Tag: rabbitology

The dry bones of the Autumn People

John C. Wright excavates an astonishing review of THE LORD OF THE RINGS to illustrate the malice and poverty of spirit inhibiting those who never have anything but evil to speak of that which speaks truth to the human condition.

The reason why this mocking and forgotten review should be remembered and held up to mockery in turn is because the animating spirit behind it is alive and well, if not increased in size and reach and insolence.

Ray Bradbury described this spirit, as is his wont to describe anything he describes, with the insight of a poet and the wisdom of a sage:

“For these beings, fall is the ever normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond. Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eye? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars. They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth. In gusts they beetle-scurry, creep, thread, filter, motion, make all moons sullen, and surely cloud all clear-run waters. The spider-web hears them, trembles – breaks. Such are the autumn people. Beware of them.”
-Ray Bradbury, SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES

Elsewhere, he describes their homeland:

“That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain.”
-Ray Bradbury, THE OCTOBER COUNTRY

If this sound deliciously like the dreary rainscape of the microscopic yet immeasurable Hell portrayed in THE GREAT DIVORCE by C.S. Lewis, where the houses are imaginary and do not keep out the cold and wet, it is no coincidence. The two writers both had met the Autumn People from the cold lands deep in October.

They are among us today, the Autumn People, and in greater numbers, and for the most part they have dispensed with the delicacy of expression of Mr. Wilson, as with his culture and his learning. His spiritual grandchildren are among us, and turned against his learning the same scorn he turned against Tolkien’s, so they cannot express themselves as well, or, indeed, coherently.

From the point of view of an autopsy then, one wonders what is wrong with such people as Mr. Wilson? What ails the Autumn People?

The Autumn People are now the gatekeepers of SF/F and of our larger media culture. They mock and belittle all nobility, all tradition, all religion. They are intellectual parasites who have nothing to offer but nihilism and momentary animal pleasure. They disingenuously appeal to justice, a concept in which they do not actually believe, in order to attack the very foundations of civilization. They preach uncertainty with all the rock-solid belief of a divinely-appointed prophet and place their faith in a method documented to be reliably false.

Mr. Wright asks what ails the Autumn People. There are others, even more generous of spirit, who wish to cure them. As for me and my House, we think only to vanquish their soulless Insect Army and send them scuttling back under the rocks from which they crept. For if the literary world is abandoned to them, there will never be another Middle Earth, there will never be another Narnia, there will be nothing but the black ravenous goo of the Silent Oecumene.

The Autumn People admire autumnal books. The Autumn Man is a man who has collapsed into temptation. The disease has eaten into his bones so that he can no longer stand. What he wants to hear is stories that mock the standing people, that trip them up, that bring things down to his level.  Above all, the Autumn People like sly, sarcastic books, books that mock and shock, books that sneer. Sneering is the only emotion they know, aside from dull resentment and petulant hatred. The Autumn Man therefore wants to hear a story that says he is in the right when he knows he is deeply wrong. 

It sounds familiar, does it not? Sneering, snark, science fetishization, and sex in its most degraded form is the totality of today’s Pink SF/F. And notice in particular how Wright astutely draws the connection between the behavior of the reviewer and his current heirs: “the accuser does not address the evidence, which is
public, but attacks the subconscious motive, which is not only private,
it is unknown even to the person himself.”

This passive-aggression, this attempt to safely snipe from cover while avoiding direct confrontation that will permit others to adjudicate the objective facts of the matter, is the hallmark of the Autumn People, the rabbits, the insects, the Nothing Mentality. Beware of them. Stand against them. And always – always – shine the light of truth upon them. It is the one thing they truly fear.

Scalzi and the safe space

Brad Torgersen has a theory about why the Chief Rabbit of Whatever will not leave the safety of his warren:

I no longer directly engage Scalzi — on anything. I used to engage him routinely. But an argument is only an argument if both parties take each other seriously enough to argue. In late 2012, I reached the point where I couldn’t take Scalzi seriously anymore. Mostly because I realized that Whatever is primarily his marketing tool, and that by partaking in his comments (and engaging him in argument there), I was merely playing along with the marketing. Marketing which was helping Scalzi financially as well as emotionally, and all I was getting for my trouble was an ever-increasing sense of frustration.

Now I observe Scalzi from afar. And if he occasionally makes me think he could use a good boot to the head, his denizens, (and the sort of person easily attracted to his blog, and therefore Scalzi’s very effective cult of personality he maintains via that blog), make me think this even more so.

You cannot argue with that sort of group inside the walls of its own house. The house and the landlord both reflect back to the group precisely what they each need to hear and see, in order to remain convinced that they — and they alone — have all the right ideas.

And so I remain disengaged. Because (to paraphrase the W.O.P.R.) the only winning move (with Scalzi and Whatever) is not to play.

It might be different if Scalzi ever stepped beyond his “safe space” in order to defend himself and his invective in an environment where he isn’t lord of the manor. But because Scalzi has created a “safe space” in which he never has to be made to feel demonstrably wrong for any length of time longer than it takes him to ban/deride a critic, he is not what I’d call an honest participant in the larger cultural, political, and philosophical debate. He needs his “safe space” too much.

Which is probably why most people (on Scalzi’s side of this) make such a noise about “safe spaces”, in all kinds of different arenas. They have concluded that any forum for interactivity that does not immediately affirm them — and all of their many smelly little orthodoxies and prejudices — is not “safe”, and therefore they will go to great lengths to whine about, pester, or attack, anyone who does not enable them in their need to be “safe.”

Mr. Torgersen is correct about the insidious and pernicious nature of rabbit warrens. They are intellectually enervating; Mr. Scalzi’s inflated opinion of his argumentative skills have always been illustrative of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, but after years of neither permitting substantive discourse on Whatever nor engaging in it outside that safe space, they will have deteriorated from even that low standard.

That is why I encourage SUBSTANTIVE intellectual disputation here. That does not mean that I tolerate the trivial and superficial stuff; there is nothing to be gained in the dialectical contemplation of whether X is or is not a poopyhead. And it is why I accept debate challenges whether they are hosted here or elsewhere and why I accept invitations to a black man’s blog when he wishes to discuss imputations of raciss.

I make no pretense of always being right and that is why I have no fear of taking the risk of being shown to be wrong. But for those who have built up a vast and illusory web of deceit, exaggeration, and spin, the risk of being exposed for who and what they truly are is simply too great. And so they are left posturing to their retarded rabbit choir.

I have to disagree with Mr. Torgesen, however, when he declares that the only winning move with McRapey is not to play. I think the fact that McRapey has stopped his previous practice of divulging his site traffic and his sales numbers, and hidden his previously available blog statistics at Quantcast, is sufficient evidence that shining a light on his web of deceit is also an effective strategy. Here were the last three months of Whatever traffic that were available to the public prior to him shutting it down; contrast them with the year before, when I began exposing his various deceits and con games:

Nov 2013: 407,363 (Nov 2012: 768,725,  down 47 percent)
Dec 2013: 475,543 (Dec 2012: 861,912, down 45 percent)
Jan 2014: 542,192 (Jan 2013: 840,874, down 36 percent)

My own monthly traffic went up 36 percent, from 786,956 to 1,076,538, during that same time period. That monthly average is more than Scalzi’s all-time peak of 1,027,644 in May 2012, which marked the only time Whatever exceeded one million pageviews.

So, disengagement and retreat is certainly an option, but it is a tactic that ensures intellectual stagnation and eventual irrelevance. More to the point, McRapey used to benefit from his appeal to the political moderates and right-wingers who did not realize that he was their self-appointed enemy; like Marko Kloos and David Weber, he had the rare advantage of being able to successfully sell to both sides of the political aisle.

But no longer. Now that he has been unmasked as a particularly deranged leader of the SF/F Left, I suspect there are more than a few of his former fans, perhaps as many as four in ten based on the site traffic, who are no longer willing to support him or his work. The ideological division of SF/F has observably begun and I strongly suspect that the authors and publishers of the SF/F Right will do to the mainstream SF/F publishers precisely what Fox News has done to the mainstream media.

Sounds just like SFWA

What is happening in Birmingham, England is pretty much what happened over the last 20 years at the SF/F publishers, and what is happening right now in SFWA:

Islamic fundamentalists are allegedly plotting to convert Birmingham schools so that children are taught according to strict Islamic codes by ousting teachers through a dirty tricks campaign and replacing them with radicals. The city council and the Birmingham Mail have received documents which purport to show that jihadists – or those fighting against non-Muslims – are targeting schools and orchestrating false allegations against staff, including non-Muslims, in an operation dubbed Trojan Horse.

The SFWA knows all about false allegations; it has an entire report full of them. Notice that even on Wikipedia, the SFWA action is falsely reported.

“In June, Beale used the SFWA Twitter feed to post several controversial links to his blog, in which he called an African-American author a “half-savage” and an editor a “fat frog.”. After complaints from members, in August, the SFWA Board announced that they were expelling Beale as a member due to violations of their by-laws. Beale posted a letter from the SFWA president to his blog.”

Let’s count the errors:

  1. I used the @swfaauthors feed, not the official SFWA one. They are two different Twitter accounts.
  2. I did not post several controversial links to my blog. I posted one link and it contained nothing controversial. It was the blog post that was controversial, not the Tweet.
  3. The SFWA Board did not announce that they were expelling me. They did not name the member expelled in their announcement. As Locus Online correctly noted, I was the one who announced my expulsion.
  4. The SFWA Board did not announce I was expelled due to violations of their by-laws. The SFWA Board did not give any reason for the expulsion of the unnamed member expelled.
  5. To be complete, I referred to N.K. Jemisin as “an educated, but ignorant half-savage, with little more understanding of
    what it took to build a new literature by ‘a bunch of beardy old
    middle-class middle-American guys’ than an illiterate Igbotu tribesman
    has of how to build a jet engine” and I stand by the assertion. I also pointed out that she is a liar.
  6. In addition to her resemblance to an overweight amphibian, I also observed that Teresa Nielsen Hayden is “grotesquely malformed” and does not appear to belong to the same species or phylum as my wife.

The SFWA are irreligious fundamentalists, they just happen to be softer, squishier, and more cowardly than the Islamic variety. And this is why diversity is always and everywhere doomed. Let one rabbit in, and its priority is always to get another rabbit in there with it. Once accomplished, the breeding begins. And when they feel they have sufficient numbers, they begin forcing all the not-rabbits out.

SF Fandom is “cleaning house”

It’s a pity to see that someone who writes pretty good neo-Lovecraftian pastiches, who wrote the brilliant Accelerando, should nevertheless show himself to be so deeply and profoundly absurd with regards to politics, public relations, and simple civility:

So today Loncon 3 announced that Jonathan Ross would be toastmaster at the Hugo awards this August in London. And lo, twitter melted down in outrage for some reason.

I agree with Farah Mendlesohn (who resigned from the committee over this choice) that he’s a very bad choice for Hugo toastmaster.

My reasons for thinking this differ slightly from hers.

Regardless of Mr. Ross’s personality and track record, it is clearly the case that he has a history of scrapping with tabloid journalists, then being quoted out of context.

The problem I see is that while fandom is in the process of cleaning house, inviting him — or anyone with a controversial media profile — to be Hugo toastmaster is like rolling out a welcome mat at the Worldcon front door that says “muck-rakers welcome”. There’s a lot of muck to be raked, even before we get into Daily Mail photographers stalking cosplayers: just look at the recent SFWA fracas (plural), the Jim Frenkel/harassment scandal at Tor, and so on.

Worldcon should be safe space for fans, and inviting a high profile media personality who has been targeted by the tabloids is going to cause collateral damage, even if nothing happens, simply by making many fans feel less safe.

We’re seeing a huge explosion of anxiety on twitter right now. If Ross is toastmaster, I can predict that at least one major Hugo nominee/past winner who was planning to be there won’t be present at the ceremony, because Ross has past form for using women with weight issues as the butt of his humour. She says she doesn’t feel safe, and I believe her: I wouldn’t want to be there in her shoes (and I’m an ancient has-been who hasn’t been on the shortlist for a couple of years, now, so I’m unlikely to be in the front row). I don’t like seeing my friends mocked, so I probably won’t be there either. And this is regardless of whether the mockery would come from the toastmaster, or the tabloid journalists in the back of the audience.

The sad fact is, however well-behaved Mr. Ross is on the day, inviting him into a pulpit that has been misused in the past is sending a really bad signal. (And anyway, what happened to our community’s supposed newfound commitment to diversity? Isn’t it about time we had a toastmaster who wasn’t a white privileged male? Someone like, say, Jane Goldman?)

The amusing thing is that even AFTER the debacle was concluded and Ross declined the invitation, Stross believes it was good to have hounded him from the event:

His appointment was probably a bad move, but the way he was hounded out was, in my opinion, much worse.

Would you rather the Hugo ceremony went ahead with a toastmaster trailed by tabloid journalists looking for scandal, with half the nominees missing (either because they were afraid of the toastmaster, or out of solidarity with those who were afraid, or out of fear of the tabloid press), under a cloud of ill-tempered back-biting about privilege and contempt for minorities?

It’s better to get it out of the way right now, the same day that the bad decision was made public, than to wait.

Keep in mind that Johnathan Ross’s politics are much closer to theirs than to mine, but that didn’t prevent them from chasing him out too.  It’s no wonder most of these creepy little people live hand-to-mouth, afraid to leave their safe spaces. They are literally too stupid and frightened to go out and make a living among normal people. In the end, it’s Us vs Them. K-selection vs r-selection. Fit vs fat. The sane population vs fandom.

If you have to ask, then yeah, you’re probably on the list to be ideologically cleansed too.

So be it. I went to one SF convention once, back in 1996. Needless to say, once was more than enough. One fan came up after a panel and told me I didn’t look like an SF writer. After glancing looking around, I couldn’t disagree with him. I had to resist the urge to ask him: “why, because I’m healthy?”

Speaking of the Hugo Awards: Warbound for Best Novel!

That’s not funny!

Scientists are gradually beginning to discover that progressives are, as the rest of us have known for decades, essentially humorless:

While Americans choose their next president, let us consider a question more amenable to science: Which candidate’s supporters have a better sense of humor? In strict accordance with experimental protocol, we begin by asking you to rate, on a scale of 1 (not funny at all) to 9 (hilarious) the following three attempts at humor:

A) Jake is about to chip onto the green at his local golf course when a long funeral procession passes by. He stops in midswing, doffs his cap, closes his eyes and bows in prayer. His playing companion is deeply impressed. “That’s the most thoughtful and touching thing I’ve ever seen,” he says. Jake replies, “Yeah, well, we were married 35 years.”

B) I think there should be something in science called the “reindeer effect.” I don’t know what it would be, but I think it’d be good to hear someone say, “Gentlemen, what we have here is a terrifying example of the reindeer effect.”

C) If you saw two guys named Hambone and Flippy, which one would you think liked dolphins the most? I’d say Flippy, wouldn’t you? You’d be wrong, though. It’s Hambone.

Those were some of the jokes rated by nearly 300 people in Boston in a recent study. (You can rate some of the others at TierneyLab, nytimes.com/tierneylab.) The researchers picked out a variety of jokes — good, bad, conventional, absurdist — to look for differences in reactions between self-described liberals and conservatives.

They expected conservatives to like traditional jokes, like the one about the golfing widower, that reinforce racial and gender stereotypes. And because liberals had previously been reported to be more flexible and open to new ideas, the researchers expected them to get a bigger laugh out of unconventional humor, like Jack Handey’s “Deep Thoughts” about the reindeer effect and Hambone.

Indeed, the conservatives did rate the traditional golf and marriage jokes as significantly funnier than the liberals did. But they also gave higher ratings to the absurdist “Deep Thoughts.” In fact, they enjoyed all kinds of humor more.

Actually, it’s not quite true to say that progressives are completely humorless. They do enjoy one single joke that they repeat over and over again, in a myriad of variants.

“That X, he sure is stupid, isn’t he!”

It’s such a great joke because it works for everyone. They should have tried these three jokes on the progressives in the study:

A) George Bush is so stupid, he is really dumb!” (hilarity ensues)

B) Ronald Reagan is so stupid, he forgot he was senile! (a wave of laughter)

C) Barack Obama is so stupid, he married a Klingon! (stone cold silence)

What passes for progressive humor isn’t actually humor per se, it is merely group reinforcement behavior.  It’s how the rabbits police the bounds of what is, and what is not, currently deemed acceptable to the warren. And speaking of humor,  there are few things funnier than seeing the expression on the face of a progressive who hasn’t realized that the borders have been moved again tell a “joke” that is based on the previously defined limits, waiting expectantly for his endorphin rush of group approval, and then failing to receive it.

On the Tierney jokes, I’d rate them 7, 1, 4.

Increased demonization cycles

Sarah Hoyt has a theory concerning the increasingly rapid appearance of Pink SF’s Two-Minute Hates:

The funny thing, though, is that they are not only completely ignorant about us, and so unaware of it that the dime never drops, but that these demonization cycles seem to be coming closer and closer and get more hysterical. The next person who disagrees with them or pokes the tiniest bit of fun at them will be declared “worse than Hitler” and they’ll call for his hanging.

I think I know why.  Part of the reason the episodes are coming closer together and getting crazier is that they’re losing power and they know it.  They convinced an entire generation of women that Heinlein should not be read.  This was because “all the right thinking people know that.”  This is breaking.  There are enough blogs, and enough of us female Heinlein fans ready to tell them they’re idiots and then describe exactly in what part of their anatomy their head is lodged.

With Resnick and Malzberg the backlash was faster and louder and even a lot of their number thought (privately) that they were off their rocker.  With Card, I think only the choir thinks he’s “a fascist.”

And with Larry…  There is no word for this.  It’s like a Chihuahua trying to hold onto a car by the back bumper.  They have not only bit off more than they can chew, they’ve bit off more than they can… bite.  In tactical terms it’s getting involved in a landwar in Asia or going up against a Sicilian when death is on the line.

But wait, there’s more.  The other reason they’re getting crazier and crazier and trying to enforce group conformity more and more is that they are no longer in possession of the bully pulpit.

That’s definitely part of it. As Hugh Howey showed in the report to which I linked earlier today, independent publishers now sell more daily units in the three primary genres, Mystery/Thriller, SF/F, and Romance than the major publishers do. But the loss of the bully pulpit and the declining power of the gatekeepers has done more than drive them crazy, it has all but eliminated their targets.

Consider how much static I took for a few months from the moment I ran for president. But I’m gone now. They can’t purge me twice. They can’t purge Sarah or Larry, they’re already out of the little club. They can, in fact, they regularly dig up the corpse of Robert Heinlein in order to ritually attack him, but nobody cares, least of all REH.

So, like rats, the rabbits are on the verge of devouring themselves. They have no one else left to attack. We’ve already seen Dave Truesdale and a cohort of elderly members publicly launch a salvo at Stephen Gould and the lowlives of the Board; it won’t be long until those Very Serious and Concerned Individuals strike back with a series of point-and-shrieks directed at various petition signers.

If you’re a young writer on the right half of the political spectrum, you would have to be insane to decide to join the SFWA at this point. I mean, is it going to help you get published by Baen? Is it going to impress anyone at Castalia House? Or, for that matter, Random House, after the way they were attacked by the SFWA worthies? And do you really think the lunatics at places like Tor are going to harbor any interest in your story about spaceships and space battles if it lacks the requisite tri-gendered queer transcultural warrior princess who defends abortions in space from the evil Bible-misquoting raciss white Christian bigot?

We have achieved ideological segregation. Now the wolves can compete among themselves and laugh as we watch the rabbits frantically shrieking “not-rabbit” at their fellow rabbits as they devour each other.

Lapine spells

Oswald Spengler had the rabbits pegged in The Decline of the West. He explains why they are so prone to not only name-calling, but viewing name-calling as sufficient to make a case against a perceived foe.

“The world-fear is stilled when an intellectual form-language hammers out brazen vessels in which the mysterious is captured and made comprehensible. This is the idea of “taboo” which plays a decisive part in the spiritual life of all primitive men,  though the original content of the word lies so far from us that it is incapable of any translation into any ripe culture-language. Blind terror, religious awe, deep loneliness, melancholy, hate, obscure impulses to draw near, to be merged, to escape – all those formed feelings of mature souls are in the childish condition blurred in a monotonous indecision.”

Rabbits are not merely barbarians, but primitives. Thus the incantation “homophobe” is considered enough to banish the moralistic thought-criminal, even as the magic spell “raciss” is deemed sufficient to banish the ethno-cultural thought-criminal.

Spengler even offers an explanation for why they cannot create anything original, but more on that another time. But in the meantime, Kalel points out that Bradbury, too, identified the Nothing People:

“For these beings, fall is ever the normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond. Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eye? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars. They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth….Such are the autumn people.”

Autumn is such a beautiful time of year that it seems a travesty to identify them by that noble name. I prefer to think of them as the Nothing People, the empty-eyed, soulless creatures of the Abyss. But it is fascinating to me to see how thinkers, philosophers, and artists have all observed the same phenomenon in certain people around them.

Alhough it is ironic. Who would have ever imagined that the Wicked in Something Wicked This Way Comes would turn out to be the hollow and petty evil that is perhaps best exemplified today by the likes of John Scalzi and the shambling shoggoths of the SFWA.

The Nothing People

John C. Wright on the restless hearts of the empty souls, who are never content no matter what they achieve and regardless of what gains they make:

Being without a sense of the objective nature of reality, they are without a belief in objective morals. Being without a belief in objective morals, they lack honor, and, lacking honor, they lack courage, lack decency, lack courtesy.

Hence, their one, sole and only means of discussing their principles in debate is to accuse whomever dares question them of any and every thing they think evil: they call normal people stupid and evil and heartless, bigoted and racist and fascist and thisist and thatist.

The content of the accusation does not matter, only the relief of being able to accuse, and accuse, and accuse.

Their only consistent principle — a principle never admitted, of course, but obvious in their every manifesto — is the Unreality Principle, which holds that it is better and braver to believe in make-believe than in real reality. The more unreal the belief, the less based on fact, the more open the self contradiction, the greater the power of will and nobility of spirit needed to believe it, and hence the greatest applause from the modern mind is reserved to those of their number that believe the most unreal and unrealistic things. And yet, with typical unselfaware modern irony, they call themselves the reality-based community.

In sum, their philosophy consists of the single principle that no philosophy is valid. Their ethics consist of a single precept that making ethical judgments is ‘judgmental’ that is, ethically wrong. Their economic theory, socialism, consists of an arrogant denial that the laws of economics apply to economic phenomena. Their theory of psychology says that men do not have free will, because cause and effect is absolute; their theory of metaphysics is that subatomic particles do have free will, because cause and effect is statistical, approximate, uncertain, incomplete, and illusory. And on and on. All their thought is one self-refuting statement after another.

Philosophically, theologically and morally, the modern mindset is an end-state. Once a man has utterly rejected reason, he cannot reason himself to another conclusion. Once he has rejected morality, he has no sense of honor to compel him to live up to a philosophy more demanding than narrow selfishness.

Again, once he had rejected the authority of tradition, so that his one precept is to ignore all precepts of his teachers, he has no motive and no way to pass along to the next generation this selfsame precept, for he then is himself a teacher teaching them to ignore all teachers. And so on.

No compromise is possible with these people. I use the term loosely, for they are not morally accountable Men and Women in the full sense of the term. They are intellectual nomads, always on the move, always parasitical, always acting to destroy, always needing an accusational high that is more powerful than the one before.

This is why attempts to appease them are always fruitless, why they always devour their own. You might as rationally attempt to reason with the weather as attempt to reason with them. They eat their own as readily as they devour those they overcome, and their bitterest hatred is reserved for those who stand up to them and tell them, with all the contempt that they merit, “you are nothing and you will never be anything”. Never ever back down to them.

If there is one thing they hate to hear, it is that they are fallen. They cling furiously to their pride and to their pretense to superiority because that is all they have. They are de facto psychopaths; they have no ability to empathize for all that they claim to empathize with everything and everyone from the snail darter to a bullied homosexual teen. They have endless hypothetical love for humanity and nothing of the real thing for their neighbors or anyone but themselves.

The real and the decent people sense their emptiness. We tiptoe around them, trying not to trigger the endless minefield of their sensitivities. This is pointless. Like insects, they thrive in darkness; whenever exposed to the harsh light of truth they are desperate to conceal their words and their deeds, to hide their empty sickness. But this is wrong, because there is only one hope for them, and that is the crushing of their pride.

There is nothing that can fill up the vast abyss within them except God. Nothing. So do not spare them. Remind them that they are nothing. Remind them that they are evil. Tell them the truth because they already know it and the reason for their frenetic activity is that they are running from it. Remind them their only hope at the joy they envy and crave is to abandon their empty, narcissistic pride and allow the Way, the Truth, and the Life to fill up the void within.

One of my friends once asked me why I seem to run into so many of these people, both personally and professionally. The answer is simple. I see them, they know I see them, and their instinctive reaction is to immediately attack those who recognize them for what they are. You see, the Nothing People always lie and thereby sentence themselves to a lifetime of policing the perceptions of others. It’s not that I recognize their lies so much as I recognize the constant scanning of others perception of them in which they necessarily engage.

On advice of counsel

The SFWA’s official announcement of my expulsion doesn’t happen to mention me or why I was expelled.  The SFWA President didn’t provide a reason in his email to me either.  That was interesting in light of this belated addition to the official announcement:

Amended to add:

We will continue to omit the expelled individual’s name and the details of his behavior on advice of counsel.

They can’t mention the reason, of course, because that would reveal that their action was either a) highly selective, or, b) ideologically driven.

Meanwhile, Jemisin makes it clear, in her uniquely civilized way, that she’s got others on her hit list:

I’m still thinking about how much I’m willing to put up with, and for how much longer.

For the time being, though, I’ll remain a SFWA member. By expelling Mr. Beale,
and making a clear choice to offend at least one bigot this one time,
SFWA has done the bare minimum of what it must to retain relevance to
the bulk of its membership. Much, much more needs to be done, and I
suspect the organization will always be reactive to change
rather than proactive in this area. Frankly I don’t expect better of a
group that took 10 weeks to decide whether a member who spread hate
speech in its name was deserving of the label “professional”. But at
least for now SFWA might manage to stay relevant enough, to enough
people, to last awhile longer. I guess we’ll have to see.

Some time ago, I warned several SFWA members who were on the political left but concerned about the precedent an expulsion would set that my expulsion would not mark the end, but rather the beginning of the ideological cleansing. The mediocre feminist members of the organization, virtually none of whom should ever have been permitted to join in the first place, have nothing better to do than play sex police and ideological enforcer.  They love having an excuse to be outraged and if they can’t find one, they will manufacture one. I may be the first to be expelled by the rampaging rabbits, but it seems very unlikely I will be the last.

The lesson of the SFWA saga is the way in which it demonstrates how good organizations are invaded, conquered, and purged of both its purpose and its members by the progressive Left.  If your church, or your business, or your interest organization is not actively on guard against such individuals, and is not prepared to prevent them from joining, then the chances are very good that the process you have observed here is already underway.

In case you are interested, here is the actual vote.  Note that none of the four individuals named in the response, who were documented as doing the same thing I was accused of in the complaint, recused themselves.  Even the Board Appointed prosecutor voted:

Moved: That, having determined there is good and sufficient cause, a member be expelled from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America for conduct materially and seriously prejudicial to the purposes and interests of the organization.

Steven Gould, President
Rachel Swirsky, Vice President–Second

Lee Martindale, South/Central Regional Director–Aye
Jim Fiscus, Western Regional Director–Aye
Matthew Johnson, Canadian Director–Aye
Bud Sparhawk, Treasurer–Aye
Tansy Rayner Roberts, Overseas Director–Aye
Eugene Myers, Eastern Regional Director–Aye
Susan Forest, Secretary–Aye

Vote carried: 9-0-0-0

Of Pharyngulans and fake reviews

It would appear my expulsion from the SFWA is not enough to satisfy some rabbits, as a few of them are upset that the Amazon star rating for A Throne of Bones is a respectable 4.3 out of 5.  It’s interesting to see that while book lovers on the right don’t hesitate to publicly support left-wing writers, those on the left can’t even bear to consider the possibility that an ideological opponent might have written a book worth reading.  This is one reason why the Left is so frequently taken by surprise and obiterated in debate; they very seldom bother reading material from the other side and therefore have no idea what the other side’s positions and arguments actually are.

People sometimes ask me how I can so easily tell a review is fake, forgetting that I was once a nationally syndicated reviewer.  It’s usually obvious, because the fraudulent reviewer phrases his criticism in general terms, criticize various aspects of the book in an incoherent manner, and not infrequently refers to things that don’t even exist in the book. Fake reviews also usually appear right after something has happened to stir the warren up. In general, they read like an extreme case of a reviewer phoning it in, which is something that almost every professional reviewer has done from time to time.

Of course, it’s even easier to identify a fake review when someone publicly admits to posting one, as per this conversation yesterday at Pharyngula:

47 The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
14 August 2013 at 5:33 pm
Since Vox Day has decided to “correct” the “errors” in George R. R. Martin’s fiction, perhaps someone should head over to Amazon and “correct” the 4.3-out-of-5-star rating on 109 reviews. Pharyngulate this sucker!
 
49 anuran
14 August 2013 at 5:48 pm
@47 TVRBoK,
I’ve given it a more appropriate review

54 JAL: Snark, Sarcasm & Bitterness
14 August 2013 at 6:00 pm
Careful. With this comment he’ll be able to know which is your review. I don’t expect good things. But that’s your decision, with my situation the first thought was the risk involved.

71 ogremeister
15 August 2013 at 12:31 am 
Hmmm…and what will be your opinion should his followers decide to retaliate against PZ’s book?

Anuran, as it happens, appears to be one Todd Ellner from Portland, Oregon, who posted the following “review” of A Throne of Bones:

Tedious wish fulfillment
1.0 out of 5 stars, August 14, 2013

Flat characters, A plot that would need contour and triple integration to be considered “derivative” and a lot of chest-thumping Manly Men doing Manly Things with Manly Men. All that’s missing is the Heroic PUA.

The petty behavior of the SFWA further illustrates why Amazon was wise to ban all authors from reviewing books on its site.  I hope that they will soon also institute a policy of eliminating all reviews written by reviewers known to have written a fake one, and barring those individuals from reviewing products in the future.

As for retaliation against PZ’s book, my position is the same as it was when McRapey’s rabbits were posting fake reviews on Amazon. First, PZ didn’t take any such action himself or advocate it. Second, he is not responsible for the actions of his readers. Third, one’s integrity should not permit one to write a false review of a book, no matter how much one despises the author.  Fourth, I am actively opposed to all fake reviews, be they pro or con.  I do not want anyone who considers himself a reader, a fan, a regular, or Dread Ilk to write fake reviews of anything.  Why?  Because lying about what you have not read is wrong.

In this vein, notice that even the Pharyngulans who don’t think Mr. Ellner should post the fake review frame their objections in risk/reward terms rather than moral terms.  This illustrates a common theme here, which is that atheists simply do not possess a universal objective morality to which they can appeal when addressing the behavior of others.

I won’t pretend that reviews don’t matter. They do, which is why I always encourage those who have read the book, and liked it, to take the time to post reviews on Amazon. But I’m not sure that the fake ones don’t help more than they harm, because a cluster of one-star reviews not only increase the overall number of reviews, but indicate that the author is, at the very least, capable of inspiring genuine passion.

I should also be clear that I neither intended nor claimed to “correct” any “errors” in George Martin’s fiction. I am, as it happens, a fan of Martin’s fiction and think highly of the first three books in A Song of Ice and Fire. However, I think the direction he has been leading the subgenre of epic fantasy is a psychologically and creatively barren one and I began writing The Arts of Dark and Light as an attempt to show how an admittedly lesser writer could nevertheless accomplish more by rejecting Martin’s nihilism in favor of long-standing moral traditions.

And with only one book in the series having been written, I think it is far too soon for anyone to say if I have succeeded or failed in that regard.  For that matter, it may even be too soon to be certain that Martin is not considerably more conventional than he has hitherto appeared to be in the first five books.