about humanity around the world is how strikingly similar the attitudes of the Japanese rice farmers are to the dialect-speaking mountain clans of northern Italy and the tobacco-growing farmers of southern France. The same holds true for the self-overrated educated classes from Harvard and ToDai to Oxford and the Sorbonne. Seeing a guy who didn’t manage to complete a doctorate at Vanderbilt and can’t tell the difference between a libertarian and a fascist attempt to strike the conventional pose of the latter is simply… well, it’s a little ironic, anyhow.

Two days ago, I was having dinner with a European ambassador to a large South American country and attempting to convince her, and the international hostage negotiator on my other side, that trained, intelligence-enhanced sharks equipped with laser harnesses were the answer to the growing Somali ship-jacking problem being discussed.* Yesterday, I was lifting weights with an unemployed African who lives on social benefits and is hoping to somehow avoid eventual deportation. Today, I’ll go to the recycling center to ask the captain of my calcio team, who is one of the trash men, what time we play our first game of the season. This range of experience does not tend to lend itself to a closed mind. Bakker doesn’t realize that what he decries as “certainty” is actually nothing more than experience-informed probability calculation and pattern recognition. There is no reason one cannot take a logically sound position with confidence without having to assume the total impossibility of error in doing so.

Third, Bakker can afford to pretend – and it is a pretense, nothing more – to be uncertain about everything because he is a fantasy writer and his positions on pretty much everything are inconsequential. Those of us who deal with objective real-world issues such as the current price of gold, the ForEx rates, and the $53-trillion inflation/deflation question on a regular basis understand that there are situations concerning which one must make black-and-white decisions even though any degree of certainty about what will happen tomorrow is utterly impossible. To claim that any sane economist, or any trader, is prone to an unusual degree of epistemic arrogance is not merely stupid, it is profoundly ignorant. Take that most iron-clad law of economics, the Law of Supply and Demand. I can cite multiple exceptions to it, beginning with Veblen and conspicuous consumption, off the top of my head. Even that most closed-minded of economists, Paul Krugman, may sound absolutely certain in his assertive, Nobel Prize-winning pronouncements, but he sounds that way even as he changes his definition of inflation from one column to the next.

This is why Bakker’s entire attempt to respond to the Black Gate review in the form of an ad hominem attack is not only irrelevant and pointless, it is also incorrect. Note that Bakker’s pretentious blathering about “epistemic arrogance” is simply a variation on the left-wing meme du saison, epistemic closure. I would venture to bet, as Nate has already noted, that I have publicly changed my mind about more intellectually significant issues than Bakker ever has about anything. That’s a verifiable claim of fact: has Bakker ever a) changed his public position on the legitimacy of a war, b) changed his public position on a core element of his philosophy as I have with regards to Ricardian free trade, the core mechanism for the Austrian business cycle, and before that, Chicago School monetarism or c) actually made a substantive case for any of his ideological assumptions such as human equality, female suffrage, or what he describes as “moral realism”? Should Bakker’s fanboys be able to demonstrate otherwise, I will readily admit I am wrong… but if they cannot, will they admit that Bakker is?

The primary difference between Bakker and me is that he insists on operating in relative ignorance while avoiding the use of objective metrics that can be verified by third parties. I do not. I read his books before I reached any conclusions about them. He merely scanned my blog before retreating to his fainting couch. La, such fascism , such conservatism, among the radical libertarians – Mussolini wept! I tend to doubt Bakker has ever given as serious credence to someone whose foundational assumptions fundamentally challenge his own as I did in my recent interview with the Post-Keynesian economist Steve Keen. I suggest Mr. Bakker should listen to that interview before he further embarrasses himself with more idiotic accusations concerning my “epistemic arrogance”; even if he doesn’t understand economics well enough to comprehend the vast gulf that separates the Austrian from the Post-Keynesian, he is intelligent enough to be aware that there is a substantive difference between the two competing viewpoints.

The fact is that Bakker’s books, while intelligent and laudably ambitious, are nowhere nearly as deep and complex and sophisticated as he would apparently like to believe. The fact that the reader does not pick up one aspect or another doesn’t make a book brilliant or render its review incorrect; the Black Gate reviewer of Summa Elvetica erroneously, and rather hilariously, concluded that the philosophical arguments for the Elvish soul that were presented in the structural form of the arguments from the Summa Theologica were actually written by Thomas Aquinas, and yet his review was a fair and judicious one that managed to precisely identify the primary flaw in the book.

Bakker needs to grow up, both intellectually and emotionally. He’s not a misunderstood genius whose transgressive work outrages the morally repressed plebs even as it opens their conservative eyes to astonishing new philosophical insights. Hell, judging by the Internet reaction, my WND columns are far more outrageous and eye-opening than anything Bakker has ever written. The concepts he is utilizing are neither new nor difficult for anyone with a +1SD IQ to grasp. His inclination for sockpuppetry is childish and misguided, his sensitivity rivals that of an emo chick, and his philosophy is juvenile. And yet, he has genuine talent for writing intelligent fantasy. So, there is still hope for him, as he certainly wouldn’t be the first writer to look back on what he once considered deep and meaningful brilliance with a mortified shudder.

Any idiot can be uncertain. “I dunno” is not an indicator of superior intelligence and there is nothing intrinsically intelligent about doubt. The imperative is to learn enough to be able to ask the relevant questions, which then provide a solid foundation for ascertaining the highest-probability answers.

*Much hilarity ensued when the hostage negotiator pointed out the fatal flaw in my plan. He expressed a certain disinclination to find himself 20 years from now wearing an armored scuba suit while negotiating underwater with superintelligent, laser-armed sharks in order to get his client’s ships back.

UPDATE – Sweet Friedrich Nietzsche, but R. Scott Bakker really can be a wangsty little girl. Now he’s whining that I have “lot’s and lot’s of theories” about him, which is ironic considering the amount of erroneous psychobabble he has been directing in my direction from the start. I have no theories, I have merely read his books and observed his behavior. But, since I make a practice of answering questions, I’ll go ahead and answer the one he wrongly imagines I have been avoiding.

“What makes him think he’s won the Magical Belief and Identity Lottery?”

Oh, I don’t know. Out of nearly 7 billion people, I’m fortunate to be in the top 1% in the planet with regards to health, wealth, looks, brains, athleticism, and nationality. My wife is slender, beautiful, lovable, loyal, fertile, and funny. I meet good people who seem to enjoy my company everywhere I go. That all seems pretty lucky to me, considering that my entire contribution to the situation was choosing my parents well. I am grateful and I thank God every day for the ticket He has dealt me. If I’m not a birth lottery winner, then who is? The kid in the Congo who just got his hands chopped off and is getting raped for the fourth time today? To paraphrase the immortal parental wisdom of PJ O’Rourke, anyone in my position had damn well better get down on their knees and pray that life does not become fair.

As for belief, I don’t concern myself in the slightest with the perfect correspondence of my beliefs with What Is So or not. They either do or they don’t, but regardless, the Absolute Truth of Creation doesn’t depend upon what I happen to believe it to be at the moment and I don’t think such correspondence is even theoretically possible. Bakker simply doesn’t understand that I don’t believe his opinion, my opinion, or anyone else’s opinion matters in the least, except in how they happen to affect our decisions and subsequent actions. See Human Action for details. If Bakker genuinely wanted to figure out my core outlook on life, he should have simply listened to Sunyata in the first place rather than waste his time on perusing the blog.

In defense of the differently attracted

The American Psychological Association declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1975. Now, as many sane observers warned at the time, it appears to be looking to do the same for pedophilia:

Researchers from several prominent U.S. universities will participate tomorrow in a Baltimore conference reportedly aiming to normalize pedophilia. According to the sponsoring organization’s website, the event will examine ways in which “minor-attracted persons” can be involved in a revision of the American Psychological Association (APA) classification of pedophilia.

B4U-ACT, a group of pro-pedophile activists and mental health professionals, is behind the August 17 conference, which will include panelists from Harvard University, the Johns Hopkins University, the University of Louisville, and the University of Illinois.

B4U-ACT science director Howard Kline has criticized the definition of pedophilia by the American Psychological Association, describing its treatment of “minor-attracted persons” as “inaccurate” and “misleading”…. On their website B4U-ACT classifies pedophilia as simply another sexual orientation and decries the “stigma” attached to pedophilia, observing: “No one chooses to be emotionally and sexually attracted to children or adolescents. The cause is unknown; in fact, the development of attraction to adults is not understood.” The group says that it does not advocate treatment to change feelings of attraction to children or adolescents.

The chickenhawks have a valid point. If society accepts the redefinition of homosexuality as “normal” on the basis of its practitioners being “born that way”, then it has absolutely no reason to condemn pedophiles who are also “born that way”.

For a society to accept open homosexual identification as a normal is a strong indication that it has entered its death spiral. This doesn’t mean it is necessary to drop brick walls on people as soon as they evince interest getting a Pete Rose haircut or watching the Oscars. Just as a society can survive a small percentage of immigrants, it can thrive and prosper so long as homosexuality remains aberrant and circumspect behavior.

This ceases to be the case once what was decentralized and aberrant behavior is transformed into an open and celebrated interest group with a monomaniacal interest in continually expanding its “rights” to the detriment of the traditional societal norms. If this isn’t apparent to you yet, perhaps it will once the law, in its infinite wisdom, determines that a middle-aged pedophile has a constitutional right to marry a collection of boys under the age of ten.

The Slippery Slope is not a logical fallacy. It is, rather, a correct use of logic to provide a reasonable guide to choose between possible future events. Advocates of normalizing homosexuality and homogamy argued that their reasoning would not be used to attempt to normalize pedophilia and polygamy. It is worth noting that subsequent events have proven them to be totally incorrect.

PPPS – A virus scan, two reboots, and everything is accessible again.

Lest you think we jest

I’ve noticed that there is considerably more public discussion of how WWII, and not the New Deal, brought the USA out of the Great Depression. However, there is still some confusion as it wasn’t the war spending itself that did the trick, but rather the breaking of the windows of the rest of the planet’s industrial infrastructure. See RGD and Vox’s Broken Window Theory, Revised, which states that Bastiat’s Broken Window is no fallacy, so long as you break all the windows in the next town over as well as the legs of its glaziers.

So, barring any flattening of an alien planet and the subsequent development of interstellar trade, Paul Krugman’s fantasy of preparing for an alien space war is unlikely to lead to economic recovery:

PAUL KRUGMAN, NEW YORK TIMES: Think about World War II, right? That was actually negative social product spending, and yet it brought us out.

I mean, probably because you want to put these things together, if we say, “Look, we could use some inflation.” Ken and I are both saying that, which is, of course, anathema to a lot of people in Washington but is, in fact, what fhe basic logic says.

It’s very hard to get inflation in a depressed economy. But if you had a program of government spending plus an expansionary policy by the Fed, you could get that. So, if you think about using all of these things together, you could accomplish, you know, a great deal.

If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. And then if we discovered, oops, we made a mistake, there aren’t any aliens, we’d be better –

ROGOFF: And we need Orson Welles, is what you’re saying.

KRUGMAN: No, there was a “Twilight Zone” episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time, we don’t need it, we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.

The amazing thing isn’t the fluid way Paul Krugman moves from one fantasy to the next – remember, his inspiration for becoming an economist was Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels – but that he does so while remaining convinced that he is the only serious economic realist in the debate. The guy is seriously strange, and at this point, I’m not entirely sure he’s even sane.

Unless, of course, that stealthy Death Star is coming our way!

Visitation

I don’t usually pay too much attention to the traffic here, but I am genuinely excited about the fact that we’re about to hit 11,111,111 visitors in a minute or two here. 31 more to go!

Next up, 22,222,222!

I am officially addicted

I heard Don’t Stop the Sandman a few months ago and thought it was hysterical. But the entire CD simply takes it to another level and redefines awesome.

“[T]he sound was achieved when the metal band was stranded on a desert island in 1989 with a CD player, plenty of batteries and the CD collection of a 13 year old girl.” I think my favorite part is when they segue into a Hells Bells riff backing the Madonna lyrics.

Rock Sugar is like the bastard love-child of Spinal Tap and Tenacious D. About the only way I can imagine it could ever be topped is if Al Jourgenson, Trent Reznor, and Rob Zombie were to team up and put out a CD covering songs by Britney Spears, the Pussycat Dolls, Girls Aloud, the Spice Girls, and Destiny’s Child.

They remind me of how it cracked all of us up when Paul threw in a Loverboy guitar riff after the Technojihad chorus without warning. It was the only time I can remember Mike, who had the freakish robot-like precision required to play live drums along with samples and tightly sequenced electronics, completely missing a beat.

For those who missed it

NATE: Acceptable Man Behavior.

If your daddy, or grand-daddy dies, you get to cry.  Crying at any other time for any other reason is unacceptable….

BANE: I’ll cry any damn time I want to. I am very sensitive. I will probably cry while I am whipping your invincible ass. I cry where appropriate in movies. And then I blow my nose in the hair of the girl in front of me, and cry while I whip her boyfriend’s un-understanding ass. Your post makes me sniffle a little. God gave yuh tear ducts for more than clearing gunsmoke from your bloodshot eyes. Dammit.

NATE: Great. This is what I have to look forward to. When the shit hits the fan… No doubt I’ll end up stuck in a foxhole with Bane… I’ll be cold… tired… and sittin’ there listenin’ to him cry.

***NOTE TO SELF***
Add suicide pill to bug-out-bag.

Atheists in Gamma Hell

I know, I know, it’s simply astonishing news that women hate atheists. Even atheist women don’t like them:

Jen has slammed Richard Dawkins for some comments here. I can confirm that those comments were actually from Richard Dawkins. I also have to say that I agree with Jen and disagree with Richard. Richard did make the valid point that there are much more serious abuses of women’s rights around the world, and the Islam is a particularly horrendous offender. Women have their genitals mutilated, are beaten by husbands without recourse to legal redress, are stoned to death for adultery, are denied basic privileges like the right to drive or travel unescorted. These are far more serious problems than most American women face.

However, the existence of greater crimes does not excuse lesser crimes, and no one has even tried to equate this incident to any of the horrors above. What these situations demand is an appropriate level of response: a man who beats a woman to death has clearly committed an immensely greater crime than a man who harrasses a woman in an elevator; let us fit the punishment to the crime. Islamic injustice demands a worldwide campaign of condemnation of the excesses and inhumanity of that religion.

The elevator incident demands…a personal rejection and a woman nicely suggesting to the atheist community that they avoid doing that. And that is what it got. That is all Rebecca Watson did. For those of you who are outraged at that, I ask: which part of her response fills you with fury? That a woman said no, or that a woman has asked men to be more sensitive?

I think reasonable men will be quite capable of both opposing Islamic fundamentalism with vigor and refraining from driving away their godless colleagues with petty harrassment, colleagues who may well be even more fervent and dedicated to our common cause of promoting equality all around the world.

Look, it’s hardly news that atheist guys are creepy gammas, for the most part. That’s why they are much less likely to get married or have children. Even the small number of atheist girls don’t like atheist guys; the ludicrous internecine kerfluffle was kicked off by a male atheist hitting on female atheist in an elevator. He actually invited her for coffee, which is the “lesser crime” to which the Fowl Atheist refers.

Dawkins, who as a scientific celebrity surmounted his natural gamma status some time ago, was naturally confused by all this extravagant feminized foolishness, and pointed out how stupid it all was. This caused more hissy fits to be directed his way; Dawkins, being the coward that he has shown himself to be on numerous occasions, was naturally quick to crumble.

Now, I don’t think it’s absolutely necessary to be hapless with women to be an atheist, one need only look to Athol Kay, that godless Stud of Studs, Mr. Five Thousand Nights and a Night his own bad self, to see otherwise, but it is quite clear that it helps tremendously. No wonder they’re so furious at God. He created all those lovely women with those beautiful breasts and they aren’t even allowed to even talk to them in elevators.

The apocalypse is nigh

A laundry detergent commercial. Directed by Rob Zombie. If this is not an indication of the End of Days, I don’t know what could be. I now await the second sign of the apocalypse, Al Jourgensen’s first feminine hygiene ad, with great anticipation.

Burning inside, burning inside….

Vegetarian changes his diet

But remains a complete wanker:

So I started eating meat again… Yes, this from the guy who once said that meat eaters are bad people. I guess that must make me a bad person. Well, unlike many other carnivores, I’m at least cognizant of the fact that I’m exploiting animals for my own well-being. While I have made the move to a diet that contains meat, I am not completely at peace with it. I am fully aware and respectful of the fact that the meat on my plate comes at at price, that being the life of another animal.

But I have my reasons. My decision to eat meat again was driven by health concerns. I was a vegetarian for over ten years and I did so primarily for ethical reasons. It was in the last several years of being a vegetarian, however, that I grew increasingly concerned about my health. An increasing number of studies started to point at the importance of meat protein and animal fat—not to mention the perils of soy (which was a staple for me). Moreover, my performance at the gym was stalling. My energy levels were consistently low and I was making very little gains. This was an indication to me that something wasn’t right….

Now just because I’m eating meat again doesn’t mean I have to be an asshole about it. Like I said earlier, I am still concerned about the well-being of animals. It’s for this reason that I’m striving to be the conscious carnivore. I only eat meat from grass-fed animals that have been allowed to graze in pasture and the eggs I eat come from free-range chickens. Yes, my grocery bills are two to three times as much as they used to be, but it’s a price I’m happy to pay. I feel better knowing that the meat on my plate came from an animal that actually lived a reasonably good life.

Mr. Dvorsky doesn’t have to be an asshole about eating meat because he is already an asshole. The only thing that has really changed besides his dietary decisions is that he has now become a hypocritical and self-serving one. The fact that he is hyperconscious of what he believes to be the ethical costs of his meat diet does not make him less culpable than those who eat meat without thinking twice about it, it makes him more culpable and therefore an objectively worse person than those he formerly described as “bad people”.

The moral: never trust anyone who calls himself “an ethicist”. There is a high probability you are dealing with an amoral sociopath who is only simulating normal humanity and can rationalize any behavior on his own part.