Tag: mailvox

Mailvox: Objectivity

Northern Hamlet objects to my appeal to average Amazon ratings as evidence that the 2015 shortlist is objectively superior to recent previous Hugo shortlists:

By this criteria for distinctive works: Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises at 3.8 < Vox’s A Throne of Bones 4.2 Also, you’re also nearly tied there with Twilight at 4.1 for distinctive storyness.

Online ratings are no more an accurate measure of distinctive works than sales are. It’s an extension of the same argument… consider: we could predict 1 million Big Mac sales might result in a large number of people saying they sure do like Big Macs. There’s brand loyalty there among other things. While for Lima Beans, people might not report loving them as much. None of this has anything to do with healthiness in the same way that sales and ratings have nothing to do with distinctiveness.

Think of the NYC art world. When they award Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst with some award for their accomplishments in art, do you imagine that the average person would even understand anything about the pieces? You place an unneeded emphasis on reception (sales or ratings, take your pick here). Though art and literature’s quality can be determined there if we like, it’s hardly the only way (nor the common way these niche communities have developed in the past)

Now, you can go different ways with this… Shakespeare was great because of how many people have learned to appreciate him or Robbe-Grillet is great and we do need judges (gatekeepers if you will) to help refine our understanding of the art and literature experience.

Northern Hamlet’s response is neither unfair nor unexpected. It does, however, manage to completely miss the point. His error is obvious: he substitutes “distinctive works” for “objective superiority” without realizing that the former is a subset of the latter. He furthere demonstrates that he still doesn’t grasp the purpose for citing the metric when SirHamster points out his mistake:

SirHamster: He provided an objective measure for Hugo recognition, not for story distinctiveness. Whether or not Amazon average ratings provide a measure of story distinctiveness, they provide an objective measure of user-perceived quality, which may have some relation to distinctiveness.

Northern Hamlet: Yes, and superior in ratings alone, not in reception. Because, well, we need it to mean anything the SJWs didn’t mean.

No, we don’t need it to mean anything at all beyond the fact that it is an objective measure of quality. We have been repeatedly informed, by people who admit that they have not even read the works concerned, that those works are inferior to other, previous works that those same people may or may not have read.

Now, we could appeal to the same subjective standard to what they are appealing, which is to say our own opinions. We can even argue that our opinions are more informed and reliable than theirs; there are more people on this blog who have read John Scalzi’s and Charles Stross’s and George Martin’s work than there are people at Whatever and Not A Blog who have read the work of John C. Wright, Tom Kratman, and Vox Day. It should be obvious that those of us who have read multiple works by each of all six authors can much more fairly compare them than those who have not.

But we don’t need to rely upon subjective metrics. We can cite objective metrics, and, lo and behold, whether we turn to Amazon or the more left-leaning Goodreads, we observe the same thing at work: the 2015 shortlist is more highly regarded than the previous shortlists. Marc DuQuesne did the math. Can you tell which list is objectively and quantitatively superior?

A: 4.60 Amazon, 4.16 Goodreads
B: 4.64 Amazon, 4.16 Goodreads
C: 4.46 Amazon, 4.11 Goodreads
D: 3.90 Amazon, 3.91 Goodreads

Let’s look at my list of Top 10 SF and Fantasy books of all time. For science fiction, my top ten averages 4.32 on Amazon. For Fantasy, it averages 4.53, giving a net average of 4.43. This is considerably higher than the pre-Puppy 1986-2013 Hugo shortlist average of 4.00. Of course, my Top 10 list is wholly subjective, but review the list before you dismiss it; my more esoteric selections such as China Mieville’s Embassytown and Tanith Lee’s The Book of the Damned tend to bring the average down. So, I would certainly invite similar comparisons to other all-time top 10 lists.

This metric even picks up the perceived decline in the quality of Hugo nominees about which so many people have complained over the years:

1986 to 1995: 4.13
1996 to 2005: 3.93
2006 to 2013: 3.94

Now, unless Northern Hamlet wishes to entirely discount a metric which clearly shows the objective superiority of The Lord of the Rings (4.7) to The Sword of Shannara (3.7), Starship Troopers (4.4) to Redshirts (3.8), The Golden Age (4.1) to Rainbow’s End (3.6), and For Whom the Bell Tolls (4.5) to A Throne of Bones (4.2) in favor of opinions that are rooted in nothing objective and are entirely subjective, I suggest that despite the occasional flaws, average review ratings are a perfectly reasonable measure that any sensible SF/F reader can use as a basic quality heuristic given a sufficient number of reviews.

Mailvox: constructing Xanatos

NH asks about setting up a Xanatos Gambit:

With some of your recent posts, I realized before you had pointed it out you were forcing the SJWs to make a choice, one that could lead to them nuking their own awards. The moment I realized this, I thought, that bastard! What a genius! It was simple, yet I wouldn’t have thought of it.

Recently, I had been considering similar ideas… all roads leading your enemy to defeat, as you quoted. Yet I struggle to see those moves because those moves can be so deceptive in their simplicity, so hidden in plain view.

How did you get better over time at seeing those strategic moves? I’m not a stupid guy, but I’m looking for mental exercises if you will. What is the difference between being Machiavellian (which I score high in on tests) and being manipulative?

The difference between being Machiavellian and being manipulative is little more than the amount of foresight involved. Those who are manipulative are usually reactive, their goals are short term, and they often contradict themselves and get in their own way. Those who are Machiavellian usually have a long term goal in mind and their every move is designed to move them closer to that objective. There are two famous military dictums that I like to keep in mind at all times, the former credited to Sun Tzu, the latter to Napoleon.

  • If you know others and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know others but know yourself, you win one and lose one; if you do not know others and do not know yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.
  • When your enemy is executing a false movement, never interrupt him.

The reason you must know yourself is so that you can know your strong points, your weak points, and your capabilities. Few battles are won through overwhelming strength, they are won by breaking the enemy’s weak points before he can break your strong points. The reason you must know your enemy is so you can know his strong points to avoid them, his weak points to target them, and his capabilities so you can defend yourself against them.

[NB: This is why I HATE the term schwerpunkt in military theory, because it is an offensive term meaning focal point of effort, not a defensive term indicating a hardened resistance point as would make more sense in the above context.]

Where win-win situations, or Xanatos Gambits, are created is by taking advantage of the enemy’s illusions. Informational friction is absolutely key, and in situations like the present struggle for the Hugo Awards, it is compounded by people seeing what they want to see. So, applying Sun Tzu, you must first do two things:

  • Ensure that you are seeing an accurate picture of yourself and your enemy.
  • Identify what their illusions are concerning themselves and you.

Then present them with options where they will predictably react by choosing the one that works to your advantage. Soon enough, they will find themselves in a position where they are choosing between options that are equally beneficial to you. More or less. In some cases, you may well find that you don’t even care which option they choose.

Let me give an actual example of what underlay the Hugo situation. The SJWs in science fiction are constantly making ridiculously stupid mistakes because they violate Sun Tzu’s dictum by a) wrongly believing themselves to be more influential than they are and b) wrongly considering me and the Sad Puppies to be less influential than we are. The former is not their fault; John Scalzi has relentlessly misled them for years. “The biggest blog in SF” that they had on their side was literally 15 percent of the size they were told it was and erroneously believed it to be in August 2010. And yet, even 18 months after being exposed, there are still some SJWs who will tell you in all seriousness that Scalzi is “huge”.

Blame for the latter, on the other hand, is entirely theirs As recently as last year, there were SJWs who quite literally believed this:

My website averages well over 600 visits a day. Based on comments from other fanzine people, I’m guessing that’s more readers than VD’s blog would get even when he provokes a shit storm. Let’s deprive him of the traffic.

At the time she posted that, the site traffic was 46,456 Google pageviews per day. Yesterday it was 68,539. Last month’s average was 51,068. The ludicrous aspect of this is that the Sitemeter widget has always been publicly available, and though it’s considerably stingier than Google or WordPress, about ten seconds of research would have provided whatever ratio is required to compare apples to apples.

The immediate consequence is that the other side imagines that the Dread Ilk cannot possibly account for the numbers that are overwhelming their core strength. Ergo #GamerGate must be involved and a whole host of other delusions that the rational observer knows are not even possible, thereby leading to a series of mistakes that will likely lead to the very situation they erroneously believe is already taking place. And their failure to know their enemy means they do not know what our objectives are, so they never know if their attempts to counter our actions are thwarting us or playing into our hands.

These two comments by Alexander are apt:

  • So how long until the rabbits put 2 and 2 together and realize that they have waaaaaaaay more than just 300 sad puppies to deal with. The voters were the tip of the spear, we are now seeing the obvious signs that we have magnitudes of support behind us.
  • They’ve already gotten Breitbart, Instapundit, Twitchy, Ace, and Gamergate involved. At this rate, Finland will have declared war on SJWs by Friday.

By the time they do recalibrate their thinking, it will be far too late. It is already too late, which is why I don’t mind spelling it out. As for how I learned to see these things, part of it is a natural propensity for pattern recognition, part of it is playing a lot of wargames like Advanced Squad Leader. Nothing teaches harsh lessons in actions and consequences, or demonstrates the importance of accurate information, like wargaming.

The most important thing is this: do not underestimate your enemy or ignore his strengths out of a foolish desire to believe yourself his superior. If you want to learn more about this sort of strategic thinking, I very highly recommend reading Martin van Creveld’s A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind, which Castalia House just published last month.

Of course, sometimes it is very hard to take your enemy seriously when they are dumb enough to do things like post this caption:

Annie Bellet, one of the writers on the nominees list who was not included in the Sad Puppies or Rabbid Puppies campaign.

“Goodnight Stars” by Annie Bellet, The Apocalypse Triptych in fact appears on both the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies lists of recommendations.

Mailvox: We are lessened

I just received this news:

“Hello everyone, I am Outlaw’s nephew. I hate to be the bearer of bad news but, unfortunately Outlaw passed away last night at around 7:30. Personally, I had no idea my Uncle had this many followers on his blog. He was always a bright person and always had his own unique opinion on any topic. His death was a very tragic loss to our family. I would like to thank all of you for your prayers and support.”

He’d predicted he wouldn’t live to see Easter.

I know he’s with our Lord, free of pain, it that doesn’t still my sense of loss.

Outlaw X, aka Equus Pallidus, was one of the original Dread Ilk. He was combative and argumentative and difficult and smart and generous and fiercely loyal. He was an early supporter of my writing; he once bought 10 copies of Summa Elvetica for other Ilk who could not afford them. Longtime Ilk will recall that he could get overheated at times, but he always settled down sooner or later.

I wish I’d had
the chance to tell him about the Hugo wipeout yesterday. If he’d been better, there is no way he wouldn’t have been a part of it. And he was one of the primary reasons the Ilk became known as the Dread Ilk. His trampling of Michael Medved on Medved’s own show when Medved was waxing outraged in response to one of my WND columns was epic; I can still here him saying “You made that up in your haid” in that strong Texas accent.

Death comes for us all in time, but few of us will be remembered as fondly as Equus Pallidus. Rest in peace, my friend, and give my best regards to Bane when you see him.

Mailvox: The Singularity

One of the readers here, who also happens to have the good taste to be a John C. Wright fan, sends word of his band’s new EP, “The Singularity”. Good voice and some interesting guitar work.

Mailvox: the math is the evidence

Diogenes appears to have trouble with it:

The only thing missing from your post is any evidence supporting your assertion. Every stat I’ve seen has Firefox’s slide beginning at least two years before the Eich affair. Nor do the stats show any acceleration in decline at the time Eich was forced out.

What is your evidence — aside from wishful thinking — for laying the whole thing at the doorstep of SJWs rather than, say, the rise of Chrome? Note I dropped Firefox over the Eich affair myself. However, I don’t see any evidence that the boycott has had any impact whatsoever.

No evidence? The evidence was literally placed right in front of his nose. No acceleration in decline? The evidence was literally placed right in front of his nose. The fact that the slide began two years – or actually, as the article says, four years – before the Eich affair is not the salient point, it is the annual rate at which users have been abandoning Firefox that tells the story. Let’s look at what the quoted article said:

In the last 12 months, Firefox’s user share — an estimate of the
portion of all those who reach the Internet via a desktop browser — has
plummeted by 34%. Since Firefox crested at 25.1% in April 2010, Firefox
has lost 13.5 percentage points, or 54% of its peak share.

Firefox’s user share was at 25.1 percent. It is now at 11.6 percent five years later. Those lost 13.5 percentage points are distributed as follows:

2010 to 2014 =  7.52 points (13.9 percent of total decline per year)
2014 to 2015 =  5.98 points (44.3 percent of total decline per year)

Now, the fact that the increase in the decline of Firefox increased by a factor of three was coterminous with the boycott does not prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that the boycott was entirely responsible. But it is most certainly evidence that the boycott was at least partially responsible, especially in light of the fact that Mozilla employees clearly believe it has had a negative affect on their user numbers, hence their public pleas to Christians to overlook l’affaire d’Eich one of which was linked to in yesterday’s post.

In fact, based on the reported rate of decline, the evidence suggests that the Eich affair is having twice as negative an effect as Chrome, bloat, and every other negative factor combined. This was all immediately apparent in the post year yesterday; frankly, I find it a little shocking that it is necessary to spell it out to such a degree for people to be able to follow it. The same story also happens to be indicated in my own statistics, as Pale Moon alone now accounts for 4 percent of the current traffic here on VP, up from zero one year ago.

For those who need me to type even slower, the 5.98 points lost in 2014 is calculated by dividing 11.6 by 0.66. This provides 17.6 as the Firefox user share prior to the decline of the last 12 months. I hope that explaining the simple subtraction involved will not prove necessary.

And before anyone stupidly goes running to find a competing statistic, please note that the claim was that there was no evidence to be seen, despite the fact that said evidence was right there in the quoted article.

Mailvox: writing sociosexuality

Stan Hai isn’t sure how to go about doing it:

How can I write blue-shirt SF if I’m barely a Delta myself? Writing Alpha characters always turns out unrealistic for me, because I don’t know what I’m talking about. I finally quit writing Gamma & Omega characters, but when it comes to a hero, I’ve got three choices: Superman/James Bond/Neo (i.e. Alpha Mary Sues who never lose), Beta who’s competent in one thing (which I can’t write about because that’s not me) and Gamma Special (whom everyone is sick of.) The thing I’m working now is about a Gamma who becomes a Delta. He’s offered Special Power, and rejects it. Thoughts?

Stan has already taken the first step, which is to understand that sociosexuality exists and that it affects how people think, act, and react. Rather like the process of learning a language, he finally is beginning to understand how much he doesn’t know. This is true for EVERY man, of every rank.  Women, unsurprisingly, tend to do a better job of writing two very different types of male characters, Alpha and Delta. They even occasionally delve into a very extreme form of smothering Gamma when they want to creep their female readers out.

It is harder for men to differentiate between the different male classes as we tend to gravitate towards writing our own perspective large on all the male characters. The one thing Louis L’Amour and Neal Stephenson have in common is that they both base all the male protagonists on their own sociosexuality. They are both significant authors, but L’Amour’s protagonists are all Alphas, brimming with self-confidence, laconic, proactive, and utterly certain of female interest in them, which is not at all surprising if you know his life story. Stephenson’s are all Gammas, insecure, diffident, reactive, and forever bewildered as to why the woman with whom they are involved has any interest in them at all.

In this, Stephenson is all-too-typical of modern male SF writers. And as Hai implies, when the average Pink SF writer tries to address sociosexuality, even unconsciously, he makes a hash of it. Patrick Rothfuss’s Kvothe is probably the best example, as it is hard to imagine a better, or more hilariously mistaken, Alpha-through-a-Gamma’s eyes ever being written.

The way to do it is to first understand your own social rank and grasp that you should use it for characters of that social rank. Second, seek to understand the perspective of the others. The recent series on Gamma, which features current and ex-Gammas talking about their feelings and thought processes, has been INVALUABLE to me as a writer. I now have a much better understanding of what makes them tick; had I tried to write a Gamma protagonist before this I would have likely failed almost as spectacularly as Rothfuss fails with his Alpha. I had no idea, none, that the key to writing Gamma is a man at the bottom of the totem pole who knows he should, by rights, be at the top because Special.

However, keep in mind that you may, instead, wish to flatter various socio-sexual ranks rather than describe them. Gammas like Stephenson and Scalzi do a good job of appealing to Gammas because what appeals to them naturally appeals to other Gammas. But if a sociosexual-aware writer were to focus on flattering the various social ranks, he might have even more success.

  • Alpha. The protagonist is in charge. He seeks out, takes on, and conquers various challenges, many of whom are other Alphas. He also defeats the occasional Gamma who tries to stab him in the back. Deltas follow him gladly. Hmmm, sounds familiar, doesn’t it, Mr. Howard?
  • Beta. The good lieutenant is given great responsibility by his Alpha. Loyally serves the Alpha and accompanies him through thick and thin. At times, his loyalty is tested, the enemy even tries to tempt him into betraying his Alpha by offering him a crown of his own, but he resists, he perseveres, and his Alpha is triumphant in the end, at which point he publicly credits the Beta and tells everyone how he could never have done it without the Beta.
  • Delta. He’s just a guy, like any other guy. Larger events swirl around him, but the Delta gradually finds his place in the team, which comes to respect each other and learns how to work together as a unit. His side wins after much turmoil and suffering, although he doesn’t have much to do with that. But he knows he did his part and has the satisfaction of knowing he has the respect and approval of the others. His captain tells him that he was the glue who held it all together. He gets a medal and wins the love of a good woman in the end. They have nice healthy children and make a nice modest home together.
  • Gamma. No one knows how special he is. The Alphas unfairly rule and keep him down by trickery. Even the girl he loves in a way no woman has ever been loved before doesn’t realize how special he is or how happy he would make her if only she would let him. Bad people treat him badly and unfairly. But through his clever wit, the Gamma makes fools of everyone through always having the perfect thing to say, culminating when he totally humiliates the Alpha and reveals him to be an unworthy paper tiger in a brilliant verbal exchange front of everyone, including the girl. The Gamma is finally recognized as the true First Man in Rome by everyone as the girl shyly confesses that she has always seen and admired his specialness. He calls her “milady” and roguishly offers her his arm as everyone looks on enviously and applauds the smoothness of his style.
  • Omega. REVENGE.
  • Sigma. He is dragged from his solitary sanctuary by the desperate need of friends he hasn’t seen in years, but whom he can hardly deny. Conflict abounds, mostly between posturing idiots concerning nonsensical trivialities that no one with more than half a brain could ever possibly care about. The Sigma contemptuously dispatches three foes in succession, one by utilizing superior logic, one by seducing her, and one by physical combat, before finally ending all the conflict with a brilliant masterstroke that convinces the blithering idiots to knock it off once and for all. Everyone agrees that the ultimate solution is for the Sigma to marry the beautiful princess and be crowned king. On the day of the wedding, it is discovered that the Sigma has vanished, as have two of the prettiest and most morally flexible ladies-in-waiting. A note is found rejecting both princess and crown, and inviting everyone in the realm to either fuck off or die, as they please.
  • Lambda. He always knew he was different. He exchanging longing looks with another boy once, but nothing happened. Mean boys called him names and beat him up for being too sensitive. Then he went to the big city. There he discovered discos and bathhouses and true love. Then his true love died of AIDS/was gay-bashed to death. So he went back to the discos and bathhouses and did too many drugs until meeting a rich, successful, and previously straight Alpha who is won over by his sob story of his tragic true love and helps him kick his drug habit. He and the formerly straight Alpha travel to Mexico where they pick up a pair of hot Latin twins at a gay strip club.

Which of those seven stories deeply appeals to you? Which of these fit the plots, protagonists and perspectives of books you know? See if you can identify a popular book or series that fits each of these sociosexual themes. Understand where you fit, then work to apply these basic filters in the way you describe your characters, and you will produce works that are more psychologically real to your readers, because you are reflecting the real psychological world back to them.

Mailvox: Marxism and the Shoe Event Horizon

DB asks about a past SmartPop essay:

I am an Italian university student, and at the moment I am writing my thesis, which is about Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. While gathering some material to work on, I found The Rough Guide to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Marcus O’Dair, in which he maintains that you stated that “the Shoe Event Horizon [is] a dig not at capitalism, but rather at the Marxist notion of capitalist crisis, which is pretty much its antithesis” (page 71).

I have been trying to find the original source of this idea, but I am not sure whether it is this one:

With this letter, I would ask you if you could briefly explain how the “Shoe Event Horizon theory” is to be considered a critique to Marxism rather than to capitalism itself (I am not an expert in the fields of philosophy and economics).

My essay in THE ANTHOLOGY AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE was indeed the original source of the idea,  which I mentioned in a one-off line without explaining it. Neglecting to explain things is a time-honored personal tradition. I’m not usually doing it to be difficult, it’s just that I tend to have a very hard time grasping what is, and is not, obvious to other people.

Adams manages to mine this unlikely field, economics, for some of his most scathing barbs. The dismal science does not often figure into fictional plot lines and still less is it played for laughs, but nevertheless, it has an integral role in both the overall story and Adams’ underlying theme. Indeed, Adams betrays a remarkably sophisticated understanding of economics when he pokes fun at the Marxian concept of capitalist crisis in the Shoe Event Horizon that ruins the world of Frogstar World B.

Before I can explain why the Shoe Event Horizon is poking fun at the idea of a crisis in capitalism, I should probably cite the relevant event as recounted by Pizpot Gargravarr.

From The Restaurant at the End of the Universe:

Many years ago this was a thriving, happy planet—people, cities, shops, a normal world. Except that on the high streets of these cities there were slightly more shoe shops than one might have thought necessary. And slowly, insidiously, the numbers of these shoe shops were increasing. It’s a well-known economic phenomenon but tragic to see it in operation, for the more shoe shops there were, the more shoes they had to make and the worse and more unwearable they became. And the worse they were to wear, the more people had to buy to keep themselves shod, and the more the shops proliferated, until the whole economy of the place passed what I believe is termed the Shoe Event Horizon, and it became no longer economically possible to build anything other than shoe shops. Result—collapse, ruin and famine. Most of the population died out. Those few who had the right kind of genetic instability mutated into birds—you’ve seen one of them—who cursed their feet, cursed the ground and vowed that none should walk on it again.

There is no singular coherent theory of capitalist crisis, there are, in fact, several, but they are summarized more or less accurately on Wikipedia.

In Marxist terms, the economic crises are crises of overproduction and immiseration of the workers who, were it not for the capitalist control of the society, would be the determiners of both demand and production in the first place.

These systemic factors include:

  • Full employment profit squeeze. Capital accumulation can pull up the demand for labor power, raising wages. If wages rise “too high,” it hurts the rate of profit, causing a recession.
  • The tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The accumulation of capital, the general advancement of techniques and scale of production, and the inexorable trend to oligopoly by the victors of capitalist market competition, all involve a general tendency for the degree of capital intensity, i.e., the “organic composition of capital” of production to rise. All else constant, this is claimed to lead to a fall in the rate of profit, which would slow down accumulation.
  • Overproduction. If the capitalists win the class struggle to push wages down and labor effort up, raising the rate of surplus value, then a capitalist economy faces regular problems of excess producer supply and thus inadequate aggregate demand.

All such factors resolve to the synthetic viewpoint that all such crises are crises of over and/or misappropriated production relative to the ability and/or willingness of the workers who generate the bulk of demand to consume.

As he later does with the concept of Keynesian monetary policy still being pushed by the likes of Krugman and Abe today, Adams takes the concept of capitalist crisis stemming from overproduction to absurd and hilarious extremes. In the tragic case of the world of Frogstar B, the people actually reduced their aggregate demand by evolving into flying beings in order to escape the terrible results of the crisis caused by the overproduction of shoes.

The connection between the Shoe Event Horizon and capitalist crisis struck me as so obvious as to need no explanation, but then, it belatedly occurs to me that perhaps not everyone recognizes the implicit connection between capitalist crisis, overproduction, and inadequate aggregate demand, which in the case of Frogstar B, eventually plummeted all the way to zero.

Mailvox: dealing with anklebiters

BT was wondering how one best deals with them:

After conversing with a certain individual at length, and realizing only belatedly that they are most likely just another anklebiter, I’ve come to some hypotheses:

Anklebiters are:

  • 0 to +1 SD intellect
  • Mildly autistic at the least, which leads them to overestimate their own intellect.
  • Far more hurt by a mix of dialectic and rhetoric rather than pure rhetoric (they innately believe themselves above it) or pure dialectic (they’ll just retreat to appeals of authority).

For efficacy in pain, the mix of dialectic and rhetoric will probably depend on the level of autism in particular.

The only thing I haven’t figured out in this theory is the best way to handle said anklebiters.  Ignoring them certainly works, as they’re just self-styled intellectual tough-guys walking around with a chip on their shoulders.  It certainly seems to serve to frustrate their efforts on that end.  But anklebiters can look like an expert to the average stranger, and indeed seems to spend their time trying to convince everyone around them that they are an expert, so it may serve in everyone’s best interest to nip that problem in the bud.  How, I do not know.  Domestication training, using dialectic/rhetoric mixes as the stick?

Anklebiters are a brain-damaged form of midwit. They are almost always atheist, further pointing towards the atypical neurological profile required for that, they are usually male, and they tend to be unexpectedly poorly educated and badly read despite their observable intelligence. Most importantly, they lack the normal ability to admit failure, back up, and start over that normal individuals possess. And lacking it, they therefore lack any ability to improve their arguments or even to question any of their adopted beliefs.

That’s why anklebiters are always disappearing when trounced, only to reappear again and make the exact same arguments that have already been dismissed. The problem, as BT notes, is that this renders them immune to dialectic, and they tend to ignore pure rhetoric because they are not emotionally invested in their nonsense arguments. The more virulent form, the trolls, are sociopathic and have no meaningful human emotions to which one can appeal.

In effect, anklebiters are little more than genetically human bots, which is why there is no point in arguing with them or insulting them. They are not capable of adding anything to the discourse, so as soon as an anklebiter is identified, they are best ignored by the commenters and spammed by the moderators. There is no reason to concern oneself with how they look to the average stranger, because a) it’s not your problem, b) MPAI, and c) their own bizarre behavior will expose them sooner or later.

A guest blogger at Alpha Game has a timely post that addresses some of the issues raised here as part of his Graduating Gamma series. The most relevant quote:

This flows directly from the Gamma’s ever-present and crippling fear of being wrong somewhere and somehow. The Gamma does not understand the deep matters behind what is going on in his own beliefs, which is ironic since most Gammas vastly overestimate their knowledge and ability in most everything.

Mailvox: the anti-Puritans

SJ emails and makes what I consider to be an all-too-common mistake among Christians with regards to the rating system I created upon request yesterday:

Read your post on a Christian Ratings System. As the father of two young boys, there is a lot I like about this. And I laugh at how similar my experiences are with other Christian fathers. But I think it is important to think through one aspect of this sort of effort: Christians have self-selected towards being at the bottom of the food chain, often the victims, in our modern society.

That isn’t necessarily meant as a defense of modern society, other than being a reminder of the reality we live in. Regardless, I am sick and tired of Christians coming up on the short end, and I am concerned that the lesson that our churches and families are teaching our young men. With my own boys, I have taken the tack of raising Christian men in a Fallen and potentially violent world. I see no disparity between Christianity, being strong, and being realistic. In, not of.

Thus, I don’t necessarily argue with the idea of scores per se, but of the thresholds. For example, I am not sure that I wouldn’t let my boys read something more than a 15, and I balk at saying that a book that contains openly atheist characters scores a +3. What about the atheist characters being contrasted with Christian characters? What about setting up an atheist for a religious awakening?

My point is really not to pick nits, or to argue line items, but to try to argue for:

a) a more granular system that allows for more insight into the “Christians” of the book
b) in support of (a) but more tangentially, possibly having categories of scores
c) somehow trying to allow for books and material that encourages a realistic approach to Christianity

It’s really this latter point that makes me write this email because by making such a scoring system seems likely to help the self-same self-selecting Christians to self-select into ever more naive, victim-filled categories. I think this is especially true if the system is more or less linear and additive, as you have suggested. Ultimately, you are on to a great idea here, but it shouldn’t abide by the standards and metrics that a Fallen world has seen fit to place on Christianity. For example, some Christians swear, dammit, and the Song of Solomon is ostensibly about Sex. Perhaps with a little more granularity and possibly with some helpful Categories, this becomes a tool to teach rather than a grading system for my 4th grade Sunday School teacher.

I think we may need a word to describe the modern Christian anti-Puritan, the sort of Christian who fears that somewhere, somehow, there might be another Christian out there who is insufficiently exposed to the world. But is there truly a Christian in the world of 2015 who is insufficiently exposed to the material existence of godlessness, obscenity, sex, and sin? And what shall we call these advocates of being sufficiently engulfed by the world, though not of it? Soilitans? Filthians? Those Who Wallow? Edified Mudrollers?

My more literate response is to quote Aslan: “Child…I am telling your story, not hers. I tell no one any story but his own.”

It is no more SJ’s business to concern himself with how these self-selecting Christians self-select into ever more naive, victim-filled categories than it is for them to determine the precise threshold that will determine what books his young boys are permitted to read. And notice that all of his concerns are about influence and interpretation; he is bothered by the idea of simply permitting other Christians to acquire accurate information about the books and make their own judgments concerning them. In answer to his questions and points:

  1. What about the atheist characters being contrasted with Christian characters?
  2. What about setting up an atheist for a religious awakening?
  3. a more granular system that allows for more insight into the “Christians” of the book
  4. in support of (3) but more tangentially, possibly having categories of scores
  5. somehow trying to allow for books and material that encourages a realistic approach to Christianity 

1. What about them? Whether they are contrasted with Christian characters or not, the either exist in the book or they don’t. Why should parents who don’t want their children to be prematurely exposed to atheism be intentionally kept in the dark from knowing that there is a godless character in a book?

2. What about it? I’d rather like a system that would warn me: LAME AND UTTERLY CONVENTIONAL CONVERSION STORY AHEAD so I could avoid ever reading the book. “And then he became a Christian and lived happily ever after” is not the sort of thing I’m interested in supporting even if that was within the scope of the rating system. Which it isn’t. Regardless of what happens to the atheist over the course of the book, he is still there. How can any Christian rationally oppose parents simply being informed of godlessness in their children’s books?

I am perhaps uniquely qualified to comment on this. Does anyone seriously think I am even remotely afraid of exposing my children to atheist arguments, let alone fictional atheist characters presenting dumbed-down versions of those arguments? I throw Plato and Cicero and William S. Lind at my kids, does anyone seriously doubt that they can chew up arguments presented by the likes of Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins without even blinking? At the same time, I’d still like to know that they are being tested in this way when it is taking place.

3. No. That goes well beyond the purpose of the rating system, which is to simply inform parents what is in the book. It doesn’t involve insight into anyone, for any reason. It describes, it doesn’t interpret.

4. The more complicated the system, the less useful it is and the less anyone will use it. Again, this is an attempt to sneak interpretation and influence in through the back door.

5. And who is to define “a realistic approach to Christianity”? I doubt anyone wants me doing that. Here the attempt to influence is overt, which is in absolute contradiction to the intention of the ratings system, which is simply to inform parents of what specific elements are present within works of fiction.

The rating system is a tool for people to use, not a tool for using people. Try to keep that in mind if you’re looking to improve it.

Mailvox: Christian book ratings

CM asks if we can put together a rating system for Christian books. I think this is a good idea, although I think it bears some discussion on the best way to do that.

We are an ultra-conservative homeschool family with 8 children. Two of my older sons and I love SF books, table top games, and movies. My 12 year old is reading through the Monster Hunter series of books now. I do not mind the occasional curse word or sexual innuendo here and there. But if it gets any racier than Correia’s works I will not let them read it until they are a little older. We’ve enjoyed some of your novellas, too. Keep up the good work.

Anyway, I do not have time to keep up and read new SF works to screen them for my sons (12 year old blasted through the first Monster Hunter in one day). Is there a possibility in the future that your blog and/or Castalia House could have a sort of SF book rating or review site that would inform Christian families like mine? Just FYI, the Hollywood movie rating would be inadequate. Many PG-13 rated movies are considered nearly XXX to us.

My thought is something similar to the SJW review of games system might be useful, with zero being the perfect score of containing nothing that would be objectionable to the Christian AND containing genuine and explicit Christian elements. There is a difference, after all, as Misty of Chincoteague is entirely unobjectionable, but it has no Christian content per se.

Let’s consider some possible point factors, beginning with those that would likely be more or less acceptable to most Christian parents, but are potentially indicative of religious or ideological problems:

  • contains no genuine and explicit Christian element +1
  • exhibits unconventional Christian theology +1
  • characters demonstrate disrespect for peers or parents +1
  • an animal or major character dies +1
  • contains suggestions of physical violence +1
  • features strong independent female +1
  • contains squishy Disney-style “moral” messages +1
  • Features fairies, unicorns, or creatures from classical mythology +1
  • Features the open use of magic by the characters +1

Then there are the elements that will be objectionable to the more conservative families:

  • contains direct descriptions of physical violence +2
  • features indirect sexual themes +2
  • contains egregious or saintly minority characters +2
  • features aggressively “pro-science” themes +2
  • contains euphemistic swearing +2

Followed by those elements to which most parents will not want to expose their children:

  • contains openly atheist characters +3
  • contains detailed portrayals of physical violence +3
  • features PG-13 sex scenes +3
  • advocates left-liberal political or ideological positions +3
  • contains light and occasional swearing +3
  • Features emotionally devastating scene +3
  • Features demonic aliens or magic-based societies +3

And then the completely unacceptable:

  • contains openly atheist or anti-theist messages +5
  • mocks Christianity +5
  • sadistic horror and physical violence +5
  • features pornographic sex scenes or romanticizes adultery +5
  • features homosexual and other sexually deviant characters +5
  • contains a considerable quantity of vulgarities and obscenities +5 
  • contains openly occultic elements indicative of actual practices +5

Now, it is important to keep in mind that a novel can contain absolutely every element here and still be a Christian novel. What makes a novel Christian or not depends upon its intrinsic recognition that Jesus Christ (or some fictional facsimile therein), is the Lord and Savior of Mankind.

A Throne of Bones scores a lot of points, Book Two will score even more. But they are not books for children; I haven’t let my own children read them. Every parent has to draw their own line, but it would certainly be useful to have a large database at Castalia House where books could be rated. For example, The Lord of the Rings would rate about a 8 of 75. A Throne of Bones would rate 40. A Game of Thrones would rate 65. I think anything over 15 should be considered unacceptable to most parents.

There is considerable room for improving the system, and I would welcome suggestions as well as the rating of various books.