A comment at File 770:
The funny thing there is that, although I’ve been hanging out at Making
Light for years, this is the first year the Hugos have been a Thing
there. (There have been many more threads on food than on Hugos.)
Tag: SJW
Evolution or equality
There can be only one… at most.
It is impossible to simultaneously understand the theory of evolution and to believe in blank-slate cognitive equality among human groups of different continental origins.
Both propositions—evolution and equality—cannot simultaneously be true. You have to pick one. Choose wisely, because you can’t have both.
Either evolution is a real and ongoing process that has rendered different groups with different mean aptitudes, or we’re all equal—and thus all measurable group disparities in things such as income and intelligence are due to unfairness, hatred, injustice, and flat-out stinking evil.
Yet against all logic and evidence and propelled purely by the smarmiest sort of saccharine emotionality that has ever been shit-sprayed out of human hearts, modern progressives insist that these two fundamentally contradictory belief systems are simultaneously true.
“What sort of person who claims to believe in evolution would deny its fundamental role in shaping human history?”They insist that evolution is real and that only a dumb hillbilly would not believe in it. But they also insist that evolution had nothing to do with quantifiable disparities between groups in brain size and intelligence, and even if those dumb apelike hillbillies consistently score higher on intelligence tests than your average nonwhite hood rat, well, then, you’re dumb—and evil—for even noticing.
Now, I happen to be skeptical of one and outright reject both the existence and the possibility of the other. But that is an intellectually consistent position. Subscribing to both evolution and equality is intrinsically nonsensical.
The descent of literary criticism
Natalie Luhrs will be live-tweeting her feelz about THE WAR IN HEAVEN, beginning June 11. I wonder if she’ll like it?:
Before Theodore “Vox Day” Beale was the central figure in the Sad/Rabid Puppies Hugo Awards hacking, he wrote a series of religious-inspired fantasy novels for Pocket Books. And blogger Natalie Luhrs is going to live-tweet his debut novel, Eternal Warriors: The War in Heaven, for charity.
Here’s how it works: You donate money to RAINN, a charity that operates the National Sexual Assault Hotline. (Or to a similar organization in your own country.) You send proof of your donation to Luhrs. And for every $5 you donate, Luhrs will livetweet a page of the book, starting June 11 with the hashtag #readingVD. She will also republish her tweets, with additional commentary, on a chapter-by-chapter basis, on her site, Pretty-Terrible. If people raise $2,000, she’ll do the entire book. (She is currently at $920.)
Yeah, probably not. I’d be considerably more impressed if she’d chosen A THRONE OF BONES instead. And it’s kind of a pity that she didn’t choose THE WORLD IN SHADOW, I would have been genuinely interested to see her reaction to that. I’m rather dubious that 300 tweets that alternate between snarking about how bad the writing is and how stupid the author is will prove to be very entertaining for long.
The post-profit corporation
Starbucks is more interested in cultural revolution than corporate profits:
During the meeting, founder of Corporate Morality Action Center, Tom Stobhar, expressed concerns about the company’s support of homosexual marriage. He explained that the company’s stance affected shareholder earnings after Starbucks backed efforts to legalize same-sex “marriage” last year. The company’s announcement had resulted in boycotts against the billion-dollar coffee franchise.
Trobhar stated, “In the first full quarter after this boycott was announced, our sales and earnings — shall we say politely — were a bit disappointing.”
Starbucks CEO, Howard Schultz, promptly rebounded after Trobhar and replied, “Not every decision is an economic decision. Despite the fact that you recite statistics that are narrow in time, we did provide a 38% shareholder return over the last year. I don’t know how many things you invest in, but I would suspect not many things, companies, products, investments have returned 38% over the last 12 months. Having said that, it is not an economic decision to me. The lens in which we are making that decision is through the lens of our people. We employ over 200,000 people in this company, and we want to embrace diversity — of all kinds. If you feel, respectfully, that you can get a higher return than the 38% you got last year, it’s a free country. You can sell your shares in Starbucks and buy shares in another company. Thank you very much.”
I don’t support Starbucks anyway because they burn their coffee, but keep this in mind the next time someone tells you to ignore the evidence of your eyes because corporations are only interested in money. That’s simply not true, as SJW executives are perfectly happy to sacrifice corporate profits for their ideological agenda.
Diversity is a social cancer. It eventually destroys everything it infests. The phrase “Our diversity is our strength” is every bit as self-contradictory and Orwellian as “War is Peace” and “Black is White”.
Sad Puppies can’t be wrong
Not when the very worst writer in science fiction and fantasy opposes us:
Mercedes Lackey says:
May 15, 2015 at 9:00 PMI’ve said it before in your blog and I’ll say it again. The Puppies of both orders picked the perfect name for themselves. Puppies piss and shit all over everything, they never stop whining and yapping, they destroy everything they get their teeth into and plenty of them are too damn dumb not to shit and piss in their own bed. And then lie in it.
And then they are shocked–SHOCKED!–when someone comes along, rubs their noses in it, and smacks them. And they’ll be even more shocked when someone lock them in their crate, or sends them to the pound.
See, one thing Larry (my husband Larry Dixon) and I have learned is that editors don’t appreciate trouble. Trouble doesn’t sell books. In the long run, trouble loses sales, in a business already precarious.
I’m going to predict that someone is going to be crated over this. If they are less lucky…someone’s going to be sent to the pound.
No wonder her hastily scribbled–5.5 per year on average according to Wikipedia–are so appallingly dreadful. The woman makes the logic-challenged Eric Flint look like a genius in comparison. I’d rather read John Scalzi’s entire oeuvre twice than another Mercedes Lackey book. She’s the anti-Tanith Lee; her works were among the first Pink SF works I noticed corrupting the genre. A year ago, I would have called her an Marion Zimmer Bradley-imitator who can’t write, except that would be a bit harsh given the recent revelations of her predecessor’s problematic pasttimes. And if I was as determined to unilaterally destroy the Hugos as the SJWs claim, RP’s Best Novel category would have been as follows:
- Closer to Home: Book One of Herald Spy by Mercedes Lackey
- Bastion: Book Five of the Collegium Chronicles by Mercedes Lackey
- Children of the Night (Diana Tregarde Investigation #2) by Mercedes Lackey
- Steadfast (Elemental Masters #8) by Mercedes Lackey
- Blood Red (Elemental Masters #9) by Mercedes Lackey
As to how shocked–SHOCKED!–we are by the behavior of the SJWs in science fiction, I will simply quote Martin van Creveld in The Changing Face of War.
“As Schlieffen himself had once written, for a great victory (what he called a “Cannae” to take place, it was necessary for the commanders on both sides to cooperate, each in his own way.”
Let’s just say their behavior shocked me about as much as the discovery that the sun rose again this morning. There are precisely four things that have surprised me about the SJW response to date:
- John Scalzi more or less keeping his mouth shut. Now we know why.
- Charles Stross attempting to doxx Castalia and his insane Finnish Nazi theories. I genuinely thought he was smarter than that.
- The public approval of Mary Kowal openly buying supporting memberships for other people. It’s so hard to imagine anyone else making effective use of that tactic in the future.
- Popular Science being one of the publications in which they planted their hit stories. I knew from past experience they would plant hit pieces in the media. But that would not have been among the first 250 publications I would have guessed.
On the other hand, it is entirely unsurprising to see that Lackey is stupid enough to not realize that her prediction about Puppy-supporting authors suffering at the hands of their editors is additional testimony in support of our original contentions. And it’s not the only testimony in this regard either. I rather enjoyed Brian Z’s Stalinistic ritual denunciation under pressure:
“In case this might be misunderstood as an endorsement of that site
moderator’s views or tactics, I denounce everything Vox Populi stands
for.”
Do you, SJW, renounce the Supreme Dark Lord and all his works? And then there was Influxus’s admission of what many SJWs are thinking, but most are sensible enough to deny in public:
Of course VD loves it because it perpetuates his narrative that the Sads
are scape-goated by the SJWs of Fandom, when really the only person
that most people want to get rid of is him.
Nearly everything the SJWs do tends to support that narrative. And while I may top the list, based on their behavior towards Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen and John C. Wright and Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg and John Norman, I very much doubt I am the only troublesome individual of whom they wish to be rid. As for the pound, it is obvious that the SJWs of Fandom simply do not understand the relevant dynamic here….
UPDATE: Speaking of the Puppy narrative, further support for it from SJWs.
“I suspect that some of these sad and rabid folk will soon have to start writing under new pen names if they expect their work to survive the editorial sniff-test with most of today’s publishers.”
This, of course, is the same thing Charles Stross was telling me 10 years ago. Submit to the SJW gatekeepers or be cast out. As for me and my House, we choose out.
Eric Flint, SJW
I hadn’t bothered reading whatever Flint had been going on about, because knowing that he was still a socialist was sufficient for me, the student of several noted Marxian economists (since recanted), to know that the man is neither very intelligent nor very educated.
But I finally got around to reading the article and was mildly surprised to learn that it was even dumber than I assumed it would be.
I am a social justice warrior. Not an “SJW,” not a figment of the fevered imaginations of right-wingers, but the real deal.
Wow, the real deal! And what do SJWs always do? That’s right. All together now! SJWS ALWAYS LIE. Case in point: Eric Flint.
Then there’s Theodore Beale, aka “Vox Day.” Now we come to a far more suitable candidate, Great-Dictator-Reborn-wise. He shares Hitler’s general attitudes on race, certainly, although I don’t know where he stands on the subject of Jews. And he’s even to the right of Hitler on the subject of women. Far to the right, in fact. Hitler thought women should stick to their proper roles in child-rearing, managing households and church activity—“Kinder, Kūche, Kirche”—but he wasn’t actually opposed to women learning how to read and write and he didn’t support honor killings.
But there are two great differences between Beale and Hitler that make it impossible for Beale to play that role either.
To start with, whatever his other depravities, Hitler wasn’t a petty chiseler. Whereas Beale is nothing but a petty chiseler. He chisels when it comes to his opinions, always trying to play peekaboo and slime around defending what he obviously believes. And he’s trying to win Hugo awards by petty chiseling.
But it’s his other characteristic that really disqualifies him for the role of Great Villain in this morality play.
In a nutshell—and completely unlike Adolf Hitler—Theodore Beale is a fucking clown with delusions of grandeur. This is a man—say better, pipsqueak—who rails to the heavens about the decline—nay, the imminent doom!—of western civilization due to the savageries of sub-human races and (most of all) the pernicious—nay, Satan-inspired!—willfulness of uppity women, and likes to portray himself as the reincarnation of the feared Crusaders of yore, all the way down to wielding a flaming sword.
And… the best thing he can figure out to do with his time, money and energy is to hijack a few Hugo awards. That’ll show the sub-human-loving treacherous bitches!
The world trembles and shakes, just like it does in the imagination of a mouse whenever that mouse imagines itself to be an elephant. Except no mouse who ever lived was this stupid.
You know, we’ve wondered who was going to be the new Hitler ever since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad proved to be such a washout in that regard. My money was on Putin, so I had absolutely no idea it would turn out to be me. Someone get Hugo Boss on the line, we’re going to need some snappy new outfits for the VFM, stat!
Let’s address the issues as Mr. Flint, real deal SJW, puts them forth.
- I don’t share Hitler’s views on race, as I have a basic grasp of human genetics and I am neither a eugenicist nor an Aryan supremacist.
- On the subject of Jews, I am a Zionist who edits and publishes the eminent Israeli military historian Dr. Martin van Creveld.
- I’m not opposed to women learning to read and write. I am opposed to women being encouraged to obtain advanced degrees in the place of husbands and children. Unlike Mr. Flint, I can do the demographic math.
- I don’t support honor killings. I never have.
- I don’t hide what I really believe. Mr. Flint claims to know what I really believe without me ever putting it into words because, and I quote, “peekaboo”. If anyone is “a fucking clown” here, it is observably Mr. Flint.
- I’m not trying to win Hugo Awards. I don’t care about winning awards.
- I have no delusions of grandeur. I’m not the one who keeps running to The Guardian, Entertainment Weekly, The New Zealand Herald, NPR, Popular Science, or the Wall Street Journal to talk about me. I haven’t issued a single press release or called a single member of the media about the Hugo Awards or anything else, for that matter.
- Western civilization is in peril. In large part thanks to idiots like Mr. Flint.
- I don’t like to portray myself with a flaming sword. That was the brainchild of the Star Tribune photographer who was taking pictures of me for a story the paper was doing. Apparently he was onto something, as it’s an image many people have remembered.
- Hijacking the Hugo Awards is not the best thing I can figure out to do with my time, money and energy. First, the Hugos weren’t hijacked. We claimed the nominations fair and square, and entirely in accordance with the rules. Second, it took very little time, money, or energy as it required nothing more than a single blog post and 367 Vile Faceless Minions who despise SJWs like Eric Flint, John Scalzi, Jim Hines, and George Rape Rape Martin more than Eric Flint hates capitalist running dogs.
Anyhow, it’s always good to see one’s initial instincts confirmed. Now I can go back to completely ignoring the moronic intellectual dinosaur. Seriously, how stupid do you have to be to still subscribe to the Labor Theory of Value? I would have thought that robotics would have been sufficient to lay that to rest for anyone capable of turning on a computer.
It’s kind of funny that these people take umbrage at the idea that I am considerably more intelligent than they are. Do they even read what they write? Hitler! Honor! Hate! Hijack! Hugo! It’s as if they’ve got conceptual Tourette’s Syndrome. My favorite was Flint’s claim to a) know I share Hitler’s ideas on race but b) not know my views about Jews. We’re clearly dealing with a real master of logic here.
One tit is never enough
JCCarlton explains why Eric Flint owes Brad Torgersen an apology:
The best thing the CHORFs could have done is lived by the principles they say that they said the Hugos represented. They cold have welcomed the puppies as new blood. At the very least they could have remained silent and accepted the fact that things are going to change. Instead they created a huge media smear campaign against, among other people, Brad. Frankly, accusing BRAD of being anything other than the nicest guy you will ever meet is just weird and I don’t think I’ve ever met Brad personally. But when you play by Alinsky rules, facts aren’t relevant, the narrative is.
Along with that they are trying to “fix” the Hugos to make sure that only the “proper Worldcon membership,” the TRUFAN is allowed to pick who SF awards the Hugos to. They are trying as hard as they can to make the Hugos the comfortable racket they like so much. I don’t think that they realize just how much the nastiness they’ve been spreading around is losing them friends
Of course it doesn’t help that the CHORFs have been diligently creating their own monster. I suspect that they thought that Vox would just fall apart and blow away like dust when they went all Alinsky on him at SFWA. The problem is that Alinsky tactics only work when the other side accept you definition of them. And Vox didn’t believe what the CHORFs were saying he was and frankly was able to turn their constant distortions and half truths against them. Making false assertions doesn’t work as well on the internet where almost nothing is permanently forgotten and everything can documented. It’s hard to make false assertions when the truth is a Google search away.
What the CHORFs don’t seem to be able to understand is that once you put up something in a blog, you might as well be broadcasting your actions to the other side. And while most of us don’t care what’s on the CHORFs’ blogs on or another of us will probably see it and pass it around. And Vox is not above pointing out the other side’s strategies and saying to his readership, tit for tat.
Up until the last few years I don’t think that many of us fans really cared about the Hugos very much. The one time I’ve been able to attend a Worldcon I don’t think I even voted. I’m absolutely sure that I didn’t participate in the nomination process the next year. One thing the response the CHORFs have made many of realize for the first time is just how rotten the Hugo Awards have gotten. I think that up until the CHORFs declared total war on the puppies none of us on the other side really understood how far those people were willing to go for little plastic rocketships.
I have to admit that I don’t give a damn what Eric Flint thinks. He need not apologize to me, regardless of what he may have said. I know that some of his fellow Baen writers think well of him, but I’ve never read anything he’s written and I don’t know anything about the man except for the fact that he’s published by Baen and he’s said to be an unreconstructed socialist.
So, I don’t know if JCC is correct or not. But he’s certainly correct to claim that I am not above recommending tit for tat. Indeed, I am considerably below that, being a devotee of the tactical philosophy that requires three or more tits for every tat.
George Martin really really likes rape
Like the worm, the SJW always turns on his own:
Rape acts in Game of Thrones the TV series (to date): 50
Rape victims in Game of Thrones (to date): 29Rape acts in ASOIAF the book series (to date): 214
Rape victims in ASOIAF (to date): 117The books contain over 4 times as much rape as the show (and probably even more; the method of analysis likely underestimates the rape in the books – see below).
Before the barrage of anon hate mail floods in: that’s not to say the show’s not problematic. It’s to say that the books are problematic. ETA: Please see A Song of Ice and Fire Has a Rape Problem for a detailed discussion on why the rapes in the books aren’t any better than those in the show. Spoiler: the only women who get vengeance on their rapists are villains.
Those 214 rape acts are particularly astonishing if you compare them to the number of times a married couple has sex. Which, if my memory serves correctly, happens about twice in five books.
Nor are the various defenses of Martin that have been offered valid. As Tafkar notes: “the only thing that protects a woman from rape is being one of Martin’s POV characters.”
More damning is this conclusion: “The stories of rapists are important to George R. R. Martin. Those are
the stories he tells. Our point of view characters are the rapists, not
the victims.”
George R.R. Martin well merits his fate.
You don’t like the medicine, doctor?
Glenn Hauman on May 26, 2015 at 2:20 am said:
Dave Freer: No-one has called for a
boycott or blacklist of David Gerrold, or Glenn Hauman, or to have
their reputations tarnished and Amazon reviews deliberately lowered.And yet they got bad reviews? What a coincidence! I also didn’t call for a boycott or blacklist, and yet somehow there’s a sudden rash of bad reviews of my books up on Amazon. See http://www.amazon.com/Star-Trek-Engineers-Creative-Couplings-ebook/dp/B000WJSA3I/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
No, Glenn Hauman didn’t call for a boycott or a blacklist, he called for fake negative reviews to be posted on Amazon, fake negative reviews which were immediately posted on Amazon in response to his calls for them.
Glenn Hauman on April 15, 2015
You can game Amazon ratings as well. Here’s a list of all of Mr. Beale’s nominees, complete with handy links to Amazon. It might be a good idea to take a look at the reviews and see which ones are helpful. If you’ve read the works, you should add your own review. Oh, and to answer the title question: what do you do to rabid puppies? You put them down.Glenn Hauman on May 20, 2015
Just a reminder to all Hugo voters: After you’ve read items in the Hugo packet, you don’t have to confine any reviews of them to your own blogs and social media. Feel free to add them to Amazon as well.
I see absolutely no evidence that the sudden rash of bad reviews of Mr. Hauman’s books reflect anything but the opinions of people who have read it and are honestly expressing their disappointment with their inferior quality. After all, absolutely no one has called for anyone to review or otherwise pay attention to his work at all. It must be, as Mr. “Put Them Down” himself has said, a mere coincidence.
And because Public Enemy is always appropriate:
He book-reviewed, he S.J.W’d
Vile minions viewed his anti-Puppy feud
One-star the rating, listen to him double trouble
He signs in now he’s pushing for the lower level
Like crashing cars he’s out there stealing stars
From books he took without a single look.
Taking a toll ’cause his soul broke with the poll
From the revelation… of a Puppy Nation.
Now this is what I mean an anti-Puppy machine
If Hugo come out at all, he won’t come out clean
But look around here go the sound of the wrecking clown
Boom and pound when he put ’em down
SJWs always lie
It’s as if they have to constantly spin false narratives or they’ll stop breathing”
At least Mr. Beale isn’t claiming I’m calling for false reviews anymore, though he still hasn’t retracted that statement.
I am absolutely claiming that Glenn Hauman has called and is still calling for false reviews of certain works to be posted on Amazon. He has publicly, and disingenuously, called for them twice now. Ten negative reviews, at least five of them confirmed by the reviewer to be false, have now been posted, some by his known associates. Mr. Hauman is either lying or woefully mistaken when he says I am not claiming that he’s calling for false reviews anymore.
This is standard SJW behavior. They say something in a passive-aggressive, plausibly deniable manner that they expect others to interpret in a certain way and act accordingly. This is why they are always talking about “dog whistles”; that is how they communicate amongst themselves.
Then, when criticized for the very consequences they intended, they deny having done what they did, reject all responsibility for the consequences of their words, and insist that everyone accept the false narrative of the disconnect between their call to action and the subsequent actions.
Hauman points out that he said people should read the various Puppy works before the reviewers “put them down”, but some of the reviewers didn’t, by their own admission, read them, nor did Hauman give a damn whether they did or not. His objective was for the Puppy works to receive negative reviews, which they subsequently received. Mission accomplished. The pretense the SJW attempts to maintain is usually a childishly transparent one, and it both confuses and alarms them when one simply ignores the verbal fog of nominal “plausibility” with which they try to preemptively defend themselves and focuses on the intention and the effect.
As, one notes, the justice system likewise does. No drug dealer has ever escaped conviction because he said “melons and cantaloupes” in the place of marijuana and cocaine when wire-tapped. What he said may be true, but it is irrelevant. His intentions are best judged by the response to the words, and not the words themselves.
The reason we know it is disingenuousness and dishonesty and not an inability to connect cause-and-effect is that SJWs are not similarly inclined to respect genuine deniability whenever they are accusing someone of one of the many isms they wield as weapons to DISQUALIFY. In fact, SJWs regularly claim the ability to read minds and discern intentions even when there are no actual consequences to observe.
Don’t ever take an SJW’s spun narrative at face value. That’s exactly what they expect you to do; that’s exactly what they need you to do. Punch through it and expose them. You can be sure that the narrative will be false because SJWs always lie.
Speaking of which, these two false narratives are excellent examples:
Stevie on May 22, 2015 at 7:24 pm said:
One thing you will discover is that the canine conspirators are now in total disarray, because the Sads didn’t realise that they would be Shanghaid by the Rabids. Equally, the Rabids are in total disarray because Beale really thought he was going to be treated as an entrepreneurial mastermind by the WSJ and therefore was completely blindsided when the WSJ laughed at him. In other words, all they’ve got left is to be as destructive as possible, and do their best to make everyone else miserable.Chris Hensley on May 22, 2015 at 7:37 pm said:
“Equally, the Rabids are in total disarray because Beale really thought he was going to be treated as an entrepreneurial mastermind by the WSJ and therefore was completely blindsided when the WSJ laughed at him.”All the while Vox Day is screaming “Why are you running? We have them right where we want them!”
Are you in total disarray, Rabid Puppies? As for the idea that I was “completely blindsided” by Michael Rappoport’s article in the Wall Street Journal, this is exactly what I wrote to the Evil Legion of Evil about it two weeks before it ran: “Wall Street Journal piece coming soon, possibly tomorrow. Strangely enough, they didn’t even ask me if I hate black lesbians or kick kittens. It will probably be moderately against us, in my opinion. He wasn’t
hostile, but he played “devil’s advocate”, in his own words, several
times.”
I was, of course, under absolutely no illusions that the piece would have anything to do with entrepreneurship or my being a mastermind of any kind for the obvious reason that I actually talked to the reporter for about ten minutes. Not only were his questions mildly accusatory in nature, but the fact that he was also talking with two people who had nothing to do with the story, George Martin and John Scalzi, was sufficient to tell me which way he was going to spin it. As in fact, turned out to be the case. But the tone of the article was considerably less poisonous than the Entertainment Weekly, Guardian, and Popular Science stories that were planted by the Torlings. Which was nice, and I also noticed that the comments on the WSJ web site ran about 10-1 in our favor.
As for the clueless wonders at File 770 who don’t understand how the Torlings plant stories in the mainstream media, they should look at who publishes the authors of some of those “journo things”.
