Tag: mailvox

Mailvox: Sigma’s Bane

GJ calls for more of that of which there is not very much to give:

I’m a regular reader of your blog. As I’m not living in the West I’m not participating in Gamergate or conflicts with SJWs so I make the following observations from a distant perspective.

Just as you used not to understand Gammas well, it seems to me that you’re overestimating the initiative of the average person who is willing to fight on your side. You’ve made more than one posts encouraging readers that they too can be leaders in Gamergate. But your sociosexual theory indicates that because most people are followers (ie not Alphas, Betas, or Sigmas but Deltas) they are hardly going to do anything of their own initiative, rather follow an example set by someone they consider as a leader. As an illustration, a Sigma like yourself would hardly care about getting a Minion badge (except maybe for the purpose of demonstration of mass numbers), but many of your readers do, which implies that they still seek a hierarchy within which to operate.

This means that even in the decentralised 4GW nature of the fight firm leadership is still needed. The Hugo nominations were a great way to demonstrate numbers on your side and intimidate the opponent. But if you want the numbers of your supportive readers to be exerted on the Twitter arena, for example, it would appear that regular reminders, along with a more explicit and emphatic instructions (ie. more so than what you’ve already posted).

And here Rabid Puppies is about as much “leadership” as I can handle without feeling the need to enter a Tibetan monastery and spend the next seven years in mystic contemplation.

That was my favorite thing about the 4GW concept, the way in which it obviated the need for leadership. But GJ is probably right, there is a distinction between a lack of centralization and a lack of leadership. Fortunately, I have reason to know that more of you are taking the initiative in various ways; the Minion badges themselves are an example of this as they weren’t my idea or my creation.

Malwyn is still in a foul temper, but she did get another 100 of them out and the outflow is finally exceeding the incoming number of requests. So 130 down, another 180 or so to go.

All that being said, I am very proud of the Dread Ilk and Rabid Puppies. It may be a small-scale action on a tertiary front, but nevertheless, this has been one of the most effective actions against the SJWs in Western culture in decades.

Debate the Dragon

Puff the Magic Dragon was talking very brave until it was suggested that he debate me himself.

Go ahead and debate Vox yourself, puff. If he’s the soft target you
think he is, you should really be able to make him look foolish.

Debate
what? What are his actual positions? That’s what this is all about. He
puffs himself up into a controversial figure on the internet and when
someone calls him out on it, you find out it was all smoke and mirrors.
Is that supposed to be impressive? These issues aren’t as cut and dried
as you people seem to think they are, and apparently neither does Vox.
You guys have bought into the persona as much as those “rabbits” have.

Now, since Puff admitted that he is insufficiently knowledgeable to debate me on an economic subject, we will avoid economics despite it being one of my specialties. So, here are five actual positions that I offer Puff the Magic Dragon to debate me on. If he runs like Myers, Martin, Scalzi, and others, we will all know the value of his opinion.

  1. That One Bright Start to Guide Them is a great book and The Wasp Factory is a dreadful one. Oh, wait, sorry, I agreed to debate that with Phil Sandifier on a left-wing SF podcast. Let’s start over.
  1. That there are a series of continental-scale wars on the medium-term horizon that will be vicious, unconventional, and are likely to result in severe racial and national separatism.
  2. That John Scalzi is a fraud.
  3. That “The American Tolkien” is not a credible title for George R.R. Martin.
  4. That “marital rape” is a logical, historical, and legal contradiction in terms.
  5. That all modern human beings are not genetically equal.

That seems like a nice broad range of subjects from which to choose. I thought it was interesting to learn that for some people, the Pakman interview was informative in helping them understand my problem communicating with people:

For the record, Vox was correct about the common law. He did seem caught off guard about the fact that rape, even within marriage, is against the law in most states if not all. Pakman tried to use this as a “GOTCHA!” moment, and Vox looked confused, even though his point was not invalidated and his argument was still correct. The average person would come across thinking Vox was wrong, though.

This was actually the first time I really made sense of how Vox’s mind works. As an earlier commenter said, Vox is so far ahead that it seems to stump him that someone isn’t making the same logical jumps as quickly as he does — having to explain every step is very annoying.

It’s not always annoying (although it often is) but it is usually confusing. This is especially true when I am dealing with someone new because I have no idea at what point their ability to follow the train of logic is going to fail without warning. I was very confused when Pakman brought up US law in a bizarre attempt to rebut my reference to the historical Common Law. That’s rather like pointing out that the US lost in Vietnam to rebut a claim that the US invaded Normandy in World War II.

Where does one even go with that? Try to give him a basic primer on the historical basis for US law? Tell him that he’s an ignorant MPAI member and leave it at that? The best thing would have been to point out that his reference to US law was irrelevant and to observe that the post to which he referred was written in response to an Indian court upholding section 375 of the Indian Penal Code, except I didn’t recall that at the time because I had no idea I was going to be asked about a short three-paragraph blog post from over a year ago.

Rhetorically speaking, I suppose the best thing to do if I’m concerned about my self-image is to say “so what” and unmask the fact that he can’t follow the train of thought. But I try to be a polite guest. Perhaps I will need to rethink that policy if the host is an ambush artist; virtually none of the interviews I’d given in the past attempted to play gotcha without giving me fair warning about what the subjects would be beforehand.

I highlighted the irrelevance of his appeal to US law by reminding him that I don’t live in the USA. Which I have no doubt sounded like a non sequitur to many, only the non sequitur was Pakman’s. But I can’t help it if a lot of people didn’t understand that, because I can’t simultaneously fill in the gaps in their knowledge and defend myself against a dishonest, time-limited ambush at the same time.

Mailvox: the racism lens

It’s always fascinating how some people have an amazing ability to detect racism no matter how clearly the absence of racism by literally every definition is explained to them. From a discussion on Eric Flint’s blog:

I may as well go all-in here: In comments above Vox Day has repeatedly been called a “racist,” perhaps dozens of times. Have any of you ASKED him what his position is on racial differences? Have any of you READ what he has to say about racial differences? No? Then those of you who call him “racist” are simply a mob. In an attempt to educate, here is what Mr. Day wrote recently in a comment on Brad Torgersen’s blog; it was in response to the following statement by someone else (not Brad): “Vox Day believes that white people and Asians (and clearly Hispanics, since Beale is one, at least in part) are superior to black people, and he believes this inferiority of blacks is innate, genetic.”

Here is what Mr. Day wrote in response:

“Correction: I don’t have any reason to believe any one human population sub-group is intrinsically superior to any other population sub-group. That being said, both science and logic quite clearly indicate that no two population sub-groups are identical, and therefore every population sub-group is either superior or inferior to another sub-group on the basis of any chosen metric.
“It makes no more difference that you like or dislike this fact than if you disapprove of the speed of light or the rate of Earth gravity.
“I assert that an unborn female black child with a missing chromosome and an inclination to homosexuality is equal in human value and human dignity and unalienable, God-given rights to a straight white male in the prime of his life and a +4 SD IQ. How many of my dishonest critics will do the same?
“That doesn’t mean that I think it is wise to ask that particular child, when she is grown, to design the next plane on which I intend to fly. Or even to work in the air traffic control tower.
“I deal in reality as determined by history, science, and logic. And I care no more about what an equalitarian fantasist thinks about me or anything else than I do about the mentally deranged babbling in the psych ward. The world is as it is, not as we might wish it to be. If you can’t understand that, then I am among the least of your problems.”

So query: Do the above statements validate the multiple assertions above that Mr. Day is a “racist”? (Disclaimer: I’ve never met the man, nor talked to him; I have exchanged perhaps a couple of emails when I challenged a statement he made. But I do despise mindless online mobs screaming “racist!”)
Reply

    Gav says:
    April 21, 2015 at 10:39 AM

    A moment’s thought shows that his premise is completely ridiculous. Choose people A, B, C such that A & C are from one group and B from another, but A is taller than B is taller than C. So now I’ve got a metric (height) where group 1 is both superior and inferior to group 2 on the height metric. (For a real-life example, choose Robert Wadlow and his father for A & C, and Michael Jordan for B).

    You have to be not only racist but also stupid to believe that “every population sub-group is either superior or inferior to another sub-group on the basis of any chosen metric.”
 
        Mike says:
        April 21, 2015 at 12:21 PM

        This is a result of false equivocation between individuals and categories. Yes, the mean of the heights of all adult men if taller than the mean of the heights of all adult women, but that doesn’t mean all men are taller than all women.

        It ends up being a big problem in the scientific study of people. Some people have political/personal reasons to try to see one group as better than another, while other people have similar reasons to try to see no groups as being any different from each other. Both camps accuse the other side of being unscientific and ignoring the data.

        Really there is no conflict between the idea that one group may, on average, have a measurable difference than another group, and also the idea that the variance of individuals withing the groups may be much larger than the difference between the groups. But due to confirmation bias, people tend to ignore whatever part of that equation it is convenient for them to ignore.
        Reply
            Eric Flint says:
            April 21, 2015 at 12:33 PM

            The problem goes deeper than that, because there’s an intrinsic bias in the categories someone chooses in the first place. For instance, if you choose to compare “the race of whites” to “the race of blacks” you are assuming not only that such races exist but that they are the proper basis for comparison. But why should that be true? Due to the way the human race evolved, there is more genetic variation among Africans than there is between any given group of Africans and any non-African segment of humanity. The reason people think all Africans belong to the same “race” is because they share certain literally superficial features: skin color, hair and some facial features. But why should those criteria be used as the basis to define a “race” in the first place? Why not, for instance, choose the average distribution of blood types? In which case you wind up with a “racial map” of humanity that is completely different from a “racial map” drawn according to skin color, hair and facial features.

            My point is that there is an inherent bias in the way the question is posed in the first place, which makes any answer to the question automatically questionable. What defines a “racist” in the first place, intellectually speaking, is the firm conviction that “races” as defined sociologically have an actual biological reality which is more basic than any other possible differentiation. For which there is not a shred of actual evidence. It is a faith-based conviction. That’s a polite say of saying it’s just bigotry.
            Reply
                Mike says:
                April 21, 2015 at 1:59 PM

                Yes, I agree. There very definitely are biological races, if you define that as subsets of the overall human gene pool where certain collections of genes are much more prevalent than they are in the general population. But there is so much nonsense and xenophobia and misunderstanding involved that it’s a real nightmare to try to approach these questions without stepping on any land mines.

                I recommend a really interesting book called “The Sports Gene” that gives some great examples of how this can be done properly (IMO), and also some examples of where it has been done very much improperly.
                Reply
                    335522 says:
                    April 21, 2015 at 2:13 PM

                    With all due respect to all of you, I believe you’re missing the point. Please read the third paragraph by Vox Day that begins “I assert that an unborn female black child….” And then answer the question that I posed at the end, please (it being notable that not one of the responses addresses it).

The following quote from that exchange is an astonishing assertion that clearly demonstrates both the intellectual inferiority as well as the logical incapacity of the SJWs:

“You have to be not only racist but also stupid to believe that “every population sub-group is either superior or inferior to another sub-group on the basis of any chosen metric.”

Quite to the contrary, you have to be utterly stupid and wholly irrational to deny that assertion, or else possess hitherto-unknown evidence demonstrating that every human population sub-group is absolutely and entirely equal across the board. Every single group has an average, a mean, and a median, regardless of the metric chosen. None of those three statistics are likely to be precisely equal to the average, the mean, and the media of any other group.

At no point have I EVER claimed, suggested, implied, hinted, or intimated that EVERY SINGLE MEMBER of one human population group is superior to EVERY SINGLE MEMBER of another one. And anyone who claims that I ever have is either lying or simply too dim to bother even attempting to talk down to.

The idea that “races” don’t exist is simply antiscientific dogma. They might as well deny that “species” and “groups” exist while they’re at it.

New reader: where to start?

A new reader wonders where the best place to start reading my fiction is:

I’ve been enjoying your blog, and wanted to know – what would be the best book of yours for a new reader to start with? I’m a big sci-fi fan, but haven’t actually read your fiction yet. If it matters, my tastes are a bit older – Orson Scott Card, William Gibson, Arthur C. Clarke, etc. Terry Brooks and Tolkien when it comes to fantasy. Might be good to have a “new reader” link.

My first instinct is to say QM: AMP for those who lean SF and AMB, followed by ATOB, for those who lean fantasy. But I also think the author is among the least reliable authorities in this regard, so I’ll leave it up to the Ilk to sort it out in the comments. If you all can reach a consensus, I’ll post it here and create a New Reader link in the sidebar.

I’m going to go out on a limb and assume no one thinks that either REBEL MOON or THE RETURN OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION is the optimal starting point.

And on the Sad Puppy front, Mad Genius Dave Freer just asks the question that I did about the Toad of (formerly) Tor, only he asks it about the Guardian as well.

The chances of a ‘hit’ piece, intended to denigrate, on an American populist author with little impact on his British scene, in a publication that tends to Ahrt, are slim. The chance of it happening the very day that the Hugo Nomination shortlist is released, targeting an audience who might possibly go to LonCon, but probably would not have heard of Larry Correia? In other words, to poison minds well before they saw their voter packets…

The chance that this happened purely by accident – about the same as a fully armed nuclear missile turning into a Sperm whale a few seconds before impact.

Let’s get to a second fact. Just the facts. A year later, TNH launched a furious tirade on her blog, ‘Making Light’… attacking the Sad Puppies for sweeping the Hugo Noms. Threatening to bring down retribution for being nominated. Now coming from such a powerful person in Traditional Publishing, and one with… shall we say wide influence (the links are… telling) this is fairly serious bullying. Abuse of power.

But the important thing is WHEN IT HAPPENED.

It happened BEFORE the embargo was lifted.

These facts lead inexorably to a question so simple and so obvious I can’t see how anyone can miss it asking it:

HOW DID DAMIAN WALTER AND TERESA NIELSEN HAYDEN KNOW LARRY AND THE SAD PUPPIES HAD BEEN NOMINATED WHEN IT WAS EMBARGOED?

I think this pair of tweets from 2013 will explain a lot. Notice the connection between David Barnett, John Scalzi, and Damien Walter. And then notice who publishes David Barnett. Still dubious about a quiet circle of conspiracy centered around Tor Books?

Mailvox: refuting the rhetorical

JD has a suggestion which makes superficial sense, although I tend to doubt it will accomplish anything given the inability of rhetorical minds to change based on information:

I got an idea reading your latest post about George R. R. Martin baiting the hook. Martin just reiterates the same litany of labels/misrepresentations that people love to affix to you but I seriously doubt he has spent any time on your blog or twitter feed looking for the relevant posts and quotes to read for himself- so maybe it would be useful to put them all together in one convenient place for all to read. I am suggesting you put together a FAQ relating to Sad/Rabid Puppies and yourself in general that you put front and center on your blog. I think it could serve a variety of purposes. (It would be a fun little museum of SJW’s lies and misrepresentations about you and would be more fun to browse than a freak show at the circus.) 

I have spent a fair amount of time lately around the web and social media reading what your detractors say about you and Sad/Rabid puppies. Whether it is blog, Reddit, Twitter, etc., they trot out the same accusations: “he said black people are savages, he thinks it’s okay to throw acid in women’s faces, he got kicked out of the SFWA because he used the SFWA communication channels to spread racism, he is a white-supremacist, he is a Christian dominionist, he has said that he hates women, he is trying to destroy the Hugos, he gamed the Hugos…”

I know you have addressed these kinds of things as you have encountered them, but I think it would be helpful to put them all in one place, especially now that the mainstream media is taking notice of the Hugo situation. Quote the SJW’s accusation, link to the relevant blog entries if applicable, define yourself in your own words, and most importantly- make people accountable for twisting your words and misrepresenting you. I’m sure the Ilk wouldn’t mind helping you collect and catalogue the slanders against you.

As I said, I’m skeptical, but it can’t hurt. To address the specific accusations:

  1. I did not say black people are savages. I said one black individual, N.K. Jemisin, was a half-savage. I was wrong. She is, we are reliably informed by Ms Jemisin herself, a full savage. In addition to falsely claiming that I am “a self-described
    misogynist, racist, anti-Semite, and a few other flavors of asshole”, the charming Ms Jemisin has also claimed “a) that Heinlein was racist as *fuck*,
    and b) most of science fiction fandom was too.” It’s mildly amusing to see science fiction fandom fall all over itself to call me racist in defense of the woman who has openly, and repeatedly, declared that they are racists.
  2. I do not think it is okay to throw acid in women’s faces for any reason. I do think the Taliban are rational and that their policy of mutilating and murdering those who threaten their way of life reflects their objectives and their ruthlessness rather than an inability to think rationally. The fact that they have successively defeated the Red Army and NATO in Afghanistan tends to support my case.
  3. I was not kicked out of SFWA for any reason. The SFWA Board voted to expel me, but the membership never followed suit as required by the bylaws at the time. And no reason was given by the SFWA Board for its vote. The real reason was that Patrick Nielsen Hayden and John Scalzi refused to pay their dues to SFWA and presented the board with choice between me and a Senior Editor at Tor Books as well as its three-time former president.
  4. I am not a white supremacist. I am a Native American with considerable Mexican heritage. Mexican Revolutionary heritage to be precise. I am not a supremacist of any kind, but I would be better described as an East Asian supremacist. I tend to prefer Western European culture, specifically Italian culture, but I am an East Asian Studies major, I lived and studied in Japan, and I still speak some Japanese.
  5. I could not unreasonably be described as a small-d Christian dominionist, but I am more accurately described as a Western Civilizationist. I believe that any civilized Western society will be a Christian one or it will cease to be civilized… if it manages to survive at all. The explosion of Christianity throughout Asia versus Western postchristianity is one reason I think the future favors Asian civilization in the long term. I think Europe is in the process of going back to being the historical sideshow it was prior to the 1500s.
  6. I am not trying to destroy the Hugo Awards. I am indifferent to their fate.
  7. I did not game the 2014 Hugo Awards. After being falsely accused of doing so by numerous parties, I decided to demonstrate the absurdity of the accusation by gaming the 2015 Awards. I trust my innocence with regards to the 2014 Awards is now clear and I look forward to receiving apologies from those who falsely accused me.

Anything else? I tend to doubt knowing the relevant facts will affect many opinions, for the obvious reason that if you are inclined to write someone off completely because you heard they once called someone a “half-savage”, you are providing a very strong indication that your mind is limited to the rhetorical level.

Indeed, the fact that the same ungrammatical excerpt chopped out of the middle of a sentence keeps being trotted out again and again should alert the dialectical mind to the probability that there simply isn’t very much, if any, there there. The complete sentence, which for obvious reasons is almost never quoted, much less quoted in context, is this:


“Being an educated, but ignorant half-savage, with little more
understanding of what it took to build a new literature by “a bunch of
beardy old middle-class middle-American guys” than an illiterate Igbotu
tribesman has of how to build a jet engine, Jemisin clearly does not
understand that her dishonest call for “reconciliation” and even more
diversity within SF/F is tantamount to a call for its decline into
irrelevance.”

But it is entirely obvious that we’re not dealing with dialectical minds capable of logic, we’re dealing with rhetorical minds that are swayed solely by emotion. Such minds can be changed, but not by facts and reason. The more successful we are, and the more staunchly we stand, the more of them that will come over to our side for a whole host of “reasons” that will neither make sense to us nor withstand logical scrutiny.

Especially when this is what passes for the honest dialogue and debate from the other side when they come to comment here:

What does a right-wing fundamentalist southern Baptist do that’s “civilized”? – fuck his sister? Sodomize pigs and goats? Masturbate with his own gun? Beat his wife with a copy of the Bible? Dress in white sheets while spewing the kind of racist garbage that Hitler would be proud of? Too bad your mum didn’t abort you. At least you’re an old fuck who will die before me, so I can laugh over how few people come to your funeral.

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.