Tag: media

That was fast

Nicholas Wade, the author of the excellent A Troublesome Inheritance and science editor of the New York Times, is now still the FORMER science editor of the New York Times:

Nicholas Wade, a British-born science reporter and editor for more than 30 years with The New York Times, is no longer with the newspaper — just days after the release of his latest book, in which he depicts blacks with roots in sub-Saharan Africa as genetically less adapted to modern life than whites and Asians.

Was The New York Times uncomfortable with Wade’s science or his conclusions? It’s unclear. Neither Wade nor his former employer returned requests for comment.

Wade’s last Times article appeared April 24. His Penguin Press book “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History” arrived in bookstores on Tuesday, May 6. In excerpts from his book posted by Time.com on Friday, he is identified as a “former science editor” of the Times. Until then, coverage of his book called him a current Times journalist.

Obviously he deserved it, as he undeniably implied black people are “differently evolved” when he wrote that only 45 of the 394 genes currently deemed to be under selection are the same genes in blacks and whites. In light of such an atrocity, he may as well have called someone a “half-savage”; clearly he must be lambasted and ritualistically assailed by every goodthinking individual. I wonder if it is still acceptable to the Left to describe the fine, upstanding gentlemen who belong to Boko Haram and are so eager to host teenage schoolgirls as “less than entirely civilized although otherwise totally equal to all individuals of both sexes of European descent in every way” or if that too is a purgeable offense?

The Left is more than uncomfortable with both science and the conclusions that logically follow from it. It is now openly and avowedly anti-science. What is fascinating is that most clueless Leftists still feverishly insist that they, and not the Right, are pro-science even as they reject it in favor of various nonexistent ideals. As I have repeatedly pointed out since last August, the time for tolerating the Left has passed. Your only choice now is to submit to them or to shatter them.

UPDATE: I’m not sure this proves that Wade was not “fired”, even if he had already stepped down as science editor. “Anyway, just heard from reliable source that Wade took a retirement
package a couple of years ago.  The deal was that he could continue to
make occasional contributions on a fee basis.”

If he continues to make occasional contributions, then we’ll know he wasn’t canned for his book. If his last contribution on a fee basis turns out to have been April 24th, well, that would not prove that he was fired, but it would tend to indicate that was the case.

UPDATE 2: Not so fast. Apparently the Daily Caller author let his imagination run away with him.

“I retired from the Times about two years ago. There’s a stupid story you may have seen in the blogosphere. It is completely untrue. The writer just made that up. The fact that he saw the words ‘former Science editor’ in the piece I did in Time. He assumed that I had been fired by the Times. There is nothing to the story at all. I myself wrote the word ‘former’ in because I saw that the Time editor in putting the tag line on had said that I was Science editor of the Times. Since that was some time in the past, and is no longer true, I inserted the word ‘former’ and the writer in the Daily Caller just made the story up out of thin air. He made absolutely no attempt to contact me and not a word of it is true.” 

Faith first

We need more Christian men willing to stand up and say the same:

With all of the grotesque things that can be seen and heard on
television today you would think there would be room for two twin
brothers who are faithful to our families, committed to biblical
principles, and dedicated professionals. If our faith costs us a
television show then so be it.

It’s not much of a loss. Let the wicked immerse themselves in their own fetid stew.

The Lizard Queen DQs herself

And CNN knows it:

On May 7th CNN’s John King played a video of Hillary Clinton saying, “We have to rein in what has become [an] almost article of faith, that anybody can have a gun anywhere, [at] any time.” King quickly added, “She’s talking in the context of mental health,” but then he expressed obvious concern that this soundbite is going to make a great anti-Hillary commercial in southern Ohio, Florida, Colorado, and North Carolina, among other places.

Notice how the mainstream media will SHAMELESSLY lie on behalf of its favored candidates. Clinton wasn’t just “talking in the context of mental health”, she was talking about the expansion of concealed carry laws. While she did begin her answer in response to a question about suicide, her answer was a more broadly expansive one. But you can bet that we’re going to here the false “context” excuse when she gets nailed with her own words on the campaign trail.

Never, ever, trust a single word out of a leftist’s mouth at face value. I cannot stress this enough. They don’t believe in objective truth and they certainly feel no obligation to tell it.

The science fictional is the political

Instapundit rightly laments the politicization of science fiction in USA TODAY:

There was a time when science fiction was a place to explore new ideas, free of the conventional wisdom of staid, “mundane” society, a place where speculation replaced group think, and where writers as different as libertarian-leaning Robert Heinlein, and left-leaning Isaac Asimov and Arthur Clarke would share readers, magazines, and conventions.

But then, there was a time when that sort of openness characterized much of American intellectual life. That time seems to be over, judging by the latest science fiction dust-up. Now, apparently, a writer’s politics are the most important thing, and authors with the wrong politics are no longer acceptable, at least to a loud crowd that has apparently colonized much of the world of science fiction fandom.

Unfortunately, the reality is that the Left has politicized science fiction. While there has always been an influential Left active in science fiction – the Futurians were communists and Trotskyites who believed SF writers “should actively work for the realization of the scientific world-state
as the only genuine justification for their activities and existence” – the influence of Jack Campbell, among others, kept that tendency in check.

But the ascendancy of the post-1980s editorial gatekeepers at publishing houses like Tor, followed by the three-time SFWA presidency of a left-wing activist and inveterate self-promoter, caused the Left to assume that they were the only players on the field. They attempted a return to a modified Futurianism, albeit this time in favor of the realization of the post-racial, post-national, post-cultural, omnisexual secular society as the only justification for their activities and existence.

What is the solution? There are various possibilities, but my answer would be to outwrite them, outsell them, and win all their awards until they beg for mercy and offer a truce. They politicized science fiction, and only they can unpoliticize it. Until then, they’ll have to deal with the fact that we’re not only capable of playing the game according to the new rules, we’re able to play it better than they are.

Politics don’t belong in science fiction. But we didn’t put them there and we can’t take them out.

The Hollywood mafia in the media crosshairs

It’s interesting to see this story surface so soon after the Mozilla debacle. It will be informative to discover if the media is as willing to go after the homosexual pedophiles of Hollywood as they were to go after the homosexual pedophiles of the Catholic hierarchy:

A man who claims he was sexually abused by “X-Men” franchise director Bryan Singer said Thursday that he reported the molestation to authorities at the time, and he does not know why charges were never pursued.

With his voice occasionally wavering, Michael Egan III described abuse he said began when he was 15 years old at the hands of Singer and others. He told of being plied with drugs and promises of Hollywood fame while also enduring threats and sexual abuse in Hawaii and Los Angeles over several years….

Egan and his attorney said at a news conference that the alleged abuse was reported by Egan’s mother to the FBI and Los Angeles police and that interviews were conducted. The lawyer, Jeff Herman, later said he was not sure if his client spoke to police detectives or if the case was referred directly to the FBI. He said Egan did not report any abuse to Hawaiian authorities.

Los Angeles Police Commander Andrew Smith said the department is looking into whether a report was made. FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller said the agency could not comment on what Egan reported unless it resulted in a case or matter of public record.

One tends to assume that there is going to be a serious media effort to belittle and stymie any investigation due to disingenuous fears of fanning the flames of anti-semitism and anti-sodomism. But I doubt that effort is going to be effective because Americans increasingly dislike Hollywood, are largely unmoved by appeals to Holocaustianity, and are not going to give secular Jews any more of a pass to commit homosexual child-rape than they gave Catholic priests.

And perhaps more importantly, the mainstream media doesn’t control the narrative anymore. One hopes it will give the Corey Feldmans of the world the courage to speak out and start the process of cleaning out the Hollywood cesspool.

In the meantime, I think I’ll give the new X-Men movie a pass.

No likely futures

I’ve pointed out many times, and demonstrated on more than one occasion, that the Left is considerably less intelligent and educated than it believes itself to be. To further demonstrate the conceit, dishonesty, and self-deception of the Left, consider Damien Walter’s inept responses to criticism of his most recent hit piece aka Guardian column.

Commenter:  Not quite sure I agree with the conclusion “The future is queer”. Given the current balance of power in the world, it must as equally be likely that future generations may revert to traditional gender roles, however advanced the tech gets. For example, in 75 to 100 years, it’s quite easy to imagine a society which regards historical sexual freedom as a contributing factor to the failure of our capitalist paradise. Revisionism which twists historical events is not new, and it’s entirely possible some future government/state will twist our present when it’s their history. It’s also worth bearing in mind that the progressive liberalism talked about here affects only a tiny percentage of the world’s population. When the Chinese buy up the UK in a fire sale 50 years from now, how much mind are they going to pay such freedoms?

DamienGWalter: Of course, there are no absolutes when it comes to the future. But putting aside “collapse” scenarios, I can’t see any likely future where gender isn’t radically changed from its current norms. I think expecting otherwise would be like expecting feudal social structures to carry over in to industrial society. We can already see the structural changes being wrought by technology, the social changes are then almost determined.

There are 83 countries where homosexuality is criminalized. There are 20 countries where homogamy has been at least partially legalized. The countries where homosexuality is criminalized have growing populations. The countries where homogamy is legal have declining populations. And yet, Mr. Walter can’t see the possibility of a future where the larger trend is in line with demographic growth.  No wonder he is a mere SF wannabe rather than a bona fide SF writer; his imagination is too limited.

Any doubts that he was engaging in pure rhetoric are answered in this exchange:

Commenter: It’s Larry Correia being discussed, so let’s use his handy Internet Arguing Checklist to examine this article. Points #1 (Skim until Offended), #4 (Disregard Inconvenient Facts), and #5 (Make S——t Up) are fairly well represented here. In particular, compare Damien Walter’s misrepresentation of Correia’s article:

    But Correia boils it down to a much simpler argument. However accurate a queer future might be, SF authors must continue to pander to the bigotry of conservative readers if they want to be “commercial”.

to an excerpt from the core of Larry’s actual essay:

    “Now, before we continue I need to establish something about my personal writing philosophy. Science Fiction is SPECULATIVE FICTION. That means we can make up all sorts of crazy stuff and we can twist existing reality to do interesting new things in order to tell the story we want to tell. I’m not against having a story where there are sexes other than male and female or neuters or schmes or hirs or WTF ever or that they flip back and forth or shit… robot sex. Hell, I don’t know. Write whatever tells your story.

    But the important thing there is STORY. Not the cause of the day. STORY.

For extra entertainment, read Larry’s brilliant counter-fisking of Jim C Hines’s post.

DamienGWalter: Counter-fisking? Hmmm…sounds kinky.

Deep and insightful stuff there. But Walter gave his propagandistic game away in an earlier essay: “The challenge for writers of science fiction today is not to repeat the same dire warnings we have all already heard, or to replicate the naive visions of the genres golden age, but to create visions of the future people can believe in. Perhaps the next Nineteen Eighty-Four, instead of confronting us with our worst fear, will find the imagination to show us our greatest hope.”

What is his greatest hope? Based on his recent column, a queer future. Kathryn Cramer of Tor.com correctly pegged Walter as a propagandist rather than a writer with anything to say about the human condition on Tor.com.

“Walter says he wants SF to do more than “reflect” the world, but rather fiction that seeks to “influence” it.”

And that is what fundamentally separates Pink SF/F from Blue SF/F. We tell stories to entertain the reader and make him think. They print propaganda to lecture the reader and stop him from thinking. We ask “what if?” They assert “it will be so!”

Dogmatic and dishonest

Ross Douthat points out the moral defect being exhibited by a corporation and a university in the New York Times, which happens to be identical to that previously demonstrated by a writer’s organization:

In both cases, Mozilla and Brandeis, there was a striking difference between the clarity of what had actually happened and the evasiveness of the official responses to the events. Eich stepped down rather than recant his past support for the view that one man and one woman makes a marriage; Hirsi Ali’s invitation was withdrawn because of her sweeping criticisms of Islamic culture. But neither the phrase “marriage” nor the word “Islam” appeared in the initial statements Mozilla and Brandeis released.

Instead, the Mozilla statement rambled in the language of inclusion: “Our organizational culture reflects diversity and inclusiveness. … Our culture of openness extends to encouraging staff and community to share their beliefs and opinions. …”

The statement on Hirsi Ali was slightly more direct, saying that “her past statements … are inconsistent with Brandeis University’s core values.” But it never specified what those statements or those values might be — and then it fell back, too, on pieties about diversity: “In the spirit of free expression that has defined Brandeis University throughout its history, Ms. Hirsi Ali is welcome to join us on campus in the future to engage in a dialogue about these important issues.”

What both cases illustrate, with their fuzzy rhetoric masking ideological pressure, is a serious moral defect at the heart of elite culture in America.

The defect, crucially, is not this culture’s bias against social conservatives, or its discomfort with stinging attacks on non-Western religions. Rather, it’s the refusal to admit — to others, and to itself — that these biases fundamentally trump the commitment to “free expression” or “diversity” affirmed in mission statements and news releases.

This refusal, this self-deception, means that we have far too many powerful communities (corporate, academic, journalistic) that are simultaneously dogmatic and dishonest about it — that promise diversity but only as the left defines it, that fill their ranks with ideologues and then claim to stand athwart bias and misinformation, that speak the language of pluralism while presiding over communities that resemble the beau ideal of Sandra Y. L. Korn.

It was precisely the same pattern of behavior with the SFWA. The rhetoric was fuzzy and muddled, and the accusations were incoherent. No actual reason was ever given for the purging of the nameless member; if I had not announced the identity of the expelled member on my blog, no one outside the inner circle of the organization would have even known who had been successfully targeted for removal by the SFWA president and his obedient Board.

The reason for the deceit is twofold; it is first necessary to preserve the self-conceit of the individuals involved. They do not wish to admit that they are hypocrites who are failing to live up to their professed ideals. It is no different than the reason priests who commit child abuse, teachers who have affairs with their students, and con men who perpetrate frauds are reluctant to confess to their misdeeds even after they are caught red-handed; they are ashamed of their idealistic failures and seek to hide those failures from the knowledge of those who will judge them for it.

And second, the self-deception is vital because admitting their failures means sacrificing the moral high ground in criticizing other organizations and losing their ability to hold other organizations accountable for doing the same thing they are doing.

Both reasons are why it is vital to continue to flaunt their actions in their faces, without mercy, until they admit what they have done and make an open and public choice between their supposed ideals and their ideological dogma. SFWA thought it was marginalizing me by purging me from its ranks, but instead, they elevated my stature, increased my readership, delineated the ideological lines in SF/F, and handed every critic of their dishonesty and dogma an effective weapon to use against them until they either a) come out of the closet concerning their ideology, or b ) correct their self-destructive course.

I think the interesting question to ask here is not why these organizations are behaving in this morally defective fashion, but rather, why now?

No, we really wouldn’t

Do they really think they’re fooling anyone?

If I need something answered from the White House and they won’t tell
me, I’ll call our White House Correspondent. They’re friendlier with the
White House Correspondents in general. So the White House Correspondent
may ask Jay Carney or one of his folks about an issue and they will be
told ‘ask that at the briefing and we’ll answer it.’ They want to answer
it in front of everybody. They do know it’s coming and they’ll call on
you. There’s that kind of coordination sometimes. I wouldn’t be shocked
if there’s sometimes more coordination. I don’t think it’s everybody on
every briefing, every day. I’m pretty sure it’s not. But I think people
would be surprised at the level of cooperation reporters have in general
with politicians.”

It’s rather like a crack whore saying she thinks people might be surprised to learn she’s not a virgin.

Holding their breath and turning blue

It should be obvious that women cannot and will never be as effective as men if they are going to come right out and openly declare that they will not do their jobs because they find doing so to be offensive:

Rebecca Davies, who writes the children’s books blog at Independent.co.uk, tells me that she is equally sick of receiving “books which have been commissioned solely for the purpose of ‘getting boys reading’ [and which have] all-male characters and thin, action-based plots.” What we are doing by pigeon-holing children is badly letting them down. And books, above all things, should be available to any child who is interested in them.

Happily, as the literary editor of The Independent on Sunday, there is something that I can do about this. So I promise now that the newspaper and this website will not be reviewing any book which is explicitly aimed at just girls, or just boys. Nor will The Independent’s books section. And nor will the children’s books blog at Independent.co.uk. Any Girls’ Book of Boring Princesses that crosses my desk will go straight into the recycling pile along with every Great Big Book of Snot for Boys. If you are a publisher with enough faith in your new book that you think it will appeal to all children, we’ll be very happy to hear from you. But the next Harry Potter or Katniss Everdeen will not come in glittery pink covers. So we’d thank you not to send us such books at all.

Duly noted. I wonder how long this policy will last before it quietly goes by the wayside? Probably right around the time that a massively successful book explicitly aimed at just girls, or just boys, is published. If I were managing The Independent, I would immediately fire both women for their open refusal to simply do their jobs and review the books that are submitted for review.

This is a particularly egregious case of the gatekeepers attempting to decide what is permissible to read and what is not. The ironic thing is that they probably think the Spanish Inquisition’s list of proscribed books is one of the great crimes of human history. Would you trust these people’s opinions on any book now?

The ridiculous thing is that there is nothing to prevent a boy from reading a pink sparkly book, or to prevent a girl from reading a book with a Frazetta-style painting of a young man holding a severed orc’s head on the cover.

Of course, they’re already walking back their idiotic public posturing: We’re not planning to judge books by their cover….

Sure you’re not. And if sex-specific books demean all children, don’t sex-specific changing rooms and bathrooms demean all adults?

Same as he ever was

You may recall that I previously demonstrated that John Scalzi’s claim to have 50,000 daily readers was a 12x exaggeration of his actual daily blog readership in 2013, which was 20,600 daily pageviews and 4,085 daily readers. As it turns out, this significant exaggeration of his site traffic and his influence was nothing new.  Consider this post from July 2009, in which he arrogantly claimed that he was more influential than the three major SF publications, Analog, Asimov’s, and Fantasy & Science Fiction, combined.

Brad Torgersen: “Unless the work you’re writing is not the sort that fits any of the
Big Three, why would you allow the format and method of submission to
stop you from sending to the three markets still considered to be the
Top Dogs in short F and SF fiction?”

John Scalzi: “Because it would cost me money to buy a printer, paper and ink, the
rate they pay is shite, and I can reach more people on my Web site in a
day than any two of them can in a month.”

 In July 2009, Whatever had 300,487 monthly pageviews, or 9,613 per day. That meant he had about 1,940 daily readers. In 2009, Analog’s monthly circulation was 25,418 and Asimov’s was 16,696. It will probably not escape the mathematically literate observer’s attention that 42,114 is more than 1,940. So, five years ago, he was exaggerating his site traffic by a factor of 21.7. His absurd 2013 claims are actually less exaggerated than his previous claims.

And, of course, he was aggressively policing his potential critics even then.

Just as a general note, as I’ve told Brad to move on from this thread, directing comments to him specifically will be frustrating for him, and will not get actual responses.

Those who have recently lost respect for John Scalzi were simply not paying sufficient attention to his antics before. He’s precisely the same narcissistic con man that he’s always been, the only difference is that now he is less able to successfully control the narrative and spin a self-serving web of deceit because an increasing number of people in the SF/F world are aware of the facts and are able to see through his incessantly fraudulent activity.

As Bernie Madoff learned, eventually people figure out the con. Mr. Scalzi may not yet have come to terms with the fact that the jig is up yet, but sooner or later, he will have to do so.

“WHEN YOU SEE FRAUD, SHOUT FRAUD.”
– Nassem Talib