Tag: McRapey

Is John Scalzi a malignant narcissist?

As if being a self-confessed rapist who associates with men accused of sexually battering women wasn’t enough of an indication, reading Michael Trust’s fascinating work on malignant narcissists tends to indicate that there is something seriously off about John Scalzi. Consider these various points from the book:

Competitive/Relative Inferiority

Narcissists are weirdly competitive and strangely envious over seemingly insignificant details, from how the salary they earn compares to other’s, to the respectability of the shampoo they use, compared to the shampoos that others use. It is a shielding mechanism, designed to protect their ego, and their amygdala, from confronting their own insecurity.

You can sometimes spot this trait in a narcissist, by how they will try to verbally downplay their competitiveness in realms where they can’t compete, as a way of creating a false reality where they don’t care about their competitive inferiority. If your narcissist, out of the blue says, “Other people are obsessed with how much money they earn, but I really don’t care about things like that,” then you know they were just obsessing over exactly that subject. They are trying to establish a verbalized reality where their not caring, will allow their brain to relax over their abject failure in that regard.

McRapey on weightlifting (or practically any other subject, for that matter. To take all his various protestations about not caring at face value, you’d have to assume he was a Stoic of an emotional flatness to put the Romans to shame.)

Last week, as part of my general “try to lose weight and get a little healthier because you’re middle-aged now and you don’t want to die” thing, I started going to the local YMCA to use its weight room and indoor track, with my daughter as my workout partner. She’s been on the powerlifting team at her school for the last three years, so she’s knowledgeable about the weights in a way I am not, and is thus a good person with whom to work out. At the end of our first session, I tweeted the following:

    Let it be known that my daughter can lift more than I do. Because she’s on her school’s weightlifting team, and also because she’s awesome.

    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) June 30, 2014

This naturally aroused the derision of the hooting pack of status-anxious dudebros who let me live rent-free in their brains, prompting a predictable slew of tweets and blog posts about how this is further proof of my girly-man status, hardly a man at all, dude do you even lift, and so on.  I am delighted in all the ways that they are the best, and also, better than me.


Diminution of Stature/Humiliation

The narcissist needs to feel as if they have power, so as to pacify their insecure amygdala. It is only when everyone around them reflexively supplicates, that the narcissist can let their amygdala relax. For this reason, narcissists often build a perception of themselves as superiors, and they demand that others treat them this way. 

McRapey on running for SFWA President for the fourth time 

I have decided to step forward once more (last, last very last time I swear)
as a candidate for President, a position to which I was first elected
in 2010. I had originally intended to step down at the end of this term,
but on reflection decided there were still some things I wanted to
accomplish in the role, and it made sense to try them over the course of
an additional year. Whether I get that year will be up to SFWA members,
of course; they may be tired of me and my management style. In which
case I hope they elect someone else, rather than, say, stabbing me
Caesar-style at the Nebula Awards. Please, SFWA members: No stabbing.
That’s pointy and hurts.

Insist on Arguable Untruths

Narcissists who do this will insist on an untruth, especially one which would impede the attainment of a goal important to the group, and then they will refuse to acknowledge the falsity of the untruth. I fully believe narcissists who practice this technique do it knowingly. They know that what they are asserting is false, they enjoy seeing you upset over the fact that they are so unable to accept logic, and they refuse to give in purposely, to watch you grow increasingly agitated and frustrated. To these narcissists, truth is immaterial, the group’s goals are meaningless, and your upset emotional state is blissfully amusing. As a result they have one goal – to see your frustrated.

McRapey on the lack of women writing hard science fiction

I have a degree in philosophy from the University of Chicago
(specializing in the philosophy of language), and therefore have ample
training in rhetoric, so I doubt that rhetorical deficiencies on this
end are the issue. I read your column Vox, and I grasped your
obvious rhetorical device. It doesn’t impress me. As continually stated,
your rhetorical device is obviously bad: Poorly stated, poorly
supported, and rheorically incoherent. To restate: Your thesis is wrong
and you lack the rhetorical skills to present your thesis in a coherent
fashion. Your latter-day attempt to brush off your sexist and ignorant
statement as sarcasm is baldly transparent as backtracking; even if it
were true, it shows that your use of such devices is appallingly clumsy.
Again one wonders how you got your columnist gig, or, alternately, if
anyone bothers to edit you, as you so clearly need.

Being a Central Information Hub

Two things narcissists try to do to irritate is to invade privacy, and control and guide the flow of all information. This is probably due to some deep perception that their entire self-worth is defined by the group’s beliefs and perceptions (ie, it’s acceptance of their false reality), combined with an assumption (erroneously assuming that everyone else thinks like them), that everyone else’s self-worth is as well. Thus, to a narcissist, control the information flow, and you control everyone’s self-assessments of their own self-worth. To the narcissist, that information is pure power over not just everyone, but in the narcissist’s mind, the very (false) reality that everyone inhabits.

1. McRapey on all controversial subjects of the last 10 years

Comments off on this

2. McRapey on all people who might disagree with him


You are blocked from following @scalzi and viewing @scalzi’s Tweets.
  
Out-grouping

When interacting socially, narcissists are snakes in the grass. One of their major objectives when dealing with those they dislike is to alienate their targets from any social group to which they belong. They do this because they themselves require social validation to support the false reality that they construct to shield their amygdala from stimulation. As long as the group accepts the narcissist and their false reality, the narcissist can cling to the belief that they are somehow normal, or even superior. It is this social validation which serves as a crucial psychological crutch, shielding them from the pain that would result from an honest self-assessment of what they are. Projecting this psychology on others, the narcissist will assume that group-affiliation is just as vitally important to you. As a result, they will seek to disrupt your group affiliations as a way to both, try to disrupt the group-validation of the false reality they assume you have, and preserve this vital psychological crutch for themselves.


McRapey on August 14, 2013, after I announced my expulsion from SFWA


For No Particular Reason At All, This Song Seems Strangely Appropriate Today…. On an entirely unrelated note, today I renewed my SFWA membership. Seems I forgot to do it earlier. Oh, well, an easily corrected oversight, and it was. 


Privacy Invasion

The narcissist will intrude into their private spaces, and then feign ignorance of why they should care that he is there.

McRapey

Ask McRapey about this one. He knows what he did. This was the bizarre behavior that made it evident Scalzi’s behavior isn’t merely that of a normal self-centered individual, but more akin to that of the malignant narcissists described in the book. One would do well to keep these things in mind before one too quickly accept McRapey’s retroactive claims concerning his “satirical” practices at face value.

I’d add one more red flag in addition to those mentioned in the book. It’s what I would call a “probing” style of communication. Everything is two steps forward and one step back; if resistance is met, then it’s all only a joke, ha ha ha, and the individual retreats. If not, the breakthrough is quickly reinforced and a new narrative is established. It’s basically a deceptive tactic used to control the narrative while concealing the narcissist’s objectives. The joke about not wanting to be stabbed at the Nebula Awards is a good example of that; what is the point of the joke in the first place given that it’s not even remotely funny. It is to keep things lighthearted and distract from the fact that the narcissist is dead serious about seeking what he perceives to be power again.

How to Deal with Narcissists is a remarkable book. And it’s astonishing how well it describes the behavior of certain trolls known to infest these parts, as well as explain the reasons for that behavior. My completely unprofessional opinion is that John Scalzi is not a full-blown malignant narcissist, but merely has some observable tendencies in that regard and is rather less psychologically normal than most of his fans and his critics would tend to believe. These tendencies are most clearly seen in his habitual dishonesty and complete inability to admit the truth even when caught out publicly in a lie.

Traffic report 2014

The growth in site traffic was less spectacular than in 2013, and we saw a 1.5-million pageview month instead of the two-million one that I speculated might be possible, but traffic was nevertheless solid and both VP and AG continued to enjoy increased readership, with an overall 19.7 percent increase in pageviews over the course of the year. And, if anything, it’s picking up, as December 2014 was up 38 percent in comparison with December 2013.

In 2014, Vox Popoli had 11,236,085 pageviews and Alpha Game 4,457,537 for a total of 15,693,622 Google pageviews. To the left is a
chart showing the monthly traffic for both blogs over the last four
years; even without Alpha Game, VP has grown from 11,383 to 34,809 average daily pageviews. Combined, Vox Popoli and Alpha Game are now running at a average rate of 47,343 daily pageviews. Not quite 50k, I’m afraid, not even if they are converted to the slightly more generous WordPress metric. As for the running annual totals, they are as follows:

2008: 3,496,757
2009: 4,414,801
2010: 4,827,183
2011: 5,969,066
2012: 7,774,074
2013: 13,111,695
2014: 15,693,622

I doubt we’ll be able to maintain a 2-year doubling rate for a third straight year, since that would require nearly 11 million more pageviews in 2015, but one never knows. And speaking of nearly 50k daily pageviews, I would be remiss if, for no particular reason at all, I did not continue with a certain comparison
that was repeatedly brought to my attention in previous years. This is,
of course, the comparison with the hugely famous and massively popular
Whatever, formerly the biggest and best-known site in science fiction. The following chart shows the comparative
blog traffic over the last six years as measured in Google Pageviews.
 

Interesting, is it not, that Whatever’s traffic has now declined below the point that mine was when it was declared irrelevant on the basis of its paltry traffic by McRapey’s fans? So, have we seen Peak McRapey? It’s hard to say, as he’s increasingly moved to Twitter, an ideal medium for his unique combination of fabrication, snark, and self-promotion.

I found the 2014 totals to be particularly amusing in light of this clueless post by an SF Pinkshirt named Nalini Haynes who went public with her strategy to starve the Supreme Dark Lord: “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.”

Apparently it didn’t work so well. Anyhow, 2015 promises to be an interesting year at VP and hopefully a much better one than 2014 was. While the Hugo debacle was entertaining and the Castalia launch went much better than anticipated, I didn’t finish Book Two, Alpenwolf didn’t finish First Sword, and there were some very difficult situations being experienced behind the scenes by friends and family. If, at any point last year, you sensed I didn’t give even the smallest damn about the various public contretemps, you were correct.

But we’ve got two new partners and an exciting new project in the works at Alpenwolf, both First Sword and Book Two will be out this year, and we’ve got a number of new writers, new bloggers, and new books to announce in the next few months at Castalia. So, thank you for your interest (even if it is no more than morbid curiosity), thank you for your support, and I hope you will come along for the ride in the new year.

The Internet is forever

First, let me say that I absolutely welcome any judgment between John Scalzi and me concerning who is more reliably truthful, in a court of law or anywhere else. I believe it will be considerably easier for me to prove I am not a “racist, sexist, homophobic dipshit”, or a “troll”, than it will be for John Scalzi to prove he is not a rapist or a liar, especially in light of his known associations with the likes of Ed Kramer, Samuel Delaney, Jim Hines, and Jian Gomeshi in addition to his known propensity to make false and self-serving claims.

Got a concerned email this morning from someone who saw online an assertion that I was a “self-confessed rapist.”…

I don’t intend to do anything about Beale continuing to assert I have
confessed to being a rapist. I could bring a libel suit against him, on
the idea that accusing me of confessing to rape is defamation, it’s an
untrue assertion, and Beale knows it’s untrue and continues to assert it
anyway, for malicious purposes (the latter being important as I am
likely to be considered a public individual at this point). However, I
would also need to show that Beale’s actions have caused me harm,
economically and/or emotionally. Aside from annoyance, which does not
rise to actionable levels, I’m not seeing the harm to me personally.
Essentially, Beale escapes punishment here because he’s failed to be
important enough to be harmful.

I assume that for the foreseeable future, Beale will continue to lie
about me confessing to be a rapist, for his own purposes. Again,
annoying. On the other hand, useful. If Beale is perfectly happy to lie
so baldly and obviously about this particular thing, perhaps that should
be considered the baseline for the truth value of any other assertion
that he might choose to make, particularly about people. Likewise,
consider what sort of person you’d have to be to intentionally lie about
someone confessing to rape, and to continue to offer up that lie for
two years straight, despite knowing otherwise. Consider whether this
person is worth your time at all, or your belief. 

Of course he’s not going to do anything at all. The very last thing John Scalzi wants is to place himself in the position of having a judge deciding who defamed and damaged whom here. As for his latest claims, let’s juxtapose two public statements by Mr. Scalzi, separated by two years and two months.

  1. “No, I have not raped or sexually assaulted anyone. No, I have not admitted to raping or sexually assaulting anyone.” – John Scalzi, 27 December, 2014
  2. “I’m a rapist. I’m one of those men who likes to force myself on women
    without their consent or desire and then batter them sexually.” – John Scalzi, 25 October 2012

Now, tell me, which statement do I know is untrue? Which statement do you know is untrue? As it happens, I don’t know anything at all about Mr. Scalzi’s sexual practices or sexual history, except for what he has stated in public. Do you? Did you also know it wasn’t true that Jian Gomeshi sexually assaults women? Or that the late Marion Zimmer Bradley assaulted children? For crying out loud, Scalzi is observably lying again when he falsely states: “Beale knows it’s untrue”.

I repeat: I don’t know anything at all about Mr. Scalzi’s sexual practices or sexual history, except for what he has stated in public. As to which of those contradictory statements are true, I have no information at all.

The demonstrable facts are simple. John Scalzi has publicly admitted to being a rapist. He has openly admitted to sexually battering women. Whether he in fact committed the acts he admits to is irrelevant. Retroactively claiming his statements were “satire” doesn’t change what he wrote or what he admitted to doing, and it is absolutely and utterly ridiculous to claim that I am somehow in possession of his entire sexual history.

In this vein, it is important to recall that John Scalzi is known to be deceitful and prone to repeatedly telling easily disprovable falsehoods:

John Scalzi @scalzi 6:20 AM – 4 Dec 12
Hey, authors of non-traditionally published books! Promote your book to my 50K daily blog readers TODAY

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi 3:33 PM – 10 Aug 13
@gregpak I think if people like the content they will keep coming in regardless. I mean, my site gets 50K readers a day

“Scalzi himself quotes it at over 45,000 unique visitors daily and more than two million page views monthly.”
– Lightspeed Magazine, September 2010 interview

All three of those statements are false. I happen to be in possession of John Scalzi’s traffic records, and the fact is that at the time he made that last claim, Whatever averaged 12,860 pageviews per day, five times LESS than the 64,516 daily pageviews he was claiming. Nor did he have “over 45,000 unique visitors daily”.

Keep in mind too that Scalzi has repeatedly made false claims about me, and that he is actively and professionally associated with those who have publicly made false claims that I am “a self-described misogynist, racist, anti-Semite, and a few other flavors of asshole”, a “white supremacist”, and who have gone so far as to deny the scientific evidence of my Native American ancestry.

John Scalzi is a proven liar. I am, on the other hand, known to be rigidly truthful, less for any personal qualities than for the obvious reason that as a nationally syndicated political columnist, I have long been accustomed to having my every word closely scrutinized by political opponents seeking to disqualify me. So, by all means, please judge between us concerning who is truthful and who is not. Notice too who permits comments on these posts and who does not.

Perhaps those concerned individuals should ask John Scalzi why it is that I continue to expose his lies and hoist him on his own petard. They might wish to ask him if he refused to pay his dues to SFWA and threatened to leave if I was not purged from the organization. They could ask him if he had any discussions with Tor editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden about it, and if he knew that Mr. Nielsen Hayden was also refusing to pay his dues until I was purged. And finally, they should also ask precisely who was attacking whom, and why, in 2005.

Mammoth hunting requires no math

Which appears to be a good thing, seeing as how David Futrelle can’t grasp the relevant rape statistics:

I thought I’d seen every variety of rape apologism known to humankind. But this is a new one for me: Fantasy author and garbage human Vox Day has decided that all claims of rape directed at white guys are suspect because … white guys don’t rape.

No, really. That’s his actual argument:

    White American men simply don’t rape these days. At this point, unless a woman claims it was committed by a black or Hispanic man she didn’t previously know, all claims of rape, especially by a college woman, have to be considered intrinsically suspect.

His, er, source for these claims? A post from the website Women For Men — founded by familiar names Suzanne Venker, Helen Smith and Christina Hoff Sommers — about a video of unknown provenance of a shouting match that involves a white woman accusing a presumably white man of rape. (There are no details on the alleged incident, and it’s not clear from watching the almost literally unbelievable video what exactly happened or if the video is even real.) Needless to say, even if the video is 100% real it doesn’t actually provide anything even remotely approaching evidence for Vox’s racist claims.

Which isn’t surprising given that they aren’t, you know, true. When it comes to rape, of course, whites and blacks are overwhelmingly — roughly 8 out of 10 times — victimized by members of their own race And in most cases, as is well-known, rapes are committed by people the victim knows, not the proverbial man hiding in the bushes.

Well, no, that’s not “my actual argument”. It’s always amusing to see how the anklebiters try to pretend rhetoric is dialectic and vice-versa, depending upon what suits their purpose at the moment. Futrelle’s posturing is nothing but pure rabbit rhetoric; statistical analysis is not apology. If he actually wants the dialectical form of the argument, it is this: all claims of rape directed at white guys are intrinsically suspect because white men in America are disproportionately disinclined to commit rape. If he wishes a dialectical debate on the merits of that argument, then let us entertain his critique, by all means.

But Futrelle has no genuine intention of contesting the dialectical level, he is merely countering rhetorically-charged dialectic with dialectic-flavored rhetoric. Nevertheless, let us take Mr. Futrelle’s pseudo-dialectic at face value. According to the FBI, there were 13,886 rape arrests in 2012. Of them, 9,027 (65%) arrestees were “white” men, and 4,512 (35%) were black men. Wow, that just completely disproves my point that white men don’t commit much rape, given that 65 percent is reasonably close to the white percentage of the population (72.4), right?

Not so fast. The FBI counts both white and Hispanic offenders as “white” for statistical purposes. But there are other ways to fill in the missing information, which is to say estimate how those 9,027 arrests are distributed between white men and Hispanic men.

While no comprehensive reports have been done, every smaller report I have read indicates that Hispanics commit rape and other sex offenses at a disproportionate rate; some even show that they do so in excess of the black rate. (It is a basic police heuristic that if it’s a financial crime, it’s a white; a violent crime, a black; a sex crime, a Hispanic.) But, in order to be conservative, we shall assume that the Hispanic proclivity to commit sex offenses is no greater than the known black rate. Since the rate of black arrests is 2.77 times the black percentage of the population, applying the same multiplier to the Hispanic percentage indicates that 45.6 percent or 4,113 of the “white” men arrested for rape were actually Hispanic.

This means that actual white men only represent 29.6 percent of rape arrests, which indicates that white men are 59 percent less likely to commit rape than the average individual and 85 percent less likely to commit rape than a black or Hispanic man. For those who think in ratios rather than percentages, this means that the risk of rape posed by the average black or Hispanic man is at least 6.76 times greater than that posed by the average white man.

Since a number of Mr. Futtrelle’s readers have foolishly assumed that I am defending white men out of self interest, I should point out that for good or for ill, none of these statistics apply to me. While there are no relevant crime statistics for multiracial individuals, it turns out there are for men who are “American Indian and Alaska Native in combination with one or more other races”. With a 0.59 arrest/population ratio, we are 1.43 times more likely to commit rape than white men.

So, while it is certainly correct to say that white men engage in an amount of rape these days, they commit such a relatively small percentage of them in comparison with their percentage of the population that if college women are reporting more rapes by white men than by black or Hispanic men, their reports must be regarded as statistically improbable, ideologically motivated, and intrinsically suspicious. But of course we all know that there are statistical outliers, given that John Scalzi is white and he has reliably informed us that he, for one, is a rapist.

As rhetoric or dialectic, the conclusion stands. Certain claims of rape are intrinsically suspect on the basis of their divergence from documented statistical norms.

Also, note in the comments this implied threat from the cyberstalker Yama. I am sure you will understand how it couldn’t help but cause me substantial emotional distress and placed me in fear of death and bodily injury.

Nequam | December 19, 2014 at 8:49 pm
Ugh. I’m starting to think of creepy indulgent revenge porn involving sharp blades and a garbage disposal (so there won’t be anything worth trying to sew back on)

yamamanama | December 19, 2014 at 8:53 pm
Is it wrong that I thought of Vox Day going through that ordeal and smiled?

Yes, Yama, it is wrong. And your public expression of that thought is also, in light of your 56 documented months of cyberstalking me, most likely unlawful.

Is this a satire too?

I invite the reader to compare the difference in the amount of effort McRapey has put in over the years in repeatedly denouncing me for what he imagines to be my White Supremacy, Dudebroism, Racism, Sexism, Homophobia, and general Dipshittery with his observed reluctance to similarly denounce his friend Jian Gomeshi, upon whose Canadian radio show he appeared to discuss my imaginary crimes:

The Toronto Police Sex Crimes Unit was rather less reticent:

On Friday, October 31, 2014, Toronto Police Service Sex Crimes started an investigation into several allegations of sexual assault. On Wednesday, November 26, 2014, Jian Ghomeshi, 47, of Toronto, surrendered to police. He was charged with:

1) four counts of Sexual Assault

2) Overcome Resistance – Choking

He is scheduled to appear in court early this afternoon. We will notify the media of the court location well in advance of the appearance. 

Now, John Scalzi is a self-admitted rapist (“I’m a rapist. I’m one of those men who likes to force myself on women
without their consent or desire and then batter them sexually.”) so perhaps that might explain his reluctance to repeatedly and vociferously denounce an actual sex assailant. Again. One can observe that the list of sex criminals with whom he is known to be associated has grown rapidly in the last year:

  • Samuel Delany, SFWA Grand Master
  • Marion Zimmer Bradley, SFWA
  • Ed Kramer, SFWA
  • Jian Gomeshi

There will almost surely be more in the months and years to come. My money would be on a Jim Hines-related scandal, as he not only looks creepy, but has a passion for rape-counseling that strikes me as suspiciously akin to the single, forty-something Assistant Scoutmaster who loves nothing more than to take young boys camping. Perhaps it is merely a case of infelicitous physiognomy, but you have to admit, Hines looks like Central Casting’s idea of a sexual offender. (Seriously, McCreepy, you absolutely need a new PR shot. About the only thing that would make it more damning would be books by Nabokov, Breen, and MZB on the bookshelf behind you.)  Nor can one excuse McRapey on the grounds of “guilt by association” because guilt by association with me is something to which he has repeatedly appealed in attempting to tar Larry Correia and others.

So, is this “satire” again or simply sweet irony?

How to make a monster

A Very Important Lesson from John Scalzi and the SJWs:

John Scalzi@scalzi
Kid called me out on Twitter last night for something she considered sexist. Proud of her; happy to have raised her so she knew she could.

Josh Neff ‏@joshuamneff
You’re doing parenting right.

The Inner Babysitter ‏@PSMHopkins
I literally cheered when I saw that last night.

Ben Emery ‏@JamesBenEmery
As a parent, that’s when you sit back and go, “I know I’ve made mistakes, but overall I haven’t completely failed.”

ChaosNexus ‏@ChaosNexus
I can’t imagine there would be any wilting flowers in the Scalzi household.

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi
@ChaosNexus There really aren’t.

Well, there is observably one wilting flower there, at any rate. Notice how the male SJW openly revels in his failure; he asserts pride in his own degradation. Now, where have I heard this sort of thing before? Ah, yes, now I recollect, in Isaiah, when the prophet speaks of the judgment of the wicked of Judah.

“O My people! Their oppressors are children, And
women rule over them. O My people! Those who guide you lead you astray and confuse the direction of your paths.”
– Isaiah 3:12.

And then, of course, there is this:

“The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it
to account. They had played a similar trick with the instinct of
parenthood. The family could not actually be abolished, and, indeed,
people were encouraged to be fond of their children, in almost the
old-fashioned way. The children, on the other hand, were systematically
turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their
deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought
Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded
night and day by informers who knew him intimately.”
– George Orwell, 1984

There is nothing new about the SJW. He is the harbinger of evil and the symptom of a decadent society in the process of collapse. But to return to this specific SJW, there is, as you might expect on Twitter, a punchline.


@scalzi “Kid called me out on Twitter last night for something she considered sexist”
So you muted her?

High-larious.

8 women accuse Jian Ghomeshi

More women come forward to accuse CBC radio host Jian Gomeshi of violence, sexual abuse, and harassment:

Eight women from across Canada now accuse former CBC host Jian
Ghomeshi of abusive behaviour ranging from allegations of beating and
choking without consent, to workplace sexual harassment. The allegations the Star is probing range from 2002 to the present. One of the women, popular Canadian television actor Lucy DeCoutere, has agreed to be identified. DeCoutere, who plays Lucy on

Trailer Park Boys

, recalls an incident in 2003 when she alleges Ghomeshi, without
warning or consent, choked her to the point she could not breathe and
then slapped her hard three times on the side of her head.

Make it nine now. In the meantime, this is what McRapey, who voluntarily appeared on Gomeshi’s show last year and while on it claimed to have fairly characterized me as a “sexist” and “misogynist”, among other things, had to say about the man with whom he was so chummy on the show:

Some thoughts on Jian Ghomeshi, about whom I feel entitled to opine because I was once a guest on his show — talking about the little fundraising thing I did last year which included RAINN, an interview which now in retrospect is sadly ironic….

I think it’s possible that Mr. Ghomeshi deluded himself into thinking
these attacks equated to consensual sexual play, which is both not an
excuse at all, and a good argument for availing one’s self of educators
in that particular field who can teach one how to do one’s play safely
and to know what “consensual” actually means. However, I think it’s
rather more likely that Mr. Ghomeshi, who is a full-fledged adult and
someone with some evident facility for words, was in fact quite aware
that what he was doing was not in the least consensual and relied on his
position at the top of the Canadian cultural heap to protect him from
the consequences of his actions, as indeed it appears to have done for a
very long time….

I don’t know Mr. Ghomeshi other than through a very brief professional encounter. I don’t envy the people who do
know him who are now learning about the allegations and who suspect
that they are true. What do you do with a friend like that? Do you
drop him? Do you maintain he is your friend but acknowledge what he’s
done is wrong? Do you fight for your friend, right or wrong? One of Mr. Ghomeshi’s friends addressed this in a post of his own,
which is worth reading. I don’t have any answers for this one. I know
what I think I would want to do; I don’t know if it’s what I would do because I’ve never had to be in this situation. What I can say is that I hope I never am in this situation.

McRapey is careful to say that he believes the women – of course he does – and that Gomeshi merits punishment if he is proven guilty and so forth. Which is all well and fine. But isn’t it fascinating that he still attempts to excuse Gomeshi as one who possibly “deluded himself”? And it is also informative to observe that even after NINE public accusations by women who claim to have been physically attacked by him, McRapey STILL hasn’t accused Gomeshi of being sexist or a misogynist, accusations he has flung at me many times over the years despite the fact that in all that time, no woman has ever come forward to claim that I have abused her, harassed her, or harmed her in any way (outside the dojo, anyway). Nor is there anyone to come forward, because I simply don’t harm, harass, or abuse women.

And so we see that to the pinkshirts, words are primarily seen as weapons meant to be utilized against the ideological foe. They are not actually viewed as literal descriptors in the way that normal people see them to be.

Pinkshirt thinking is so twisted and corrupt that they consider the nonexistent actions that could potentially be derived from an idea held by an individual they deem to be evil worse than the actual actions of the individual deemed to be on their side.

50,000 readers a day

From the 2012 New York Times:

Handily demolishing the burger that he had chosen over a Midtown restaurant’s fancier Mediterranean fare, Mr. Scalzi was anything but grim; he smiled readily and giggled heartily. He is comfortable with the business of promotion: An affable speaker, he is familiar with the patois of fandom and is adept at generating buzz through the nerd mafia of like-minded collaborators. He already reaches up to 50,000 readers a day through his popular blog, “Whatever.”

So with the end of October, the three-month daily traffic average, in direct apples-to-apples terms of WordPress pageviews, has now reached 50,504. In other words, for the last three months, I’ve been genuinely averaging the sort of traffic that McRapey used to lie about having. The fact is that in July 2012, Whatever averaged 21,102 pageviews per day, up from 16,356 the month before.

As it happens, I could claim “up to 65,000 readers a day” on the same basis, but I don’t, because that would be ludicrously untruthful. First, pageviews are not readers. Second, there is no reasonable justification for using an extreme outlier when an accurate average is available. It is knowingly deceptive, even if it is common in “the busines of promotion”.

SJWs always lie. Never forget that. Never take anything they say about anyone, especially themselves, for granted. They deceive, exaggerate, and spin. They will say anything they think will make themselves look better and make their rivals and enemies look worse. They are the sort of people who habitually pretend “everybody thinks” is synonymous with “I think” and try to influence others through nonexistent peer pressure. They repeatedly appeal to nonexistent consensuses. Even when they tell the literal truth, it is usually presented in a manner intended to deceive in some way.

But they are very comfortable with the business of promotion. It’s not hard to be, when you are equally comfortable with saying things that are misleading, deceptive, and outright false. So always – always – run their numbers.

The truth is that Whatever has actually reached over 100,000 pageviews in a single day thanks to some helpful external links on three or four occasions, but McRapey did not dare tell the New York Times “up to 100,000 pageviews per day” even though he could have truthfully done so because it would have sounded ridiculous considering his actual daily traffic. But he thought, correctly, that he could get away with the misleading “up to 50,000” claim. It’s worth noting that within five months, he dropped the true, but deceptive “up to” part of the claim and was directly lying about his traffic again. Just as he had previously done in 2010, when he was interviewed by Lightspeed.  

“Scalzi himself quotes it at over 45,000 unique visitors daily and more than two million page views monthly.”   

Two million monthly? That’s a claim of more than 64,516 average daily pageviews… and at a time when he was actually seeing 12,860 per day.

Great Minds of the SF/F Left

This was the response of the author of science fiction’s longest ode to the passing of gas to this simple observation on Twitter: “If you are anti-#GamerGate, you are no longer a gamer. You may play games, but you are not a part of gaming culture. You have rejected it.” Never forget, these are the individuals in the SF/F community who genuinely believe themselves to be our moral and intellectual superiors.

John Scalzi @scalzi
If anyone tells you who gets to be a “real” gamer or not, they are stompy whiny little babies throwing a tantrum and you can ignore them.

Tiffany Reisz @tiffanyreisz
If you game, you’re a gamer. If you write, you’re a writer. If you fart, you’re a farter and maybe slow down with the beans, okay.

Trinity Bergman @TrinityBergman
How did you know about the beans??

Tiffany Reisz ?@tiffanyreisz
I made chili today. I KNOW ALL ABOUT THE BEANS.

richfletcher @richfletcher
And: if you hate, you’re a hater.

D L Owens @keikomushi
I hate beans.

Tiffany Reisz @tiffanyreisz
#farts

DangerIck @RangerRick
I am *at least* one of these things. Disclaimer: I had Thai for dinner.

Tiffany Reisz @tiffanyreisz
I had chili. You’re in a safe space. No one judges you here.

Duncan Ellis @DunxIsWriting
“Luke, I am your farter.”

Tiffany Reisz @tiffanyreisz
Butt Solo #starfarts

Marcos Astorga @GMarcos69
I fart more than i game or read so I guess that makes me a member of #Fartgate.

Tiffany Reisz @tiffanyreisz
It’s about ethics in farting.

Marilyn Holt @merlintheholt
beans, beans, the magical fruit…

D L Owens ?@keikomushi
One of the easiest ways to make new friends is to discuss bodily functions. We all appreciate it on some level.

D L Owens ?@keikomushi
In this regard, farts bring people together. 😀

Brilliant. While McRapey claims anyone who classifies gamers is to be ignored, genuine gaming professionals and executives in industries that sell into the games market are constantly analyzing who is a real gamer or not, because if you are going to make a high-powered CPU or an expensive graphics chip, you are not going to sell very many of them to the Farmville and Candy Crush Saga aficionados, regardless of how much they play those games.

It’s not that one can’t make money on casual games, it’s that the people who play them don’t consist of a market that a) spends much money per person or b) consists of a coherent and identifiable culture. This is why, despite its popularity, we are unlikely to see Tor Books publishing a line of Farmville novels any time soon, Rovio’s success in turning Angry Birds into a brand notwithstanding.

Gamasutra notes 15 Factors of Classification distinguishing hardcore gamers from non-gamers: “Hardcore gamers are clearly different from casual gamers, and the characteristics of hardcore and casual gamers will also be different from those who are generally uninterested in interactive entertainment.”

One could usefully define a “real gamer” as a player of games who plays 20+ hours of PC/console games per week and spends or consumes more than $500 on games and game-related products in a year. For example, the NPD Group describes “core gamers” in a similar manner: The NPD Group describes “core gamers” as any individuals who spend more than five hours a week playing games on a home console such as the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, a Windows PC or a Mac. By these standards, there are currently over 34 million core gamers in the United States, and they are playing video games for an average of 22 hours every week.

Everything has fallen into place

Now isn’t that just unfortunate:

Former CBC radio star Jian Ghomeshi took to Facebook Sunday, publishing an extraordinary account of what he says led to his termination from the public broadcaster.  The CBC announced Sunday it was severing ties with Mr. Ghomeshi, citing
“information” it had recently learned about the popular host of Q on CBC Radio and CBC TV….

Mr. Ghomeshi details an “on and off” relationship with a woman in her mid-20s, which included “adventurous forms of sex that included role-play, dominance and submission.” After he opted to end the relationship, Mr. Ghomeshi said an anonymous woman began reaching out to his former partners, “to tell them she had been a victim of abusive relations with me. In other words, someone was reframing what had been an ongoing consensual relationship as something nefarious.”

Mr. Ghomeshi said a freelance writer started probing the allegations and he has “lived with the threat that this stuff would be thrown out there.” He said he informed CBC of the allegations and the broadcaster was part of a team that dealt “with this for months.”

“They said they’re not concerned about the legal side,” Mr. Ghomeshi wrote. “But then they said that this type of sexual behavior was unbecoming of a prominent host on the CBC.”

Probing the allegations. Living with the threat. Unbecoming sexual behavior. Indeed. In case you’d forgotten, Mr. Ghomeshi once hosted Rapey McRaperson and helped him record some vocals for the Pink Rabbit Posse’s hit number. I can’t help but wonder: what panoply of perversions will freelance writers eventually uncover about his co-vocalist?

Ask not for whom the pinkshirts come
Crawling on hand and knee.
A-slavering from their forked tongues
They come, they come for thee!