Tag: McRapey

The rabbits ponder FIVER traffic

I was sent this exchange between some of the rabbits at the Whatever warren, bewildered by the frightening notion that their Chief Rabbit may not be anywhere nearly as important as he told them he was and that more people actually prefer the scary bad mans:

Rabbit 1: You know I am of two minds on this. First the plus side, the money donated is wonderful and it is fun to see losers fuming because feminism has MADE SF/F BETTER. And really to be honest, any man who believes in “game” is a loser to begin with. On the other hand, Scalzi is huge, with 50k readers a day (1) this only gives the evil side free publicity. If only twenty people wind up reading his stupid blogs because of this, he’ll double his readership. He is a nobody that no one listens to, he can only win in this.

Rabbit 2: Have you read his blog stats? Say what you will about his intelligence or character, but the RSHD gets some serious traffic. (2)

Scalzi-rah: As does Stormfront, I’m sure, and for similar reasons. (3)

Rabbit 3:  If you believe Beale, his Alexa rating has doubled in the past year and
his shitty little “game” blog beats out this one, and blah blah blah. 
I’m not saying he’s lying, exactly, but I dunno. I really can’t be assed
to think about it too much, but I have a feeling that Mark Twain’s
wisdom applies here.

Rabbit 4: I’m not saying he’s lying because I have no knowledge one way or the other. Anyway, the substance of a site’s content and the number of hits a site gets are two separate things. 

Rabbit 3: Well, okay, to be clear: he’s gaming Alexa, which is obvious if you
look up his site’s history. It’s not particularly hard to do, I just
don’t know how exactly he’s going about it. There are multiple ways. Not
that it really matters, or that overblown narcissists can’t have
legitimately high profiles. Some do. Beale doesn’t, though, and I just
think it’s worth pointing out his transparent dishonesty. 

Scalzi-rah: I don’t think we need to worry ourselves whether Mr. Beale’s sites legitimately get the traffic he claims or not. It’s entirely possible they do. The Internet is full off assholes, and they like to clump together. If they go to his sites and off of everyone else’s, then he’s welcome to their traffic. And if he’s making it all up, then it’s nice he has a hobby. (4)

Let’s address the traffic claims first. John Scalzi alternatively switches between claiming “50,000 daily readers”, “up to 50,000 daily readers”, and “~50,000 daily readers” depending upon what he thinks he can get away with.  His actual daily traffic for the year through November 2013 is 21,400 Google pageviews per day. Mine is 36,511. Apparently there are a considerable number of people that John Scalzi considers assholes out there.

As for the “shitty little game blog”, it has been rapidly catching up to Whatever all by itself. Whatever has been in decline ever since May 2012, the occasional bump from McRapey’s friends at the Guardian notwithstanding. Alpha Game grew from 1,675,300 pageviews in 2012 to what I estimate will be more than 3.7 million in 2013.

With regards to the supposed gaming of Alexa, I note that Whatever has more sites linking in (4,625) than it has average daily readers. This compares to 893 sites linking in to VP. But even if I did somehow successfully game the improvement of VP’s Alexa rank from 29,426 to 6,987, it should be fascinating to hear how I simultaneously managed to engineer the decline of Whatever from 12,996 to 51,779.

In any event, it is absolutely hilarious to see fans of the least honest blogger on the Internet, the Bernie Madoff of Science Fiction, desperately trying to point out my “transparent dishonesty” when I openly post my Sitemeter numbers and honestly report my Google pageviews. This is what Google reports for VP alone as of this morning; Alpha Game was another 10,115 yesterday for a slightly below par 35,390. Fridays tend to be a little slow. Anyone who doubts that my traffic exceeds Whatever’s should ask John Scalzi to post the exact same screenshot of his traffic for the last month. As for Alexa, I seem to recall openly declaring that it was a bullshit metric when similar survey measures were cited as evidence of Whatever’s presumed popularity last year. I trust that I have now conclusively made my case in that regard.

And if you think this is amusing, just wait until I am able to show that McRapey’s three “New York Times bestsellers” were gamed by Tor. Being a three-time Billboard Top 40 recording artist myself, I know it happened and I even know how. I just can’t conclusively prove it yet. But if I ever gather the proof, I will certainly post it here.

Let me see if I can put this in a manner simple enough for the rabbits who genuinely believe “Scalzi is huge” and Redshirts is a great novel to understand:  EMBLEER INLE-RAH HRAIR ELIL. SCALZI-RAH SCALZI-ROO. O ZORN! RUN HLESSI RUN!

(1) See, they really are as dumb as we suspect them to be. 50,000 DAILY READERS!
(2) Possibly a Not-Rabbit. Sounds suspiciously like a rabbit-hunter to me.
(3) McRapey is still trying to push the Stormfront meme.  Never mind that the SFWA was so desperate to sweep that report under the table that they sent out DMCA takedown notices to prevent people from reading it.
(4) Translation: OH GOD, STOP TALKING ABOUT INTERNET TRAFFIC! HE’S JUST GOING TO RUB IT IN MY FACE AGAIN!

McRapey on rhetoric

It’s as if Aristotle were walking among us! John Scalzi instructs one of his commenters on rhetoric:

Riccola: Mr. Scalzi, while you have certainly drawn your own conclusions regarding Mr. Beale, I would say you are incorrect in stating that he is a case example of the Dunning Kruger effect. He is often humble about his ability to design games, write articles, and write books. He has never stated he considers himself great or even good at any of these things. If you are referring to rhetoric I have seen no evidence to indicate he is not skilled. All those who have fully engaged him, a good example would be the ArizonaAtheist, have actually found him to be proficient at rhetoric. From what I have observed only those who do not engage him in discussion believe he is deficient in this area.

I also struggle to see how he has failed to recognize genuine skill in others. There are a plethora of examples of him praising both those he ideologically agrees with and those who despise him. He often praises your ability to market yourself. To me, that does not sound like someone incapable of recognizing genuine skill in others.

On the third plank of the Dunning Kruger effect, fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy, I would not contest as it depends entirely on your metric and perspective.

The fourth part of the effect, recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill if they are exposed to training for that skill, there is no evidence as to this to be applicable to him. I am not aware of him being trained for anything, or his reflections on being trained.

With only one part of the Dunning Kruger effect possibly applying to Mr. Beale I would hazard that you are completely unfounded in saying that he is their favourite son. I can only guess your own contempt for the man has inhibited your ability to describe him.

McRapey:  “If you are referring to rhetoric I have seen no evidence to indicate he is not skilled.”

Speaking as someone whose degree is Philosophy of language (ie, rhetoric), I see lots of evidence to the contrary, I’m afraid. He’s not bad at sounding like he knows what he’s talking about as long as you don’t know what he’s talking about, but that’s not the same thing as being rhetorically skilled, except to the limited extent that “rhetoric” means “ability to spew bullshit.”

It’s certainly true I don’t think much of him (both in that I don’t think much of him when I don’t have to, and don’t think much of him when I do have to), but in both cases, based on my experience of having to deal with him, I’m very comfortable with my assessment. And in any event it’s not a checklist; one does not need to fulfill all possible conditions to be fully in the grips of Dunning Kruger.

Riccola:  Mr. Scalzi, I do not see why you would consider possessing a bachelors degree in Philosophy of Language would given you any indication that you are proficient or familiar with rhetoric. All it means is twenty years ago you sat in at a desk, someone taught at you, and you received a piece of paper. A degree does not make you, or anyone else, an authority on a subject. Do you think there has never been a bad engineer?

McRapey: And? As I don’t know you or know your capacity to make any sort of assessment of anything (except to the extent that you’ve asserted Mr. Beale is not unskilled, which is an assertion I find dubious for several reasons and does not put you in good stead regarding my assessment of your own evaluative skills), I would say that you not seeing why it matters really is your problem and not mine. Likewise, perhaps your school gives out bachelor degrees as if they were issued from a gumball machine. Mine doesn’t, and in particular did not in my case.

What I found so amusing about this is that McRapey clearly hasn’t changed his debating technique since at least 2005.

  1. Make an obviously questionable assertion.
  2. When the assertion is questioned, appeal to bachelor’s degree.
  3. When the appeal to the bachelor’s degree is questioned, question the questioner’s intellect and/or good will.
  4. Avoid further questions.
  5. Posture as if one has thoroughly proved one’s point.

Riccola isn’t the first to discover John Scalzi’s rhetorical limitations. In addition to my first encounter with them in 2005, Agathis had much the same experience. Not only does McRapey have no observable capacity for dialectic, his rhetoric is almost entirely limited to name-calling, argumentum ad hominem, inept satire, and the sophistic technique known as “ambiguity”. The irony of Scalzi’s position should be readily apparent when one compares his observed lack of rhetorical skill with the Dunning-Kruger effect checklist.

Dunning and Kruger proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:

  1. tend to overestimate their own level of skill; (check)
  2. fail to recognize genuine skill in others; (check)
  3. fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy; (check)
  4. recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they are exposed to training for that skill. (NA)

McRapey not only hits squarely on three of the four checkboxes, but his exhibited behavior is even worse than Dunning and Kruger conceived. He claims to have had rhetorical training, and yet he STILL doesn’t acknowledge his near-complete lack of rhetorical skill. Now, I tend to suspect this is because he genuinely doesn’t realize that he’s had no real rhetorical training, but is rather operating on the false assumption that Riccola already noted.

McRapey went on to dig himself in deeper by revealing that despite his BACHELOR’S DEGREE IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE, he was incapable of following the Latin into Greek:

You’d have to ask him; he came up with the “Vox Day” name. Note that it’s a play off of “Vox Dei,” i.e., “The Voice of God,” which is amusing for several reasons.

As for besting me in argument, well, no, not at any point I can remember. Bear in mind I haven’t engaged him in discussion for years now, so this claim is not based on anything recent. With respect to me, I am aware of him not being able to understand what satire is until it was pointed out to him and then compensating for his error by calling me “McRapey” as salve for his ego; I’m also aware that because he doesn’t appear to understand what “up to” means, that he likes to say I lie about my readership numbers here. I’m not entirely sure either of those qualify as excellent arguments, based as they are on weak foundations.

This is not to say Mr. Beale is absolutely incapable of creating a sound logical argument. But in my experience in looking at his arguments, he does it rarely, in no small part because his ground level assumptions are complete shit. If you build your arguments on shit, they’re going to topple over regardless of how you construct your edifice. It’s not his arguments’ only problem, but it’s their first problem, to be sure.

Let’s just say I am not greatly impressed by his ability to argue. Again, you are free to disagree.

Since “theos” in Greek is god, well, unlike Mr. Philosophy of Language, I suspect most of you should be able to figure out the secret etymological chain that has been lost upon so many would-be outers over the years. He’s very nearly correct about my not besting him in argument, because beyond that first encounter he has resolutely run away from debate with me, even when it was publicly proposed by third parties.

I’ve already proven beyond any shadow of doubt that John Scalzi lies about his blog traffic, which is now less than two-thirds of my own. I not only understand what “up to” means, (and “~” as well), and how it can be used to mislead people, but I also caught him when he tried to drop the “up to” on at least two occasions earlier this year. As for his claims about my inability to recognize satire, I am content to respond by pointing to the second item on the Dunning Kruger effect checklist in combination with this quote: “I’m very comfortable with my assessment.”

No doubt he is.

It is hardly surprising that McRapey doesn’t try to critique any of my arguments or show a single example of one that is incorrect, but merely waves his hand and provides a naked assertion that my “ground level assumptions are complete shit”. If called on this, no doubt he will point out that he has a BACHELOR’S DEGREE….

An embarrassing failure

I tried. So help me, I tried. I honestly thought I had pulled it off, but the verdict is in and I simply didn’t manage to do it. McRapey writes:

From January 1 through today, Mr. Beale has mentioned me by name (or by nickname) on those two sites 145 times. This is defined as references in blog posts; other references — references in comments, persistent sidebar links, or comments by others weren’t counted, nor were Twitter or other social media posts. If you want to do the math, that means Mr. Beale invoked me on his blogs on average once every 2.366 days. Which is rather a lot! There are 22 days left in the year, which means if Mr. Beale follows his average, he’ll mention me nine more times before the ball drops in Times Square. So, for my purposes, I am using 154 times as the official tally number.

I had pledged $5 per reference up to $1,000, which (again with the math) means that Mr. Beale would have had to reference me 200 times over the year for the full payout. 154 times turns out to be 77% of that.

So: If you made a pledge to support the Counteract a Bigot fund drive earlier this year, please donate at least 77% of your pledge amount to the organizations you pledged to fund.

I say at least because, of course, I encourage you to donate the full amount of your pledge if you can. I will be doing so, I have just done so, as well as adding in another $250 to my pledge as thanks to the friend who kept track of Mr. Beale’s sites so I didn’t have to. But even if everyone sticks to just 77% of their full pledge amount, we’ll still have donated at least $46,000 dollars to charities and organizations dedicated to fighting bigotry and/or sexual assault in its various forms. And that ain’t bad.

As for Mr. Beale, well. He’s Dunning-Kruger’s favorite son. As such he’s incapable of imagining himself in anything other than a victory condition, so I’m sure he’ll imagine one here, too. Let him. The rest of us know better.

The idea that I am incapable of imagining myself in anything other than a victory condition is an interesting one; I am admittedly good at many things, but I’m not THAT good. Indeed, one need merely look at my failure to mention McRapey the requisite 200 times to see that I am not always triumphant. I am embarrassed. I am chagrined. And I would also be remiss if I did not bring the following facts to the reader’s attention. (The numbers in parentheses are global Alexa rankings.)

Alexa USA rankings 12/12/12
12,996 Whatever
29,426 Vox Popoli
73,183 Alpha Game

Alexa USA rankings 12/12/13
6,690 Vox Popoli (55,972)
14,181 Alpha Game (101,337)
50,207 Whatever (143,885)


Google Pageviews November 2012
745,857 “those two sites”
726,445 Whatever

Google Pageviews November 2013
1,058,663 “those two sites”
384,958 Whatever

Considering that the victory conditions last year were established as blog traffic, with members of the Whatever warren taunting me about Whatever’s supposedly gargantuan blog readership and McRapey himself pounding his chest about his 8 million pageviews in 2012 when he wasn’t advertising his “50,000 DAILY READERS”, in this case, the facts speak rather clearly for themselves. McRapey is unlikely to even hit 7.5 million Google pageviews this year; imagine how much more his readership would have declined if “those two sites” hadn’t mentioned him 145 times, to say nothing of the copious references on Heartiste and other sites.

I note that the Dunning-Kruger effect is “a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority.”  I leave it to the reader to determine who the description fits more closely.

But at least he’ll always have his Participation Hugo.

~1 on Amazon

McRapey simply never stops self-promoting:

If you’re a non-traditionally pubbed author, today’s the day to tell my ~50k daily readers about your book.

It strikes me that if scientists could simply figure out how to harness the little man’s internal self-promotion engine, we wouldn’t need green energy or nuclear reactors.

In related news, I’m very pleased to announce that Quantum Mortis: A Man Disrupted is now the ~1-selling science fiction book on Amazon! To celebrate that, I’m posting the corrected high-resolution version of JartStar’s Quantum Mortis: Gravity Kills wallpaper here for download. Just click on the image to see the whole thing; right click and Save As to save it. Because it is pretty.

As for ~50k DAILY READERS… why not just go straight to ~ONE MILLION DAILY READERS? Believe it or not, that’s a closer multiple to 50,000 than 50,000 is to his current number of average daily readers.

In any event, thanks to a little help from the Master Monster Hunter, it turns out that I am also the ~1 author in Science Fiction today.  Hey, this self-promotion stuff is easy!

We have an answer

The Chateau’s response to the brain study is about as calm and understated as one would expect….

As is so often the case, though, there is something hard and logical beneath the savage provocation. I very strongly suspect, as, I think, Heartiste does as well, that the wiring of Gamma brains will show up differently on brain scans than other male brains.

Here is my scientific hypothesis: The reason Gamma male thought processes and conclusions tend have more in common with female thought processes and conclusions than with normal male thought processes and conclusions is because they have more of the inter-hemisphere connections and less of the intra-hemisphere connections than normal men.

Saving SF from Strong Female Characters V

The fifth part of the ongoing series, in which John Wright makes it clear that the Strong Female Character in SF/F is nothing less than the written feminist version of Soviet Realism:

Now, I do not mean to sound cynical, so I will ask rather than speak my opinion. Is there any strong woman character which meets with the approval of the Politically Correct who also happens to be, as the characters in Lewis and Tolkien, reflect a Christian worldview, or, as happens in Burroughs or E.E. Smith, to reflect what one might call the traditional heroic worldview, a worldview reminiscent of the Stoic and Military virtues of the ancient Romans and Greeks?

I have heard some Leftists praise the female characters of Robert Heinlein, who, with one exception, I myself find to be somewhat demeaning to women. (The one exceptions is  Cynthia Randall in ‘The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag’, perhaps the only honest portrayal of a woman throughout his whole oeuvre.) Others despise his portrayals.

My cynical question is this: when they ask for ‘strong’ female characters, are they actually honestly asking for strong female characters, Deborah from the Bible, Antigone from myth, Britomart from poetry, or are they only asking for Leftist female characters, poster children for Leftist causes?

If so, what they are asking for is Political Correctness, which means, substituting true narratives about the real glories and sorrows of the human condition for a false narrative, an advertisement for Leftwing political causes, which tell lies about the glories and man, bemoan with crocodile tears only the sorrows of their particular mascots and special causes, and make false promises about the cure for the world’s pain.

If so, they are giving up art for an ad.

Myself, I want to see women writers not because they are women, but because I would like to have the genius of distaff half the human race writing new and brilliant science fiction stories for us to enjoy. But, as far as I can tell, this is akin to the complaint that Science Fiction is meant for juvenile audiences. That has not been true during my lifetime. I have not seen even the slightest trace of the all-boy club mentality ever, neither in any writer nor in any editor nor in any reader.

I have seen plenty of people like me, who are annoyed with the cheerless preachy monotony of Political Correctness and would like the dullards to stop ruining good stories with their sucker punches and pauses for their political advertisements, but, hey, the PC types answer any criticism of PC  by calling the complainer a sexist, or saying he is paranoid, or saying that PC does not exist. Any lie will do, just so long as it is an accusation.

To tell the truth about what they are doing, which is informal censorship, that is, thought policework, is the one thing they fear.

As I said before, they think they are fooling us into thinking they are honest and compassionate people, and we know they are not, and they know they are not, but they do not know we know, so when one of us mentions, for the umpteenth time, that the Emperor has No Clothes, they react with exaggerated fear and fury. Because they are afraid of anyone, no matter how humble or obscure, who punctures their little daydream of make-believe, their land of colored cloud where they are the saints and the saviors of the world.

The fact of the matter is that those who demand Strong Female Characters don’t actually want genuinely strong women possessed of the feminine virtues. They simply want to substitute a nominal woman for a man and claim the masculine virtues for their Mary Sues in order to make themselves feel better about themselves.

Remember, most Pink SF is written in order to let the gamma male or shambling shoggoth author retroactively triumph over his persecutors from junior high and high school. Hence the lack of credible action and the interminable focus on “witty” dialogue that always allows the author stand-in to come out on top. To say nothing of the inevitable love triangles focused on the Mary Sue. It is wish-fulfillment of a very different kind than the adventurous fantasy of Blue SF.

Now, few Pink SF writers go so far in their wish-fulfillment as McRapey, who in addition to having male infantry soldiers swapping blow jobs as currency has now apparently paralyzed his female characters in his next novel. (A subconscious confession due to the weight of all that Rohypnol plaguing a guilty conscience?) The two primary focuses of the fantasy in Pink SF are the sexual desirability of the author/Mary Sue and the belated revenge of the author on his real-life enemies. These take the place of the Blue SF triumph of the protagonist over the environment, his fictional enemies, and himself.

Knowing themselves weak in life, the writers of Pink SF stride confidently through their fantasies as the demigods they wish themselves to be. And anyone who dares to observe that those fantasies bear no resemblance to reality is not merely mean, but indubitably evil.

So, who will he rip off?

The people have spoken. Of the 401 respondents, 202 (50%) believe that John Scalzi’s next novel is not going to rip off Heinlein, Piper, Dick, or Star Trek, but someone entirely new. Only 11 (3%) thought that he’d return to ripping off H. Beam Piper, while 23 naive Scalzi fans (6%) genuinely believe he’s going to publish something entirely new and original. That would certainly be interesting; should that unlikely future come to pass, I might even consider reading it myself.

I happened to think the majority is wrong. I assume he would publish a Midnight Star tie-in novel. But as it happens, I was wrong, as unbeknownst to most of us who don’t pay anywhere nearly as much attention to McRapey as some would assume we do, we already had our answer: LOCK IN

Fifteen years from now, a new virus sweeps the globe. 95% of those afflicted experience nothing worse than fever and headaches. Four per cent suffer acute meningitis, creating the largest medical crisis in history. And one percent find themselves “locked in”—fully awake and aware, but unable to move or respond to Stimulus.

One per cent doesn’t seem like a lot. But in the United States, that’s 1.7 million people “locked in” …including the President’s wife and daughter. Spurred by grief and the sheer magnitude of the suffering, America undertakes a massive scientific initiative. Nothing can restore to the “locked in” the ability to control their own bodies. But two new technologies emerge. One is a virtual reality environment, “The Agora,” in which the locked-in can interact with other humans, both locked-in and not. The other is the discovery that a few rare individuals have brains that are receptive to being controlled by others, meaning that from time to time, those who are locked in can “ride” these people and use their bodies as if they were their own.

This skill is quickly regulated, licensed, bonded, and controlled. Nothing can go wrong. Certainly nobody would be tempted to misuse it, for murder, for political power, or worse…

I can’t remember who wrote it, but apparently the answer is either James Cameron or the guy who wrote the book about rich people riding the bodies of poor people renting them out. Anyone remember the name of that one?

John Scalzi is a “bourgeois pudding”

Inverarity considers the wisdom of boycotting authors of whom one disapproves:

Case in point: many of you are probably aware of the infamous “feud” that’s been going for a couple of years now between John Scalzi and Theodore Beale, aka “Vox Day.” John Scalzi is the bourgeois pudding of SF – nice, inoffensive, always triangulating for the “rational middle” of a political argument, writes decent if unexciting sci-fi.

Vox Day is… well, indescribable. Though there is a gulf between what he’s been accused of saying and what he has actually said, he’s way, way out there, and if he doesn’t make your head explode, his commenters will. Orson Scott Card and John C. Wright are mild gentlemen of moderate views compared to VD.

VD has written several novels, largely self-published. I am sure the thought of contributing money to him, or even adding to his download count, fills many with reflexive horror. But I am filled with a certain perverse curiosity (and a bit of defiance after the ridiculous spectacle of the SFWA booting him from the organization), and I downloaded a few of his novellas when they were available for free on Amazon. (Reviews forthcoming. If I ever get around to them.)

Would I pay money for one of his books? Probably not. Do I think I have an obligation to not support him in any way, shape or form by reading, downloading, reviewing, or giving him publicity? That is where I get off the Right-Thinking People Train.

This is a reasonable perspective and it is unfortunate that it is no longer the norm in the professional writing community. It’s also hard to disagree with the gentleman’s characterization of Mr. Scalzi’s fiction, although he omitted the phrase “derivative”, which is absolutely necessary to describe the genre’s great rip-off artist. In fact, I am given to understand that the award-winning McRapey is very nearly done with a new novel, which makes one wonder what the subject matter will be:

While I can’t disagree with Inverarity’s assertion of my immoderate views, I do have to correct the erroneous characterization of my novels as “largely self-published”.  [This has now been corrected – VD] While I do intend to “self-publish” through First Sword, precisely none of my books to date are self-published. It would certainly surprise Simon & Schuster to learn that they belong to me and I have no interest in Marcher Lord Press beyond the fact that I am one of their authors. The fact that I have been permitted a considerable amount of leeway by publishers from Pocket Books to Marcher Lord is of no more significance than the fact that Stephen King is similarly afforded a great deal of independence by his publishers.

I’m not one of the leading authors of SF/F… but my publishers, past and present, aren’t the only ones in the industry who harbor the suspicions I have the potential to become one. That probably wouldn’t have been possible under the old system, but now the gatekeepers are crumbling….

I tend to agree with Inverarity concerning the foolishness of limiting your reading to those with whom you agree, or at least do not disagree too greatly. Among other things, a refusal to familiarize myself with Marxism and the correct terminology utilized in two of its forms would have simplified the plot of QUANTUM MORTIS and severely crippled one character who is portrayed as neither a villain nor a cardboard cutout. That being said, I do think it is important to recognize that there is a cultural war being waged, that the Left is the only one actually fighting it, and the people of the Right will not see its views respected, much less held up in an exemplary manner, if it continues to support the artists seeking to destroy it at the expense of the artists seeking to uphold them.

I neither expect nor require support from the other side. I expect to be attacked, belittled, ignored, and lied about. I have been reliably informed by a recent SF convention-goer that I am the most-hated author in science fiction today. Good! Whether I am wrong or whether I am right, I am simply exercising my right to speak what I perceive to be the undeniable and demonstrable truth. If those who are openly attempting to spread lies and left-wing propaganda disapprove of me, I suggest that merely shows there is some substance, or at the very least, some rhetorical plausibility to what I am saying.  For years, they said I was irrelevant. Then they said I was ridiculous. Now they say I am too extreme and dangerous… and I’m sure every reader here is well-aware of Gandhi’s Progression.

I hope those of you on the Right who are interested in the genre will continue to support the efforts of me and other writers of the Right. Try Kratman. Try Correia. Try Wright. Try Walker and Williamson. If you haven’t yet, try Card. Preorder QUANTUM MORTIS as a Christmas gift and get the ebook free for yourself. I am confident most of you will not be disappointed, particularly if John Scalzi is your idea of “decent if unexciting sci-fi”. And I also hope those of you on the Left will consider extending the same courtesy to us that we have extended to you for decades, and judge our work on the basis of its merits and its demerits rather than the ideological views of the writer.

After all, do you really think your support for abortion, feminism, multiculturalism, and global dictatorship by a technocratic UN is any less offensive to me than my views are to you? In summary, I don’t avoid reading any author due to his views; I would quite happily read McRapey’s novels if they weren’t tedious works of derivative mediocrity. The Android’s Dream and Ghost Brigades were enough to cause me to lose interest in them years before the so-called feud began.

In any event, I am happy to offer Inverarity copies of QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted and QUANTUM MORTIS Gravity Kills. If he is interested, I would be happy to send him the pair of ebooks so as to save his conscience the burden of inadvertently supporting me financially. And who knows, perhaps he might even find it to be indecent, but exciting SF.

As a bonus, the link features our favorite literary troll, Andrew Marston of the New England Wildlife Center, attacking Larry Correia, Tom Kratman, and Dan Simmons in the comments.

Live by the sword, die by the sword

A fitting end to an inglorious military career:

The man in charge of the Air Force’s sexual-harassment enforcement
was himself indicted on a sexual assault charge in an Arlington court
Monday. Lieutenant-Colonel Jeffrey Krusinki was arrested back in May for allegedly groping a woman in Arlington. She claims he grabbed her breasts and buttocks in a parking lot in Crystal City.

It will be amusing when McRapey and McCreepy find themselves similarly hoist on their own petards, will it not? Even if they don’t do anything to deserve it, it’s just a matter of time before someone finds it in her interest to launch an accusation or two.

It’s inevitable. Why? Voltaire’s Prayer. Consider the following evidence:

Wil Wheaton ‏@wilw
Cat: I love you so much!. Me: Aww. I love you, too. Cat: Feed me. Me: I already fed you. Cat: Feed me again. Me: Um, no. Cat: I hate you.

UPDATE: Well, that was quicker than expected. Remember when I said that Alpha Game would eventually pass up Whatever too?

scalzi.com
47,446 USA Rank

alphagameplan.blogspot.com
46,497 USA Rank

In truth, this is more an indictment of the Alexa ranking system than anything else; the biggest and most importantest science fiction site ever still gets more monthly pageviews than Alpha Game’s 349,623 monthly average. But I find the comparative rankings to be more than a little amusing in light of the rabbits who appealed to these sorts of estimated traffic rankings less than a year ago.

Juxtaposition

A conversation on Twitter:

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi 7 Nov
If you spend all your time trying to convince people you’re just as important as somebody else, you’re really probably not.

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi 7 Nov
Conversely, if you spend all your time trying to convince people that somone else isn’t important, they may be.

Marko Kloos ‏@markokloos 7 Nov
@scalzi This is of course APROPOS OF NOTHING and doesn’t refer to ANY PARTICULAR INDIVIDUAL we may know.

To which one can only resort to the cruel tactic of quoting Mr. Scalzi:

“All the dudebros who adamantly maintain I don’t get 50K visitors a day are totally right. #HaHaHa”

 

As it happens, Mr. Scalzi’s Whatever has averaged just under 20,000 Google pageviews per day in 2013, which figure includes the occasional spike derived from external sources. That’s not bad; I leave the question of whether it indicates a degree of importance or not up to the reader. But since we’re discussing comparisons, there is also this from Alexa this morning:


scalzi.com
111,031 Global rank
46,471 USA rank

voxday.blogspot.com 
107,993 Global rank
23,066 USA rank


It should be amusing when my number two blog also passes up what used to be such an important science fiction site next year. What is ironic about these comparisons is that it was not my intention to target Scalzi himself when I first began comparing VP to Whatever last year. The comparison was a direct response to a few rabbits from his warren who were asserting, falsely, that this blog was irrelevant and insignificant because so few people read it. Scalzi himself had always indicated that he was aware that the blog readership here was considerable, if not necessarily of a size comparable to his own.

However, in the process of setting the facts straight, Mr. Scalzi’s own dishonesty was inadvertently uncovered – 50,000 DAILY READERS – and months later he is still trying to spin the situation and salvage the illusion of his self-importance. Apparently the Participation Hugo is not enough and the mere fact of my citing verifiable statistics in correcting the false claims of others is somehow proof of his continued significance. But adding to the degree of difficulty he faces here, he is trying to do this while simultaneously pretending to not care about how the truth undermines the entire foundation of his career as a novelist.

It’s not remarkable that he’s willing to shoot for such an ambitious reinterpretation of objective reality. He is a gamma male, after all, and spin, exaggeration, and deceit are his idiom. What is remarkable is that people like Marko Kloos repeatedly fall for it. Or at least pretend to fall for it. Then again, I suppose one must keep in mind that Bernie Madoff managed to fool a lot more people a lot longer to considerably more profit than John Scalzi has.

That being said, I don’t mind coming right out and saying that I don’t think I am more important than Mr. Scalzi. In fact, in the world of SF/F, it is patently obvious that I am considerably less important than its biggest con man since L. Ron Hubbard. It will do no one any good to curry favor with me and it could even do them an amount of professional harm given the way that petty little world works. I merely believe I am a better, smarter, more substantial writer than Mr. Scalzi, and a writer with more interesting ideas…. ideas that happen to be my own.