Having repeatedly tried to support the YES vote for Scottish independence by claiming it was 22 points down in the polls, the UK media tries to boost the NO turnout by suddenly reporting that the YES side is ahead by two points:
Scotland WILL become independent, shock new poll claims as it shows 51% now back Yes campaign with just 11 days until vote
Fifty-one per cent of voters to choose independence on September 18
Shock poll puts Yes campaign in the lead for the first time
Better Together safely holds 49 per cent of the vote
Gap between sides narrows to just two points with less than a fortnight before historic referendum
It’s always interesting to see the way in which the polls move before a big vote of this sort. They always seem to move in the same pattern whenever the media clearly favors one side over another. First a huge lead for the side it is supporting, gradually declining over time, and when the media gets worried it is actually going to lose, a shock poll suddenly appears showing the side it opposes ahead, but only by a little.
It seems to me that the more the English politicians and celebrities huff and puff, the more the Scots appear to favor independence.
Observers are unimpressed with the gaming journalists’ hatred for their nominal audience:
Slate readers are over, declining—a dead demographic.
Why on Earth would I start a column with this thesis? There is no faster way to alienate my audience—that is, the people who pay my bills. And yet, this is exactly what writers at not one but half a dozen online gaming publications did to their audiences last week, and it points to a significant shift in the business of gaming. Gamers are not over, but gaming journalism is.
Some background: Recently, there were some egregious incidents of harassment in the gaming community, as I covered in a previous piece. The harassment story quickly spiraled into a much larger fight, clumsily dubbed #GamerGate, between an angry, mostly anonymous mass of gamers and the gaming press. The fight blew up on Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, gaming sites, 4chan, and elsewhere last week. With rhetorical shrapnel flying everywhere, one ironic low was achieved when popular and resolutely positive gamer Steven Williams, aka Boogie2988, found himself simultaneously maligned as a brainwashed feminist by self-declared men’s rights activists and fat-shamed by self-declared social justice advocates. Another low was when thoughtful freelance gaming writer Jenn Frank decided to leave the field altogether after being unfairly singled out for relentless criticism.
Trying to sort through GamerGate is like sinking into quicksand, but the general tenor of the discussion has been: A fair number of gamers hate the journalists who cover them, and the journalists hate them back.
If you’ll notice, I don’t pay any attention whatsoever to all the new gaming sites and I have absolutely no idea why anyone else ever did. It is entirely obvious that none of them know anything about the history of games, and many of them are observably not very interested in games at all.
Bob @bobby_5150 Between @voxday and @scalzi , who would have thought scalzi would be the bigger douche bag. (;:;)
Agree&Amplify @angreeandamp @bobby_5150 Makes You wonder just what else Vox may be right about.
For some time now, John Scalzi has been offering dubious explanations of his past traffic claims. Last year he stopped reporting his annual traffic and even resorted to posting misleading evidence of a one-day traffic spike driven by an external source in order to shore up his more fraudulent claims. However, it turns out that he was even more grossly fraudulent than we knew when talking himself up to the media. Consider his 2010 interview with this Hugo-winning SF/F magazine, in which he undeniably misrepresented the amount of traffic his site receives by a factor of between 17.5 and five, respectively.
Interview: John Scalzi by Erin Stocks Published September 2010
Anything you ever wanted to know about science fiction writer John Scalzi you can find online at the public and rather opinionated blog that he’s kept since 1998, whatever.scalzi.com/. His bio page holds all the usual info—education, past jobs, present jobs, books published, awards won—and is wrapped up with the tongue-in-cheek coda: “For more detailed information, including a complete bibliography, visit the Wikipedia entry on me. It’s generally accurate.”
But spend a little more time browsing, and you’ll learn that beyond the dry stats and quippy bon mots, there’s more to John Scalzi and his writing than meets the eye. For one thing, his blog gets an extraordinary amount of traffic for a writer’s website–Scalzi himself quotes it at over 45,000 unique visitors daily and more than two million page views monthly.
As it happens, there is considerably more of interest beyond “the dry stats”. For various reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with my relationship with certain hacker groups, I am in possession of a considerable amount of Mr. Scalzi’s historical traffic statistics and to say that he exaggerated his blog traffic does not really do the man justice. Consider: for the 12-month period from September 2009 to August 2010 immediately preceding the September interview with Ms Stocks, Whatever had 4,916,947 pageviews. And while 409,745 pageviews per month isn’t bad, it is considerably less than the “extraordinary amount” of “more than two million page views monthly” that he claimed at the time.
You don’t need to take my word for it either, as in his post entitled 8 Million Views for 2012, Scalzi happened to include a graphic summary of his annual pageviews from previous years, shown here on the right. The 4.49 million number is for 2009 and equates to 374,023 per month. The 5.13 million is for 2010 and amounts to 427,599 per month. Obviously, the 409,745-pageview number for the twelve-month period in between is both credible and substantiated by Scalzi’s own report.
Nor will his usual retreat to the “up to” excuse hold any water. The fact is that at no point, either before or after the Lightspeed interview, did Whatever ever have “more than two million page views monthly”. John Scalzi has only once ever had more than one million page views, barely, in May 2012. And his unique visitor claim is even less accurate. Prior to September 2010, Whatever’s peak MONTHLY unique visitors was just under 135,000, in February 2010. That means that far from being “over 45,000 unique visitors daily”, he was actually seeing “under 4,500 unique visitors daily”. Considerably under, as it happens; the actual number of daily unique visitors from September 2009 through August 2010 was 2,567. Which even the most math-illiterate pinkshirt should be able to grasp is not “over 45,000”.
Now, you may not like me at all. You may not agree with me about much. You may even believe that I am Voxemort, the Supreme Dark Lord, whose name must not be mentioned in the science fiction and fantasy world, in a non-ironic sense. But none of that changes the observable facts. And the facts are that John Scalzi is a proven liar, a fraudulent self-marketer who has regularly inflated his reported traffic in a self-serving manner, and an inherently untrustworthy individual. You simply cannot take anything the man says at face value, much less place any confidence in the narrative he attempts to pass off, because his primary concern is how any given fact or individual can best serve what he perceives to be his interests.
It may help to understand that my perspective has always been iconoclastic and my opinions have been widely read since I was first nationally syndicated back in 1995. As a result, I am under a certain amount of pressure to never modify, spin, or manipulate information in any deceptive or misleading way, because there are literally dozens of critics who dislike me and are waiting to exploit even the smallest slip-up. (Look what resulted from that single tweeted blog link, for example.) It has been that way for nearly twenty years now. So, if I am saying something about my traffic, or especially about someone else’s traffic, you can bet your life on the fact that I am telling you the absolute truth to the extent that it is available to me.
I have had a Sitemeter widget on the sidebar for the entire existence of this blog. I have a Google pageviews widget on the sidebar of the AG blog, and I would have one here if it worked with the old template that I prefer and still use. When I say that this blog had 41,075 pageviews yesterday, or that there were 62,971 pageviews between the two one week ago, or the two blogs will get over 1.5 million pageviews this month, I am not exaggerating in the slightest and I can easily prove the truth of my assertions. John Scalzi has all the same information about his traffic that I do and more. All he has to do to prove me to be a liar is to simply make public his WordPress statistics from September 2009 to August 2010.
Ask yourself why he does not do so. Ask yourself why he will not do so. Ask yourself why he has not only continued to hide his daily traffic numbers since I first called them into question last year, but is now releasing even less information than he did before. And then, like Agree&Amplify, you might consider asking yourself, what else is Vox right about? What else is John Scalzi lying about?
Now, perhaps he is entirely correct and I am “a real bigoted shithole of a human being” and “an undeserving bigot shithole”, my Hugo-nominated novelette is “to put it charitably, not good”, and Larry Correia is “whining about how [he] totally MEANT to fail spectacularly at the Hugos” and trying to “RATIONALIZE [HIS] HUMILIATING DEFEAT”.
Or perhaps he is not, and he is simply lying about these things as he has been observed to lie about other things. The incontrovertible evidence is right there in front of you. To take it into account or to blithely ignore it is up to you. And it’s mysterious, is it not, that this very well-sourced and impartial information concerning his “more than two million page views monthly” is missing from his Wikipedia page.
I saw this conversation come up in my Notifications on Twitter today:
Francis Begbie @BegbieBegbie I think there’s something to @voxday ‘s theory on atheism and social skills: Look at Myers response in the comments.
Preston S. Brooks @Rebel_Bill That’s beyond a lack of social skills, that’s almost into the realm of autism.
I had no idea what they were talking about, so I went over to Pharyngula and saw that PZ, fresh from correctly criticizing Richard Dawkins for failing to understand that you can’t complain about people reacting emotionally when you intentionally push their emotional buttons with rhetoric intended to do just that, had somehow decided that the coverage of Robin Williams’s suicide was a wonderful opportunity to strike a morally superior prose and preen about his supposed a) lack of interest in celebrities and b) deep concern for people of African descent. The response referenced above:
Celebrity culture. Fuck it. These people do not have an emotional connection to Robin Williams, the man; it’s fine to like the actor/comedian and enjoy his work, but look at this thread, and my twitter feed: people are freaking out that someone pointed out that the obsession with celebrity is getting in the way of caring about things that matter. I’m mainly feeling that I should have been more rude, because asking me to have been nicer about the dead famous guy is completely missing the point.
But it’s not PZ’s social autism that amuses me. I’ve known his AQ score indicates basic lack of empathy since 2008; my observations concerning the connection between atheism and social autism in TIA even prompted at least two scientific studies. What amuses me is PZ’s transparent hypocrisy.
I’m sorry to report that comedian Robin Williams has committed suicide, an event of great import and grief to his family. But his sacrifice has been a great boon to the the news cycle and the electoral machinery — thank God that we have a tragedy involving a wealthy white man to drag us away from the depressing news about brown people. I mean, really: young 18 year old black man gunned down for walking in the street vs. 63 year old white comedian killing himself?
That is from the first of two posts about Robin Williams at Pharyngula. The number of posts about Michael Brown’s death on Pharyngula and the subsequent black unrest in Ferguson, MO in the five days since his death? ZERO. PZ is not only empathetically obtuse, he is observably guilty of the very act he was attempting to portray himself as being above.
Of course, PZ is smart enough to know that the reason that the media doesn’t cover the deaths of young black men is because doing so would shatter their attempts to sell the myth of racial equality. If the media did what he feigns to want, he would accuse them of racism, because if every death of a young black man was covered in the same intense detail as Robin Williams’s death, there would be more nationwide demand for interning all male African-Americans between the ages of 15 and 30 than there ever was for interning Japanese-Americans.
Speaking at Wikipedia’s annual Wikimania conference in London today, Wales said: “History is a human right and one of the worst things that a person can do is attempt to use force to silence another.
“I’ve been in the public eye for quite some time; some people say good things and some people say bad things. That’s history and I would never ever use any kind of legal process like this to try to suppress the truth. I think that’s deeply immoral.”
I can’t think of any non-state organization that suppresses the truth as much as Wikipedia. The system that Wales has set up ruthlessly and relentlessly suppresses the truth under its false rubric of requiring a “reliable source”.
Don’t take my word for it. Look at the Wikipedia page about me. Does that describe my views at all? Are the totality of my views really limited to little more than a feud with John Scalzi and my expulsion from SFWA? Do I have no opinions on economics, politics, philosophy, literature, and religion despite having written books on the former and the latter? It’s telling, too, to observe that if the so-called feud and the expulsion are the only significant aspects of my views, there is no mention of the connection between the former and the latter.
Now, here are my views on the various schools of economics:
The Austrian school of economics presently provides Man’s best understanding of the field of economics, but the core mechanism for its business cycle is incorrect. In place of the shift between consumer goods and capital goods, it is the limits of demand for credit that is the causal factor of the boom-bust cycle.
Those are my actual views on the subject. That is the absolute truth. Post them on Wikipedia and they’ll be suppressed within 24 hours even though most of my other “views” are directly taken from the “reliable source” that is my own writing.
UPDATE: Speaking of the so-called feud, I thought this Twitter exchange between one ClarkHat and John Scalzi was illuminating. McRapey clearly doesn’t grasp (or more likely, being a gamma male, is unable to publicly admit), that he is a successful, but mediocre SF writer, not even when his book was picked up for a television series by the distinguished network famous for Sharknado and Werewolves vs Strippers:
CLARKHAT: Would you care to actually respond to my comments that 1) your writing is mediocre 2) your rewards >> your merit
JOHN SCALZI: Sure: 1. You’re wrong, 2. You’re wrong but even if you were right so what? Hope that helps.
CH: suggests a theory I hadn’t considered: you really DON’T understand the delta between your work & great work
JS: Your problem is you have really no understanding of my psychology. Which is fine, but doesn’t make you less wrong. I don’t mind you being wrong, however, as it has no effect on what I do or how I do it. Go on being wrong!
You and I have no disagreement in you sharing your thoughts on what is great writing. Do! I think that’s a fine thing.
CH: But this is again Blue Model reframing: “your thoughts”. My pt is not about “my truth”; it is about objective artistic truth. I am not saying “**I** prefer Mieville over @scalzi”; I am saying “objective standards exist; try some Mieville”.
JS: “Objective artistic truth.” Ooooh, I have the giggles now. DO GO ON.
CH: “You think Davinci’s David is better than my paper mache puppet of Donald Trump? That’s just, like, your opinion, man.
JS: This objective art hypothesis of yours is ADORABLE. And explains many things, i.e., “What I like is OBJECTIVELY great, so there.”
That’s the amusing thing about McRapey. For all his vaunted rhetorical skills granted by virtue of BACHELOR’S DEGREE IN PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE, he doesn’t grasp that he can’t assert that ClarkHat is wrong about him being a mediocre writer while simultaneously denying the concept of objective standards in art.
If all art is subjective, then Scalzi is a mediocre writer by virtue of ClarkHat subjectively declaring him to be so. And if all art is objective, then he is a mediocre writer by virtue of the comparison of his work with that of other, better writers. There is no way that Scalzi can correctly declare ClarkHat to be wrong, as he nevertheless repeatedly does.
I heard just this week from my agent and editor that, despite declining sales, Tor Books has agreed to published the penultimate and ultimate volume in the sexilogy (not what it sounds like; get your mind out of the gutter!) of the nonaward-winning Count to the Eschaton Sequence!
Those who have been anxiously waiting for John Scalzi’s best-selling military scifi novel Old Man’s War to get a live-action adaptation won’t have to be waiting much longer. Syfy and Academy Award-nominated director Wolfgang Petersen will adapt the books for television as a series titled Ghost Brigades, after the second novel in the series.
You might remember that Paramount had originally purchased the rights to the Old Man’s War novel to make a movie, but those plans fell through. But don’t worry that this adaptation is going to skip the events of the first novel; as the author himself explains in a tongue-in-cheek self-Q&A on his website, “The series will pull elements from various books in the OMW universe in any event.” The title “Ghost Brigades” was used for the show instead of “Old Man’s War” simply because it sounded “sexier.”
I’m rather disappointed about one of these things, but possibly not the one you might think. While I personally dislike John Scalzi and consider him a fraud, a coward, and a mediocre, derivative novelist, I don’t wish him any ill. I genuinely believe he is rather well-suited for the medium of television, and based on my limited experience in the TV industry, his self-marketing tendencies may actually be on the modest side there.
No, you see, I was rather hoping to have Castalia pick up the rest of the Count to the Eschaton books. C’est la vie, a la prochaine fois. We have not yet reached the point where we can directly compete with Tor Books. But we will. Sooner or later.
Between statements like this and the various public calls for genocide, the Israeli/American Jew PR effort that has met with mixed results in the USA is absolutely back-firing in Europe.
An Israeli official has called for concentration camps in Gaza and ‘the conquest of the entire Gaza Strip, and annihilation of all fighting forces and their supporters’.
Moshe Feiglin, Deputy Speaker of the Israeli Knesset and member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party, posted the inflammatory message on his Facebook page at the weekend.
He lays out a detailed plan for the destruction of Gaza – which includes shipping its residents across the world – in a letter he addressed to the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
This is the gentleman of whom Shimshon spoke a few posts ago. He’s only got about 10 percent support in Israel, if I understand correctly, but as we know from NK Jemisin’s example, 10 percent support is dangerous and sufficient to inspire impassioned speeches about how all the white folk want you dead. Or something like that, anyhow.
To help clarify the difference between the European reaction and the American one in perspective, here are the top-rated comments.
From Italy with 1676 upvotes: It is what we have all been thinking was the real Israeli agenda. How can the world just do nothing:(
From the UK with 1034 upvotes: Israel wants the land for its natural gas, it’s as simple as that. It won’t stop and is behaving in an appalling manner…. Hamas and the Israeli Government should hang their heads in shame. Both are terrorist organisations in my mind.
From the UK with 939 upvotes:And Israel wonders why the Palestinians – plus a growing number of the rest of the world – hate them?
From Sweden with 818 upvotes:It is truely disgusting that the people who have been through what they have are doing exactly the same to another group. They keep talking about the hamas charter of wiping out israel. More often then not, it is israel who wants to wipe out palestinians.
And for comparison’s sake, the worst-rated from Wales with 787 downvotes:Seems fair – Hamas have called for the extermination of the jews, so its only reasonable that Israel should exterminate all palestinians.
Now, keep in mind that this is from the readership of the anti-immigration, right-leaning Daily Mail, which does not exactly have a lot of Muslims among its readership. I can assure you that the language in the more left-leaning papers is considerably more vehement and virulently anti-Israel.
Feiglin’s plan is so overtly Naziesque that it almost seems as if he’s trolling everyone. About the only thing he missed was to say that Palestinians would have ID numbers tattooed on their arms and forced to wear a yellow crescent moon on their clothing. Then again, what with the Holocaust card being played out, perhaps the Israelis are ready to throw it away and embrace their role as the world’s cartoon villains even if the Jews in America are not.
Perhaps those of you who previously doubted me will take my warnings about Europe a little more seriously now. It’s not just the Turkish and Pakistani immigrants who are increasingly hostile to Israel and Jewry.
I’ve been thinking a bit about how one might apply the principles of 4GW to blog commenting, mostly inspired by what happened in the comments at esr’s place after Andrew Marston showed up the other day.
What got me thinking about it is observing that online trolls have much the same sorts of advantages as non-state actors do in war; they can’t be destroyed even by overwhelming force, they are perceived as the weaker party, and they have the ability to control the time and place of the engagement. Even when they are roundly defeated, they can simply retreat only to reappear without warning in the future.
4GW teaches two forms of engagement, de-escalation and the Hama model. I think Tom Kratman’s direct assault on Luscinia/Marston can be taken as a good form of the latter. The challenge of the Hama model is that it is time-constrained. William Lind says that with today’s 24/7 global communications, a state actor has three or four days to fully unload on a non-state actor without taking serious flak on the moral level. The Syrian army took four days to flatten Hama, after which it spent three weeks hunting down insurgents in the rubble.
I interpret this to mean that if you’re going to go all out rhetorically against a troll, one has three, perhaps four comments before people start to get sick of it and turn against you. Not that sympathies will turn towards the troll, but they will begin to adopt a “pox on both houses” attitude and the moral level will be lost.
Moreover, the Hama model is best adopted when one possesses overwhelming force, which is to say, the delete key, because one has the ability to prevent the troll from answering back and prolonging the engagement.
As to what the de-escalation model would entail, I shall have to give the matter further thought. But I do know the one thing it relies most heavily upon is information….
No doubt they’ll be completely astonished when their sales collapse by 80 percent:
Marvel is excited to announce an all-new era for the God of Thunder in brand new series, THOR, written by Jason Aaron complimented with art from Russell Dauterman. This October, Marvel Comics evolves once again in one of the most shocking and exciting changes ever to shake one of the “big three” of Captain America, Iron Man and Thor. No longer is the classic Thunder God able to hold the mighty hammer, Mjölnir, and a brand new female hero will emerge worthy of the name THOR.
Series writer Jason Aaron emphasizes, “This is not She-Thor. This is not Lady Thor. This is not Thorita. This is THOR. This is the THOR of the Marvel Universe. But it’s unlike any Thor we’ve ever seen before.” THOR is the latest in the ever-growing and long list of female-centric titles that continues to invite new readers into the Marvel Universe.
The astonishing thing is that these people actually believe they are the creative ones. Why not turn the WONDER WOMAN into a cross-dressing man? Why not transform the SUPERMAN into a monkey? Why not change the CAPTAIN AMERICA into a buck private in the Armed Forces of the United Nations?
Intentionally or unconsciously, they confuse self-parody with creativity. They tear down and think they are engaged in creative destruction, only what they rebuild is nothing but a cheap and ugly mockery of what stood there before.
How do you know that Nicholas Wade’s A TROUBLESOME INHERITANCE is worth reading? Because the New York Times has published a second hit-piecereview. And it is a classic of its type, utilizing techniques that you see repeatedly here and elsewhere when left-wingers are attempting to cast doubt on something they cannot reasonably rebut.
First, David Dobbs resorts to the popular “Disproof by Citation” tactic. One often sees this used in reference to scientific studies (in particular John Lott’s landmark study on gun crime), in which the left-wing critic will claim, almost always falsely, that some hitherto unknown figure has “demolished” or “destroyed” or “refuted” or “totally disproven” the “debunked” piece being cited.
In his 2007 book “A Farewell to Alms,” the economic historian Gregory Clark argued that the English came to rule the world largely because their rich outbred their poor, and thus embedded their superior genes and values throughout the nation. In her comprehensive takedown, the historian Deirdre N. McCloskey noted that Clark’s idea was a “bold hypothesis, and was bold when first articulated by social Darwinists such as Charles Davenport and Francis Galton in the century before last.” Indeed, over the past 150 years, various white Western scientists and writers have repeatedly offered biological explanations for Caucasian superiority. They have repeatedly failed because, as McCloskey noted, none ever mounted a credible quantitative argument.
Note the phrase “comprehensive takedown”. That is the first red flag. And yet, even without reading McCloskey, without even reading Clark, we can safely assume that both she, and Dobbs, are not being honest because we know that a) Clark’s argument is not the same as those made by the social Darwinists, b) Clark’s argument only refers to the English and not other white nations, c) the only part of the “comprehensive takedown” actually cited simply called Clark’s idea a “bold hypothesis” before going off onto a tangent attacking other, unrelated parties. Furthermore, Clark does present a credible quantitative argument, one involving “the real day wages of English farm laborers from 1200 to 1800”, “homicide rates”, and other obviously quantitative factors. As Wade describes it:
“Clark has documented four behaviors that steadily changed in the English population between 1200 and 1800, as well as a plausible mechanism of change. The four behaviors are those of interpersonal violence, literacy, the propensity to save and the propensity to work.”
Now, how can you reconcile McCloskey’s claim that Clark did not mount a credible quantitative argument with the observable fact that this is exactly what Clark has done, complete with graphs and explanations of exactly how he is quantifying the four behaviors? By reading more carefully and realizing that McCloskey isn’t actually addressing Clark, but rather Davenport, Galton, and others from the pre-quantification era of social science. Dobbs knows that most people don’t read carefully, they only skim to see what they want to see. He’s not actually lying about anything except for the assertion – which is a subjective matter – of the “comprehensive takedown”, but he deceives the common reader into thinking that his assertion is supported.
Second, Dobbs erects a strawman and burns it. Third, he resorts to outright lying.
And despite his protests to the contrary, Wade often sounds as if he sees the rise of the West as a sort of stable endpoint of human history and evolution — as if, having considered 5,000 years in which history has successively blessed the Middle East, the Far East and the Ottoman Empire, he observes the West’s current run of glory and thinks the pendulum has stilled.
If Wade could point to genes that give races distinctive social behaviors, we might overlook such shortcomings. But he cannot.
So, Wade specifically and repeatedly states he is not doing what Dobbs thinks he is doing, which Dobbs then uses as justification to reach a conclusion that manifestly and absurdly contradicts everything Wade is saying. Wade never claims that “the pendulum has stilled”, quite to the contrary, his ENTIRE ARGUMENT depends upon the idea that the pendulum never stops swinging. And Wade does point to genes, specific genes, including the MAO-A gene, the SLC24A5 gene, the ABCC11 gene, and the EDAR gene that give races distinctive features as well as, in the case of the MAO-A gene, observably affecting their social behaviors.
Fourth and finally, Dobbs resorts to Vox’s Second Law of Critical Dynamics. If I can imagine it, it must be assumed true. If you can’t conclusively prove it, it must be assumed false.
Learn to recognize these deplorable rhetorical tactics. And never, ever, take a left-winger’s word for anything. You’ll be surprised how often they blatantly lie in the hopes that you won’t bother doing the research necessary to call them out on it.
