Tag: SJW

Shelving Aristotle

Now the SJWs are openly coming out against Aristotle’s logic at File 770:

Stevie on June 4, 2015 at 6:21 pm said:
Incidentally, had not Athens been Lords of the Sea then we not have their Golden Age. We would not have the works of Aristotle. For one brief moment I thought wistfully of what an improvement this would be, but came down on the side of sanity….

Chris Hensley on June 4, 2015 at 6:26 pm said:
The works of Aristotle are important. Much of it has been replaced by
better knowledge, but we wouldn’t have that knowledge was still built
upon Aristotle. It is time that his logic be put upon the shelf next to
his physics.

One thing that is readily apparent is that they very much resent how we have correctly identified them as rhetoricals incapable of rational dialectic and ruled by their feelbads rather than reason. Consider exactly what it is that they are rejecting. They are rejecting logic for fantasy because they cannot be instructed by information, they are only guided by emotion.

They are, quite literally, irrational. And in the SJWs always lie department, there is this:

Dex on June 5, 2015 at 6:20 am said: 
I think this, more than anything, is the accurate way to approach
characters like VD. The man is a grifter. For all the outrage he
manufactures, it appeals to a fringe group that flocks to him and is
happy to throw money his way so long as he seems to be fighting the good
fight. The entire Hugo situation is nothing but a scam for him to earn
the publicity that his talent can’t, and entice a small group of
hardcore followers to financially support him. It’s Alex Jones without
the audience. I have no doubt that within six months, his publishing
house will include links to buying gold coins, Prepper food packs and
herbal cures to diabetes.

It’s interesting that he makes such claims, in light of the email I received just two hours ago from the company with whom I tried an advertising experiment about two years ago.

We’ve been working with you some time ago and I believe we can make a good partnership again. Since last time we worked we have grown up a lot and made a lot of improvements for our publishers. Get back to me if you are interested and I will help you to resume a campaign according to your needs.

Anyone want to see those ads for celebrity feet again? I certainly don’t, so I politely declined. It’s a strange sort of grifter who turns down over $1k in advertising money per month just because I prefer to not annoy my readers. And considering that I have written more than 500 columns and 15,000 blog posts, and Castalia has given away over 32,000 free books in the last 18 months, I daresay I’ve provided more free content than anyone else in the entire science fiction field in recent years. Even Brainstorm has a not insubstantial free component to it.

That being said, I very appreciate the willingness of my hardcore supporters to support me and Castalia House. And because I appreciate it, I try to make sure that every time anyone pays for anything, they feel they are receiving substantive subjective value.

If You Were an Award, My Love

“If You Were An Award, My Love”
by Juan Tabo and S. Harris

If you were an award, my love, then you would be a Hugo™. You’d be a big one, five feet, ten inches, the same height as human-you and twice the height of Regular Size John Scalzi, You’d be made of brass, and wood and plastic, and difficult to take on an airplane as carry on due to enhanced security precautions. Your eyes wouldn’t exist, because you were a rocket, stupid.

If you were a Hugo®, then I would become Taller, Stronger John Scalzi so that I could spend all my time with you. I’d bring you raw chickens and live goats, if you were into that kind of thing.  I’d make my bed right under the trophy case, in the basement where my wife lets me sleep. When I couldn’t sleep, I’d sing you lullabies.

If I sang you lullabies, I’d soon notice how you were still a statue. You’d just sit there, because you were still a statue. When you thought I was asleep, you’d still be a statue, and I would still be Taller, Stronger, John Scalzi.

If I were still Taller, Stronger John Scalzi, I would rage against Puppies, Sad and Rabid, and my friends the League of Social Justice Warriors would rally to fund new research into defeating Puppies. Money would flood into the World Con. Biologists would try to figure out how to give rabbits jaws with big sharp teeth. Then I would know that I lived in a world of magic where anything was possible and a story with no fantasy and no science and very little fiction could be nominated for a Hugo©.

If we lived in a world of magic where anything was possible and a story with no fantasy and no science and very little fiction could be nominated for a Hugo™ then you would be an award, my love. You’d stand for everything progressive and PETA© and transgender and carbon-neutral and GMO/peanut free and latina and pro-Palestine and LGBT friendly and you’d miss the Soviet Union in a melancholy kind of way. Your Social Just-Us Warrior supporters would intimidate your foes effortlessly through coordinated campaigns of doxxing and public hateshaming. Whereas you—fragile, lovely, human you—must rely on threats and intimidation and troll-like slow-writing George R. R. Martin.

A Hugo©, even a large one, would never have to end up in the hands of John C. Wright or Jim Butcher or Steve Rzasa or Vox Day because they are insufficiently progressive, and are likely soaked in gin and malice.  A Hugo®, my love, would eschew gin and malice and instead be soaked in Grand Marnier® and love©.  A Hugo™ would bare rocket engine and liberal pedigree and they would cower. They’d hide in the Internet instead of crashing our party. They’d grasp each other for comfort and shout “Remember Heinlein and Campbell” instead of seizing the ballot and not letting anyone at all but the Puppies vote for the nominations and would then vote again in a completely democratic process on the nominated works as we slipped in the pools of our aggregated tears.

If you were an award, my love, I’d teach you the scents of those men. I’d lead a large herd of rabbits to them quietly, oh so quietly. They’d laugh, and probably not be scared since they are feelbad hurtspeak people. Your nostrils would flare as you inhaled the night and then, with the suddenness of prey, you’d run and cry. I’d cry, too.

If I cried, cried, cried, I’d eventually feel shame. I’d promise to change the Hugo rules so no one could ever do something like that again through voting. I’d avert my eyes from the newspapers when they showed photographs of the Hugo nominees, just as they must avert their eyes from the newspapers that show my crying face. How reporters adore my face, the face of the writer with his half-written acceptance speech, tickets to Washington, green chiffon bridesmaid dress.  The writer who sits by the bedside of another writer who wrote about tribbles and is hurtbad because our insular community is not now sufficiently insular for my taste.

If you were an award, my love, then no one could take you, and if nothing could take you, then I would be externally validated as my persona requires. I would bloom into the most beautiful Socially Just Warrior Flower. I would stretch joyfully toward the left. I’d trust in your shiny brass and wood to keep you/me/us safe now and forever from the feelbad hurtspeech men, and the tally of the ballots and the internet, and the shuttering of my empty trophy case.
 
UPDATE: I just what can’t words wow just wow…. 

UPDATE 2: Yeah, we’re going to need a bigger harpoon.

He REALLY likes rape

George Rape Rape Martin explains that books without rape are “boring and “fundamentally dishonest”:

Martin, 66, said that the characters in his novels using rape to get their way is legitimate because it reflects European history, which inspired his own fantasy novels.

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Martin said: ‘I’m writing about war, which is what almost all epic fantasy is about. ‘But if you’re going to write about war, and you just want to include all the cool battles and heroes killing a lot of orcs and things like that and you don’t portray [sexual violence], then there’s something fundamentally dishonest about that.

‘Rape, unfortunately, is still a part of war today. It’s not a strong testament to the human race, but I don’t think we should pretend it doesn’t exist. I want to portray struggle. Drama comes out of conflict. If you portray a utopia, then you probably wrote a pretty boring book.’

Sure, but one has to question his devotion to historical realism when there is one rape every twenty-four pages, while children apparently spring into existence without married couples ever having sex.

Hugo Recommendations: Best Fan Writer

This is how I am voting in the
Best Fan Writer category. Of course, I merely offer this information
regarding my individual ballot for no particular reason at all, and the
fact that I have done so should not be confused in any way, shape, or
form with a slate or a bloc vote, much less a direct order by the
Supreme Dark Lord of the Evil Legion of Evil to his 368 Vile Faceless
Minions or anyone else.

  1. Jeffro Johnson
  2. Dave Freer
  3. Amanda S. Green
  4. Cedar Sanderson
  5. Laura J. Mixon

With regards to Mixon, I still don’t consider a professional writer with five novels published by Tor who also happens to be the current SFWA President’s wife to be anything remotely recognizable as a proper “Fan Writer”, but that ship sailed back when John Scalzi, Jim Hines, and Kameron Hurley waged their successful campaigns for it. No sense in fighting battles already lost.

The more relevant problem is that Best Related Work would be a more reasonable category for a single expose, and Deidre Saorse Moen’s expose of Marion Zimmer Bradley was a considerably more important work in that regard. That being said, I don’t regard the Hugo Awards as being the place to recognize investigative journalism, otherwise I would have nominated Saorse Moen’s stunning revelations about Marion Zimmer Bradley as a Best Related Work. But regardless, Mixon did publish a credible expose and she is a legitimate, if not necessarily compelling candidate.

Best Novel
Best Novella

Now, what is interesting is that the very SJW who is leading the charge to change the Hugo rules this year has also declared that personal dislike and ideological opposition is sufficient cause to vote No Award.

Best Fan Writer

Freer’s been an ass to me, and incoherent at length to pretty much everybody, so no rocket for him. Green and Sanderson seem to not like SJWs like me, so I’ll return the favor. I’m a bit reluctant to give Mixon the award for an expose. Johnson at least restricts himself to book reviews, so my ballot is Johnson and no award.

Note the name on the B.1.1. proposals: “Proposed by: Chris Gerrib, Catherine Faber and Steven desJardins”.  This quite clearly demonstrates that the impetus to change the rules is, as we expected, being driven by SJW ideology and feelbads about the wrong people being nominated. So it is more than a little ironic that Chris Gerrib and I will nevertheless be voting for the same individual in the Best Fan Writer category, as Johnson’s work is excellent, well-researched, and resolutely apolitical.

But Gerrib shows the fundamental difference between the SJW and the Puppy. I put Marko Kloos on the Rabid Puppy slate in the full knowledge that he hates me. I have repeatedly nominated Charles Stross for the Nebula Award in the past; you can look up the old NAR records and see that I was, in fact, one of the only members of SFWA championing his work back then. I openly declare China Mieville to be one of the three best living SF writers despite the fact that his politics and his economics border on the brain-damaged. I wouldn’t hesitate to nominate Johnny Con himself if he ever wrote a novel that was legitimately worthy of a nomination.

The SJWs don’t do that. They are ruled by their feelings, and the mere semblance of ideological distaste for them is sufficient to render a writer’s work without merit and unworthy of any award.

And that, my dear SJWs, is one of the two reasons why we don’t believe you when you preen and posture and proclaim the works of the right to be unworthy. Because every time the mask slips, we see that the real reason behind the various rationales being given is the writer’s disapproval of your noxious ideology.

The other reason, of course, is that we have working memories. We are able to compare what we believe to be meritorious to what you have previously prized. You expect us to believe that “Turncoat” is a bad short story while “If You Gave a Dinosaur a Cookie, My Love” is among the very best the genre has to offer. You expect us to accept that the insightful essays of Transhuman and Subhuman and the impeccable science of “The Hot Equations” are totally unworthy of an award that has gone to a ridiculous and factually incorrect blog post, Chicks Dig Time Lords, and a collection of online blog snark in recent years.

In short, we do not believe a word you say about literary quality. After all, you say a man is actually a woman, you say evil is actually good, so it is hardly surprising that you also tell us good SF is actually terrible while declaring dreadful Pink SF to be superlative.

SJWs always lie.

David Brooks discovers SJWs

And, unsurprisingly, he likes what he sees. He just thinks they take their “noble impulses” a little too far:

Every generation has an opportunity to change the world. Right now, college campuses around the country are home to a moral movement that seeks to reverse centuries of historic wrongs.

This movement is led by students forced to live with the legacy of sexism, with the threat, and sometimes the experience, of sexual assault. It is led by students whose lives have been marred by racism and bigotry. It is led by people who want to secure equal rights for gays, lesbians and other historically marginalized groups.

These students are driven by noble impulses to do justice and identify oppression. They want to not only crack down on exploitation and discrimination, but also eradicate the cultural environment that tolerates these things. They want to police social norms so that hurtful comments are no longer tolerated and so that real bigotry is given no tacit support. Of course, at some level, they are right. Callous statements in the mainstream can lead to hostile behavior on the edge. That’s why we don’t tolerate Holocaust denial….

The problem is that the campus activists have moral fervor, but don’t always have settled philosophies to restrain the fervor of their emotions. Settled philosophies are meant to (but obviously don’t always) instill a limiting sense of humility, a deference to the complexity and multifaceted nature of reality. But many of today’s activists are forced to rely on a relatively simple social theory.

According to this theory, the dividing lines between good and evil are starkly clear. The essential conflict is between the traumatized purity of the victim and the verbal violence of the oppressor. According to this theory, the ultimate source of authority is not some hard-to-understand truth. It is everybody’s personal feelings.

No. Their impulses are not noble. They are not right on any level. They have no right to police anything. Their eternal argumentum ad sensum is an intrinsically false and dangerous philosophy. They and their totalitarian ideology are what need to be eradicated.

SJW is solipsistic totalitarianism. SJW is the real bigotry of the mind. SJW delenda est.

No comment necessary

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.)

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 PM   

I’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:

  1. John Scalzi more or less keeping his mouth shut. Now we know why.
  2. Charles Stross attempting to doxx Castalia and his insane Finnish Nazi theories. I genuinely thought he was smarter than that.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.