Tag: mailvox

Big in Lisbon

QUANTUM MORTIS Gravidade Mortal is free today:

#1  Kindle > Literature & Fiction > Foreign Language Fiction > Portuguese
#1  Foreign Languages > Portuguese > Crime, Thriller & Mystery
#1  Foreign Languages > Portuguese > Fantasy, Horror & Science Fiction


And so is Uma Magia Perdida.


#2 Kindle > Literature & Fiction > Foreign Language Fiction > Portuguese
#2 Foreign Languages > Portuguese > Fantasy, Horror & Science Fiction

In other news, BS wants to know precisely who I mean when I talk about Pink SF/F:

I started reading your blog after finding you on a link from Instapundit. I don’t particularly like SF but do like fantasy of the sort Patricia McKillip writes (as an example). I also love Tolkein (again as an example). I read your story you had for free (now vanished from my Kindle app) and enjoyed it very much. I bought your Irrational Atheist. I think I might like Sarah Hoyt. I see you have some recommendations on your website. I don’t want to wind up with books by authors you refer to as “pink SF/F. Is there a list of what authors to either avoid or to look for?

Marion “the child molester” Zimmer Bradley and Samuel “NAMBLA” Delaney clearly top the Pink list. They are among the worst of the freak show. Off the top of my head there is Jim Hines, Mary Kowal, Rachel Swirsky, Marko Kloos, John Scalzi, Sheri Tepper, and Mercedes Lackey. But you can find a longer list here comprised of self-identified equalitarians.

We probably should see about putting a comprehensive Pink SF/F list together as a service to those who wish to avoid it. So, if you have a candidate, provide their name and make the case for inclusion in the comments. But they should be clear-cut candidates, not merely authors who are influenced by the gatekeepers. For example, I would not consider Jim Butcher to be a Pink SF/F writer, he is merely a gamma male who can’t bear to imagine a man making a move on an attractive woman.

Mailvox: a case for the Singularity

James Miller, an econ professor at Smith and the author of Singularity Rising, asked if he could present his case for
the future likelihood of a Singularity. Or, as the Original Cyberpunk has described it, “the rapture of the nerds”. Since this is a place where we are always pleased to give both space and genuine consideration to diverse points of view, I readily agreed to his request.

I define a Singularity as a threshold of time at which AIs at least as
smart as humans and/or augmented human intelligence radically remake
civilization. 

1.  Rocks exist!
Strange as it seems, the existence of rocks actually
provides us with evidence that it should be possible to build computers
powerful enough to take us to a Singularity. 
There are around ten trillion, trillion atoms in a one-kilogram rock,
and as inventor and leading Singularity scholar Ray Kurzweil writes: “Despite the apparent solidity of the object, the atoms are
all in motion, sharing electrons back and forth, changing particle spins, and
generating rapidly moving electromagnetic fields.  All of this activity represents computation,
even if not very meaningfully organized.”

If the particles in the rock were organized in a more
“purposeful manner” it would be possible to create a computer trillions of
times more computationally powerful than all the human brains on earth
combined.   Our eventual capacity to
accomplish this is established by our second fact. 

2.  Biological cells exist!
The human body makes use of tiny biological machines to
create and repair cells.  Once mankind
masters this nanotechnology we will be able to cheaply create powerful
molecular computers.  Our third fact
proves that these computers could be turned into general purpose thinking
machines. 

3.  Human brains exist!
Suppose this book claimed that scientists would soon build a
human teleportation device.  Given that
many past predictions of scientific miracles—such as cheap fusion power, flying
cars or a cure for cancer—have come up short, you would rightly be suspicious
of my teleportation prediction.  But my
credibility would jump if I discovered a species of apes that had the inborn
ability to instantly transport themselves across great distances.

In some alternate universe that had different laws of
physics, it’s perfectly possible that intelligent machines couldn’t be created.  But human brains provide absolute proof that
our universe allows the construction of intelligent, self-aware machines.   And, because the brain exists already,
scientists can probe, dissect, scan and interrogate it.  We’re even beginning to understand the
brain’s DNA and protein-based ‘source code’. 
Also, many of the tools used to study the brain have been becoming
exponentially more powerful, which explains why engineers might be only a
couple of decades away from building a working digital model of the brain even
though today we seem far from understanding all of the brains operations.  Would-be creators of AI are already using
neuroscience research to help them create machine learning software.   Our fourth fact shows the fantastic
potential of AI. 

4.  Albert Einstein existed!

It’s extremely unlikely that the chaotic forces of evolution
just happened to stumble on the best possible recipe for intelligence when they
created our brains, especially since our brains have many constraints imposed
on them by biology: they must run on energy obtained from mere food; must fit
in a small space; and can’t use useful materials such as metals and plastics,
that engineers employ all the time.

But even if people such as Albert Einstein had close to the
highest possible level of intelligence allowed by the laws of physics, creating
a few million people or machines possessing this man’s brain power would still
change the world far more than the industrial revolution. We share about 98% of our genes with some primates, but that
2% difference was enough to produce creatures that can assemble spaceships,
sequence genes, and build hydrogen bombs.  
What happens when mankind takes its next step, and births lifeforms who
have a 2% genetic distance from us?  

5.  If we were smarter, we would be smarter!

Becoming smarter enhances our ability to do everything,
including our ability to figure out ways of becoming even smarter because our
intelligence is a reflective superpower able to turn on itself to decipher its
own workings.  Consider, for example, a
college student taking a focus-improving drug such as Adderall, Ritalin or
Provigil, to help learn genetics.  After
graduation, this student might get a job researching the genetic basis of human
intelligence, and her work might assist pharmaceutical companies in making
better cognitive enhancing drugs that will help future students acquire an even
deeper understanding of genetics. 
Smarter scientists could invent ways of making even smarter scientists
who could in turn… Now, throw the power of machine intelligence into this
positive feedback loop and we will end up at technological heights beyond our
imagination.  

I hereby recuse myself from the position of critic, mostly since my position on the concept can be best described as “mild, but curious skepticism”. But everyone should feel free to either express their doubts or offer additional arguments to bolster Prof. Miller’s case.

Mailvox: the irrelevance of raciss

The Left is finally, dimly, beginning to grasp that they have inoculated everyone from the charge of racism by virtue of accusing nearly everyone of it.

I just caught the end of a lefty, high-brow (in relative terms) BBC political show (The Marr Show).  At the end a black guy, a lefty trade union leader sitting next to Nigel Farage said that he was troubled…(my pause for effect)…that the word ‘racist’ had been so devalued as to mean very little any more. And that was a very bad thing.  (Nigel agreed)

Once you can debate without sexist, racist etc being used to shut down everything…where does it end? I mean, you might be able to have adult discussions about issues, which could mean real progress towards tackling the tractable issues.

I don’t think it’s a bad thing at all. The devaluation of “racist” was always inevitable, which is one reason that I never feared cretins trying to make it stick.  We see the same thing writ small and large. In the SF/F world, the pinkshirts foolishly thought that by pointing and shrieking and crying raciss would harm me. One Hugo nomination and 10 straight months with at least 100k more pageviews than the leading pinkshirt site has ever had later, it is obvious that their slanderous approach was a complete failure. In the world of UK politics, three straight weeks of every major media institution daily crying racist at UKIP resulted in the first national election in over a century in which neither the Tory nor the Labour party finished first. That is beyond complete failure, it was an epic failure the likes of which have seldom been previously seen.

In a civilized Western world enduring an active decades-long invasion by tens of millions of the half-civilized and uncivilized, it should not be at all surprising that accusations of racism, whether true or false, now tend to do the accused more good than harm. Especially in light of the fact that the core concept underlying anti-racism, the idea that all human beings are fundamentally the same under the skin, has now been completely disproven by genetic science.

Science is always on the side of the realists, no matter their ideology. If your beliefs are in line with both logic and science, truly in line with them, they will eventually triumph in the end, no matter how unpopular they might be today. Prior to the mass invasion of the vibrants, it was possible to claim that the barbarian non-Western populations could be transformed into civilized quasi-Westerners by pretending everyone was the same. A few decades, and more than a few riots, street beheadings, mass rapes, murders, and sex enslavements later, it is no longer possible to credibly claim that multiculturalism, diversity, or anti-racism are intellectually viable positions.

So the Left is beginning to mourn the effective loss of what has been its most important political weapon in the last 50 years. And despite their desperate efforts, I tend to doubt “homophobe” and “transphobe” are likely to serve as adequate substitutes. It would be nice if this meant we could have genuinely dialectical debate, but I tend to suspect it will do little more than change the form of their rhetoric rather than the substance.

Mailvox: employment advice

DH, who has more than a little expertise in the area of employment and human resources,  offers some excellent advice in this age of purges:

Make them fire you. If you resign under pressure you have basically no legal standing. Make. Them. Fire. You. If they pressure you to resign, you should write a letter, declining to resign, declining to take any responsibility for your private, off-duty, speech and/or actions. Specifically point out that you are exercising your personal discretion to engage in political and social commentary regarding current events, that you are not willing to be subjected to a hostile work environment for your unorthodox political views, and that you are not willing to explain or defend or justify those personal political views.

Always make them do their own dirty work.

Most of the time, employment purges are not legal. If you are being pressured to resign, that is in itself a de facto admission that they know they can’t fire you. Of course, none of this will prevent you from getting blackballed when applying for a new job, which is why it is wise to always use an untraceable pseudonym on the Internet and to avoid social media.

It will be used against you, somehow, by someone. Whether or not that is fair and desirable is irrelevant. Those are the new rules of the game. Master them and play by them. Play by them ruthlessly and remember that the Left tends to be far more careless about these things than the Right because they assume their positions are beyond criticism.

Mailvox: pulp future

JG observes the likelihood that one day, the 90-pound ninja princess will be seen as painfully dated too:

Last night I was catching up on my DVR and I watched The Misfits (1961) with Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable.  So, I’m watching Marilyn with her 1950’s pointy-bra mams, her tiny waist, her fertile hips, her squeezable booty, her small feet, her delicate jaw line, and her high-pitched, almost musical uber-feminine voice, and for some reason I had the following thought: 

If she suddenly started doing kung fu and beating the crap out of all these cowboys….. that would be absolutely f***ing retarded. 

Fortunately, that didn’t happen.  Nonetheless, I’ve come to the conclusion that in 60+ years, IF we still have the technology to enable things like films, DVRs and TV, people will look at all those action flicks from this decade starring Scarlett Johansson and laugh in much the same way we laugh at “guy in a rubber suit” monster movies from the 1950s.   

It’s not hard to imagine the utterly retarded nature of our entertainment will one day be seen as the absurdist Whedon years. Joss Whedon will probably be viewed as a crazy neo-Dadaist clown famous for his over-the-top equalitarian lunacies.

Mailvox: making the choice

In response to yesterday’s column about it being time to choose your side, I heard from a reader who is interested in creating a short fiction companion site to Castalia House. While I don’t have the bandwidth to do much more than offer advice and perhaps some branding, I’m interested in finding out if there is anyone here interested in being involved in some way, shape, or form, be it editing, contributing short fiction, or helping with the site.

If so, mention it here, and if there are enough people that are interested, I’ll see about gathering the names and sending them to the individual concerned. There are a number of possibilities here I can imagine, from amping up Stupefying Stories to creating an entirely new short fiction brand. But the initial path will be determined by how many volunteers are willing to get involved.

As I told the guy, there is no money in short fiction these days. It has to be a mission and an objective to be pursued as an end in itself. I’d like to see it happen, as I can easily envision it being the NCAA to Castalia’s NFL, where writers can develop their storytelling and writing skills in the process of becoming publishable authors. But it has to be done right or there is no point in doing it at all.

The key to making things happen, of course, is simply jumping in and doing it. At Castalia, we had no plan. We had 10 ebooks, a name, a URL, and the support of the Dread Ilk. Three months later, we’ve sold or given away more than 15,000 books. So, I have no doubt that if the people here want to make it happen, we can collectively make it happen.

It would surprise me terribly if in five years, we have a fledgling Internet TV channel and production studio going. Or perhaps we will be petty warlords battling for local supremacy in various zombie-strewn post-civilization wastelands instead. But regardless, we have the advantage of knowing that even two men joined by their mutual allegiance to a certain Name can accomplish more than most people can imagine.

Mailvox: The Greatest American Author

Nate poses the question:

Faulkner?  Hemingway?  Poe?  Some other? Go. I lean towards Faulkner myself… but I am an inveterate southron rebel.. and so I confess bias.  That doesn’t mean I’m not correct.

I have to admit that I admire Faulkner, for his attitude towards publishers and prizes if nothing else. But I am not especially fond of his work.  Hemingway I find to be considerably overrated, more a product of his self-promotion than anything else. His lean, stripped-down prose was innovative and influential, but I think it has had a seriously deleterious effect on literature. One has only to read John C. Wright to lament the world of rich and expansive prose that we have lost.

We are all the children of Hemingway and we are the worse off for it.

I am strongly partial to Edgar Allen Poe, but I am concerned that may be more due to my inclination for the morbid than anything else. Before I cast my vote for him, perhaps we should cast a broader net.

There is John Updike. No, he is too self-conscious, too inclined towards literary posturing. Everything reads as if he is looking expectantly at the readers and anticipating their approval: “look, Ma, I’s writin’!” John Irving has a way with words, but he wrote essentially the same book over and over, and I found his petty, exaggerated absurdities to be insulting. Saul Bellow is boring and tedious. Philip Roth is perverted, self-absorbed, and tedious.

There is O. Henry, whose short stories are among the best ever written, but there is more to literary greatness than tight plotting and clever twist endings.

Neal Stephenson merits being at least mentioned, as I would consider his Reamde to be a legitimate candidate for a Great American Novel. But his grasp of the human condition, to say nothing of his difficulty with endings, is too shaky in comparison with the other greats. Ray Bradbury is the most sentimental American author, and I would argue that Dandelion Wine is the most perfect portrait of the traditional America to which every sane American would like to return, but, like Stephenson, the mere inclusion on the list is sufficient. I would say that Bradbury is the greatest American SF author, however.

I am an F. Scott Fitzgerald fan, but his work is too little and too light to merit serious consideration. I have not read Thomas Pynchon, and I seriously hope that no one would so foolish as to propose David Foster Wallace with a straight face. Tom Wolfe’s novels have always struck me as cartoons, insightful and observant cartoons, to be sure, but cartoons nevertheless. Kurt Vonnegut is an unfunny clown; I put him below Stephen King. Hell, I’d put him below Stephanie Miller and Laurell K. Hamilton. Jack London might be the quintessentially American writer, but his style was far too limited to merit serious consideration.

At the end of the day, I don’t see how it is possible to go with anyone but Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain himself. He had the complete package, prose, plot, characters, and commentary on the human condition, in addition to fully representing the American spirit.

Mailvox: irritated by atheists

DB has a tough time maintaining an even keel when arguing with atheists:

How do you maintain your temper when arguing with atheists. I cannot. I find myself so angry that I cannot take anything they say at face value. God has spoken to me and told me to stop arguing with atheists. I can still witness but under no circumstances may I argue. I am directed to pity them and pray for their salvation.

Do you ever wonder if you are helping them or if you are getting through at all? I feel a visceral anger at them and the damage they have caused our society. I am no longer going to be arguing on the internet or in person. How can they be anything but enemies of all that is good?

Since good is defined by God and since atheists are, by definition, active disbelievers in God, logic dictates that atheists are enemies of God and all that is good. This logic is confirmed by observation; examine any evil and the chances are high that atheists are disproportionately caught up in it, or at the very least are overt advocates.

But that doesn’t mean you should get angry with them when they start arguing dishonestly, attempting to pass off rhetoric as dialectic, moving the goalposts, holding you to standards they don’t hold themselves, offering repeated bait-and-switches, and falling silent rather than admitting defeat. To the contrary, such behaviors indicate that they know they are losing the argument.

The reason I never get even a little upset by the atheist with whom I am debating is because I know they are not my intended audience. I don’t care if they cling stubbornly to their erroneous beliefs nor do I care what they do in order to preserve them. To me they are little more than a stage prop, a straight man, a feeder of lines. The worse my interlocutor’s behavior becomes, the more convincing my arguments are perceived by the audience. In fact, for me the difficulty is not maintaining my equanimity, but rather, avoiding the temptation to intentionally trigger the bad behavior and thereby winning a rhetorical battle rather than a comprehensive dialectical one.

(NB: this is precisely why atheists go out of their way to be so offensive and to upset the Christian. It is an attempt to win the rhetorical battle by making you lose your temper.)

So, if you are a Christian who finds that atheists tend to make your temperature rise, apologetic debate is probably not for you. Serve the Kingdom in another role; pray for them. Pick them up when they fall down. Help them when they need assistance. More souls have been won for Jesus Christ by kindness than by words.

But atheists are prouder, more intelligent, and less emotional than the norm, and are therefore less convinced by deeds than words. So, many of them require their pride in their intelligence to be broken before they can reach a state of mind that permits them to hear the Good News and contemplate it rationally. And this is where people like me can open up their minds, by forcing them to acknowledge the myriad flaws in their arguments and by making them question their previously unquestioned assumptions. I know that I am getting through to at least some of them, because they have let me know that has been the case.

It’s rewarding and inspiring to see atheists transform from bitter enemies of God to fearless servants of Jesus Christ. If you keep in mind that the next arrogant, irritating, and slippery-tongued atheist you meet may be the larval form of a John C. Wright or an Apostle Paul, I suspect you will be able to find some charity in your heart for them.

Mailvox: the psychic undercurrent

Anonymous Conservative notices that everyone’s antennae are twitching these days:

Something difficult to pin down is activating amygdalae. It’s telling everyone’s brain that bad is coming, and everyone is trying to assuage those amygdalae, to turn off all the uncomfortable warning alarms they are producing in their brains. Conservatives buy up guns and canned goods to ease the stress level and lower the warning level by preparing. Liberals, deep down know the collapse is the end for them, so the only way to assuage their amygdalae is to retreat even deeper into the bubbles of denial that are producing our problems the begin with. Part of that denial is sending anyone who doesn’t tell them the future is happy far, far away, so they won’t have to think about it.

What Vox asks is the most fascinating question of our time. How can it be that our bellies are full, we are bombarded with endless, professionally produced propaganda telling us everything is fine, and yet deep within us, we all feel like the cattle on an island that head for high ground hours before the tsunami, that nobody knew was coming, hits? How complex is our biology that we connect with our world on such a deep subconscious level that we can’t be tricked by professional liars with nearly limitless resources and a death grip on every major media? How bad is the coming mess, that we can’t be blinded to it?

And why is it in nature, when the tsunami is coming, no cattle insist on telling all the others that now is the best possible time to go swimming, but in our supposedly more advanced species, we have idiots telling us that if we only double down on the debt spending, print a little more currency, and debauch our culture sexually a little more, everything will get better, because a collapse is impossible?

Of course, some are more sensitive than others. I’ve more or less felt this way since 1999, and not due to Y2K either. Or at least not directly; my concern then was that it would be used as the same sort of excuse that 9/11 was two years later.

Remember, it’s not paranoia when they actually are out to undermine the foundations of your civilization. If only we actually had a Last Redoubt to which we could safely retreat from the rising tide of abhumanity.

Mailvox: Mozilla’s Islamophobia

BC thinks Eich could have handled it better too:

I am a little surprised that you haven’t pursued the anti-Islam angle on the whole Eich thing — e.g.  “Mozilla Policy Denies Muslims Executive Positions.” Personally, I think Mozilla’s problems started well before they forced Eich to fall on his sword, and that they let the grounds of the debate be set for them.

While I don’t think firing those who complained (as you suggested) would have worked, they had other options that a seasoned PR staff could have found. Off the top of my head, they could have responded to the crisis early by pointing out that, while senior management absolutely is pro gay marriage (I assume that they are) that denying all who oppose gay marriage the CEO position is fundamentally incompatible with their open philosophy. Then turn it around and ask why it is OK for the boycotters (OK Cupid in particular) to be so openly anti-Muslim? Since when is extreme prejudice against Muslims not just tolerated, but encouraged? As a global company, one would think Mozilla would hold itself to a higher standard.

My concern about the firings is that they would be billed as proof that he was anti-gay and actually caused things to snowball.

Obviously, what he did failed. My main point is that if you can’t manage to present OK Cupid’s position as the close minded/thought police in this kerfuffle then your PR folks are not very good. Seriously, the CEO made a small contribution to an admittedly hot button issue where he was actually in the majority at the time, therefore we should boycott an entire company that, on the whole, is probably strongly left of center? It’s ridiculous. So, I am confident that it was poor PR even if I am not 100% on the correct solution.

My guess is that a better solution would show how open Mozilla is — something like showing muslims in turbans working closely with an extravagantly gay guy wearing ass-less chaps, two women in Subaru showing up at work with an orthodox jew, then show the caption “OK Cupid would have us fire half of these people. We don’t tolerate intolerance”. I would have laughed and OK Cupid would have looked like the fascists that they are.

The reality, I think, is that Mozilla’s board and top management didn’t want Eich there as CEO and was happy to see him forced out, even though they wanted to keep him around in a non-CEO capacity. (High function rabbits understand that they need some non-rabbits around to do the actual work out of the limelight.) So, even though they could have easily won the PR war and sent the gay fascists within and without the organization scurrying for the closet, they didn’t want to fight it, let alone win it.