Tag: rabbitology

Pinkshirts at play

Now, recall that we’re supposed to be concerned that the mainstream media is against #GamerGate. John Scalzi was crowing to Sparklepunter that. But do they seriously think we don’t notice when the greater portion of the media establishment is simply pinkshirts doing exactly what Clark described at Popehat: “using these pink resources to promote, give good reviews to, and bestow awards on pink developers and pink games….” In this vein, consider the New York Times review of science fiction and fantasy today:

“Ancillary Justice,” the first novel in Ann Leckie’s far-future posthuman space opera series, recently became the first novel to win the “triple crown” of the genre (the Hugo, Nebula and Arthur C. Clarke awards), but not without controversy. The central question is whether the story’s structural gimmick — the protagonist’s tendency to refer to all people as “she” regardless of actual gender or even humanity — is sufficiently mind-blowing as to merit all the accolades. It isn’t a gimmick, though; it’s a coup. Rather than seriously entertain the endless, if stupid, debate on whether women have a place in stories of the future, Leckie’s book does the literary equivalent of rolling its eyes and walking out of the room. Her refusal to waste energy on stupidity forces her audience to do the same: A few pages into the first novel, the reader gives up trying to guess each character’s actual gender, and just accepts that this will be a story full of interesting women doing awesome things.

Notice that the reviewer dismisses the controversy around whether an eminently forgettable debut novel truly merits being the most highly-awarded SF/F novel of all time. As if there was every any doubt that a book written by a female pinkshirt was going to be full of women doing things. Prediction: the recently-released sequel to this vaunted SF novel ever is going to fall considerably short of expectations. Now, care to guess who wrote the review?

Why, none other than the educated, but ignorant half-savage herself, NK Jemisin! But we’re supposed to be duly impressed by the fact that the supposedly objective mainstream media praises “a story full of interesting women doing awesome things”, which I note could be used to describe practically any female-written novel from The Pillow Book to 50 Shades of Grey.

Like most pinkshirt victories, this one is hollow and bordering on pyrrhic, because the primary accomplishment is to cause the reader to realize that there is no point reading the NYT’s book reviews anymore. Assuming, of course, that one didn’t already figure that out about 20 years ago. Either way, it represents a once-formidable gatekeeper continuing its spiral downward into irrelevance.

Choose this day

To paraphrase Joshua, choose this day with whom you will stand. Clark at PopeHat has an intelligent and analytical piece that contains an important section on the way pinkshirts invade and take over organizations and institutions, but I can’t agree with his quasi-neutral position. In any case, consider this very good description of what he calls entryism:

The entryism is of the usual type: people with blue/pink ideals join red / gray groups and try to achieve social status with in those groups, then use that social status to push for the admission of – and promotion of – more blue/pink members. Once the blue/pink members achieve a majority they then change the rules of admission to create a lock on their new conquest (in the case of academia, for example, even blue researchers in the Netherlands of all places, were shocked by how blatant the process was).

The status shaming is also of the usual type: high status blue / pinks follow Alinksy’s battle plan.

First, they pick a low-status target (rule 12). This target is usually a pale, bespectacled Aspergers-ish nerd) for a transgression against the norms they wish to universalize. The high social status pinks paint themselves as victims of a power imbalance, then they use their superior popularity to out-speak the target and push their version of the narrative. Pink allies in the media join in to keep the pressure on (rule 8). This is easy to do, because the act of social shaming is not only fun, but it’s click-bait, so everyone involved not only has lolz, they has cheeseburger (rule 6). The toxic nature of the allegations is usually sufficient to make sure that the target of the attack does not get much, if any, sympathetic press (rule 12, again: “Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions”.)

In computer gaming the attempt at entry came by first establishing a few pinks inside the community (not a problem, because the world of gamer development did not think of itself as politicized), and then using these pink resources to promote, give good reviews to, and bestow awards on pink developers and pink games, even when the games in question are not “games” by the normal definition.

Excellent observations. I would add that what I call Blues (and Clark calls red/gray) do not join Pink organizations, both because they have no desire to do so and because pink groups actively police their ranks at all times. Look at how rapidly I was purged from SFWA, in a clear violation of  by people who did not even qualify to join it for years after I became a member. The old school writers, who made a living publishing science fiction, didn’t care what anyone else thought about anything. The new school pretenders, many of whom are primarily activists of one sort or another and have not even published a single novel, care about little else.

That is why it is so difficult for organizations to recover once penetrated by entryist pinkshirts. The result is no more surprising than when one country invades another that has not bothered to field an army. Once the organization is occupied, it is easier to simply leave than to organize resistance among the stunned and demoralized membership. And those who don’t leave of their own volition will be pushed out, even for so small an “infraction” as referring to someone as “li’l girl”. Notice that the PGA President was fired in the name of the same “inclusivity” that the pinkshirts are now attempting to force on the gaming industry. “Inclusivity” must be rejected as strongly and as firmly as “equality”, “fairness”, and ever other pinkshirt slogan.

What Clark’s analysis unfortunately leaves out of the equation is that pinkshirts are intrinsically parasitical. For all that they preen about being “creative”, they do not create anything and they are incapable of building anything that is not political in nature. They are, for the most part, women and feminized men; it is not an accident that many of the “women” who are actually doing something in the game industry – for all his flaws and histrionics, Brianna Wu is a legitimate game developer – are actually men.

It’s important to remember that the pinks are not the political Left per se. They are a radical subset of it. There are certainly genuine left-wing creators, but the fact that they are genuine creators means that they have no need to interfere with other creators in any way. The more you see someone aggressively speaking out about the need to interfere with the creations of others, the more you can be certain that they have no ability to create anything themselves.

The single biggest problem that the Blue side has is the stubborn determination of many who do not sign onto the Pink program to remain on the fence until something affects them personally. I remember the cynical laughter of my father when a longtime friend, who had scoffed at my father’s concerns about the growing anti-business bureaucracy in Minnesota for more than 15 years, was suddenly galvanized into political action when the grasping tentacles finally reached into his own medical practice. It was, of course, far too late at that point.

That’s why it is important for those who don’t sign onto the pinkshirts’ program to actively oppose it. Yes, they will call you names. Yes, they will actively attempt to harm you and your career. But here is the secret: they are going to do it anyhow and buying time is only going to ensure that you will face them when they are stronger and more able to harm you.

What #GamerGate has shown is that we have the ability to strike back. We have the ability to harm them the way they are constantly seeking to harm us. Standing up to them works. Look at how their attempt to isolate me completely imploded; not only has this blog now reliably seeing nearly 3x the daily traffic as the one-time leading blog in SF/F, but Thursday marked its single most-trafficked day ever without any media coverage or even any links from a bigger site like Instapundit.

And speaking of Instapundit, look at the way more and more people have no tolerance for the pinkshirts. The mere polite mention of receiving a Scalzi book in the mail was enough to provoke anger; the most liked comment was this one from David in Virginia: “Not one penny to Scalzi from me. You can pump his stuff till hell
freezes over, Professor, and he still won’t get one red cent from me.”

I’m not addressing the Dread Ilk here. You guys have been PHENOMENAL. I can’t even thank you when you get my back from time to time because you guys always there. You’ve made Castalia House, which originally was just supposed to be a way of getting my books out there after Marcher Lord was bought, a going concern in which my books are practically a minor afterthought, so much so that successful, mainstream-published authors have been contacting us to discuss the possibility of working with us. I may not be the sort to need emotional support, (as Jonah Goldberg once said, I feed on the Dark Side of the Force) but it’s good to know that it is there nevertheless.

No, I’m addressing the Grays, the fence-sitters, the people who are hoping against hope that this will pass them by and the situation will magically improve. It won’t, so long as you and others like you are afraid. But I’m telling you, as someone who has been targeted unmercilessly by everyone from CAIR to the SFWA, there is no reason for fear. Standing up to them won’t kill you and it will make you stronger, more confident, and more capable. You’ll lose battles, sure, but you will win the war.

So get off the fence. Choose your side. Do something. Support the Blues. Stand with them instead of distancing yourself from them as if it will save you. (It won’t.) Attack the pinkshirts at their various points of weakness. Here is my pledge to you. If you do something, whether it is starting a game journo site, developing a card game, making a VASSAL module, reviewing books, or launching an email campaign against SyFy, I will support it somehow. Maybe via a personal endorsement (or a timely critique, if that would be more helpful), maybe a blog post, most often just a tweet. I simply can’t do much more than I’m already doing; as it stands, I’m already up until close to dawn working on my various game, book, and technology projects. But I can, and will, support you in yours.

He doth protest too much

It is richly ironic that Jimmy Wales, of all people, is complaining about the EU laws suppressing the truth on the Internet:

Speaking at Wikipedia’s annual Wikimania conference in London today, Wales said: “History is a human right and one of the worst things that a person can do is attempt to use force to silence another.

“I’ve been in the public eye for quite some time; some people say good things and some people say bad things. That’s history and I would never ever use any kind of legal process like this to try to suppress the truth. I think that’s deeply immoral.”

I can’t think of any non-state organization that suppresses the truth as much as Wikipedia.  The system that Wales has set up ruthlessly and relentlessly suppresses the truth under its false rubric of requiring a “reliable source”.

Don’t take my word for it. Look at the Wikipedia page about me. Does that describe my views at all? Are the totality of my views really limited to little more than a feud with John Scalzi and my expulsion from SFWA? Do I have no opinions on economics, politics, philosophy, literature, and religion despite having written books on the former and the latter? It’s telling, too, to observe that if the so-called feud and the expulsion are the only significant aspects of my views, there is no mention of the connection between the former and the latter.

Now, here are my views on the various schools of economics:

The Austrian school of economics presently provides Man’s best understanding of the field of economics, but the core mechanism for its business cycle is incorrect. In place of the shift between consumer goods and capital goods, it is the limits of demand for credit that is the causal factor of the boom-bust cycle.

Those are my actual views on the subject. That is the absolute truth. Post them on Wikipedia and they’ll be suppressed within 24 hours even though most of my other “views” are directly taken from the “reliable source” that is my own writing.

UPDATE: Speaking of the so-called feud, I thought this Twitter exchange between one ClarkHat and John Scalzi was illuminating. McRapey clearly doesn’t grasp (or more likely, being a gamma male, is unable to publicly admit), that he is a successful, but mediocre SF writer, not even when his book was picked up for a television series by the distinguished network famous for Sharknado and Werewolves vs Strippers:

CLARKHAT: Would you care to actually respond to my comments that 1) your writing is mediocre 2) your rewards >> your merit

JOHN SCALZI: Sure: 1. You’re wrong, 2. You’re wrong but even if you were right so what? Hope that helps.

CH: suggests a theory I hadn’t considered: you really DON’T understand the delta between your work & great work

JS: Your problem is you have really no understanding of my psychology. Which is fine, but doesn’t make you less wrong. I don’t mind you being wrong, however, as it has no effect on what I do or how I do it. Go on being wrong!

You and I have no disagreement in you sharing your thoughts on what is great writing. Do! I think that’s a fine thing.

CH: But this is again Blue Model reframing: “your thoughts”. My pt is not about “my truth”; it is about objective artistic truth. I am not saying “**I** prefer Mieville over @scalzi”; I am saying “objective standards exist; try some Mieville”.

JS: “Objective artistic truth.” Ooooh, I have the giggles now. DO GO ON.

CH: “You think Davinci’s David is better than my paper mache puppet of Donald Trump? That’s just, like, your opinion, man.

JS: This objective art hypothesis of yours is ADORABLE. And explains many things, i.e., “What I like is OBJECTIVELY great, so there.”

That’s the amusing thing about McRapey. For all his vaunted rhetorical skills granted by virtue of BACHELOR’S DEGREE IN PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE, he doesn’t grasp that he can’t assert that ClarkHat is wrong about him being a mediocre writer while simultaneously denying the concept of objective standards in art.

If all art is subjective, then Scalzi is a mediocre writer by virtue of ClarkHat subjectively declaring him to be so. And if all art is objective, then he is a mediocre writer by virtue of the comparison of his work with that of other, better writers. There is no way that Scalzi can correctly declare ClarkHat to be wrong, as he nevertheless repeatedly does.

ESR on SF and literary penis envy

Er, sorry, I guess that was literary STATUS envy. Although considering the predominantly female and low-testosterone gamma male makeup of the other side, either description would serve equally well. In any event, ESR addresses the Blue SF/Pink SF divide:

I’ve been aware for some time of a culture war simmering in the SF world. And trying to ignore it, as I believed it was largely irrelevant to any of my concerns and I have friends on both sides of the divide. Recently, for a number of reasons I may go into in a later post, I’ve been forced to take a closer look at it. And now I’m going to have to weigh in, because it seems to me that the side I might otherwise be most sympathetic to has made a rather basic error in its analysis. That error bears on something I do very much care about, which is the health of the SF genre as a whole.

Both sides in this war believe they’re fighting about politics. I consider this evaluation a serious mistake by at least one of the sides.

On the one hand, you have a faction that is broadly left-wing in its politics and believes it has a mission to purge SF of authors who are reactionary, racist, sexist et weary cetera…. On the other hand, you have a faction that is broadly conservative or libertarian in its politics. Its members deny, mostly truthfully, being the bad things the Rabbits accuse them of.

It’s interesting to see ESR weigh in on this, not only because he is an unusually intelligent individual, but as he says, he has sympathies on both sides of the divide. And, I would suspect, competing natural inclinations as well. But it was a little surprising to see him conclude that he tended to be more sympathetic to the side of evilly Evil. As the title of his post suggests, his observation is that the root cause of the divide is not political, but rather literary:

Alas, I cannot join the Evil League of Evil, for I believe they have
made the same mistake as the Rabbits; they have mistaken accident for
essence. The problem with the Rabbits is not that left-wing politics is dessicating and poisoning their fiction. While I have made the case elsewhere that SF is libertarian at its core,
it nevertheless remains possible to write left-wing message SF that is
readable, enjoyable, and of high quality – Iain Banks’s Culture novels
leap to mind as recent examples, and we can refer back to vintage
classics such as Pohl & Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants
for confirmation. Nor, I think, is the failure of Rabbit fiction to
engage most SF fans and potential fans mainly down to its politics; I
think the Evil League is prone to overestimate the popular appeal of
their particular positions here.

No, I judge that what is dessicating and poisoning the Rabbit version
of SF is something distinct from left-wing political slant but
co-morbid with it: colonization by English majors and the rise of
literary status envy as a significant shaping force in the field.

This is a development that’s easy to mistake for a political one
because of the accidental fact that most university humanities
departments have, over the last sixty years or so, become extreme-left
political monocultures. But, in the language of epidemiology, I believe
the politics is a marker for the actual disease rather than the pathogen
itself. And it’s no use to fight the marker organism rather than the
actual pathogen….

The Evil League of Evil is fighting the wrong war in the wrong way.
To truly crush the Rabbits, they should be talking less about politics
and more about what has been best and most noble in the traditions of
the SF genre itself. I think a lot of fans know there is something
fatally gone missing in the Rabbit version of science fiction; what they
lack is the language to describe and demand it. That being said, in the long run, I don’t think the Evil League of Evil can lose.

Of course the Evil League of Evil cannot lose. Not with me as its Supreme Dark Lord! I have studied the lessons of my many failed predecessors well and have subsequently implemented the following protocols:

  1. Installed a magical ground-to-air defense system called IRON CLAW that will grab, pull down, and dismember any airborne creature large enough to carry a hobbit.
  2. Scheduled rotating squads of crack guards, each including at least one experienced battlemage, to be positioned outside the side door to Mount Doom. Also hired new Head of Security after ordering the previous one thrown into the lava flowing inside the aforementioned mountain.
  3. Established an operation called HERODSIX that tracks global birth data and passes it on to a team of nutritionists who will arrange to feed abortifacients to any pregnant woman who has previously given birth to six sons.
  4. Constructed a well-guarded underground facility in which my undead, unkillable warriors are created. Instead of carting a heavy, rune-inscribed iron cauldron around to every prospective battlefield, the Evil League of Evil is paying top silver for freshly killed corpses in good condition, with a bonus for each one over 6’4″.
  5. Dismantled and reassembled the four thrones at Cair Laugharne. I’m looking forward to seeing the little bastards park their bony little arses on them as foretold now that they’ve been made into gold-plated wooden stakes.
  6. Armored the air intakes to my mighty mountain fortress, Gheddorodim, with plasma shields capable of deflecting the most powerful energy-torpedo.
  7. Implemented DOUBLE-TAP, a protocol which includes bans on monologuing, evil cackling, unauthorized torture, and extended prisoner-taunting by all lieutenants and minions of rank E6 or higher. It also lays out specific policies concerning proper confirmations of death (or True Death in the case of the undead), and corpse disposal. All employees of the Evil League of Evil who fail to abide by the protocol will themselves be subject to DOUBLE-TAP.
  8. Also, at the request of Generalissimo Xcrucifix, we now have cookies. Chocolate Chip and Oatmeal Butterscotch. I’m not convinced this actually enhances our security, but I don’t see how it harms it either.

Now, in my opinion, ESR is partially correct in his interpretation of the divide as being intrinsically literary. But while the literary aspect is absolutely another facet of the SF/F divide, and one which I have written about in some detail in the past, it’s only the second of five facets that separate the Evil League of Evil from the rabbits.

  1. Political. This is obvious. We tend to be center-to-right, they tend to be left-to-extreme left.
  2. Literary. They tend to be focused on style, followed by ideological concerns regarding diversity and social justice. While our best stylists, Gene Wolfe and John C. Wright, are better than theirs, it’s true that they tend to be more skilled when it comes to pure prose. As the International Lord of Hate has frequently pointed out, we are focused on story, story, story, followed by characters, followed by worldbuilding and/or ideas.
  3. Religious. We tend to be either religious or religion-friendly seculars. They tend to range from goddess-worshipping Unitarians to rabid anti-theists. Even the atheists in our midst are more comfortable with religion in their SF/F  than their most religious members.
  4. Socio-sexual. We tend to be men of Delta rank or higher. They tend to be women, feminized Gamma males, or Omega males. Our female members possess more of the masculine virtues of courage and honor than most of their men.
  5. Experiential. We tend to come from worlds outside of academia and education. We write and we work real jobs that are totally unrelated to writing. They mostly write, and write about writing, and teach, quite often about writing. I expect their academic majors were mostly English, with the occasional STEM degree, while ours are from a much broader spectrum. For example, by training, John is a lawyer, Larry is an accountant, and I am an economist. And ironically, for all their politically correct enthusiasm for diversity, we are probably more ethnically and linguistically diverse.

The differences between the two sides are often visibly identifiable, and not just because we’re the ones carrying guns. One of the two book signings I ever did was a big one featuring 20 different authors at a big Barnes & Noble, including Gordon R. Dickson, Joel Rosenberg, Lois Bujold, David Feintuch, David Arneson, and various other SF/F luminaries. One kid asking me to sign his book said: “You don’t look like an SF writer.” And, I had to admit, after looking to either side of me, it wasn’t at all clear that we belonged to the same phylum, let alone species.

In response to a few of the various statements and questions raised:

  1. I would never deny that it remains possible to write left-wing message SF that is readable, enjoyable, and of high quality. That is true. But I would argue that the Culture novels are an excellent example of how the left-wing messages tend to harm, rather than enhance, the fiction. It’s not an accident that nothing interesting ever happens in the Culture (or in the Federation), or that in order to simply tell a story, it is necessary to leave the left-wing utopia and go in search of adventure elsewhere. Just as the Left has only one joke (you know that guy there, he’s stupid, isn’t he?) it has only one story, that of the struggle of the transition of an entity, individual or collective, from Badthink to Goodthink. They don’t tell stories, they tell Very Important Lessons.
  2.  How do you separate real writers from wannabes with deep pockets? Who cares? Let everyone write. Publish them all and let Amazon sort them out. SFWA was already irrelevant because its reason for existence was subverted. It was captured by the mainstream publishers long ago, as illustrated by its lining up against Amazon on Hatchette’s behalf.
  3. The term “rabbit” actually comes from E.O. Wilson’s ecological r/K selection theory. I explained it in a post called Digging Out the Rabbit People. It is derogatory; it is also very apt. More importantly, it’s always fun to be able to throw in the occasional Lapine phrase from Watership Down.
  4. Contra Mr. Andrew Marston of Marshfield, MA’s claims, I do sell books. I’m no bestseller, to be sure but my books usually sell around 5,000 copies apiece. Not enough to live on, especially when it takes me two years to write one, but not bad for a hobby. My bestselling book sold between 35,000 and 40,000 copies. My bestselling game sold over six million copies. And I have never had a trust fund.
  5. The idea that the existence of the “Gamma Rabbit” t-shirt is evidence that the rabbits have a sense of humor about themselves indicates an insufficient understanding of the gamma mentality and the gamma male’s need to spin the narrative in his favor. It’s little more credible than Scalzi’s claims that he found my mocking his inept satire and exposure of his self-inflating traffic claims to be “adorable”.

UPDATE: The Official Spokesvillain of the Evil League of Evil, The King in Yellow, explains the identifiable attributes of the rabbits/morlocks/trog-progs:

There are thirteen identifiable markers of the membership of the tribe of Troglodytes:

1. Theologically, they are atheist and agnostic, or at least laiacist.
2. In Metaphysics, they are nihilist. They hold the universe to have no innate meaning.
3. In Epistemology, they are subjectivists and (ironically) empiricists.
4. In Ontology, they are materialists. They believe minds are epiphenomena of matter.
5. In Logic, they are polylogists. They believe each race and both genders possesses unique and exclusive rules of logic.
6. In Aesthetics, they glorify the ugly and destroy beauty.
7. In Ethics, they are Gnostics. Whatever we call good, they call evil, and whatever we call evil, they call good.
8. In Politics, they are statists, and tacitly totalitarian. They want arbitrary power rather than law and order.
9. In Economics, they are socialist. They want the law of supply and demand to vanish softly away.
10. In Semantics, they are nominalists. They hold words to have no innate meaning.
11. In their psychological stance, they are sadists.
12. In their psychopathology, they are suicidal. They don’t want to live, they want you to die.
13. Emotionally, they are infantile. The emotion that governs them is envy.

Now, these are rough generalizations only, and no one member of the movement believes all these points, and, being a strongly anti-intellectual and pro-irrational bent, few of them even know what these big words mean. Some of these points contradict each other. That matters nothing to them. Logic is not their strong suit.

    And now, a moment of silence

    For Our Friend Damien’s abortive SF career:

    Damien Walter @damiengwalter
    I don’t believe I can claim to belong in SF any longer. That makes me a little sad, but also excited.

    While I did advise Our Friend that he ought to go ahead and quit as per his declaration concerning his distaste for the true demographics of the SF community, I don’t think I can take all the blame for this sad loss to world literature. Any reasonable mind will clearly conclude that it is mostly the fault of that dreadful D-List author, Larry Correia: 

    The Official Alphabetical List of Author Success

    A List – High upon Mount Olympus They Gaze Down Upon the Pathetic Mortals = All the $

    •  Authors who are worth more than the GDP of some countries.
    •  Authors who build their houses out of gold bars.
    •  Characters from their books get their own theme parks.
    •  The lady who wrote Twilight.

    B List – The King(s) =$$$$$$$$$$

    • Authors who have TV shows about their books starring Peter Dinklage.
    • Authors who sleep on large piles of money.
    • Politicians who get illegal campaign contributions masquerading as advances.
    • Oprah’s Book Club

    and all the way down to:

    X List – The X

    • Writes violent pornographic bondage fan fiction involving My Little
      Ponies, Voltron, and Breaking Bad on the internet, while dressed in a
      stained bunny costume that looks like a strange gimp version of that
      thing from Donnie Darko.
    • Don’t make any sudden moves.
    • We’re just going to walk away real slow now.

    Y List – The Yama

    • A primordial creature barely capable of vomiting words onto a page in a
      blasphemous impersonation of the act of writing, so mind shattering and
      terrible that a single story threatened to end language forever. He is
      The Thing That Should Not Be. To read his foul creations will summon the
      Black Goat of the Woods with its Thousand Young, and it will kill your
      muse and sodomize the corpse.
    • Is confident that he’d be a much
      more successful writer than A-X, if only he wasn’t too busy stalking
      Asian women on the internet to actually submit any of his crayon
      scribbles.
    • The reason sci-fi conventions have security.

    Z List –  The Guardian’s Village Idiot = ($)

    • A kind of Anti-Author.
    • Motivated by delusions of relevancy, crowd sources witch hunts against writers higher on the list.
    • Collects the opposite of royalties, and actually has to be paid a strange sort of “Book Welfare” to produce a book.

    I’m sure we will all be waiting, with no small amount of anticipation, to learn what genre Our Friend Damien will be not writing in next.

    Wishful thinking

    To say nothing of projection. It’s always interesting to see how people who write about me, of whom I’ve only heard because they are writing about me, almost invariably claim that if I respond to them in any way, this indicates I am obsessed with them. It’s less interesting how they frequently imagine that I must be sock-puppeting in order to pretend that fewer people visit here than, in fact, do read the blog.

    Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
    Gorblimey guv’, the sad old men who read Vox Day’s blog are literally obsessed with me. It’s like every day is Damofest over there.

    Michael Grey ‏@Mikes005
    @damiengwalter Not to rain on your parade, but I’m pretty certain it’s just Beale posting under aliases. Too much syntax repetition.

    Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
    @Mikes005 That’s a waaaay less creepy thought! I think about 50% of the comments are Beale, and they’re obvious, yes.

    As it happens, I post under two, and only two names. VD in black text most of the time, Vox in blue text when I am logged in and forget to use Name/URL. But most critics like this don’t genuinely believe what they’re saying; they’re not so stupid that they can’t click on Sitemeter and see the panoply of different IP addresses from all over the world appearing seconds apart. For example, in the same minute there were visitors from: New York (USA), Bourgogne (France), Trabzon (Turkey), Reading (UK), Oregon (USA), Washington (USA), and Israel, in addition to the majority of IP addresses that were not location marked.

    This is just the usual left-wing performance art, where one person publicly strikes a pose and the others pretend to believe what he’s saying. The purpose seems to be an attempt to render small a prospective threat to the warren. However, it appears some of them are either stupid or self-absorbed to such an extent that they truly  have no idea about the reality of the situation. Being able to tweet this in response to one clueless wonder’s tweet rather amused me:

    “Who listens to Vox Day? I mean – is there any real following?” That same day: 52,447 Google pageviews.

    Keep in mind that is someone from the very community that believed John Scalzi was one of the most significant figures in SF because he was claiming UP TO 45,000 daily readers per day at a time when he was actually averaging 13,604 Google pageviews per day. Set aside VP. Alpha Game alone is now averaging more daily pageviews than that: 15,179 every day this week.

    I realize I am extremely fortunate to have such an enthusiastic and high-quality readership. Just this morning, I received a Chinese translation of QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted from Tiger. Last week, Emilio sent me Spanish translations of that and of QUANTUM MORTIS Gravity Kills, which will be forthcoming as soon as I finish the corrections to two other books. Two brave souls are even taking on the translation of the 850-page A Throne of Bones. Very few authors are so fortunate to have readers who are willing to do so much, and I am deeply appreciative of the community here for its ongoing support and active involvement.

    And do you know, it occurs to me that my writing has now been translated into nine languages. Do they also feign to think I’m doing all of that myself when I’m not busy sock-puppeting my own blog? Anyhow, it’s nothing new. People have been trying the same thing since my WND column first began attracting attention back in 2001. It didn’t matter then. It doesn’t matter now. As for the “sad old men” comment, I don’t think they have any idea how many younger readers there are. For example, I received this email from a college student yesterday:

    My philosophy professor wrote your blog down as one of the four blogs we
    need to pay attention to, and I’ve been reading regularly for a couple
    of years now.

    I emailed him back to learn the names of the other blogs, and was rather pleased that my surmise concerning one of them was correct: Edward Feser.

    The fall of Richard Feynman

    It’s predictable, and yet fascinating, to watch the Left methodically devour itself over time. Richard Feynman was a genuine hero of scientistry, the Joker of the Manhattan Project, revered by scientists and and rationalists and science fetishists for decades, a witty man whom atheists too bright to be impressed with the likes of Dawkins were often prone to quote. And now, with the latest purge, in this case by Scientific American, it is apparent that the winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics has now been read out of the Left’s pantheon for his historical crimes against feminism.

    Throughout its 169-year history, Scientific American has been an august and sober chronicler of the advance of human knowledge, from chemistry to physics to anthropology.

    Lately, however, things have become kind of a mess.

    A series of blog posts on the magazine’s Web site over the past few months has unleashed waves of criticism and claims that the publication was promoting racism, sexism and “genetic determinism.”

    Late last week, the publication took down the latest alleged outrage, a post about the late physicist Richard Feynman and his notorious womanizing. Then it republished the post with an editor’s note explaining that it was restoring the article “in the interest of openness and transparency.”

    And it fired the blogger who wrote it.

    The trouble started in April when a guest blogger, a doctoral student named Chris Martin, wrote about Lawrence H. Summers’ assertions when he was president of Harvard University about the paucity of women in some scientific fields. While acknowledging that discrimination played a role in holding back women, Martin also concluded, “the latest research suggests that discrimination has a weaker impact than people might think, and that innate sex differences explain quite a lot.”

    The post drew a sharp pushback, particularly on social media, from readers who questioned Martin’s scientific and cultural bona fides. “This slovenly article above is so full of outdated information it is painful,” wrote one commenter.

    The second land mine was a post in May by Ashutosh Jogalekar, which favorably reviewed a controversial book by Nicholas Wade, “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History.” Jogalekar praised the book, saying it confirms the need to “recognize a strong genetic component to [social and cognitive] differences” among racial groups.

    This time, some social-media commenters accused Scientific American of promoting questionable racial theories. In early July, the reaction led the publication’s blog editor, Curtis Brainard, to post a note that read in part, “While we believe that [the racism and sexism] charges are excessive, we share readers’ concerns. Although we expect our bloggers to cover controversial topics from time to time, we also recognize that sensitive issues require extra care, and that did not happen here.”

    The last straw was Jogalekar’s post on Friday about Feynman, the Nobel-winning father of quantum electrodynamics. Commenting on recent biographies of Feynman, Jogalekar noted the physicist’s “casual sexism,” including his affairs with two married women, his humiliation of a female student and his delight in documenting his strategies for picking up women in bars. But while expressing disappointment in Feynman’s behavior, Jogalekar essentially dismissed it as a byproduct of the “male-dominated American society in the giddy postwar years.”

    Within a day of the column’s appearance, Scientific American pulled it from its site, with another note from Brainard: “The text of this post has been removed because it did not meet Scientific American’s quality standards.”

    One other thing: Jogalekar was fired.

    It would appear there is NO PLACE for Nobel-winning physicists in science anymore. There is certainly NO PLACE in the increasingly inappropriately named Scientific American for anyone who takes science more seriously than left-wing feminist dogma.

    McRapey and the leftward death spiral

    John C. Wright and George R.R. Martin both attempt to explain John Scalzi’s habitual reaction to criticism and public humiliation:

    The Evil League of Evil smites again. I am too delicate of
    constitution to repeat the details, since the writer involved, Mr. John
    Scalzi, is one who has treated me with respect in the past, and I would
    wish to return the favor if I could.

    Despite this, my loyalty to the Evil League of Evil requires me to
    draw attention to the odd phenomenon of leftwing thinkers of reacting to
    public humiliation by redoubling their efforts to humiliate themselves.

    There is a normal psychological mechanism, something like an inner
    ear, which allows someone to correct himself when his words and thoughts
    become imbalanced. The social cues, or the whisper of conscience or
    reason, tells a man he has said something too extreme or too absurd, and
    that his thought no longer reflect reality, and so he reverses course,
    modifies his position, admits of some exception, apologizes and puts
    himself right.

    This mechanism, in those poor souls afflicted by the political
    neurosis of Leftwingnuttery is jammed or, worse, is set in reverse. When
    they discover themselves to be in an unbalanced position, instead of
    shifting their center of mass and returning to true, their psychological
    inner ear tells them their fault is that they are not tipping far
    enough, and so they throw themselves headlong.

    That is a credible theory, but I think it fails to take human socio-sexuality into account, and particular, the Gamma Delusion Complex, as does Mr. Martin’s explanation, provided in A Game of Thrones.

    When Tyrion encounters Jon Snow up at the wall, he gives Ned’s bastard the classic, but profound advice of the misfit: “Let [those who mock you] see that their words can cut you, and you’ll never be free of their mockery. If they want to give you [an insulting] name, take it, make it your own. Then they can’t hurt you with it anymore.”
    – “A Different Kind of Other: The Role of Freaks and Outcasts in A Song of Ice and Fire“, Brent Hartinger

    This is why John Scalzi has publicly adopted the Gamma Rabbit as a device and why he attempts to redefine every apt description of his cowardly, dishonest, and reprehensible behavior, from “insect” to “pussy”, as a compliment of some kind. He reacts in this manner because he is a deeply insecure misfit, a fatherless and effeminate man, so his instinctive response is not to deny the charge and demonstrate it to be false, but rather to protect his own overly sensitive feelings.

    This is also why he is always pretending to enjoy the very abuse that hurts him and returns him to his feelings of childhood rejection. After having his overtures rejected by Larry Correia, Scalzi predictably lashed out in a bitter and vulgar manner, only to suffer a very public humiliation at the hands of the Correiakin, who, being masculine and of higher socio-sexual status, does not fear direct conflict. This promptly led to exactly the sort of misfit posturing recommended by Martin’s Tyrion, prior to Scalzi finally metaphorically placing his hands over his ears when he couldn’t take the humiliation any longer.


    “So you’re saying I’m tough, resilient, constantly reinventing myself, and a source of great pleasure? This is an insult?”
    – retweeted 19 Jun 2014

    “Honestly, the stupidity of people who think they’re making clever points
    on my thread is like a meeting of the Dunning-Kruger fan club.”
    – tweeted 19 Jun 2014

    “Shhhh. Can you hear that? It’s the sound of a bunch of jackasses on
    Twitter, desperately trying to pretend that I haven’t muted their asses.”
     – tweeted 20 Jun 2014

    He can mute his own Twitter account, but he can’t mute reality. As I’ve demonstrated here, the correct way to puncture John Scalzi’s incessant spinning is to simply keep repeating the truth no matter how he tries to deflect and redefine it. Just continue observing the readily apparent: he is a fraud, he is a literary mediocrity, he is a socio-sexual gamma, he is a coward, he is insecure, and he is unable to engage in effective debate.

    I suspect Scalzi will always remain popular in some misfit circles because he is, and he will probably always be, one of them. Unlike those misfits (or as Sarah Hoyt would say, Odds) who are determined to improve themselves and grow out of the social prison of their low status, the self-deluded Gamma redefines his every action as winning, and reinterprets every expression of criticism or contempt as praise. The fact that he does so is not an indication of psychological strength, but rather, extreme psychological weakness. The Gamma has to claim victory on all occasions, however absurd the claim appears, because he simply cannot handle the pain of admitting that he is a loser.

    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.

    The Tetsubo strikes

    Larry Correia addresses the wannabe’s latest hit piece in the Guardian. It’s as if he thinks he cries about us enough, Tor will reward him a book contract:

    Women writers have asserted a growing presence in the genre, leading this year lead to a strong presence in all of the genre’s major awards.

    Great. Despite the narrative about me to the contrary, I like female authors. I support female authors. I support authors from any group you can think of as long as they tell a good story and they’re not complete douchebags, so I guess you could say that I just support authors in general. I’m all in favor of anybody from any group being able to write what they want, more power to them.

    So if we want true equality among writers how about we give awards based on quality rather than what box the author checks on an EEOC form?

    Oh, but wait. I forgot. I like to judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. That’s racist now. I also like to judge a book based upon whether I like it or not, rather than ranking the nominees based upon the acceptability of their political outlooks or which ones best assuage my warm-beige guilt.

    (speaking of irony, when the announcements were made and I immediately started getting character assassinated for being a hater of women, homosexuals, sunshine, and goodness with zero evidence, the book of the week I was promoting on this blog was written by a non-white immigrant woman and had a gay hero, but hey, narrative).

    Women and non-white writers swept the board at the Nebula awards, winning every major category.

    Normally, if there is a bunch of gloating and back slapping about how one particular group was totally shut out of something, we’d consider that bigotry. However I tend to forget that to a libprog diversity is literally only skin deep, while diversity of thought is evil and must be crushed. The same people crowing about this year’s diversity were happy to attack nominees last year for their religious beliefs, because that’s the wrong kind of diversity. They routinely attack non-whites and women if they aren’t of the correct political persuasion.

    Speaking of gloating, Twitter after the Nebulas was interesting. If you take the tweets of the Social Justice Warrior crowd, Ctrl H, find and replace White Male with Jew, they totally sound like snippets of Heinrich Himmler speeches. It is hilarious until the nausea sets in.

    And in the meantime, Damien tweets: “Vox Day is VERY upset that other conservative writers are distancing themselves from his extremism.” 

    (laughs) Now that I posted it here, that’s probably the most-read piece of fiction he’s ever written. See, I’m not a rabbit. I’m no more concerned what other conservative writers think of my opinions than what Damien or the SFWA does. They don’t need my approval, and I most certainly don’t need theirs.

    And The Rapier finishes off the remains. Sweet Shakespeare, but the man’s blog posts make for far more entertaining reading than any 10 Pink SF/F novels. Read the whole thing. It is… Mr. John C. Wright at his soul-withering best.

    Dear sir,

    I reject your kindly-meant advice with the wholehearted yet instinctive contempt a clean-minded bridegroom uses when throwing aside a disease-raddled whore who has lept from the garbage pit to embrace him.

    My reason is this: It is not that I think Vox Day good, Mr. Walter. I do not know much of anything about him. I think you are evil. I know enough about you to know that, you smarmy, unctuous, long-haired, dough-faced, damp-fingered, weak-minded, small-souled, craven, race-baiting, unutterable failure of a human being.

    The more you talk, the stronger your opposition grows, as the science fiction readership slowly comes to understand that you and yours hold them in contempt. You regard them as lesser beings. You talk as if they are the merely passive recipients of the political opinions you and yours want to program into their unwinking and dull eyes. You speak as if they are bags of meat, whose only dignity is in their most shallow surface features, namely, their skin color.

    That is your picture of the men and women I revere as my patrons and patronesses.

    You think you are better than them. Your reason for thinking yourself better is that you abandoned the intellectual clarity and moral discipline, that you call ‘reaction’, which they embrace. You think you are better than them, not despite, but because you are  worse; objectively and obviously worse; worse as a thinker, worse as a man.

    Ultimately people judge a man by how often his mouth is full of manure, I fear you will deeply regret your public display of coprophagy in the future.