Tag: media

Social policies have long-term consequences

That is Dr. Helen’s primary message in Men on Strike. She was interviewed by Jerry Bowyer in Forbes.

Jerry: “It’s interesting – you mention Kay
Hymowitz’s book, which is in some ways similar to yours but in other
ways very different. Let’s not single her out in particular, but there
does tend to be a scold-y tone. Yeah, that’s really going to work with
men, right? There does tend to be a scold-y tone in a lot of the “what’s
wrong with men” vein, the “failure to launch”, “they’re not going to
college”, “they’re not participating in the economy” – a tone that seems
to (interestingly for liberals) place no obligation whatsoever or no
causal effect whatsoever on larger societal factors.”

Helen: “I definitely think there is a scolding
factor and I think people are so used to shaming men, and that’s very
prevalent in the culture. I think that we see – I mean, there are so
many messages through the commercials, through the media, that men are
just no good. And so it’s just so easy to pick up and say that, “Yeah,
men are worthless. They’re not good fathers.” We’ve got so many messages
out there and I think that’s a really negative thing to be sending to
men and particularly young boys in schools and in society. Going back to
some of these books like End of Men or Manning Up, you’re right: the
message is basically, “You know what, you’re doing this because you’re
just an immature man.”

There’s a chapter in Hymowitz’s book about Child-Man in the Promised
Land and it’s looking at how men just have so many options and this is
why they’re doing what they’re doing. My point in my book is that men
are not going to participate in a society that is not going to reward
them for that behavior. In other words: if you’re a good father, a good
husband, and you do all of the things you’re supposed to do, society
still will go after you if you step out of line in any particular way.

In the old days, it was sort of like – fifty years ago a man was head
of household, looked up to, treated with respect, and now a married man
in many ways is seen as less of a man (not more of one) and it’s doubly
so if he has kids.

Men on Strike is a very good book, not so much because it contains anything that will be new to the readers here, but because it is putting those ideas in front of a lot of people who have never considered them before. And one of those things that many people haven’t seen before is what the Forbes writer describes as “a lack of scoldiness”; Dr. Helen is one of the few female writers on intersexual relations who is actually sympathetic towards men and understands that the world is not a zero-sum game where the sexes are concerned.

The fact that something is bad for men doesn’t mean that it is good for women.

2013 and beyond

It seems some other bloggers are beginning to get into the habit of being open with their traffic numbers; it’s nice to see people gradually getting over the idea that hiding this information from people will somehow inflate their perceived importance. Here are the Google pageviews for a few other bloggers, with the Global Alexa rank given in parentheses.

Whatever: 7,519,279
Steve Sailer: 6,635,426
Rational Male: 2,543,859

Being open with our traffic is a healthy exercise, I think, because it prevents us from getting too carried away with any exaggerated sense of our own importance. The numbers are a tiny drop in the bucket compared to mainstream media sites like Fox News and the New York Times, but remember, there was a time when those media outlets were once very small too. If anyone else has a site for which they’d like to share their Google pageviews, leave the data in the comments and I’ll add it here.

It strikes me as almost criminal that such an original thinker as Steve should have only 6.6 million pageviews per year when clueless wonders such as Malcolm Gladwell are bestselling authors, but as Steve himself notes, “The reality is that web searches bring a lot of people to individual
postings I’ve written and then … it doesn’t make much impression on
them. They presumably stare blankly for awhile and then they’re on their
way. I suspect that my combination of highbrow content without highbrow
affectation is a turnoff for the vast majority of random visitors.”

They are the sort of people who gravitate to liberal blogs that invariably describe themselves as “thoughtful” while mindlessly repeating pablum straight out of the New York Times without ever evincing evidence of having had a single original thought of their own.

I don’t appear to have Steve’s problem, as the admitted reluctance of many bloggers to link here means that most of my traffic consists of regular readers rather than web searches and fly-by-nighters. Of course, it also means that the level of engagement, the average visit duration, and the quality of the discourse tends to be higher, so I see it as a net positive. This is also why, as the traffic continues to grow and the blog increasingly comes to the attention of various self-appointed activists, I’ll be cracking down harder and harder on the disruptive elements who will seek to interfere with the discourse here.

Disagreement is expected. Dissent is fine. Substantive criticism is both encouraged and appreciated. Mindless, reflexive ankle-biting is discouraged. Derailing is not permitted and trolls will be actively and aggressively pursued. Alles klar?

I’m also interested in opening up Alpha Game again to other regular contributors in 2014 as it was never intended as a single author blog. The initial batch of contributors all ran out of steam within the first month or two back in 2011, which is not terribly surprising, so this time I intend to take a different approach and begin by adding a single additional contributor who will focus on a particular aspect of Game. I want to add depth rather than breadth. This focus could be anything from Game in literature to Game and improving marital relations. However, if you’re not able to commit to four 500-word posts per week, please don’t even think of volunteering. Remember, I’ve been doing this for a while now and the fact is that the vast majority of people with the inchoate urge to write don’t really have all that much to say.

The Patriarch teaches

Phil Robertson is now America’s Patriarch:

[H]e stood in front of the small class, at White’s Ferry Road Church wearing his full camouflage suit and addressed the group for around 45 minutes.

He said: ‘I have been immoral, drunk, high. I ran with the wicked people for 28 years and I have run with the Jesus people since and the contrast is astounding.

‘I tell people, “You are a sinner, we all are. Do you want to hear my story before I give you the bottom line on your story?”

‘We murder each other and we steal from one another, sex and immorality goes ballistic. All the diseases that just so happen to follow sexual mischief… boy there are some microbes running around now.

‘Sexual sins are numerous and many, I have a few myself. So what is your safest course of action? If you’re a man, find yourself a woman, marry them and keep your sex right there.

‘You can have fun, but one thing is for sure, as long as you are both healthy in the first place, you are not going to catch some debilitating illness, there is safety there.

‘Commonsense says we are not going to procreate the human race unless we have a man and a woman. From the beginning Jesus said, “It is a man and a woman.” Adam was made and Eve was made for this reason. They left their fathers and mothers and be united to become one flesh, that’s what marriage is all about.

‘But we looked at it and said it was an outdated stereotype. When you look back at the human race, the sins have always been the same: We get high, we get drunk, we get laid, we steal and kill.

‘Has this changed at all from the time God burnt up whole cities because their every thought was evil?’

Then reading from the Bible he said, ‘The acts of the sinful nature are obvious. Sexual immorality, is number one on the list. How many ways can we sin sexually? My goodness. You open up that can of worms and people will be mad at you over it.

‘I am just reading what was written over 2000 years ago. Those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom. All I did was quote from the scriptures, but they just didn’t know it. Whether I said it, or they read it, what’s the difference? The sins are the same, humans haven’t changed.

‘If you give them the bad news, they’ll start kicking and screaming. But you love them more than you fear them, so you tell them.

‘A lot of times they don’t even wait for you to finish and say, ‘But there’s a way out, do you want to hear the rest of the story or what?

‘Jesus will take sins away, if you’re a homosexual he’ll take it away, if you’re an adulterer, if you’re a liar, what’s the difference? If you break one sin you may as well break them all.

‘If we lose our morality, we will lose our country. It will happen. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all walk around without stealing from each other and killing each other?

‘Why don’t we just love each other enough that we wouldn’t want to do these things to each other?’

Robertson – who made his fortune from inventing and manufacturing hunting equipment before finding TV stardom – went on: ‘We are a bunch of rednecks from Louisiana, but I am not uneducated, I have a degree from Louisiana Tech.

‘But this week I have been called an ignoramus. This week I have been asked, “Is this the first time you have brought up sin?” I said, “Are you kidding? I have been traveling to and fro spreading this message.”

‘Then he said, “Well do you invite yourself to go and get your Bible and tell people what you are now sharing with us?” I said, “No they are inviting me.”

‘I have made hundreds and hundreds of speeches and you can pick them apart and the center has always been Jesus Christ.

‘Do many people get up and walk out? Yeah, all the time, do I hold it against them? No. Anybody can get up and stop listening. We are all just humans on this planet.’

He added: ‘Jesus Christ was the most perfect being to ever walk this planet and he was persecuted and nailed to the cross, so please don’t be surprised when we get a little static.’

The best part, however, was how he closed in prayer: “I will not give or back off from my path because you conquered death, Father, so we are not worried about all the repercussions.”

May God grant us all similar fearlessness in Jesus Christ. That spirit of fear you sometimes feel didn’t come from Him. We can always find a reason to back down, an excuse to worry about the repercussions. Phil Robertson reminds us that as Christians, we are always going to get a little static, so we may as well grow up spiritually and accept it.

National Review sharpens the blade

The sans-culottes at National Review are getting the guillotine ready again. As predicted by many, it appears Mark Steyn will be the next to follow in the footsteps of the John Birch Society, Joe Sobran, Ann Coulter, and John Derbyshire?  Jason Lee Steorts, an editor at National Review, writes:

I can’t agree with Mark that anything of value is lost when derogatory epithets go out of bounds in polite society. They tend to be bad even for humor, substituting stereotype and cliché for originality. People who used them in different times need not be regarded as monstrous, nor must the canon be censored; we could instead feel good about having awoken to a greater civility and make generous allowances for human fallibility. By way of criticizing speech, I’ll say that I found the derogatory language in this column, and especially the slur in its borrowed concluding joke, both puerile in its own right and disappointing coming from a writer of such talent.

To which Steyn responded:

I’m not inclined to euphemize intimidation and bullying as a lively exchange of ideas – “the use of speech to criticize other speech”, as Mr Steorts absurdly dignifies it. So do excuse me if I skip to the men’s room during his patronizing disquisition on the distinction between “state coercion” and “cultural coercion”. I’m well aware of that, thank you. In the early days of my free-speech battles in Canada, my friend Ezra Levant used a particular word to me: “de-normalize”. Our enemies didn’t particularly care whether they won in court. Whatever the verdict, they’d succeed in “de-normalizing” us – that’s to say, putting us beyond the pale of polite society and mainstream culture. “De-normalizing” is the business GLAAD and the other enforcers are in. You’ll recall Paula Deen’s accuser eventually lost in court – but the verdict came too late for Ms Deen’s book deal, and TV show, and endorsement contracts.

Up north, Ezra and I decided that, if they were going to “de-normalize” us, we’d “de-normalize” them. So we pushed back, and got the entire racket discredited and, eventually, the law repealed. It’s rough stuff, and exhausting, but the alternative is to let the control-freaks shrivel the bounds of public discourse remorselessly so that soon enough you lack even the words to mount an opposing argument. As this commenter to Mr Steorts noted, the point about unearthing two “derogatory” “puerile” yet weirdly prescient gags is that, pace Marx, these days comedy repeats as tragedy.

I am sorry my editor at NR does not grasp the stakes. Indeed, he seems inclined to “normalize” what GLAAD is doing. But, if he truly finds my “derogatory language” offensive, I’d rather he just indefinitely suspend me than twist himself into a soggy pretzel of ambivalent inertia trying to avoid the central point – that a society where lives are ruined over an aside because some identity-group don decides it must be so is ugly and profoundly illiberal. As to his kind but belated and conditional pledge to join me on the barricades, I had enough of that level of passionate support up in Canada to know that, when the call to arms comes, there will always be some “derogatory” or “puerile” expression that it will be more important to tut over. So thanks for the offer, but I don’t think you’d be much use, would you?

National Review doesn’t realize that its genteel world of polite dissent from left-liberal orthodoxy is over. It is no longer a significant voice on the Right; one could quite perhaps even argue that it is not even really conservative anymore. I can’t actually take a position on that, however, since I quit reading National Review after they fired John Derbyshire for failing to kowtow to liberal orthodoxy on race. National Review has long attempted to curry favor with the mainstream media by reading others out of the respectable Right. So it only seems just that increasingly people are not-reading National Review out of the relevant Right.

And it is more than a little ironic that Steorts is criticizing Steyn for his derogatory expressions when, after attacking Kathryn Lopez over gay marriage, he justified his attacks on her thusly:

So it is your view, Kathryn, that the action of democratically elected representatives, who are accountable to the citizens of the State of New York, is tyrannical in a way that justifies comparison to North Korea, a state in which an absolute ruler has burned people alive in a stadium. Okay. But now I want a new word for what “tyranny” used to mean.

I would like to see the reaction of a North Korean refugee to your claim.

It would also be nice if you troubled yourself to make an argument.

Update: I see that several commenters find my tone beyond the pale. With respect, I think y’all are way too sensitive. The harshest thing here is the sarcasm of “trouble yourself,” which strikes me as mild by the standards of polemical writing generally and writing at NRO (including posts by commenters) in particular. 

Hmmm, I’m noticing a hypocritical inconsistency as well as the fact that the conservative position on a certain subject tends to upset the manage editor… I know absolutely nothing about Steorts, but on the basis of these two pieces, it would not surprise me in the slightest to learn that Steorts is one of those putative “gay media conservatives” in the mold of Andrew Sullivan. Which, as we have come to learn, reliably indicate that he’s not conservative at all.

Media bias: the conclusive proof

Many people have argued over the years, in the face of the obvious evidence, that the media cannot be systematically biased to the Left because it would not make business sense to spurn more than half the population as customers. However, the recent decision by A&E to fire its biggest and most lucrative TV star because it is more concerned about catering to homosexuals than making money vividly demonstrates that politics and propaganda are more important to the media companies than making a profit:

A&E has placed Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson on indefinite hiatus following anti-gay remarks he made in a recent profile in GQ. “We are extremely disappointed to have read Phil Robertson’s comments in GQ, which are based on his own personal beliefs and are not reflected in the series Duck Dynasty,” A&E said in a statement. “His personal views in no way reflect those of A+E Networks, who have always been strong supporters and champions of the LGBT community. The network has placed Phil under hiatus from filming indefinitely.”

These are companies that never fire anyone for anti-Christian or anti-Republican remarks, but they’ll act with alacrity against anyone who says anything critical of the sexually abnormal. Notice that Alec Baldwin didn’t get fired for his many and various rants until he offended homosexuals one too many times.

And if you watch A+E, why are you supporting “strong supporters and champions of the LGBT community”?

As for the statement by the spokesman of GLAAD, I shall await with interest his next statement on Muslim theology. “Phil and his family claim to be Christian, but Phil’s lies about an entire community fly in the face of what true Christians believe,” GLAAD spokesperson Wilson Cruz said.

The fact is that a queer propagandist like Wilson Cruz obviously no more knows what “true Christians believe” than he knows what “true Martians believe”. The true and Biblically-based Christian belief is that self-identified homosexuals are unrepentant sinners whom God regards as abomination because they identify themselves with their sin. It is absolutely impossible to be a Christian and an unrepentant homosexual for the obvious reason that Christianity requires repentance for one’s sins.

Everyone on the planet is fallen. And no one chooses their particular flavor of temptation. But we are all responsible for our own actions, we all choose whether to give into our temptations or not, and we all choose whether to repent of those moral failures, those sins, or not.

Eco on the disappearance of the book

Umberto Eco considered a failed prophecy of Marshall McLuhan in light of recent developments in e-publishing in an article published on October 30, 2013 in L’Espresso.
At the start of the Seventies, Marshall
McLuhan announced some profound changes in our ways of thinking and
communication. One of his intuitions was that we were entering into a
global village, and in the universe of the Internet we have certainly
seen the verification of his vision. However, after analyzing the
influence of the printing press on the evolution of the culture and
our individual sensibilities in The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan
announced, in Understanding Media and other works, the sunset
of alphabetic linearity and the newly arisen dominance of images. To
hypersimplify this, he anticipated that the masses “will no longer
read anymore, they will watch TV, (or the strobing lights of the
disco).”
McLuhan died
in 1980, just as we were entering the daily world of the personal
computer. (There appeared models that were more or less toys and
experimental objects at the end of the Seventies, but the mass market
began in 1981 with the IBM PC.) If McLuhan had lived
a few more years, he would
have had to admit that
even in a world apparently
dominated by images,
the personal computer was establishing a
new alphabetical civilization.
It may be true that the preschoolers of today use iPads, but all the
information we receive from the Internet, email, and SMS are based on
our knowledge of the
alphabet. Computers perfect the situation imagined in Hugo’s The
Hunchback of Notre Dame, in which the
archdeacon Frollo, indicating first a book, and then the cathedral
seen from the window, rich with images and other visual symbols,
says: “this will kill that”. With all its
multimedia links, the computer certainly
possesses the characteristics of being the instrument of the global
village, and it has the capacity to revive again the “that” of
the Gothic cathedral, but it still
fundamentally rests upon neo-gutenbergian
principles.

To return to the alphabet, the invention of
the ebook has provided the possibility to read alphabetic texts on
screens instead of paper. And on these screens one can expect to read
yet another series of auguries predicting the disappearance of the
book and of the newspaper, (in part suggested by some declines in
sales.) One of the favorite sports of every unimaginative journalist
over the years is to ask the men of letters how they see the coming
demise of the world of print. It is not enough to argue that the book
remains of fundamental importance to the transmission and
conservation of information, or that we have scientific proof that
books printed 500 years ago have survived wonderfully while we cannot
scientifically demonstrate that the magnetized storage systems
presently in use can survive for more than ten years. (Nor can we
verify this, since computers today cannot read a floppy disk from the
Eighties.)

Now, however, there are some
disconcerting occurrences that have caught the attention of
journalists, although we have not yet grasped their significance and
their eventual consequences. In August, Jeff Bezos of Amazon bought
the Washington Post, and while announcing the decline of the daily
newspaper, Warren Buffet recently acquired some 63 local newpapers. As
Federico Rampini observed in Repubblica the other day, Buffet is a giant
of the Old Economy and he is not an innovator, but he has a rare
acuity for discerning investment opportunities. And I suspect
that other sharks of Silicon Valley are also moving against the
newspapers.
Rampini asked if the final blow will
not be Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg purchasing the New York Times.
Even if this doesn’t happen, it is clear that the digital world is
overtaking print. What about commercial calculations, political
speculations, and the desire to preserve the press as a democratic
watchdog? I don’t feel that I have a sufficient grasp on the situation to
interpret these various facts correctly. However, I think it is interesting to
consider the possibility of the reversal of another famous prophecy. Perhaps
Mao had it wrong and one must take the paper tiger seriously.

25 Best Tweets of 2013

The Right Wing News puts a list of the year’s best political tweets together and one of them turns out to be mine:

I think this is what is described as “losing your base”. Bill Ayers: “Try Obama for War Crimes”.
    — Vox Day (@voxday) June 18, 2013

I also liked Joe Rogan’s:

An institution begins the slide

I suppose there are many who will lament the first step in the demise of New York magazine. I tend to see it more as reason for good cheer:

This week’s announcement that New York magazine was becoming a biweekly was greeted, in my profession, with the sort of cheer that might herald the announcement of a sewer line backup or a mid-honeymoon appendectomy.

New York magazine is very successful. Its editor is very well regarded, and it wins lots of awards. It gets scads of Web traffic. It publishes magazine features that win the admiration of fellow journalists and has also become practically ubiquitous on social media. And, apparently, it still can’t pay the bills as a weekly publication. Hearing that New York magazine can’t make it as a weekly is, for a professional journalist, rather like being told that your teddy bear has cancer. How is that even possible?

The answer is that the circulation of print magazines is declining, while advertising revenue has taken a suicidal plunge. Companies who wanted to inform people about their firm’s activities used to have basically three choices: print media, television or radio. (OK, four if you count billboards.) These were all media companies, and they used the money corporations gave them to produce news.

What I find remarkable is how many of these institutions will glumly permit themselves to sink into oblivion without ever doing anything to significantly address the core issues. CNN is going to try to compete with every other network showing reality shows rather than make any attempt to appeal to the other half of the ideological spectrum. New York magazine has gone to a biweekly rather than attempt to broaden its appeal beyond liberals who live in New York and liberals who wish they did.

As technology gradually kills the liberal media’s ability to maintain its monopoly, it becomes ever more obvious that media was never first and foremost a business, but rather a giant propaganda machine wherein profit was an incidental bonus rather than its fundamental rationale.

Retreat and revolution

The head of CNN finally tires of being repeatedly prison-raped in the ratings every night by Fox News and throws in the towel:

After
almost a year of tinkering, CNN Worldwide President Jeff Zucker has
concluded that a news channel cannot subsist on news alone. So
he is planning much broader changes for the network—including a
prime-time shakeup that’s likely to make CNN traditionalists cringe.

Once,
CNN’s vanilla coverage was a point of pride. Now, the boss boasts about
the ratings for his unscripted series, and documentaries like the Sea
World-slamming film Blackfish. Zucker, in his first one-on-one interview
since taking control of CNN last January, told Capital he wants news
coverage “that is just not being so obvious.”

Instead,
he wants more of “an attitude and a take”: “We’re all regurgitating the
same information. I want people to say, ‘You know what? That was
interesting. I hadn’t thought of that,’” Zucker said. “The goal for the
next six months, is that we need more shows and less newscasts.”

Zucker—“rhymes
with hooker,” he likes to say—also expanded on comments he has made
about breaking CNN out of a mindset created by historic rivalries with
MSNBC and Fox. He wants the network to attract “viewers who are watching
places like Discovery and History and Nat Geo and A&E.”

“People
who traditionally just watch the cable news networks [are] a great
audience,” he said. “I’m not trying to alienate that audience. But the
overall cable news audience has not grown in the last 12 years, OK? So,
all we’re doing is trading [audience] share. … We also want to broaden
what people can expect from CNN.”

The 48-year-old
Zucker initially faced internal resistance to his experiments beyond the
realm of hard news, but he now has an irrefutable retort: The No. 1
show on CNN is now “Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown,” a travel-adventure
show featuring the bad-boy celebrity chef. Zucker said that inside CNN,
his formula has finally been accepted “because people have seen the
results.”

As JartStar commented: “It will be amusing
that in another year or two CNN will have less to do with the news and
more to do with reality TV than SyFy has with science fiction”.

And
fitting. What Fox has done to CNN is exactly what Larry, Mike, Tom,
Sara, and me are going to do to the world of Pink SF. By presenting an
ideological alternative that appeals to more than half of the
prospective audience that is ignored and denigrated by the monolithic
gatekeepers, our market is far less saturated. Having lost their former
ability to keep us out of print and out of the bookstores, there is
nothing the genre publishers can do except watch helplessly as we cut
into their sales in the same way that Fox News cut into CNN’s ratings.

I
only wish Amazon permitted authors to give away Kindle Select
books on an ongoing basis. Every individual who downloads a free copy of
The Last Witchking or The Wardog’s Coin and reads it isn’t merely a potential buyer of A Throne of Bones or Quantum Mortis, he is also one more book sale lost to the gatekeepers.

They
are the dinosaurs, heavy with overhead and thin operating margins. We
are the mammals, able to write and publish a book in the time it takes
them to bring a finished book to market. That’s why we are going to win
despite their best efforts to pretend we don’t even exist.

Speaking
of which, I’m looking for translators who are interested in translating
my books in return for a share in the revenue. If you are a native
speaker of a language other than English and you want to take active part in the Blue
SF Revolution, fire me an email.

Juxtaposition

A conversation on Twitter:

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

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

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

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

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

 

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


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

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


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

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

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

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