Tag: media

For varying degrees of “fascist”

In which Our Friend Damien proves beyond any shadow of a doubt that he doesn’t know what “fascist” means. But certainly we would be remiss if we did not help him complete his list. And, for the purposes of improving the obvious gaps in his education, recommend that he read I Fascisti by Giordano Bruno Guerri and Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg. At the very least, he would do well to read my translation of “Il manifesto dei fasci di combattimento”, penned by Mussolini himself, to better understand who is, and who is not, fascistic, paying particular attention to the very first plank of the program.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
I might do a column on sci-fis most crazy, fascist authors. Nominations?

Cora Buhlert ‏@CoraBuhlert
@damiengwalter You really need some? I thought your “fan club” provided sufficient ammunition.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
@CoraBuhlert May be one or two I’ve missed…

Cora Buhlert ‏@CoraBuhlert
@damiengwalter Kratman, Wright, VD, Correia, the entire Mad Genius Club, prepper fic authors, anybody in that Buzzfeed article.

Paul Weimer ‏@PrinceJvstin
@CoraBuhlert @damiengwalter that’s a fairly solidly comprehensive list

Cora Buhlert ‏@CoraBuhlert
@damiengwalter Ringo, though he’s not a jerk as far as I know.

 Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
@CoraBuhlert I think the Oh No John Ringo meme suggests he is.

Cora Buhlert ‏@CoraBuhlert
@damiengwalter Not as jerky as the others who will flood you with trolls.

The amusing thing is that Damien has been repeatedly writing about Larry Correia and me in The Guardian, he just normally pretends to be writing about some mysterious Voldemortean figures Who Shall Not Be Named, whose secret identities only the PC cognoscenti may be permitted to know. But a point-and-shriek routine isn’t very effective when one only shrieks and refuses to actually point at anyone. So, for all that the charge of fascism is risibly inaccurate, it would arguably be a step forward.

Perhaps one day Damien will even reach the point where he feels comfortable doing the journalistically responsible thing and actually ask a question or two of his targets instead of repeatedly engaging in the conventional left-wing spin cycle into which no genuine information is permitted to penetrate.

In any event, who is Damien missing? He appears to have most of the Evil League of Evil already covered. Except M-Zed, of course, who will be mortally wounded at being overlooked.

Thought policing isn’t good business

Anthony Cumia correctly identifies a violent savage as a savage and gets fired, because it is supposed to be bad for business to permit its employees any freedom of speech, even on their off-hours. Except the corporate cure appears to be considerably worse than the disease:

Opie is devastated, Anthony is unrepentant, and their fans are livid and seeking revenge.

“Stop firing people for being themselves,” demanded one loyal listener of SiriusXM radio’s transgressive, occasionally tasteless Opie & Anthony Show, after shock jock Anthony Cumia was summarily terminated for a series of tweets—first reported last Wednesday by Gawker—that SiriusXM described as “racially-charged,” “hate-filled,” and “abhorrent.”

“Fascist bloggers don’t get to tell me what I can listen to,” wrote another diehard O&A fan, posting his comment on the web site for a petition to “Reinstate Anthony Cumia.”

“FUCK Sirius XM!” was a typical posting on “Boycott Sirius for Anthony Cumia’s Firing,” a Facebook page claiming 65,000 supporters, adding that “the army is growing.”

Even A-list comedian and frequent O&A guest Colin Quinn weighed in, tweeting sympathetically at Cumia: “I disagree with what you say but I will defend to the death my right to stop u saying it (Voltaire if he worked for gawker).” Show regulars Jay Mohr and Penn Gillette also cheered for Cumia. 

So goes Day Six of this strange radio morality play, combining elements of racial resentment and freedom of expression, that began the night of July 2, when Cumia claims he was snapping pictures in Times Square and a young African American woman objected to being photographed by punching him repeatedly in the face. An enraged Cumia vented obscenely on Twitter—the digital equivalent of white-on-black crime in retribution for an alleged physical assault.

Since then, rage and confusion have dominated the discussion, though not to the exclusion of some surprisingly thoughtful analysis from O&A fans who say they are drawn to the show because it is unfiltered, honest, funny and devoid of political correctness.

 “I follow him for his comedy, not for his opinions,” said Scott VanDusen, 30, who plans to cancel his SiriusXM subscription if Cumia is not reinstated by week’s end, and described himself as a Libertarian and the owner of software company in Wisconsin….

An additional planned boycott of the satellite and online radio
company’s advertising sponsors—which include such brands as McDonalds,
Geico, General Motors, ExxonMobil and American Express—is hardly good
news for SiriusXM’s stockholders, who have watched the share price on
NASDAQ drop nearly 2 percent since Cumia’s firing was announced on
Friday.

Imagine that…. It would certainly be informative to see a comprehensive list of the various people that Opie and Anthony have insulted and disrespected over the years without Sirius taking any exception. Apparently protection must be provided at all times to shield the poor tender feelings of an innocent, childlike people who cannot be held responsible for their actions or be expected to survive the sort of direct criticism that is regularly meted out to adults.

The obvious and inherent racism of the self-appointed anti-racist thought police never ceases to amaze me. And they will never win, because people have eyes and because die Gedanken sind immer frei.

Expose or damage control?

The Guardian relies heavily upon certain left-wing SF/F authors while reporting on the Bradley revelations:

The world of science fiction and fantasy is in shock, following news that the daughter of the bestselling late fantasy author Marion Zimmer Bradley has accused her mother of abusing her as a child.

Authors such as John Scalzi, G Willow Wilson and Jim Hines have reacted to the allegations against a woman who had been regarded a pillar of the SFF community with horror. The writer Janni Lee Simner has announced she will be donating her earnings from a story set in a fictional world created by Bradley to an anti-abuse charity.

One wonders how John Scalzi’s one-word commentary via Twitter, Jim “Celebrate the Legacy of MZB” Hines’s belated attempt to cover his past as an MZB cheerleader, and a female convert to Islam who published her first novel in 2012 are deemed a reasonable representation of “the world of science fiction and fantasy”.  Scalzi, who spent more words denying that Ed Kramer was still on the SFWA membership list than he did discussing Bradley, is mentioned twice in the article, while Deirdre Saoirse Moen, who along with Moira Greyland is actually responsible for the revelations, is only mentioned once in passing.

Stephen Goldin, the longtime SFWA member and former editor of the SFWA Bulletin, whose posting of the MZB depositions on SFF.net substantiated Greyland’s accusations, isn’t mentioned at all. Neither is the original MZB tribute on Tor.com that prompted Mrs. Greyland’s original email to Miss Moen.

While it is good that coverage of the problem of child abusers in science fiction is spreading, this is yet another example of why you can never trust the mainstream media to do more than scratch the surface. That being said, this part of the article is poignant and illustrates the importance of exposing the monsters regardless of the cost to their reputations:

Greyland, writing to the Guardian via email, said that she had not spoken out before “because I thought that my mother’s fans would be angry with me for saying anything against someone who had championed women’s rights and made so many of them feel differently about themselves and their lives.  I didn’t want to hurt anyone she had helped, so I just kept my mouth shut”.

Greyland, a harpist, singer and opera director, said it was now clear to her that “one reason I never said anything is that I regarded her life as being more important than mine: her fame more important, and assuredly the comfort of her fans as more important.  Those who knew me, knew the truth about her, but beyond that, it did not matter what she had done to me, as long as her work and her reputation continued.”

It will be interesting to see if this is a genuine effort to dig into the larger problem of child abuse in science fiction or if it is an exercise in damage control. Meanwhile, Larry Correia’s #1 fan actually has a reasonable take on the Bradley revelations, comparing it to the Jimmy Savile scandal, and considering it in light of how people react to the moral failures of their cultural icons:

How far can we separate any cultural figure from the values they represent? And in rejecting the figure, do we risk rejecting values that should transcend the actions of any single individual? The Mists of Avalon and the Darkover series made Marion Zimmer Bradley a leader of the emerging feminist movement in science fiction, alongside writers including Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ and Margaret Atwood. In critical terms Bradley was rarely considered seriously comparable to those writers, but as a writer of popular, mythic fiction she reached an audience those more acclaimed figures of feminism SF did not.

Readers will ultimately choose whether the works of Marion Zimmer Bradley are remembered and continue to be read. Many readers, myself included, will agree with Redditor CJGibson that “to read/support these authors in spite of their positions or actions sends a tacit message that what they’re doing is OK”.

I don’t have any problem with people separating the work from the artist and continuing to enjoy it. The work and the artist are not the same and the work doesn’t NECESSARILY reflect the evils of the artist. I still listen to Lostprophets despite the appalling crimes of the band’s lead singer. (MZB’s work is no dilemma for me despite the observable overlap between her crimes and her fiction as I never thought much of her work in the first place.) I don’t believe in the whitewashing of history.

Where I have a problem, and where I believe a line must be drawn, is when the artist is still celebrated, honored, and lionized on the basis of his work while his known moral failings are ignored or even denied.

Prizes for pedophiles and plagiarists

The Left gives its awards to any writer it deems politically useful, even if that writer is a sex criminal or didn’t actually do the original writing. Christopher Ketcham exposes the Pulitzer Prize-winning Chris Hedges as a serial plagiarist:

In early 2010, the editors at Harper’s Magazine began reviewing a lengthy manuscript submitted by Chris Hedges, a former New York Times reporter. In the piece, Hedges had turned his eye to Camden, New Jersey, one of the most downtrodden cities in the nation. Hedges’s editor at Harper’s, Theodore Ross, who left the magazine in 2011 and is now a freelance writer, was excited when he saw the draft. “I thought it was a great story about a topic—poverty—that nobody covers enough,” Ross said.

The trouble began when Ross passed the piece along to the fact-checker assigned to the story. As Ross and the fact-checker began working through the material, they discovered that sections of Hedges’s draft appeared to have been lifted directly from the work of a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter named Matt Katz, who in 2009 had published a four-part series on social and political dysfunction in Camden.

Given Hedges’s institutional pedigree, this discovery shocked the editors at Harper’s. Hedges had been a star foreign correspondent at the Times, where he reported from war zones and was part of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for covering global terrorism. In 2002, he had received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. He is a fellow at the Nation Institute. He has taught at Princeton University and Columbia University. He writes a weekly column published in the widely read progressive website Truthdig and frequently republished on the Truthout website. He is the author of twelve books, including the best-selling American Fascists. Since leaving the Times in 2005, he has evolved into a polemicist of the American left. For his fierce denunciations of the corporate state, his attacks on the political elite, and his enthusiasm for grassroots revolt, he has secured a place as a firebrand revered among progressive readers.

A leading moralist of the left, however, had now been caught plagiarizing at one of the oldest magazines of the left.

Ross and the fact-checker, who remains an editor at the magazine and asked that his name not be used in this story, sat down to discuss the matter before approaching Ellen Rosenbush, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, and Rick MacArthur, the publisher, who knew Hedges personally. The fact-checker was assigned to speak to Hedges about the material lifted from Matt Katz. According to Ross and the fact-checker, Hedges told them that he had shared the draft with Katz, who, Hedges claimed, had approved his use of Katz’s language and reporting. (Rosenbush and MacArthur declined to comment on the record for this article.)

But when the editors at Harper’s asked Katz about Hedges’s account, Katz told them he had not in fact seen the manuscript. “When I went back to Hedges, he tried to clarify by saying he didn’t mean that he had actually showed Katz the draft,” the fact-checker said. “He lied to me—lied to his fact-checker.”

At this point, Ross said, he brought the matter to Rosenbush, and together—after a series of meetings that included the fact-checker, literary editor Ben Metcalf, and MacArthur—they decided Harper’s could no longer stand behind the piece.

“I do not believe I shared a text with Matt Katz, but this was a few years ago,” Hedges wrote to me when I asked him about this account. “I know I spoke with him several times as he wrote the series and covered Camden.” Katz told me that he did not remember seeing a draft, and he confirmed speaking with a Harper’s fact-checker. He declined to comment further.

The plagiarism at Harper’s was not an isolated incident. Hedges has a history of lifting material from other writers that goes back at least to his first book, War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, published in 2002. He has echoed language from Nation author Naomi Klein. He has lifted lines from radical social critic Neil Postman. He has even purloined lines from Ernest Hemingway.

One has to say this for the Hugo Award-winning John Scalzi. Unlike Mr. Hedges, at least Mr. Scalzi is willing to admit that he ripped off Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, H. Beam Piper, and Star Trek.

Forget the morality of Hedges’s plagiarism. What sort of idiot thinks stealing lines from ERNEST HEMINGWAY is going to pass unnoticed? And isn’t it remarkable how many of these former New York Times reporters turn out to be plagiarists?

Instapundit goes after the IRS

It is remarkable how quickly the feared agency began acting like frightened gangsters once they found themselves in the investigative crosshairs:

When charges came out that the IRS targeted Tea Party groups for harassment, the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto started calling Obama “President Asterisk.” His point was that this illicit assistance tainted the election, the way an athlete’s use of illegal performance-enhancers results in an asterisk on any records he sets.

Now it may be time for another asterisk. As Congress investigates the IRS chicanery, the IRS has responded to a request for emails to and from Lois Lerner, who spearheaded the Tea Party harassment, by saying, basically, that the dog ate its homework. Or, rather, the IRS claims, somewhat dubiously, that “a hard drive crash” on Lerner’s computer led to the loss of emails to outside entities “such as the White House, Treasury, Department of Justice, FEC, or Democrat offices.” You know, the very people she’s accused of coordinating her harassment with….

Targeting Americans is unforgivable; covering it up is worse, and if the
IRS has made it impossible to target the individuals responsible, then
the IRS as a whole should pay the price.

I find it very, very difficult to believe that the “missing emails” defense is going to hold up. Too many people have suffered at the IRS hands for too long for Congress to give Lerner and company a pass.

Game of Thrones Season 4 finale

In addition to streamlining the story, Messrs. Benioff and Weiss appear to have a better grip on where A Song of Ice and Fire is going than Mr. Martin does himself. Not that I appreciated all their innovations; while apparently aborting Brienne of Tarth’s tedious wandering is a true mercy, it was just silly to see her defeating the Hound, not once, but twice. But at least a) she is a physical freak, and b) they made it look like a close-run thing, so it wasn’t too ridiculously Pink in these latter and oft very silly days.

I was wondering what on Earth Stannis Baratheon was doing NORTH of the Wall. Why does Mance need a tunnel to go south if Stannis doesn’t need it to go south? Ships, one presumes, but this was not actually explained that I noticed. And how did Stannis’s tiny force, even augmented by Iron Bank financing, so easily demolish the 100,000 strong army of the Wildings?

Despite these questions, it promises to avoid the interminable Stannis in the Snow chapters that so dragged down the latter books. And Benioff and Weiss have wisely kept the Mereen elements to a bare minimum, retaining only the emotionally powerful aspects of the Danaerys storyline – losing Ser Jorat and having to chain her dragons – rather than waste time on bureaucratic and romantic matters.

Tyrion’s escape seemed rushed. The murder of Shay was more like an accident than a betrayal punished, and it seemed odd that Tywin didn’t simply point out that he sent Jaime and Tyrion’s escape was all his doing. But Tyrion redeemed the whole scene with his final, hissed “I have always been your son”. One won’t often see two better actors facing off than in that last father-son Lannister showdown.

I also liked that Benioff and Weiss clearly grasp how boring the Bran storyline is. Short, action-packed, and full of skeletons erupting from the snow, that was definitely a great way to go. Burying Bran under a tree and leaving him there to vegetate for the rest of the show strikes me as an excellent idea.

All in all, I am considerably more optimistic about Season Five than I am about The Winds of Winter, although I would very much like to be proven wrong and to see Mr. Martin regain his fastball.

Don’t mess with an old pro

It may surprise some to hear it, but my primary influence as a columnist was probably George Will. Mostly due to his ability to deliver methodical bitchslappings of the sort he provides to a few senatorial critics. The old guy still has it:

I have received your letter of June 12, and I am puzzled. You say my statistics “fly in the face of everything we know about this issue.” You do not mention which statistics, but those I used come from the Obama administration, and from simple arithmetic involving publicly available reports on campus sexual assaults.

The administration asserts that only 12 percent of college sexual assaults are reported. Note well: I did not question this statistic. Rather, I used it.

I cited one of the calculations based on it that Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute has performed {link}. So, I think your complaint is with the conclusion that arithmetic dictates, based on the administration’s statistic. The inescapable conclusion is that another administration statistic that one in five women is sexually assaulted while in college is insupportable and might call for tempering your rhetoric about “the scourge of sexual assault.”

As for what you call my “ancient beliefs,” which you think derive from an “antiquated” and “counterintuitive” culture, allow me to tell you something really counterintuitive: I think I take sexual assault much more seriously than you do. Which is why I worry about definitions of that category of crime that might, by their breadth, tend to trivialize it. And why I think sexual assault is a felony that should be dealt with by the criminal justice system, and not be adjudicated by improvised campus processes.

If there was one thing I learned from Will, it was this: always check their numbers. Con artists always get the math wrong.

Nicholas Kristof and the Butterfield Effect

Michael Graham defines the Butterfield Effect:

It’s what happens when someone on the Left makes a statement that is laughably ludicrous on its face, yet it reveals what the speaker truly believes — no matter how dumb.

“The Butterfield Effect” is named in honor of ace New York Times crime reporter Fox Butterfield, the intrepid analyst responsible for such brilliantly headlined stories as “More Inmates, Despite Drop In Crime,” and “Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction,” not to mention the poetic 1997 header, “Crime Keeps on Falling, but Prisons Keep on Filling.”

Mr. Butterfield is truly perplexed at what he calls the “paradox” of more criminals in prison coinciding with less crime in neighborhoods. An observation that might appear obvious to an 8th grader (crooks + jail = fewer crimes) is simply beyond his grasp. Butterfield of the Times is the poster boy for the greatest conundrum facing the American Left today: How do you explain to people who just don’t get it that the problem is they just don’t get it?

 Nicholas Kristof is my favorite exemplar of this effect. Previously there was his brilliant idea to combat Boko Haram with redoubled efforts to educate Nigerian girls. And look at his column today, in which he affects to be puzzled why Aung San Suu Kyi isn’t standing up for the rights of Myanmar’s Muslims to set up madrassas all over the country and indiscriminately murder Buddhists.

  1. Aung San Suu Kyi should be one of the heroes of modern times. Instead, as her country imposes on the Rohingya Muslim minority an apartheid that would have made white supremacists in South Africa blush, she bites her tongue. It seems as though she aspires to become president of Myanmar, and speaking up for a reviled minority could be fatal to her prospects.
  2. In the absence of schools, Wahhabi madrassas are popping up ominously in closed camps.
  3. “She supports Muslims,” U Pan Tha, a 66-year-old Buddhist, told me,
    bitterly. His home was burned by Muslims in 2012 clashes, and he now
    lives in a camp for displaced people. He voted for Aung San Suu Kyi’s
    party in 1990, but he says he won’t in the elections next year. “We will
    choose the military government over Suu Kyi,” he said.

It’s an apt reference to South Africa; it would appear Suu Kyi has learned from de Klerk’s mistakes. Kristof doesn’t seem to realize that once there are enough Muslims in the USA, history suggests they will begin behaving the same way they do in Myanmar, in India, in the Philippines, in China, in the former Soviet Union, and in the Middle East. After a few schools or churches or synagogues are attacked, what the American people’s response will likely make Myanmar’s patient strangulation of the Rohingya look moderate in comparison.

There will be a second and larger scale Reconquista across the West sooner or later. It’s that or Sharia. The sooner it takes place, the less violent it will be.

Another whack of the Tetsubo

I’m beginning to get the impression that Larry is underwhelmed by the call to repentance, recantation, and self-abasement: 

Secondly, and this is going to be much more damaging for him longterm, he allowed himself to become very closely associated to Vox Day in the process. Ultimately people do judge others by their associations, and both Larry Correia and John C Wright have made very public declarations of support for Day, that I fear both will deeply regret in the long run.

One of the tactics I’ve seen them take is conflating my views with those of Vox Day. It doesn’t matter that I’ve disagreed with the man, and I’ve debated with him several times, but they sure love linking me to Vox. See, unlike me, they can actually find a couple of comments from him that they can manage to spin up some outrage over, and everybody knows righteous indignation gives libprogs super powers.

You have an issue with something Vox said, take it up with him. I did, and I found the guy to be a capable debater, and many of the insinuations about him floating around the internet were grossly exaggerated. (says the man who the Guardian has insinuated hates women and wants to keep fiction the exclusive domain of a group he doesn’t technically belong to, so I simply can’t imagine the internet exaggerating somebody’s beliefs.)

The woman Vox insulted with the infamous half-savage comment also has a long history of inflammatory racial statements, and had been throwing insults at Vox for years, but somehow she always gets a pass in these discussions about “divisiveness” (remember what I said earlier about the Ctrl H search and replace to put Jew instead of White Man in their tweets? She’s totally the best). I don’t think she likes me much either, because she gave a speech a little while ago and condemned Mr. Free Speech At All Costs… I think that’s supposed to be me, but personally I took that as a compliment, because you know, that part where I actually believe in free speech and stuff.

So I recommend a short story by somebody who made a statement they found racist? DIVISIVE! And Damien will condemn me in his newspaper. Meanwhile, an approved author writes tons of negative things about an ethnic group that it is cool to hate? Totally not divisive, and Damien will plug her in his newspaper. Now me personally, I think the concept of race is increasingly irrelevant bullshit, and I judge all humans as individuals, but I’m the International Lord of Hate.

Public declaration of support? By that Damien means I failed to join his lynch mob? Sadly I couldn’t find my jack boots in time.

One of the International Lord of Hate’s commenters pointed out what Damien was trying, and failing, to accomplish: “They want to slam Vox because he is the one nut they can’t crack, but
boy, if they can turn a few of his friends and supporters, that’s at
least along the lines of their goals.”

On behalf of Mr. Correia, Mr. Wright, and Mrs. Hoyt, I am offended at the idea they should be deemed any easier to crack than me. (As opposed to that notoriously soft and bendable reed, Col. Kratman, whose pastimes make Ramsay Snow’s look like embroidery.) Now, it is true that mi amigo latino has a different perspective on race than I do. I realize this may astonish white people, particularly of the SWPL variety, but we members of La Raza Cósmica do not necessarily think alike; some of us don’t even believe in the inevitability of Universópolis. Transmetachronopolis, yes. Universópolis, not so much.

As Larry says, we’ve even debated the matter in private, and while I did not convince him, I believe he did come to understand that my position is based entirely on sound genetic science and history rather than personal preferences. Since then, the publication of A Troublesome Inheritance by Nicholas Wade has demonstrated that my “controversial” views are entirely in line with current science and that the “Nurture not Nature” perspective is outdated and unscientific.

(Nota Ironica: the very concept of La Raza Cósmica is based on the idea that Darwinism was “created to validate, explain, and justify ethnic superiority and to repress others.” So, you see, this is why only fifth-racers like me “have the territorial, racial, and spiritual factors necessary to initiate the ‘universal era of humanity’.” Bow down, you colonial sons and daughters of the Old World, abase yourselves, you children of the Orient, kneel before me, you spawnlings of Darkest Africa. Bow to me, in the name of humanity!)

I love Larry. I have great respect for him. He’s the best action writer of our generation. But I don’t answer for him and he doesn’t answer for me. That’s one thing the Left will never accept: there is no guilt by association. A man can only answer for his own deeds, his own words, his own actions.

Which is one reason why Larry declined the opportunity to participate in the suggested auto-da-fe:

I’m quite serious about my suggestion by the way. I think if Correia wrote publicly to support the new diversity in the genre, and apologised for any perception he was campaigning against it, that might help him a lot.

Apologize for the perception? Apologize for being seen as an enemy of progress? That sounds suspiciously like the apologies Stalin used to have people sign right before he shipped them off to the gulag, so in response, Beria, er, I mean Damien, here are a few of my thoughts about what it really means when a libprog demands an apology.

Rule number one. Never apologize for something that shouldn’t be apologized for. Check out all the various firings, purges, boycotts, and cancellations. Apologizing for causing their outrage is you taking responsibility for their ignorance and inability to control their own emotions. Apologizing to the perpetually outraged means they own you. You have declared yourself guilty and vulnerable to their threats. It is like negotiating with terrorists. Give into their demands and you’re just encouraging them to blow something else up.

If I was the type of mushy headed fool that would issue an apology, it wouldn’t matter anyway, because as we’ve already seen my actual words and actions mean nothing compared to the agreed upon narrative, and that narrative is that I’m guilty of pretty much every vile thing they can think of. Luckily for me, I’m successful enough that these people aren’t particularly threatening, so I scrape them off my shoe and continue writing books.

Normal people only apologize for things that should be apologized for, like for example: “I’m sorry the Social Justice Warrior contingent of sci-fi is made up of a bunch of perpetually outraged adult children.”

I suspected that would be the outcome. As for me, I’m just wondering when all the pinkshirts and Social Justice Warriors who said less-than-flattering things about me are going to apologize to me now that N.K. Jemisin has openly admitted that she is not merely “half-savage”, but rather, “all savage and damned proud of it”.

And in the meantime, John C. Wright has produced the United Underworld Literary Movement Manifesto, complete with logo. Apparently I am the Supreme Dark Lord, Secret Warden of the Cosmic Fifth Race, and Eternal Champion of Universópolis.

Mailvox: pulp future

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

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

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

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

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