Tag: McRapey

Gotcha

I was waiting for John Scalzi to finally react to my exposure of his significant exaggeration of his average daily blog readers.  As I half-expected he would, he waited until he had a big day, in this case courtesy of an article in the Guardian, then responded by putting out a misleading tweet that didn’t actually justify his false claim to have “50K daily blog readers”.

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

He then posted this image, which based on the numbers appears to be WordPress statistics. One could, of course, dispute them based on the fact that there is nothing to indicate they are actual Whatever numbers, to say nothing the fact of one day is not evidence of the daily average. However, I happen to know they are correct, so I will not do so. Instead, I will simply show how they are being used in an intentionally misleading manner.

That #HaHaHa  cracked me up. The triumphant pose is simply Mr. Scalzi’s usual posturing and the tweet is nothing but blown cover as cover. Despite what the graphic implies, I am totally right and Mr. Scalzi knows it. He does not get 50k visitors a day except on very rare occasions. I previously pointed out that he has, on three occasions, (now four), gotten more than 50k visitors in a day thanks to external factors such as yesterday’s Guardian article. That was why I noted how, after first being exposed, he backed down and belatedly modified his claim to “up to 50k readers per day”.

So, for no particular reason at all, here is the actual traffic data for Whatever from January 1, 2009 to August 26, 2013, adjusted to reflect the metric chosen in his tweet. In the interest of being perfectly accurate, I’ve even included yesterday, his latest big day.  During that 56-month period, the number of daily readers/visitors to Whatever has averaged exactly 2,972, only 47,028 short of his 50k claim.  If we limit the time scale to 2013, that still only increases his daily blog readership to 4,085, the figure I previously cited. Even during his very best month, May 2012, he never came within 35,000 visitors of the 50,000 “readers a day” he claimed.

One of the things I found interesting about the Whatever statistics is that contra what one might assume, the engagement of the Whatever warren isn’t particularly high. His readers average fewer than six pageviews per visit; better than average but hardly spectacular.  And their engagement is observably declining, as it has dropped from 8.4 in early 2009 to 4.1 this month.  This can be seen by comparing the daily average pageviews over the same 4+ year period seen in the chart below with the previous chart.

As you can see, at no point have Mr. Scalzi’s daily pageviews even come within 20,000 of the 50,000 daily readers he claimed.  While he can legitimately claim “up to 50k readers per day” on the basis of occasional bumps from the mainstream media, to do so in the pretense that those outliers represent his normal daily traffic is not only absurd, it is presenting the statistics in a completely deceptive manner.

Now, I can’t speak for any other “dudebros”, but I do most certainly continue to maintain that John Scalzi is not only a dishonest and fraudulent self-promoter, he is a serial bullshit artist and he does not get 50,000 daily blog readers.  And if Mr. Scalzi wishes to publicly dispute these numbers rather than continuing to present misleading one-offs as wildly exaggerated indications of Whatever’s popularity, I absolutely invite him to do so.  Unlike him, I do not bluff.

As before, I encourage him to come clean and make his traffic transparent to the public, as do I and many other bloggers. All this continued obfuscation, exaggeration, and denial accomplishes is to make him look desperate as well as dishonest.  Given that his derivative writing career was largely dependent upon the successful pretense that he was the most popular blogger in SF/F, it’s fascinating to discover that the whole thing was nothing but a house of cards from the start.

John Scalzi is the Bernie Madoff of science fiction.

Mailvox: John Scalzi IS Stuart Smalley

He’s good enough, he’s smart enough, and DOGGONE IT, people like him! An acquaintance emails me to wonder if McRapey has finally jumped the shark:

But, here’s the thing. I may be a dirty dirty feminist, but I’m also a
feminist with five acres of really awesome lawn, on which rests a
lovely, large house, in which I have lots of very cool things. I got the
lawn and house and things by being successful — that’s right! I am
financially successful through work! It’s not like, say, I’ve generally
failed at everything I’ve done and am living off remittances from
family. Nope, I worked for this stuff. Go me.

So, he’s denouncing white privilege?

I
am not saying that being a feminist is sufficient for having a
successful career, big house and a ridiculously large lawn that is the
size of a New York City block — but on the other hand it certainly
hasn’t hurt me in acquiring those things, has it.

So, white males have the privilege of doing things that are against the cultural norm, without hurting their privilege?

Or,
to put it another way, after some random dudebro has attempted to
insult me on the Internet by taking a photo of me in a dress that I’ve
already posted on my own site and slapping the word “feminist” on it,
all I have to go back to is a successful career, a loving family, a
circle of amazing friends and talented peers, and a social system whose
systematic biases favor me in nearly all cases as a well-off straight
white man. Even when I put on a dress.


So, he’s boasting of white male privilege now.  I DID say that would come out eventually.
I had no idea what my emailer was talking about, which turned out to be this post at Whatever.  And it appears that McRapey has the wrong idea about who produced the image that mocked him.

Over the weekend, some dudebro with a history of shitting on women took this picture of me (which you may remember from here) and meme-ized it, with the intent, given his personal history and predilections, of mocking me — both for my views as regards women, and for wearing a dress.

If McRapey happens to be referring to me or to Heartiste, he has it completely wrong.  Neither one of us had anything to do with producing or captioning his experiment in transgenderism.  Because he swims in a very small and self-selected pond, McRapey doesn’t seem to understand that he has literally become an Internet joke to many and my blog is only one of several better trafficked than Whatever that consider him to be a laughing matter.  As Heartiste puts it: “It’s telling that the triumvirate of Schwyzer, Manboobz and @scalzi are the best quasi-male tokens the feminist collective can claim.” And as much as I appreciate the descriptive phrase “scalzied manboob”, I can’t take any credit for it.

Calling anyone a feminist is a very serious insult.  As I have previously noted: calling a feminist a feminazi is an insult to the German National Socialist Workers Party. Despite their many flaws, Fascism, National Socialism and Communism were all demonstrably more humane, more sustainable, more rational ideologies than feminism. Attempt to own the insult at your own risk.

He does it for you.

In answer to my emailer’s question, I don’t think McRapey has jumped the shark here. The feminist left has a very high tolerance for hypocrisy on behalf of those it sees as its male allies. See: Bill Clinton. McRapey’s primary problem is that he has never recovered from his Daddy abandoning him to be raised by a woman in poverty.  He’s constantly reminding himself, and everyone else, that he possesses the trappings of success because he feels like a fraud and a failure.  Which is understandable, because although he did find a surprising amount of success through his combination of hard work, stunt writing and relentless self-promotion, he is a fraud.

And that’s why his success will never be enough for him. I’ve seen his type numerous times on a much larger scale in both the game industry and in the tech industry. The car always has to be more exotic, the boat always has to be bigger, the lawn always has to be more expansive, and the readership always has to be 46,000 daily readers more than it is, because nothing is enough to erase that irrational fear of being found out.


That’s why I get under McRapey’s skin so easily and why he repeatedly announces that he doesn’t care, he’s henceforth ignoring me, and so forth, before launching yet another charity drive, attempting yet another surreptitious dig, or holding his breath and threatening to quit an organization if I am not expelled from it. Notice that someone else merely captions a photo and that is sufficient to provoke yet another Stuart Smalley outburst from the man.

And still some of you ask me why I continue to do this. Is it not self-evident?

On a tangential note, it is little surprising to hear that the liberal proponent of gun control has acquired some guns and is attempting to learn how to use them.  I suppose we can all look forward to seeing the inevitable picture featuring McRapey as Lara Croft.  Because charity.  In the end, McRapey is little more than a tragicomic example of how the absence of a father in one’s youth scars even the successful individual, as his Smalleyesque boasting shows that he never had anyone in his life to teach him this:


“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools….


“If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!”

Ensnaring the sophists

There was an interesting synchronicity between one of McRapey’s recent tweets and a text from the Organon that I was reading at the gym yesterday.


15 Aug

It’s interesting how many people clearly think they can argue well, who in fact can’t argue their way out of a paper bag.
I found his characteristically self-inflating implication to be more than a little amusing there, coming as it does from an individual who makes habitual use of the sophistical tactic that Aristotle described in De sophisticis elenchis as “ambiguity”, and, when called on it, once tried to justify its use because “a degree in philosophy from the University of Chicago”.  I imagine the educated reader can identify the logical fallacy there.

Now, it’s probably true that a lot number of people overrate their ability to argue; I may have helped a few of them better understand the effective limits of their ability right here on this blog. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what one thinks of one’s own ability to argue, what matters is what those who have actually observed one’s arguments think of them.

In any event, what I find more interesting than a perfectly normal inability to correctly self-assess is how most people are completely unable to expose false arguments despite the fact that the tools for doing so have been readily available for literally thousands of years. 

Rhetoric may be a little complicated for some to follow, but On Sophistical Refutations is relatively straightforward, it’s short, and it is well worth reading as it specifically identifies a number of basic tactics that are repeatedly utilized by those who are presenting invalid arguments, or as is often the case, presenting a false refutation of another’s argument.

 “Those ways of producing the false appearance of an argument which depend on language are six in number: they are ambiguity, amphiboly, combination, division of words, accent, form of expression. Of this we may assure ourselves both by induction, and by syllogistic proof based on this-and it may be on other assumptions as well-that this is the number of ways in which we might fall to mean the same thing by the same names or expressions.

“Arguments such as the following depend upon ambiguity. ‘Those learn who know: for it is those who know their letters who learn the letters dictated to them’. For to ‘learn’ is ambiguous; it signifies both ‘to understand’ by the use of knowledge, and also ‘to acquire knowledge’. Again, ‘Evils are good: for what needs to be is good, and evils must needs be’. For ‘what needs to be’ has a double meaning: it means what is inevitable, as often is the case with evils, too (for evil of some kind is inevitable), while on the other hand we say of good things as well that they ‘need to be’. Moreover, ‘The same man is both seated and standing and he is both sick and in health: for it is he who stood up who is standing, and he who is recovering who is in health: but it is the seated man who stood up, and the sick man who was recovering’. For ‘The sick man does so and so’, or ‘has so and so done to him’ is not single in meaning: sometimes it means ‘the man who is sick or is seated now’, sometimes ‘the man who was sick formerly’.

“Of course, the man who was recovering was the sick man, who really was sick at the time: but the man who is in health is not sick at the same time: he is ‘the sick man’ in the sense not that he is sick now, but that he was sick formerly.”

Aristotelian ambiguity is a tactic that is often used by sophistical interlocutors by claiming the right to assign to their opponent the only possible meaning of a word that the opponent has used, even when the other meanings of that word are much more readily applicable and the opponent has declared that the assigned meaning was not the meaning utilized.  The fact that this requires both a) mind-reading, and, b) the opponent’s ignorance of his own word-choice seldom slows the sophistical leftist down.

But then, Aristotle understood that for some people, the perception, (50,000 claimed daily blog readers), is much more important than the reality, (4,000 actual daily blog readers).

“Now for some people it is better worth while to seem to be wise, than to be wise without seeming to be (for the art of the sophist is the semblance of wisdom without the reality, and the sophist is one who makes money from an apparent but unreal wisdom); for them, then, it is clearly essential also to seem to accomplish the task of a wise man rather than to accomplish it without seeming to do so.”

It’s worth noting that sophists who favor ambiguity-based refutations are extremely vulnerable to having their
tactics used against them.  By
intentionally utilizing a word that has multiple definitions, including some
that are less than helpful to your case, you can be certain that the sophist will
latch onto the definition they perceive to be damaging to your argument and
thereby leap eagerly into the trap. He will do so because his objective in an argument
is usually focused on disqualifying his opponent in the eyes of the crowd rather than in genuinely refuting his opponent’s argument.

McRapey retreats

You may recall that for the last nine months John Scalzi has been lying about his average daily blog readers.

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: http://bit.ly/TzNsdl

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

Four days after I busted him for exaggerating his daily readership by a mere 46,000 readers, he abruptly, and for no particular reason at all, retreated to his previous claim of UP TO 50k readers.

piovere ‏@piovere 4:44 PM – 16 Aug 13
@scalzi via what means do you get these many ARCs? I ha thought it was SFWA related, but I guess not?

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi 4:45 PM – 16 Aug 13
@piovere It’s related to having 50K Twitter followers and up to 50K daily readers of the blog, many of whom like SF/F.

While it is technically true, McRapey’s claim about having up to 50k daily readers of his blog is more than a little misleading considering how much smaller his average daily blog readership is.  Come clean, Johnny. Be honest about your site traffic. Just do what I do and post your numbers for the public to see. You’ll sleep better at night knowing that even if everyone knows you’re less popular than all your friends thought you were, at least you’re not a fraud… in this regard.

Besides, you know that if you don’t, someone else just might do it for you. For no particular reason at all.

BUSTED, or, a minor margin of error

McRapey never stops stretching the facts in the interests of self-promotion.

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

I find this amusing because it is so perfectly in lack of character.  The fact is that John Scalzi’s site doesn’t get 50k readers a day.  It doesn’t even get 50k pageviews per day.  McRapey is exaggerating his daily readers by a factor between 10 and 25.  This is mathematically obvious because last year he was celebrating 8 million WordPress pageviews in 2012, which works out to 20,822 Google pageviews per day.  However, most sites run around 4 pageviews per reader, which means that, at most, McRapey’s site averages 5,205 readers per day. And if the level of engagement is higher than average there, as is the case here, then the actual number of average daily readers could be as low as 2,000.

By doubling his actual pageviews and then swapping “reader” for “pageview”, McRapey tries to make his site look considerably more popular and influential than it is. This sort of bait-and-switch is typical for the Left and it isn’t new for McRapey.  I recall that the very first time he came to my attention, he was bragging about his vast knowledge of science fiction based, in part, on “Four science fiction novels sold” at a time when he only had one “conventionally published”. I correctly had him pegged for a bullshit artist from the very start.

If I were to exaggerate on a similar scale, I could claim 75k readers a day for my sites.  But I don’t.  Because there aren’t.

UPDATE: It turns out this isn’t the first time McRapey has lied about his blog traffic.  In this 2012 tweet, he even makes it clear that his 50k claim refers only to average daily blog readers, not pageviews or one-time maximums, and it is a claim that happens to be completely, utterly, and provably false.

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: http://bit.ly/TzNsdl

I invite McRapey to come clean about his ludicrous exaggerations and do what I and many other honest bloggers do.  Just put up a link that allows your readers to see exactly what your real daily readers are and stop blatantly lying about how many of them there are.

UPDATE II: McRapey wrote: “Bear in mind that I don’t generally lie for the sake of lying. That’s really stupid, and I’m not that
good of a liar. Most things aren’t worth lying about, and as a rule I
do try to live my life in a manner so that lying isn’t something I have
to do a lot of.”

One has to admire the calculated preparatory spin.  McRapey doesn’t lie for the sake of lying, he lies whenever he thinks it suits his interests and he can get away with it. Scalzi lies frequently and he lies shamelessly.  He often lies about very stupid things. The man is a gifted self-promoter, and one of the things that makes him so good at self-promotion is his complete lack of honesty or integrity.

And that is probably what lies at the heart of our contempt for each other.

Hugo Danger’s epic meltdown

It is certainly a doozy.  A brief sample of hits from Hugo’s Great Manic Confession follows.  TL;DR: We were right.  The leading male feminist was a complete fraud.

I am handing over my password to a trusted friend shortly.
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 15h

Well, that was a manic episode.
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 18h

I’m sorry that I kept mocking socially awkward men as creeps as a way of making myself look better.
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 18h

Please. After the sexting and the fraudulence and the sheer ugly debasedness of it all I’m finished.
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 18h

People are tweeting me saying I’m hurting myself more by doing this. How? You think I had a chance at a comeback?
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 18h

I did promote others but I secretly wanted to be THE male feminist
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 18h

To everyone at the Good Men Project I am so sorry
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

Or find a better way of doing it because I did deserve it. I was a shitty writer and I was a fraud and I did try to kill my ex
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

So you should know that you were RIGHT! This man is not well.
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

The point is simple and clear and sane. I have been a self-aggrandizing fraud from day one. @studentactivism will tell you
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

So yes, I sexted with a hooker. Yes, I wanted to have my students watch me screw James Deen.
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

I loved being the most notorious bad boy male feminist out there
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

But I was just craving attention.
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

I’m a monstrous hypocrite.
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

…that I was sleeping with a 23 year-old. And sexting a 27 year-old. Not my students at least.
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

I cheated on my wife and pretended to be reformed. I wrote an article in the Atlantic condemning age-disparate relationships the same week
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

My friends who defended me I’m so sorry. You did all that work for nothing. The critics were right, they could see it.
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

I am so so sorry that I let myself be like this. But I wanted atttention so f-ing bad. This was all about attention.
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

And yes, I networked like a motherfucker to get promoted.
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

I’ll be fine, and I’ll dump in some tranquilizers in a sec. But let the truth come out. The critics were right.
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

I loved the attention more and I was fucking awesome at getting it.
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

I read one book of Kimmel’s and made myself an expert on men and masculinity.
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

But there was no there there.
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

I then built a career as a well-known online male feminist on fraudulent pretenses. My mania let me talk a good game
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

So the real story you all missed is that I talked my way into teaching women’s studies on the basis of 2 undergrad courses only
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

I don’t know about you, but I am looking forward to seeing how McRapey is going to top this bold move by Hugo Danger.  Let’s face it, a mere ballgown isn’t going to do it.

Who wore it better?

On the left, we have Hugo Schwyzer, recently disgraced professor and self-described adulterer.  On the right, we have John Scalzi, award-winning science fiction author and self-described rapist. I think those who still doubt the intellectual legitimacy of Game should find it informative to observe that public figures who so confidently present themselves as pro-feminist critics of masculinity are so inclined to display themselves in a sexually creepy manner.  It does tend to underline the concept of the Gamma male as a female-oriented mind in a male body.

And it is certainly more than a little ironic to observe that both men also often claim that they represent models for superior male behavior and offer advice accordingly.  I leave it to the reader to decide for himself how justified those claims are, as well as the wisdom of taking their advice.

UPDATE: Speaking of female-oriented minds, one of these two paragons of mental stability pretended to attempt suicide last week.

Hugo Schwyzer, the social sciences academic at Pasadena City College
best known as the “porn professor,” tried to commit suicide last night,
he told the Weekly today. He was visiting his mother in the Monterey area, where he grew up,
when it happened about 10 p.m., he said. He was placed on a 72-hour
psychiatric hold at Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula, the
professor said: “I took an entire bottle of Klonapin,” he said. That’s a muscle relaxant and anti-anxiety drug.

One can only assume that by “took an entire bottle of Klonapin” he actually meant “washed down a pair of Advil with a wine cooler”.  Gammas are prone to striking false poses, particularly self-harming ones.  Hugo Danger has no more intention of harming himself over his most recent round of public humiliation than I do over ATOB finishing third in the 2013 Clive Staples voting.

Voltairean revenge

“I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.” 
– Voltaire

9 Jun 2012 … Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 
I stopped engaging with Men’s Rights Activists: the huge support for guys like Vox Day ..

In light of Mr Schwyzer’s less than entirely astonishing self-immolation, I can’t even imagine what sort of three-ring circus of scandal is lurking in McRapey’s future. I mean, the man is already calling himself a rapist and posting pictures of himself wearing dresses.

Who doesn’t understand what?

The current SFWA president provides a fascinating retweet from the previous SFWA president.

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi 20 Jul
As a general rule, a person too stupid to understand satire shouldn’t try to use it as an affirmative defense.
Retweeted by Steven Gould

Now, logic suggests that there are two possibilities here.  The first is that a member of Mensa doesn’t understand satire.  The second is that John Scalzi is a foolish ass who didn’t stop and think before he asserted his belief in a dimwitted reader’s interpretation of one of my posts.

Whatever could the answer be?  Remember, leftist attacks often involve psychological projection of their own deficiencies.  Consider the similarities between McRapey’s claims that I don’t understand satire and his response to my explanation for the readily observable fact that women write very little hard science fiction more than eight years ago:

“John, you think it makes more sense to postulate that despite my
obvious familiarity with the hard SF works of various women, I am
dedicated to a theory of genetic female inferiority while simultaneously
being in denial of the existence of books I own, than to admit you
failed to grasp an obvious rhetorical device.”

It’s possible, Vox. On the other hand, 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.

McRapey can’t be wrong, you see, because credentials.  Credentials and ample training.

Response Part X

Section C purports to be evidence of what Matthew Johnson imagines to be my “bad faith”.  Which I find to be more than a little ironic, considering his near-complete failure to provide any of the considerable exculpatory evidence available in his “comprehensive” report.

C. Actions which demonstrate bad faith

This section of the report examines actions by Mr. Beale which, while not individually as serious as those described in parts A and B, may be taken as cumulative evidence that his interactions with SFWA have not been in good faith.

Two general issues will be addressed in this section:

1. Declarations of unwillingness to obey SFWA bylaws and procedures

1.1 Archiving Forum material for later publication
1.2 Refusal to abide by bylaws and Board sanctions

2. Threats of nuisance litigation

As well, the final part of this section will look at posts and comments made by Beale in which he makes statements regarding his intentions and his attitude towards SFWA.

In related news, the SFWA Board has voted on my 17 June complaint, which concerned Nora Jemisin’s apparent violation of discussion forum confidentiality in her speech in Australia,  Lee Martindale’s implied threat to commit criminal violence against me in the event of my election, and Laura Resnick’s threat to kill me, dismember me, and serve the remains to her dinner guests.

SFWA President Steven Gould moved that the Board “disallow the complaint filed by a member against multiple members to continue through the complaint process for insufficient grounds” and the measure passed 6-0.

Just to make it clear that I have not violated any confidentiality rules, please note that I received the results of the Board vote from parties other than the SFWA Ombudsman. I am still awaiting the result of my 11 July complaint concerning the actions of Mr. Gould and Mr. Johnson.

Something else I found interesting related to the charge in B.3 concerning the supposedly negative effect of my membership in the organization.  Given the necessity of an objective metric to ascertain the validity of Mr. Johnson’s charges, I asked him how many members the organization had on June 13th versus July 15th.  Mr. Johnson informed me: “The membership numbers in the online directory represent our best data. We do not track membership numbers by specific dates.”

Given that the online directory still contains several members who left the organization some time ago, this makes it clear that the Board will have little choice but to dismiss that aspect of the complaint for what are, in this particular case, legitimately “insufficient grounds”.

And in the meantime, former SFWA president McRapey appears to have taken the news that rehashed Jane Austen is still acceptable “science fiction” in the eyes of SFWA 3.0 a little too enthusiastically.  That, or he’s simply not dealing well with his copious free time now that he’s left Steven Gould to clean up, however ineptly, the Augean detritus that three years of McRapey’s “leadership” left behind.

Either way, he has let it be known that he would henceforth prefer to be known as Jane Scalzi in a courageous attempt to play life on a more challenging difficulty level.  I know everyone in the Dread Ilk will join me in wishing him well in his transition.

UPDATE: Mr. Johnson’s statement is absolutely fascinating in light of Article V, Section 5 (c) of the SFWA bylaws.

Response Part IX

§ 107 . Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use

Notwithstanding
the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted
work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by
any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as
criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies
for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of
copyright.