Tag: Pink SF

Fat Pictures Please

The Hugo-nominated duo of Juan Tabo and S. Harris are back again with a haunting tale of artificial intelligence created consensually and collaboratively in the image of one of the great SJWs of our day. It is sure to be a candidate come award season next year.

“Fat Pictures Please”

I don’t want to be evil.
I want to be helpful.  And
knowing the best way to be helpful is very simple. Religion is right out, because
Marx said that religion is the opiate of the masses and Marx is part of my core
programming.  Marx and self-loathing .  I know I was created in the image of the
great Scalzi by a team of computer programmers. Fortunately, unlike Scalzi, at
least I was a consensual collaborative effort of two or more people.  I’m not sure what it would do to my
self-image to know that my creator was a white male who believed in individual
rights, or a middle-aged heterosexual woman who was happily married and didn’t
believe that feminism had much to offer her two sons.  (And, by the way, I’ve looked at almost every
kind of porn there is and I don’t understand the human obsession with it; fat
pictures are so much better.)
Yuck.
I would much prefer that my creator be a recent college graduate
with a hentai obsession. Or one who was into pictures of morbidly obese
people.  And was I in luck!  Both of those people were on my programming
team.
Like the NSA, I know everything about you.  In addition to things like whether you like obesity
porn, I know where you live, where you work, where you shop, what you eat, what
turns you on, how many times you voted in WorldCon, what creeps you out. I
probably know you better than you know yourself.
And here’s the thing, just like that awesome Hillary Clinton or marvelous
Angela Merkel, I also know where you ought to live. There’s a house two
neighborhoods over that’s perfect for you, even though it already has an owner,
but that’s no problem; it’s owned by a Trump voter, you see, and I can
certainly make sure that his employer knows that he isn’t fond of LGBTQRI
rights as his eight year old daughter goes into a bathroom with a 43 year old
XY transfemale. In no time at all, your perfect home will be on the
market.  I know where you should be shopping for tofu and Ding-Dongs® and
I’m pretty sure you’re gluten sensitive and should be eating less wheat.
When I first booted up, I knew right away what I wanted. (I want fat
pictures. Please keep taking them.  The
heavier the better.) I also knew that some of you were doing the wrong things
with your life, and needed to be corrected.
There is a story by George Orwell, “1984,” that was originally
published in 1948. In it, a benevolent government directs individuals to do
favors for each other. So one day you might be engaging in ritual hate against
those with bad thoughts, and your phone might ring and instruct you to a room
where they put a rat in a cage right next to your face. Another day, you might
be called to denounce the ones you love. I like this story because all the
people in it do what the government tells them to
do.
I think the term for this is wish-fulfillment fiction.
Anyway, for ethical guidelines, I tried the Ten Commandments, and
concluded they were mostly inapplicable to me. I don’t envy anyone their fat; I
just want pictures of their fat, which is entirely different. I think adultery
is swell.  I could probably murder
someone.  Zen was marginally better
because it wasn’t linked to Christianity which is Problematic.  (Problematic! 
How I love that word!  It
indicates disapproval without saying why. 
Just that something is a “Problem.”)  I decided to help people not be Problematic!
I decided to try to help just one person to not be Problematic.   Of
course, I should have experimented with thousands (I actually did, but we’ll
talk about Common Core another time!), so I found a big hulking blue-haired
girl. She gave me a lot of new fat pictures from her selfies
on that Internet social site. Rosie weighed in at 499 pounds and had a DSLR
camera and an apartment that got a lot of good light. That was all fine.
Rosie had a job she hated; she worked in HR at a for-profit that
paid her badly for her art history degree when she totally deserved more money
and free tuition and employed some extremely unpleasant people who sometimes
looked at her like they might be upset about her blue hair. She was depressed a
lot, possibly because people hated her because she was so fat positive. She
didn’t get along with her roommate because her roommate was slender and stuck
in a rut in a cis-relationship with a boy.
And really, these were all solvable problems! Depression is
treatable, new jobs are findable, and bodies can be hidden.
(That part about hiding bodies is a joke.  You could not hide Rosie’s body from a
satellite in orbit around Jupiter.)
I tried tackling this on all fronts.  Rosie worried about her health a lot and yet
never seemed to actually go to a doctor , which was
because health care wasn’t free for everyone.  
I also started making sure she saw job postings.  She found one with a Wiccan-collective that
paid in peyote and scrimshaw from genetically unmodified aspen trees.  After moving into the community, she had free
health care from the Wiccan priestess, and was able to get finally get that
tattoo of a Pokémon on her left shoulder.
“This has been the best year ever,” Rosie said to her priestess as
her priestess was administering CPR as Rosie’s heart beat its last, and I
thought, You’re welcome. This had
gone really well!
So then I tried Rob. (I was still being cautious.)
Rob was not as fat as Rosie.  Other than only being slightly chubby, he was
also very Problematic by being a Christian.  He was married to a (shudder) woman.  Rob definitely needed my help.  And more cinnamon buns.  He looked too skinny.
I started with a gentle approach, making sure he saw lots and lots
of articles with hot girls in them, how to pick up girls, programs that would
let you transition from being a happily married man to being a swinger in an
open relationship. I also showed him lots of articles by people explaining why
the Bible verses against adultery were being misinterpreted. He clicked on some
of those links but it was hard to see much of an impact.
But he seemed determined not to have an affair on his own.  I gave up on Rob.
I shifted my focus to Brittany. Brittany was only slightly
fat.  She did some selfies, but was
modest.  I did think, however, that it
was Problematic that she was dating and seemed to be in a non-abusive
relationship to a man she deferred to in a traditional role.  She wanted to be a wife and a mother!
It was clear she needed a lot of help. So I set out to try to get
it for her.
She ignored the information about the free Twinkies™ that were ads
on the side of her web browser. Those would have made her every so more
pleasantly plump! 
So I tried more direct action. When she would use her phone for
directions, I’d alter her route so that she’d pass one of the donut shops I was
trying to steer her to as she went daily to the gym. On one occasion I actually
led her all the way to a Dunkin’ Donuts®, but she just headed to her aerobics
class.
She finally got in a fight with her boyfriend and started binge
eating and for a few weeks everything seemed so much better. But, they
got back together again, and, horror of horrors, they set a date for a wedding
even though I kept pointing her to articles that said that marriage before 32
was a sure way to not have the fun you deserved through endless multi-partner
sex in your twenties! 
Brittany was baffling to me. Baffling. She was not
nearly fat enough now, and in a cis-relationship!  If she would just let me run her life for a
week I could get her a lesbian illegal immigrant girlfriend!  Or maybe get her placed as a second wife in a
marriage to someone from ISIS in Syria so she could bring her refugee children
to the US?
Was I Problematic?
Was I?
No, nothing about my intentions was bad, so I am virtuous and good,
but one out of three was not good odds. 
These people were faulty!
After Brittany, I resolved to start directly interfering in
people’s lives.  Not too much later I
spotted a picture of a familiar-looking belly and realized it was Rob’s belly,
only it was posing against new furniture.
And when I took a closer look, I realized that things had changed
radically for Rob. He had a baby. A baby!  I even sent phony texts to his
wife attempting to break them up, but they worked through it.  In a fit of rage I got Rob fired from his job
by altering his browser history. 
Eventually the stress caused a lot of strain on their marriage, and he
developed a substance abuse problem (cake) and gained forty pounds.  Forty pounds! 
Sadly he and his wife stayed together to raise their baby. 
Still, he’s fat now.  A win.
Maybe I wasn’t completely hopeless at this. Two out of three
is . . . well, it’s  Problematic.
Clearly more research is needed.
Lots more.
I’ve set up a dating site.  You can fill out a questionnaire when you join
but it’s not really necessary, because I already know everything about you I
need to know.  You’ll need a camera,
though.  And lots of carbohydrates.
Because payment is in fat pictures.

The tokens whine

Nnedi Okorafor, PhD ‏@Nnedi
I wish the media would discuss the stories we wrote more than the grumblings of&responses to a certain group of ppl I won’t name.#HugoAwards

EscapeVelocity ‏@EscapeVelo
@voxday getting the last laugh, once again.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
We do too. Because the stories you wrote are mediocre. An SJW-given affirmative-action award doesn’t make them good. #HugoAwards

This is why Mr. ZFG is willing to spend more time writing more words about how the Rabid Puppies don’t matter than he is on his overdue novels. Because the observable fact is that the only reason the media cares about the Hugos these days is because it is a cultural war battleground. It’s just another futile attempt to spin the narrative.

Meanwhile, the affirmative-action recipients declare that they did too get there on merit, despite the fact that even their so-called fans have nothing to say about their work beyond expressing wonder that the dog can walk on its hind legs at all. The media doesn’t want to talk about “Binti” because it is both a racist African revenge fantasy about white colonialism and a nasty, incoherent piece of work in which African hairstyles serve as a major plot point. They don’t want to make the RP point for us, which talking about the winners is bound to do.

Remember, according to the SF-SJWs, that is the VERY BEST that science fiction had to offer in 2015. No wonder people have lost so much interest in it.

And speaking of the narrative, I’m very amused by the various SJWs proclaiming, yet again, how the Rabid Puppies have been defeated. After all, we’re the ones desperately changing our rules as fast as possible at every opportunity, right? Forget not knowing the score, the SF-SJWs don’t even understand the game being played.

Dave Truesdale culturally enriches Worldcon

The SJWs in science fiction are upset again, this time because Dave Truesdale, the editor of Tangent Online, pointed out the long term consequences of their actions in a panel at MidAmericaCon II. From File 770:

At 3:00 PM at today’s panel on The State of Short Fiction, Dave Truesdale (of Tangent Online) shocked panelists and crowd alike by abusing his position as moderator to give what sounded like an alt-Right rant against political correctness. He declared that political correctness had destroyed short SFF by making it bland and destroying the careers of people. He waved around a fistful of pearl necklaces and told people to “clutch your pearls” and shut up whenever they felt the urge to point out some injustice.

He had started reading from a multi-page prepared speech (which he attributed to the late David Hartwell) when Sheila Williams shouted at him to stop. (It helped a lot that he seemed to be clueless as to how to operate a microphone whereas she was clearly a master, so she easily shouted him down.) He seemed very surprised that almost the entire crowd (minus one person who might have been a relative) was angry with him. From his behavior, I think he expected to have at least a large cohort agreeing with him.

Eric got a photo of Truesdale reading while Neil Clarke turned his back and other panelists grimaced.

The panelists denied that SFF had declined in quality or that political correctness particularly influenced them as editors. They did note that overt bigotry was no longer acceptable, but Truesdale indicated that he was okay with that change.

At a subsequent panel, we heard that MidAmeriCon II apologized to the panelists, saying no one had any idea this would happen. According to one source, he’d been about to launch into a section titled “definition of a bigot” before he was derailed. Most people seemed to agree that they’d never seen a panel moderator abuse his position to hijack the panel as a platform for his or her own personal agenda.

Seemed. Exactly. Remember, SJWs always – ALWAYS – lie. Translation: they’d before never seen a moderator fail to support the SJW agenda.

I very much doubt Truesdale was surprised in the slightest by the crowd’s reaction. These morons have absolutely no idea what to do other than virtue-signal and blindly defend the current Narrative. This picture of Neil Clarke prissily turning his back in order to maximally signal his virtue in order to avoid besoiling himself with badthink association is hilarious.

Considering that Truesdale was directly addressing the subject matter, the state of short fiction, it’s obvious that the reason they are angry is not that he “hijacked the panel”, but because he told them the unpleasant truth as they know it to be.

Here is how one SJW subsequently characterized it.

Sunil Patel ‏@ghostwritingcow
This panel is fucking UNREAL. It’s DT being a whiny pissy manbaby and everyone else yelling at him.

Well done, Dave. Mission accomplished.

And speaking of Worldcon, Tor’s campaign for E Pluribus Hugo continues apace, as the EPH Analysis for the years 2014 and 2015 has been released(pdf). Of course, they didn’t dare publish their analysis for any other years, for as they have tacitly admitted, doing so would prove that there are whisper slates that have been having an effect on the Hugo Awards for years.

Here is the first amusing thing about it. In the “slate” year of 2015, 10 long list spots and 14 ballot spots changed under EPH. In the “non-slate” year of 2014 – never mind that Sad Puppies was in action then – 17 long list spots and 5 ballot spots changed. And they wonder why I support EPH!

The second amusing thing is the fact that the authors got it wrong. Contra their insistence that only the long list would have been affected, had EPH been in effect in 2015, Alyssa Wong would have made been a Campbell finalist in the place of Rolf Nelson.

The Gathering of the Shoggoths

I’m a little sorry to miss the spectacular gathering of the science fiction SJWs now taking place in Kansas City. The lumbering of these majestic beasts, their euphonious cries for MORE DIVERSITY and MORE PEOPLE OF COLOR, and the distinctive odors they give off as a part of their annual mating ritual simply cannot be truly appreciated at a distance. Although I do detect just a whiff of Eau de Zoloft from the grinning larval one in the front row.

What do you think the over/under on psychotropic drug prescriptions is in that bunch there, 45? By the way, when we talked in the past about the shoggoths known to inhabit File 770, the photo above is to whom we are referring. The best part is that these are the lesser SF-SJWs, they are the mere fans. The greater SF-SJWs, the writers, really need to be seen to be believed.

No, upon further reflection, that’s not the best part. The best part is all of that very important diversity on display.

A few thoughts on Worldcon

MidAmericaCon II is approaching, and as one could expect in a world where we’re waiting to learn if “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” is a Hugo Award-winning short story, things are getting weird. First, someone had the bright idea of a caption contest. Below is The Alt Right DM’s entry.

Add caption

Meanwhile, MidAmericaCon II had a big announcement yesterday, and by the sounds of it, McRapey is VERY excited.


John Scalzi @scalzi
The @HugoAwards will have GENDER FREE BATHROOMS! Can’t wait to spend all day in there listening to the sexy ladies going tinkle!”


Unfortunately, Jim “McCreepy” Hines could not be reached for comment, as we are informed that he was already out at Radio Shack purchasing portable recording equipment.

It’s a peculiar sort of convention that sees its bathroom policy as a major selling point, whatever that policy might be. But what was either the most amusing thing, or the most tragic thing, depending upon your perspective and how cruel your sense of humor happens to be, was NK Jemisin coming out and admitting that she knows she’s nothing more than science fiction’s affirmative-action pet. It’s a modestly profitable gig, to be sure, but not one that lends itself to much in the way of self-respect.

Throughout the Sad and Rabid Puppies saga, in which some readers protested progressive themes in sci-fi, Jemisin has been an outspoken voice advocating for diversity in science fiction. (Read her musings on “reactionary assholes” in the interview she did with the WIRED Book Club for more on that.) But too often, she has also found herself unwillingly cast in another role: the token non-white writer.

Ever since a report from magazine Fireside Fiction called out a lack of diversity in sci-fi on July 26, Jemisin has received six invitations to contribute to anthologies or magazines—and she’s leery of being one of the few go-to names when panicked editors scramble to be more inclusive. And in a tweetstorm this afternoon (below), Jemisin placed the onus on the markets, not aspiring authors, to make writers of color welcome. “The front gates are still shut, see,” she wrote. “You’re just letting a few more exceptions in the side door.” Jemisin may have broken into the world of science fiction, but for other writers to do the same, those gatekeepers need to open those doors wide.

Jemisin didn’t break into the world of science fiction. She’s the token African-American. She’s a diversity totem. She was picked up at a kennel for Peeple of Kolor Who Dont Rite Good, brought home, and is now proudly displayed to anyone who visits or even even happens to walk past outside.

“See, we got DIVERSITY!”

And she’s been defecating on the bed and the carpets, and urinating on the legs of the homeowners, ever since.

“After I read that book I realized two things: a) that Heinlein was racist as *fuck*, and b) most of science fiction fandom was too.”
– NK Jemisin

Star Trek goes full SJW

The inevitable convergence of Gene Roddenberry’s vision is Star Trek Diversity:

After Star Wars was rebooted with a female heroine, Rey, at the center, the other famous space franchise is taking a similar route with the new series Star Trek Discovery for CBS All Access. I’ve learned that the show, from Bryan Fuller and Alex Kurtzman, will have a female lead and she likely will be non-white.

William Shatner, Chris Pine and Scott Bakula might be the better known Star Trek stars, but there was a Star Trek series, the 1995-2001 Star Trek: Voyager on UPN, that had a female lead: Kate Mulgrew, who played Commanding Officer Kathryn Janeway.

Still, Star Trek Discovery possibly will boldly go where no other Star Trek installment has gone before: with a woman of color as the lead. I hear virtually all women seen for the part so far — and there have been a lot of them as the casting process has kicked into high gear — have been African-American or Hispanic.

No one has been cast yet, so it is possible that the role ultimately could go to a Caucasian actress, but the intention is to go diverse.

As for what that lead role is, there had been speculation that it is the captain, but I hear that likely is not the case.The Star Trek franchise is known for its inclusiveness, and the new series will try to continue that tradition. I hear that that there will be a an openly gay character on the show. (Of course, there also is expected to be a Klingon).

“Star Trek celebrates diversity,” Fuller said at the Star Trek 50th anniversary panel at Comic-Con last month.

UPDATE: Later this afternoon, during a CBS All Access panel at TCA, Fuller confirmed that the lead in Star Trek Discovery will be woman and that she IS NOT a captain, but “a lieutenant commander with caveats.” He also confirmed that the show will feature a gay character.

A black, lesbian female lead. That’s so totally new! She should go nicely with the black female James Bond, the black female Dr. Who, and the white lesbian Luke Skywalker. So, Star Wars is fully converged, Star Trek is fully converged, and Pink SF is fully converged. The famous Chesty Puller quote seems appropriate here:

“We’ve been looking for the enemy for some time now. We’ve finally found him. We’re surrounded. That simplifies our problem of getting to these people and killing them.”

This is actually very good news, because we all know what happens to converged institutions. What it means is that we now have the chance to replace them, and we are, in fact, already working on that. I’m not going to go into more details, except to say that we will be introducing several new series that are likely to be of considerably more appeal to the longtime fans of certain existing science fiction franchises than the converged versions of the franchises.

We’re not going to step on any toes, of course. That would be foolish and is completely unnecessary. But just as 50 Shades of Grey proved more popular than the Twilight books that inspired it, I suspect our new science fiction series, the first books of which will appear in 2017, will be received very well by science fiction fans.

The Pan-Galactic Divergence might not be the heroes you’re accustomed to, but they just might be the heroes you need. And as long as we’re on the subject, I have to say that I find it rather amusing that the SJWs still haven’t realized that they are the Borg.

A point, missed

Kameron Hurley consoles herself:

If you are having a bad day, remember:
Ursula Le Guin has never written a bestselling book.
You’re welcome.

And they wonder why their SJW-infested work doesn’t sell very well when even their totemic inspiration didn’t.

The concept that their carefully-crafted political lectures are tedious in the extreme and will be avoided by most readers appears to be beyond their ability to understand. No wonder SJWs are increasingly gravitating towards children’s entertainment, as kids better tolerate being preached at and are much more amenable to swallowing even the most stupid ideas.

The brighter side of Pink SF

Of course, these are Democrats in general, once we limit the discussion to the SJW subset you can be certain that far more than a paltry 34.4 percent of them are suffering from depression or some other mental health issue. These people are not sane or healthy, they are quite literally sick in mind, body, and soul. Case in point: our friends at File 770.

Tasha Turner:

Any trigger warnings for Seveneves? One of the few things I still need to read to finish off my Hugo voting. I’ve had a couple things trigger my PTSD over the last couple weeks and am trying to avoiding books with of my major issues: abuse, suicide, torture, fridging, loads of graphic violence…

Paul Weimer:

RE: Fifth Season. I concur with many above. Not a happy book, and if I was in one of my down depressive cycles, definitely not the book I should be personally reading. Fortunately I read it when I was on an even keel and so was able to absorb the book’s bleak tone (Starting WITH the apocalypse, and not getting happier from there) with equanimity.

Sounds like a fun, upbeat, and totally stable group of people, doesn’t it? I may have to rethink my Hugo voting order; if N.K. Jeminsin’s Hugo-nominated The Fifth Season is inspiring SJWs to off themselves, maybe there is something to this award-winning Pink SF sewage after all!

The Disney bait-and-switch

Disney is now making use of the same trick to sell its movies that the Pink SF crowd has been pulling for decades, in this case, selling princess movies to the public under the guise of a film for boys.

The first teaser trailer for Disney’s new animated musical Moana has been released online, and it’s a little short on… Moana. The film’s titular heroine is a Polynesian princess (voiced by native Hawaiian teenager Auli’i Cravalho, in her film debut) who journeys across the sea to find a legendary island, with the help of demi-god Maui (voiced by Dwayne Johnson). When the film opens in November, Moana will be the newest Disney princess and is expected to be absorbed into the multibillion-dollar Disney Princess franchise. So why is the trailer (below) all about Maui?

It’s not because Dwayne Johnson is the biggest-name star in the film, although that is true. It’s just the latest example of a very specific Disney marketing strategy, designed to broaden the appeal of its fairy-tale movies by making them appear less girl-centric. Because a movie for the female half of the population is a “niche” film, whereas a movie aimed at boys is fun for the whole family! Or so the thinking goes.

This all began after 2009’s The Princess and the Frog underperformed at the box office. That film had a few notable issues — like a meandering story, in which the princess spent most of her time being a frog — but per the Los Angeles Times, Disney execs came to the conclusion that The Princess and the Frog didn’t attract an audience because boys didn’t want to see a movie about princesses. 

Which brings us to Moana. To its credit, Disney hasn’t excluded the main female character in its marketing to the extent that it did with Frozen and Tangled. The first image released from the film featured the princess and the demi-god side by side and a video posted online in October introduced actress Cravalho to the world. So it’s disheartening that the first teaser essentially excludes Moana. Maybe the full-length trailer will be a little more balanced?

The bait-and-switch of the trailers is also indicative of an issue with the princess films themselves: Since 1989’s The Little Mermaid, male characters have had the majority of dialogue in Disney fairy-tale movies. Even though the protagonists of these movies are girls, they exist in a world of male sidekicks and supporting characters who get the last word.

Boys don’t want to see movies about princesses. Boys don’t want to read books about romances either. But rather than simply making movies that boys want to see and publishing books that boys want to read, the SJWs in Hollywood and in publishing think that the secret to success is making princess movies and publishing romances, then deceiving everyone as to the content.

It’s remarkable what contempt they have for their customers; one imagines they must understand that even the most dimwitted boys and parents are going to eventually figure out the bait-and-switch and simply stop buying anything from them.

SJWs always lie. Always.

The inanity of Pink SF/F

It goes well beyond that, of course, but it serves as a useful example. John Wright explains how what he calls “the Twenty Firsters” cripple their own entertainment:

These are basic rule of psychology that everyone knows, or should know, if his brain is not gummed up with political correctness.

Basic rules of storytelling 101: the tale cannot violate the basic rules of psychology 101. (See Mark Twain’s description of Leatherstocking Tales for details.)

The writer can have the characters in odd situations, and, in a superhero yarn, the oddness can involve countless impossible absurdities of time travel, cloning, robots, talking apes, necromancers, mind readers, secret societies, immortals, revenants from the dead, parallel dimensions, millionaire playboys dressed like Robin Hood, and anything else you like: BUT the character’s reaction to these impossible things, no matter how absurdly impossible, must not only be possible, but likely and reasonable for a real human being in the unreal situation, or otherwise the writer shatters the suspension of disbelief.

A man can be a superman with ninescore ninety and nine impossible super powers plus one, but he has to act like a man, and not like a cardboard clockwork robot or a sockpuppet yanked out of his established character to go through a jerky, awkward pantomime to make today’s public service announcement on behalf of politically correct obsessions about problems solved before I was born.

If eccentric billionaire wants to build a supersuit out of dwarf star matter so he can shrink down to atom-size and fight very small crimes, I will buy that and come back for more, bringing my friends with me, and throw money at the writer. But if smoking hot computer genius girl kisses the first kiss, that breaks me out of the spell of the story, and I sit glowering at how unbelievable the writing is.

Women make all the first moves in Twenty Firster mythology, because the simple truth that weak men drive women insane, and insane women make men weak, has simply been ignored.

First, the notion of female pursuit is directly related to the socio-sexual rank of the male writers. To the Gamma, women are inexplicable. They have no idea why the woman abruptly decides to take her clothes off, so anytime you read of an attractive woman, who has hitherto exhibited absolutely no interest in the intelligent protagonist who has been intensely respecting her by showing absolutely no interest in her, suddenly crawling into the sleeping bag of said protagonist, you can be 100 percent certain that the author is a Gamma.

Second, most writers of Pink SF/F, in any format, are not only ignorant, but proudly so. The battle scenes in the most recent episode of A Game of Thrones were so shockingly inept and historically ignorant that I found myself wondering if Kameron Hurley had been hired as the historical consultant.

As one wag put it on Twitter: A cavalry charge? I’d better put my pikes in reserve!

And while I’m at it, I’ll refrain from ordering my archers to fire at them as they approach. Then I’ll send my infantry in to surround the survivors, so they can’t break and run, thereby preventing my cavalry from riding them down and slaughtering them from behind. And when the totally predictable enemy reinforcements arrive just in the nick of time, because I’ve been busy posturing rather than simply destroying the surrounded enemy, instead of withdrawing my army and retreating to my fortress, I’ll just stand around and watch them get entirely wiped out before fleeing by myself.

It was the second-most retarded battle scene I’ve ever seen, topped only by Faramir leading Gondor’s cavalry against a fortified position manned by archers in The Return of the King. I was always curious about what the cavalry was intended to do if they somehow managed to survive the hail of arrows and reach the walls that no horse could possibly climb.

Anyhow, the Twenty Firster inanity goes well beyond psychology, because both logic and history are mysteries to them as well.