Tag: SJW

SJWs attack Open Source Software

Paging ESR… paging ESR… ERS, please report with your weapons loaded. We have an SJW breach in OSS. #OSSGATE operatives, please report to your activation nodes.

8 May 2015 Eve Braun (eve.t.braun@gmail.com) wrote: Two other things we implemented which aided the recruitment
process:

We followed advice which is quickly becoming the industry
norm. Never look at someones Github profile until you have made the
decision to hire or not hire them and do not let it influence you.
Github profiles tend to favor CIS White men over most minorities in
a number of ways. CIS white men often have more spare time or chose
to pursue building up an impressive portfolio of code rather than
women or minorities who have to deal with things like raising
children or instiutionalised racism. Some in the SocJus community
have even said that technically companies could possibly even be
breaking discriminatory law by allowing peoples github profiles and
publicly available code to influence their hiring decisions – watch
this space.

(More info: http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss-community)

We used Randi Harper’s (https://twitter.com/freebsdgirl)
blockbot to assess applicants twitter profiles for problematic or
toxic viewpoints. This may sound a bit extreme but some of the
staff here suffer from Aspergers & PTSD and our top priority is
to ensure that they don’t get put in triggering situations.Making a
wrong hire could present a scenario where the employee could be
triggered on a daily basis by another employee with an oppressive
viewpoint. Other than from a diversity standpoint, from a business
standpoint these sorts of negative interactions can cost a company
a huge amount of time & money in employees taking off sick
days. When all the employees are on the same page the synergy in
the office aids productivity.

Still think the anti-SJW crusade is an overreaction? There is only one answer to them, only one cure: relentless rejection. Look to #GamerGate and #SadPuppies for inspiration and ideas on how to push them back.


Notice that the SJW Eve Braun is trying to make a corporate virtue out of saving company time and money by not hiring “CIS white men with “problematic or toxic viewpoints”. Of course, SJWs always lie.

Get him to neurology, stat!

Seriously, David Gerrold is not merely incoherent, he’s directly contradicting himself:

Here’s what I suggest. Consider this a starting place for the conversation, not a finished proposal. First, we as a community need to reaffirm our commitment to
inclusiveness — everybody’s welcome, regardless of political views,
religion, sexual orientation, gender, skin color, ethnicity, place of
national origin, body shape, disability, age, whatever. The only
requirement is a love of fantasy and science fiction and respect for
other participants.

My own rule about discussion is that
disagreement should be about issues, not personalities. This is because
most of us have issues, not all of us have personalities. I would
recommend this as a general policy as well. I might think that X or Y is
a big stinky poo-poo head, but speaking it aloud is not the best way to
win points in a debate.

Second, after we reaffirm our commitment to inclusiveness, we need to
consider whether or not the Hugo nominating rules need to be adjusted. I
believe that the administrators of the award should have the power to
disqualify slate-ballots, but the mechanisms for this might be
controversial….

But the point I’m working toward is a difficult one — it’s a
conversation that we tend to shy away from. But any functioning
community, does have the right to protect itself from disruptive
agencies. Groups can and do disinvite those who spoil the party.

The SFWA expelled Vox Day for his unprofessional behavior. Fandom as a
community, and the Worldcon as an institution, should have the same
power to invite someone to the egress. Other conventions have taken
steps to protect themselves from toxic and disruptive individuals — and
based on the back-and-forth conversations I’ve seen, and as unpleasant a
discussion as this will be, maybe it’s time to have a discussion about
the mechanisms for shutting down someone who has publicly declared his
intention to destroy the awards.

That’s the point. We cannot
talk about healing while the knife is still being twisted in the wound. I
can’t speak for the sad puppies, I can’t tell them what to do — but I
would hope that they would recognize that being perceived as standing
next to a man who wants to destroy the system is not the best place to
stand.

TL;DR: Worldcon must be inclusive and tolerant, so we must expel Vox Day and anyone associated with him in any way who fails to publicly denounce him before presenting themselves to us and requesting absolution.

Gerrold still hasn’t figured out that there is no way to expel someone from a group who doesn’t belong to it and doesn’t want to belong to it. But I like where he’s going with his suggestions. As I have often pointed out, it’s hard to destroy things from the outside, and it’s a lot easier if you can get the insiders to do it for you.

It’s also amusing to see them insist that they are not at all political, when the first point is a call to establish SJW ideology as a core principle. As Brad Torgersen has said, the fish don’t understand that the water in which they swim is wet.

An apology to GamerGate

SJWs always lie, and sooner or later, the honest non-SJW is eventually going to realize that so long as he, or in this case, she, pays enough attention:

My name is Sofie Liv, i’m a young woman from Denmark, I love playing video games and sometimes review them.

And I feel like I owe you all the greatest apology. I’m ashamed, and I want to apologies. I can only apologies for myself so here goes.

We all know about the Zoe Quinn and Sarkeesian thing that happened so long ago. Back then as I was just minding my own buisness with my web review show, reviewing the nerd things I love so much on the Agonybooth, I was given information that these women had been threatened, that they had been driven into misery, that gamergate was behind all of it, that all these second grade photoshopped images were proof of it, that these women were doxxed and got rape threats on a daily basis.

And like a complete sucker, I bought it! I suckered it up, I bought into it, and I am ashamed. No part of me would believe that someone would downright lie about rape threats, it didn’t even occour to me that they would lie about their own mental state, because no part of me could ever believe that someone would lie about those things.

Then slowly arguments started crawling up, I raised my eyebrow at quite a bit of the things Sarkeesian openly said, I had to point out. “That isn’t right.”

At that point I had taken a new stand… I am not with Sarkeesian, but neither am I with Gamergate, I think they both did wrong. Still, stupid me hadn’t done prober fact checking, but just taken peoples word for these things happening.

So many people in my circle, so many people following me pointed to the harrashment of these women as plain fact…. I now know this is untrue. Now I have finally done the prober actual research and found the sources, and I know i’ve been lied to… and as a sucker I suckered it up. I called Gamergate things, hinted at you guys being imoral, I switched from reviewing movies to review another medium that I love, video games, and called it a stand against the idea women can’t be gamers… an idea I now know, doesn’t even exsist!

Now my game reviews has been turned into a stand up against the Sarkeesian ideals, because now I actually feel it’s important to stand up to her and call her bullshit for what it is… It’s bullshit. She’s full of bullshit, and I can only apologies that I bought so easily into it as a brain dead sheep.

What I want to say with all of this is that, I think you people have done absolutely fantastic. In spite of all this bad rep you still managed to stand up and stand true to what this is actually about.

Apology accepted. This is why it is so important for us to stand our ground. This is why it is so important for us to speak the truth, and keep speaking the truth, whether anyone believes us or not, whether the media calls us names or not, and whether people offer us friendship and approval or not.

The one thing SJWs absolutely rely upon is honest people NOT calling them out. They don’t expect to convince everyone, they merely want to silence anyone who threatens their false narratives. So stop playing along with them. Stop sitting there in mute disapproval of their lies and misrepresentations, stand up, and declare “that is not true!”

SJWs are the sons and daughter of the Father of Lies. They are the People of the Lie and they can only be defeated by the Sword of Truth.

Never retreat, never apologize

Brad Torgersen
Correia also likes women. We’re not sure about Scalzi on that count. If you know what I mean.

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi
Brad Torgersen attempts to insult me by implying I’m gay; I respond. He attempts an apology; I respond to that too.

Does no one listen or learn? Never, EVER apologize to SJWs! Case in point: “The apology was worse than the ini­tial attempted slur — it rein­forced
the fact that Torg­ersen thinks calling someone gay is a slur.”

I repeat. NEVER APOLOGIZE TO SJWs. They will see it as fear, take the apology, and use it as a club with which to beat you. Never back down to them, never retreat, never apologize.Notice that this was all posted AFTER Torgersen apologized to Scalzi.

    Hur hur, homophobia’s a gas when you’re a Sad Puppy!
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) May 4, 2015

    Again: I’m mostly sad for the Sad Puppies. So much insecurity and envy and anger and need. For their own sakes, I wish they were happy.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) May 4, 2015

    Note that my pity for the Sad Puppies doesn’t preclude me pointing out they are assholes. And that they’ve made the active choice to be so.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) May 4, 2015

    Also, if I DID like men more than women, so what? That would be a perfectly good thing, nor would I be the slightest bit ashamed of it.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) May 4, 2015

    If Brad Torgersen wants to insult me, insinuating I’m gay won’t work. It’s not an insult to be gay. Be an insult to be a Sad Puppy, however.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) May 4, 2015

If it’s not an insult to be gay, then why is McRapey acting as if it is an insult? And how has Brad Torgersen damaged his potentially promising career by not insulting someone?

mintwitch ‏@mintwitch
Brad is just… so sad. He’s completely lost his grip, and unfortunately probably damaged a potentially promising career.

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi
If he has, I suspect he will attribute it to his politics rather than his personal behavior.

So, just a single insult of the wrong individual is sufficient to damage a promising career. That’s fascinating, in light of how we have been repeatedly assured that there isn’t any cabal or conspiracy or collection of people who will attempt to torpedo your career in science fiction over mere differences of opinion. After all, was it not Orson Scott Card’s personal behavior to which the SJWs objected when they attacked the Ender’s Game movie?

Was it not my personal behavior to which they objected when they attacked me on the basis of a syndicated op/ed column?

In the meantime, AN EDUCATIONAL DIALOGUE from the Evil Legion of Evil:

John Scalzi: “I’d rather like men than to be a Sad Puppy.”

Minion 189: “What do you mean when you say ‘like men’? Do you mean in the manner of owing someone a big favor in the Ground Forces?

John Scalzi: “Um, yeah.”

Big Gay Steve: “This can be arranged. I know a guy.”

John Scalzi: “SQUEEEE!”

The End

I don’t know about you, but I find it somewhat surprising that McRapey would publicly express a preference for being sodomized to seeing the likes of Jim Butcher or John C. Wright win a Hugo Award. It’s not exactly what you’d call a binary option.

Patience is a strategic virtue

An informative dialogue between members of the Dread Ilk:

Ticticboom: “Larry Correia and Brad Torgensen have mentioned that most of their
interactions with Vox have been asking him not to burn the Hugos down.
What the SJWs don’t realize is how downright forgiving and tolerant Vox
is compared to what they think of as his followers.”

Vile Faceless Minion 156: “Agreed. When I see interviews where the left twists Vox’s (or another truthteller’s) words, calls names and basically spit on those I appreciate for standing up for Western Civilization… I feel blinding rage and a desire to destroy. Vox shrugs and presses onwards. I don’t understand this calm moderation and cannot maintain it.”

I feel flashes of emotional reaction just like anyone else. I know what it is like to feel the blinding rage and harbor the intense desire to destroy. The difference is that I spent six years in a very hard school learning not to trust such feelings or to give into them. In the martial arts, when you react emotionally, when you throw caution to the wind, you pay for it, and you often pay for it in pain.

The best, fastest, hardest kick I ever threw in my life was in my fifth year, when I was sparring my sensei one afternoon. We were going at it hard and fast. I was holding nothing back and he was probably going about 90 percent. He feinted with a left jab, then pulled back-and-up as he often did; reading it correctly, I moved in and launched a skipping front sidekick that would have taken a lesser fighter’s head off. I mean, it was a rocket! I had him absolutely dead to rights and I knew it.

But somehow, he managed to lift his head up and turn it so that my heel barely brushed the side of his chin. He ducked and leaped sideways to safety before I could follow it up, smiled broadly, and said, “Now THAT was close. But not close enough!”

I completely lost it. It was maddening. I couldn’t BELIEVE that I’d read him perfectly, timed him perfectly, threw the perfect kick, and STILL didn’t catch the bastard cleanly. I went after him hard with my hands, he retreated, blocking everything, until finally, in frustration, I literally leaped at him and threw a haymaker at his head. This was insanely stupid, and in five years I’d never made such an unmitigated error before, but I was seeing red. My sensei told me later that he had so much time, and I’d left myself so open by leaving my feet and extending myself, that he actually had time to think “I cannot believe he did that” as he ducked under the wild punch and came up and across with a rear-hand shot to the body, which in combination with my forward momentum hit me so hard that it not only knocked the wind out of me, it actually lifted me higher off the ground on his fist.

I was lucky that I didn’t rupture anything. I’ve been knocked out and I’ve had bones broken, but that was the hardest anyone has ever hit me. I went down in what we called the full “armadillo” and stayed down. Getting up was not an option;  I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t even roll over onto my back. It felt like I’d been hit by a charging bull. My abdomen was bruised for days and if he’d hit me just a few inches to the left, I’d have had several broken ribs.

In light of that experience, consider the completely unsurprising news that Floyd Mayweather not only won last night, but won rather easily against a very highly-regarded fighter.

Floyd Mayweather Jr. spent Saturday night doing — for the most part
— what he’s done in the vast majority of his championship bouts over
the last decade. He fought strategically. He landed counterpunchers. He held to offset rallies. The significance of this one was that the opponent was Manny Pacquiao. In
a welterweight bout that’s seemingly been a generation in the making,
Mayweather controlled the action in mid ring, eluded prolonged damage
along the ropes and worked his way to a unanimous decision that earned
him the WBO welterweight title to go along with the WBA and WBC belts he
arrived with. The win boosted him to 48-0 as a pro in a 19-year career. Pacquiao is 57-6-2.

“He fought strategically.” That’s the significant quote here. Now let’s look at how fighting strategically applies to the Hugo 2015 situation. We know, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that the SJWs are going to vote No Award on most of the Puppy-recommended works. Some will claim to have read them all, some will proudly proclaim that they have read none, others will pretend to genuinely believe that there is not a single award-worthy work in the lot, and a few particularly foolish ones will even convince themselves they believe as much. That’s fine, we all know what their opinions are worth as the list of past winners are well-documented. The only relevant point is that they are going to do it.

So why shouldn’t we join them? Why not pour on the gasoline as they run around shrieking and lighting matches? After all, getting things nominated that the other side would No Award, then turning around and joining them to ensure no awards were given out was my original idea, which I set aside in favor of SP3 and Brad Torgersen’s ultimately futile attempt to save the Hugos from the SJWs. The reason to abandon this original objective now that it is firmly in our grasp is that the situation has developed in ways that I did not fully anticipate, thereby indicating a strategic adjustment. Why settle for burning Munich when Berlin may be within reach, especially if the munchkins are promising to burn Munich for us as we advance? Jeff Duntemann’s summary to which Mike Glyer directed our attention yesterday is informative in this regard.

It’s something like a sociological law: Commotion attracts attention.
Attention is unpredictable, because it reaches friend and foe alike. It
can go your way, or it can go the other way. There’s no way to control
the polarity of adverse attention. The only way to limit adverse
attention is to stop the commotion.

In other words, just shut up.

I know, this is difficult. For some psychologies, hate is delicious
to the point of being psychological crack, so it’s hard to just lecture
them on the fact that hate has consequences, including but hardly
limited to adverse attention.

My conclusion is this: The opponents of Sad Puppies 3 put them on the map,
and probably took them from a fluke to a viable long-term institution. I
don’t think this is what the APs intended. In the wake of the April 4
announcement of the final Hugo ballot, I’d guess the opposition has
generated several hundred kilostreisands of adverse attention, and the
numbers will continue to increase.

In other words, thanks to the SJW overreaction, our capabilities may now permit us to accomplish more than we had reasonably believed possible at the start. Brad wanted to do something that was always impossible because the SJWs are much more poisonous than he naively believed them to be. I was not surprised by their nature (which is why I was always dubious about the SP3 goal), but I was surprised by how astonishingly stupid and self-destructive their post-shortlist reactions have been. So, thanks to them, the strategic situation has now changed and it behooves us to take advantage of their mistakes. The original options as I saw them, prior to the nominations being announced, were as follows:

  1. SJWs and Puppies play it straight. Puppies win between 1 and 3 awards. Vox Day collects two more 6th of 5 participation prizes.
  2. SJWs choose nuclear option and Puppies play it straight. No Award wins
    the majority of categories. Vox Day collects two more 6th of 5
    participation prizes.
  3. SJWs and Puppies choose nuclear option. No Award wins the majority of
    categories. Vox Day collects two more 6th of 5 participation prize.

Three options, two outcomes. From a strategic perspective, Option 3 is obviously the preferable one there. It may be little hard on John C. Wright, Jim Butcher, Toni Weisskopf, and other strong finalists who might genuinely appreciate winning an award, but as I have consistently pointed out from the start, I don’t care about awards. Neither do the hundreds of Vile Faceless Minions of the Evil Legion of Evil. But this situation no longer applies. Now, with the influx of THOUSANDS of new voters, whose allegiances are unknown, there are three possible outcomes.

  1. SJWs and Puppies play it straight. Puppies win between 3 and 6 awards. Vox Day collects neither Hugo Awards nor 6th of 5 participation prizes.
  2. SJWs and Puppies choose nuclear option. No Award wins the majority of categories.Vox Day collects two more 6th of 5 participation prizes.
  3. SJWs choose nuclear option and Puppies play it straight. No Award wins the majority of categories. Vox Day collects two more 6th of 5 participation prizes.
  4. SJWs choose nuclear option and Puppies play it straight. Puppies win between 10 and 12 awards. Vox Day wins Best Editor, Short Form and finishes third, behind Toni Weisskopf and Jim Minz, in the other editorial category.

The Option 4 is a legitimate possibility if two-thirds or more of the new supporting members are Puppy sympathizers. The reason Option 4 is the more desirable outcome is because a) the results of Option 2 and Option 3 are exactly the same, and b) it will publicly break the perceived power of the SJWs under the current rules. Option 2/3 interrupts their inability to hand out awards to themselves for a single year, but Option 4 will reveal the hard limits of their influence and render them relatively impotent for the foreseeable future.

The best possible outcome is not to see them nuke themselves, as amusing as that would be, but to see them try to nuke themselves and fail, thereby demonstrating that they don’t even possess the nukes they think they have. And even if Option 4 turns out to have been beyond our reach this year, its failure is still within the range of our victory conditions. This is what it means to successfully execute a Xanatos Gambit. If we fail, we win. If we succeed, we win even bigger. Why settle for victory when we can vanquish?

Now that the science fiction SJWs have publicly declared No Award, the best possible outcome for us is for them to try to burn down the awards and fail. And that is why we should not help them do it. I very much understand the temptation to cry havoc, run amok, and gleefully set fires, but keep this in mind: while strategic arson is good, strategic occupation is glorious.

Translation: stow the flamethrowers. For now. And as for those who are tempted to freak out and overreact simply because the other side is throwing punches, keep in mind how the great champions react to getting hit.

Floyd Mayweather let Manny Pacquiao hit him with a slew of body blows, then looked Pacquiao in the eye, shook his head, and said NOPE.

SJWs always lie

“Being a “social justice warrior” means I get to read (and incidentally,
vote for on award ballots) what I want, rather than waiting to be told
by someone else what I should like and what I shouldn’t.”
 – John Scalzi, 1 May 2015

Actually, that’s almost exactly the opposite of what it means to be an SJW. That sounds considerably more like a #GamerGate position, which McRapey vehemently opposes.

Translation: Johnny Con knows he’s on the losing side and he’s trying to run his “make nice” routine. Yep.

“You’ll note I’m addressing Mr. Ringo’s argument here and not Mr.
Ringo himself. He and I get on tolerably well as humans. Do likewise,
please. Likewise, avoid gratuitous slamming of Baen,
please. This all is less about the publisher itself than it is about the
publisher being used as a stand-in for a particular worldview, which it
(or its individual employees or authors) may or may not endorse.”
  – John Scalzi, 1 May 2015

“I think both Toni Weisskopf and Jim Minz are eminently worthy of Hugo
Award editor nominations; I regret the presence of the slates makes the
argument of their consideration more complicated for so many people.”
   – John Scalzi, 1 May 2015

Contrast with this:

When Ms. Weisskopf addresses the Baen true faithful like this (as she
does both in the Baen’s Bar and on the site of Ms. Hoyt, a Baen author),
aside from anything else she’s doing, she’s engaging in the laudable
tactic of binding — or rebinding — her company’s host to her company’s
product: Baen fans are the real science fiction fans, and real science fiction fans want real science fiction, which comes from Baen. It’s a nice bit of commercial epistemic closure. So good job, Ms. Weisskopf.

Ms. Weisskopf’s unilateral attempt to establish fans of her publishing house as the One True Church, with Heinlein as its graven image, is flat out wrong. Not only are they not the One True Church, they don’t even get Robert Heinlein to themselves. They have to timeshare him with me and with many other fans who love his work, see him as an influence, and at the same time are happy to welcome anyone who wants to be part of the science fiction and fantasy community into the fold, no matter how they got there. Try to take Robert Heinlein from me, guys. See where that gets you. He’s not yours alone. You can’t gatekeep him from me.

Likewise, Ms. Weisskopf’s handwringing about what should be done about the interlopers and heretics incorrectly arrogates to her little group the ability to make any sort of decision on the matter. They can’t. Baen is not, in fact, the core of science fiction and fantasy; people who identify as Baen fans are not the only “real” science fiction and fantasy fans. 
– John Scalzi, 11 March, 2014

 Yeah, I tend to doubt she’s likely to buy it, Johnny Con. And “tolerably well as humans” should be translated as “John Ringo regards me with contempt, but I’m not done trying to suck up to him yet.”

And then there is, as usual, this: “Pretty sure that’s not the reason as far as regards Beale. I think his problem is straight-up envy.”

Mm-hmmm. Keep telling yourself that, Johnny. Perhaps one day you’ll even start to believe it.

Compare and contrast

The SJWs in science fiction believe that if they can control the narrative, if they can convince the media to tell the story their way, they are going to retain their control of the science fiction establishment. They are given every opportunity to spin the narrative and make their case; Brad, Larry, and I were contacted by a Wall Street Journal reporter yesterday, which was a welcome change from most of the coverage that we’ve been seeing of late, but so too were John Scalzi and George Martin.

It’s just like one sees on the cable news. If a talking head has on a liberal guest, the liberal appears alone to sell the narrative. If a talking head has on a conservative guest, a liberal guest usually appears to dispute the narrative. And although it is only a guess, I suspect that the way that the story is likely to go will be moderately anti-Puppy, in light of the reporter actually “playing devil’s advocate” in conversation with me.

When I pointed out how the Puppy case is bolstered by comparing the number of Hugo nominations belonging to those in the Making Light clique, (15 for Charles Stross, 15/14 for Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and 9 for John Scalzi compared to 12 for Isaac Asimov, 12 for Robert Heinlein, and 7 for Arthur C. Clarke), the reporter shot back, and I quote, “yeah, but they’re editors!”

Although I pointed out to him that a) Charles Stross and John Scalzi are not, in fact, editors, and b) Isaac Asimov was an editor as well as a writer, I got the feeling that he was not likely to quote me concerning those readily observable and very telling facts. We’ll see, perhaps I’m wrong.

But the anti-Puppy influence over the mainstream media is largely irrelevant. Because, when people look more closely at the situation, here is the sort of thing they are seeing the Anti-Puppies say:

Anna Feruglio Dal Dan: “It’s not the Hugo ballot – that is a problem, but I am solving it by gleefully voting No Award to lots of categories, and I think I will make a point not to read any of it just to annoy you – it’s the strutting and posturing and pronouncing of you guys that I find hilarious. OK, I tell a lie, some of you are just boring and lame, Kratman for example can’t even insult people creatively, but you have moments of pure comedy genius.”

Hampus Eckerman: “Honestly, when you are saying that there are no unwritten rules, the
only thing you’re really saying is that you haven’t got the social
competence to notice them. Even when people write them on your nose.

Mickey Finn: “I’ve been making my way through the short stories, novellas and
novelettes, and so far haven’t even encountered a competently polished
turd.

NelC: “I’m not absolutely convinced that you’re not the type of loony who
thinks he can gain advantage by pretending to be a (different kind of)
loony, but either way, you’re seriously fucked in the head.”

Alexvdl: “I think you have articulated better than anyone else why Beale’s (and
other puppies) reliance on rating systems shows how far outside fandom
they are.”

Whatever reader: “I had a great time voting “No Award” today… I’d rather give the award to a trash can than to the crap they spent years working on.”

By contrast, here is how the non-Puppies in the field see the situation.

Rick Moen: “I think it’s abundantly clear what about the Beale and Torgersen
campaigning and (apparent) acquisition of nomination votes has made
habitual Hugo voters and Worldcon co-goers very annoyed and (in my
estimation) in a mood to terminate what they see as behaviour hostile to
the Worldcon.”

Whereas here is how at least some of those outside science fiction are seeing it:

Greg Ellis: “When all of this blew up I was not even a non-attending supporting
member of WorldCon. I’ve known about the Hugos for years, but never knew
I had, as a fan, a chance to vote for nominees or on the final ballot.
That all changed this year. What also changed was that I came down on
the Sad Puppies side of the debate. For awhile I was trying to look at both sides and judge equitably. I
was trying to be fair and open-minded and non-biased. Then I asked the
wrong question of the wrong people at the wrong time. Even Brianna Wu
chimed in on that one. I was a “white supremacist” by mere association
with Brad Torgerson and Larry Correia because they knew Vox Day and I
was friends with Brad and Larry on FaceBook. Guilt-by-association. I do
not tolerate being accused of something that anyone who knows me
understands that I am not. You want to push me into somebody else’s
camp, make an accusation like that.”

RI: I’ve been a spectator to this conflict for several months now. To be
honest, I didn’t even know who any of the participants were when I first
started following. Now, because of the outcry against you, Mr. Correia,
and Mr. Torgersen I have become a daily reader of your blog and am
rapidly burning through Mr. Corriea’s books.

Bojoti, a Worldcon Supporting member appears to share similar sentiments:

I knew absolutely nothing about the Sad Puppies until this year. I knew of the Hugos but little about them, either. I’d followed George R.R. Martin’s Not a Blog for years, and I remember him encouraging people to vote because the Hugos were their award (except now, they aren’t). But, back then, I had a house full of kids which meant less time for reading and fewer dollars for sure! Now, the kids are gone, and I have more of both of the aforementioned. When I discovered that WorldCon would be held in the Midwest in 2016, I was excited and decided to get a supporting membership for this year and attend the next.

I didn’t realize all the turmoil about Sad Puppies until after the nominations were announced. I came to the situation too late to nominate and unaware that my membership would be an affront to the TrueFans. I just wanted to participate in and give back to a genre that has been integral to my life. Instead, I find that I’m not welcome at the cool kids’ table, which is ironically hilarious, because my science fiction ways were unpopular to the non-science fiction crowd of my youth.

As is my researching way, I took to the Internet to look at all sides. I went all the way back to the inception of Sad Puppies. I read “Making Light.” I Googled, read, and digested from a wide spectrum from news sources (most very biased and inaccurate), authors’ websites, Twitter, and Facebook.

I think what the TrueFans and Sad Puppies don’t realize is that they are being watched by the great unwashed masses, hoi polloi, the little people of science fiction. Some of the behavior and rhetoric is so hateful and venomous that I regret my membership. Authors were saying that the new members didn’t love science fiction; they were claiming that they didn’t even read! Some were even saying stupid things like the Koch brothers bought my membership. TrueFans were disgusted by the thought of new members. They like the WorldCon being small and are actively against new members.

I’m rethinking attending WorldCon 2016. I’ll wait to see what happens at Sasquan before I decide. If people are going to act crazy like a frenetic bag of cut snakes, I want no part of that fandom (or Fandom). I don’t need to spend money to be ostracized, belittled, and hated. I’m sure I can get that for free, elsewhere!

The TrueFans are pushing the new members right into the Sad Puppies’ doghouse. I wasn’t a Sad Puppy, but if the TrueFans don’t want me, they have proven the Sad Puppies’ charge of insular exclusivity. When the TrueFans band together and decide as a bloc NOT to read the works and agree to vote No Award to Sad Puppy nominations, they’ve lost any respect or sympathy I had for them. When people advocate putting the Puppies “down,” I’m horrified. When people write “basically if the “hero” isn’t white and male, the Puppies will get all Sad at you and threaten to rape you to death. Like the good, tolerant humans they are, natch,” I’m sickened. When an author opines the correct way to treat the Sad Puppies is “Well, we make fun of them. We refuse to play with them. We refuse to share our resources with them,” I flash back to the petty games of the middle school mean girls’ cliques.

Baen Books author John Ringo has an idea where things are headed and why:

The SJBs, CHORFs, what have you are facing an uphill climb. Their ‘award winning authors’ are hardly popular in the mainstream (also frequently boring as shit on a panel) and every convention which has tried to stay entirely ‘SJW’ has found it has little or no market.

The CHORFs accuse the SPs of ‘fighting to retain white-male privilege.’ The reality is that the CHORFs are desperate to retain any sort of relevance at all. ‘Their’ conventions are failing. ‘Their’ books don’t sell as well as ‘pulp crap’. ‘Their’ magazines are losing circulation and closing. Lose control of the Hugos and they become irrelevant. And desperate regimes get crazier and crazier the more desperate they become.

They are not completely irrelevant yet. But they will be. And they fear it. Their over-the-top reactions make that very clear indeed.

They also serve

It was suggested that they also serve, who inadvertently and unknowingly do the bidding of the Evil Legion of Evil through their ludicrously predictable reactions. And lo, a badge for this brigade of Unwitting Minions was created. Evil Legion of Evil minions are free to award it to those whose behavior is so egregiously stupid or shortsighted or self-destructive that they could not possibly serve your Supreme Dark Lord better if they were consciously doing His Evil Bidding.

Given that they are, without exception, unique and special snowflakes, they naturally all bear the title “Minion #1”.

On a not entirely unrelated note, RI explains why he is now reading this blog and Larry Correia’s books:

I’ve been a spectator to this conflict for several months now. To be honest, I didn’t even know who any of the participants were when I first started following. Now, because of the outcry against you, Mr. Correia, and Mr. Torgersen I have become a daily reader of your blog and am rapidly burning through Mr. Corriea’s books. I’d like to think I stand somewhere in the between you and Corriea. I’ve noticed you’ve been calling attention to some of the unethical book reviewing practices of the SJWs and I found one I thought you would like to point out on your blog.

This person openly admits to downgrading her review after finding out about Correia’s politics.

If I am any evidence of a growing trend, then the SJWs are basically screaming themselves into irrelevance. I am glad you have decided to wade into this and stand up for your beliefs and stand against the terrorism of the left. God bless you, sir.

This is the perspective that is so often ignored. What people are assumed to perceive, and what they will actually perceive, are often two different things. Larry once said that the benefit of telling the truth is that you have no need to worry about keeping your stories straight, and another one is that people tend to recognize those who tell the truth, whether they accept the truth on that particular subject or not.

THEY are in retreat

I told you that George RR Martin has lost the plot. After publicly declining the very debate for which he called, he actually repeated his call for what he already rejected:

Here’s an idea — debate the issue without epithets. Namecalling, whether with old epithets or new ones, is no substitute for actual discussion.

Oh, come on, you cowardly sad sack of an SJW. I gave you the opportunity to debate the issue. Honestly. Civilly. Rationally. You declined. So, guess what that leaves? And while we’re at it, just get it over with and hand the books over to Brandon Sanderson or Joe Abercrombie to finish already.

As Martin’s befuddled post demonstrates, it is readily apparent that science fiction’s CHORFs aren’t entirely confident they are winning anymore. Jim Hines steals yet another page from John Scalzi’s playbook, this time playing the classic “hey, forget my past attacks on you, we’re all just friends who happen to disagree” card:

I am so damn tired of the insistence on shoving everyone and everything into an artificial “Us vs. Them” framework. The Puppies thing is just the latest example. The only clearly defined “side” in this mess is the puppies themselves, and even that’s a slippery argument. Is Theodore Beale of the Rabid Puppies on the same side as Brad Torgersen and Larry Correia? Correia suggests they are: “Look at it like this. I’m Churchill. Brad is FDR. We wound up on the same side as Stalin.” But what about the commenters? Can people support some of what the puppies said they wanted — say, greater awareness of tie-in work in Hugo nominations — without having to swear allegiance to all things rabid?

There is nothing artificial about it. The main reason SJWs were successful in infiltrating the science fiction establishment and imposing their ideology on it was due to their Fabian strategy of denying any conflict was taking place. Their entryism depended entirely upon stealth and plausible deniability. That’s why the single most important aspect of both #GamerGate and #SadPuppies was the way in which it was made perfectly clear to everyone that there are, in fact, two sides.

There are those who want to be able to define what is permissible to read, write, design, develop, play, think, and say, (SJWs) and those who wish to read, write, design, develop, play, think, and say whatever the hell they happen to please. (Everybody else)

Jim Hines isn’t “so damn tired” of “an artificial Us vs. Them framework”. He is simply alarmed that their most effective tactic has been exposed and rendered impotent.

 I keep coming across commentary and arguments that assume you have to be either pro-puppy or anti-puppy. In broader discussions, you’re either us or you’re the enemy. Left or Right. Puppy or CHORF. Lately, I’m seeing more accusations of blacklists and gatekeepers and people’s careers being hurt because of their politics or beliefs or whatever, because some publishers are for Us and some are for Them, and you can’t succeed in this business without swearing allegiance to the Evil Gun Nuts of Baen or the Evil Tree-hugging Lib’ruls of Tor. To be honest, that last bit is funny as hell.

His point might be more convincing if we didn’t have Charles “15 Hugo Nominations” Stross on record warning me about the danger to my career if I didn’t stop writing my op/ed column and start sucking up to the then-Toad of Tor and Tor Senior Editor PNH. Or testimony from everyone from Larry Correia to Sarah Hoyt. You certainly can succeed in this business by fighting the establishment, but that doesn’t mean the establishment doesn’t exist or that it won’t attack you. It’s not like everyone doesn’t know that opinions deemed badthink can not only ruin your chances of getting published by an SJW-dominated publishing house, but get them to conspire to have the SFWA Board vote to “expel” you.

I know some of the Sad Puppies desperately want there to be some kind of
Social Justice Warrior Conspiracy that’s been manipulating the Hugos
and persecuting them for years, because that creates a simple narrative
with them as the feisty rebels striking a blow against the Evil Empire.
But there’s been zero evidence for it. Correia himself said he’d audited
the Hugos a few years back and found no sign of anything suspect.

The lesson, as always, SJWs ALWAYS lie. Correia found no sign of anything suspect in the ballot-counting by the WorldCons. He did not admit there was no SJW conspiracy. A very dishonest switcheroo by McCreepy.

Part of my anger at Torgersen and Correia is because I feel like they deliberately encouraged this Us vs. Them mentality in order to win support and votes. They invented an evil cabal of “Them,” then rallied people to join their side against this fictitious enemy. Which only increases the abuse and the hatred. And please note: I’m angry at them as individuals, not because they’re conservative, or because of their views on gun control, or because they might have a different religious belief than I do. I’m angry because whatever problems were out there, these two individuals actively made them worse, and they hurt a great many people in the process. Themselves included.

Fandom is not two distinct sides. It’s a bunch of people who like things in a really big genre, a genre that has guns and spaceships and dinosaurs and dragons and magic and manly men and genderfluid protagonists and grittiness and erotica and humor and hard-core feminism and sexism and racism and hope and stereotypes and anger and messages and politics and fluff and were-jaguars and superheroes and so much more.

Criticism is not war. Choosing not to read or support things you don’t like isn’t censorship. Liking something problematic doesn’t make you a bad person.

He shouldn’t be angry at Brad and Larry, who both seriously attempted to fix the Hugo system. He should be angry at me, because I have successfully exposed that which Hines and the other SJWs desperately wanted to keep hidden, for the same reason they hid their history of embracing child molesters like Breen, MzB, and Kramer, to name a few. But we didn’t make anything worse, any more than Deidre Saoirse Moen raped any children when she helped bring MzB’s behavior to light.

Criticism isn’t war. But taking over the SF establishment for ideological purposes is war. Of course they don’t like the fact that an opposition has arisen and is fighting back. That’s why they tried to discredit and disqualify and defenestrate me 10 years ago. They correctly sensed a potentially dangerous enemy and attempted to marginalize me. But I’m still here, and more importantly, I am not alone.

That’s why they are suddenly declaring there is no war. But it’s too late. The mask has been ripped off and too many have seen the true face of the SJWs…. as Dave Freer of the Mad Genius Club notes their recent behavior:

But seriously, what have the AP [Anti-Puppies] tried so far, and what success has it brought them?  They’ve brought out media attacks accusing the Puppies and nominees of being sexists, racists, misogynist, homophobes – the usual made-up get out of jail cards rubbish with no substance and some funny twists – we’re all white Mormon men. Especially Sarah Hoyt. And a twenty year bi-racial marriage makes Brad Torgersen a racist. Then the voters weren’t real fans but slaves who voted to order (which was a true PR disaster, angering a huge circle of people).

Then there were the ‘you’ll never work in this town’ again threats to careers and reputations – with the Nielsen-Haydens and David Gerrold shrieking ‘who will rid us of these troublesome puppies?’ and providing precise instructions of what to do. Not a ‘blacklist’ of course (slither). Just things that people would do, like exclude them from publications, cons and reviews. Unlike the puppies, who actively said that their people shouldn’t, for example, boycott Tor, no such criticism came out of the AP. We’ve had people inform us we’re mad (at great length. It was funny, and very revealing – about the bat-sh!t loony writer), and bad, and just downright unfeeling to poor David’s tender sensibilities. Some AP camp-follower called Jane Carnall of Edinburgh, who has written a few opinion pieces in ‘The Guardian, went off and followed the instruction issued on ‘Making Light’ and started issuing fake 1 star reviews on Amazon on John Wright’s stories.

Oh and the cheering announcement that they will ‘No Award’ the Pups nominees out of existence, and we’ll never ever win Hugos. The latest (from a chorus, including Scalzi) has been that if the puppies and nominees do not immediately and forthwith viciously denounce Vox Day they will declare us stupid dupes and one with him. Deserving of his fate too. I’ve kind of lost track of the ‘if you do’ offer. Maybe we’ll be allowed to live out our short miserable lives like penitent whores in a nunnery, being kindly permitted to clean their chamber-pots with our tongues. Think for yourselves what you’d do given that choice: live free and maybe win or die, or surrender and live as a second – or third or fifth class citizen, continually used as a kicking boy?

And if the AP told me otherwise, I wouldn’t believe a word, given their track record. The AP really have credibility issues they need to work on.

Never believe an opponent who tries to tell you the game hasn’t even started yet. And never believe an enemy who tells you that because there is no war, you should stop shooting at him and lay down your arms. Remember, rabbits only win when wolves refuse to fight.

Interestingly enough, after an amount of his usual meandering, R. Scott Bakker reaches much the same conclusion:

 The fact that Beale managed to pull this little coup is proof positive that science fiction and fantasy matter, that we dwell in a rare corner of culture where the battle of ideas is for… fucking… real.

Only it’s not a rare corner. The battle of ideas is ongoing and everywhere throughout the culture. It’s in Games, it’s in Science Fiction, it’s in Comics, and it’s in TV and Movies. And for the first time in decades, those who favor liberty are on the offensive.

SJW science

Whether they call themselves scientists or science fiction writers, the lesson, as always, is this: SJWs always lie. Robert Trivers writes about Stephen Jay Gould, an evolutionary biologist he quickly learned was strongly inclined towards intellectual fraudulence and faux scientific fakery:

Many of us theoretical biologists who knew Stephen personally thought he
was something of an intellectual fraud precisely because he had a
talent for coining terms that promised more than they could deliver,
while claiming exactly the opposite….

Recently something brand new has emerged about Steve that is astonishing. In his own empirical work attacking others for biased data analysis in the service of political ideology—it is he who is guilty of the same bias in service of political ideology. What is worse—and more shocking—is that Steve’s errors are very extensive and the bias very serious. A careful reanalysis of one case shows that his target is unblemished while his own attack is biased in all the ways Gould attributes to his victim. His most celebrated book (The Mismeasure of Man) starts with a takedown of Samuel George Morton. Morton was a scientist in the early 19 th Century who devoted himself to measuring the human cranium, especially the volume of the inside, a rough estimate of the size of the enclosed brain. He did so meticulously by pouring first seeds and then ball bearings into skulls until they were full and then pouring them out and measuring their volume in a graduated cylinder. He was a pure empiricist. He knew brain size was an important variable but very little about the details (indeed, we do not know much more today). He thought his data would bear on whether we were one species or several, but in any case he was busy creating a vast trove of true and useful facts.

I love these people—they work for the future and gather data whose logic later generations will reveal. Precisely because they have no axes to grind or hypotheses to prove, their data are apt to be more reliable than the first wave after a new theory. I have benefitted from them in my own life, most memorably when I was shown a large and accurate literature on ratios of investment in 20 ant species, gathered long before anyone appreciated why these facts might be of some considerable interest, as indeed they were.

In any case, Morton grouped his data by population according to best estimates of gross relatedness, Amerindians with Amerindians, Africans with Africans, Nordic Europeans with Nordic, and so on. It is here, Gould alleged, that all sorts of errors were made that supported preconceived notions that among the smaller cranial capacity (and therefore stupider)) peoples would be Amerindians and Africans. For example, Gould claimed that Morton made more subgroups among Nordic people than tropical ones, thus permitting more of them to be above norm, but in fact, the opposite was true. Morton reported more Amerindian subsamples than European and routinely pointed out when particular Amerindian subsamples were as high or higher than the European mean, facts that Gould claimed Morton hid.

In other cases, Gould eliminates all samples with less than four individuals in order to reduce the number of sub-samples with only one sex—a statistically meaningless goal but one that happened to be biased in his favor and permitted him to make additional errors in his favor by arbitrarily eliminating some skulls while including others. If you are comparing group means, you may not wish to use means of less than four, but if you are adding up sub-samples to produce a larger sample, there is no reason not to aggregate all data. Morton is made to look careless and incorrect when it is really Steve who is arbitrarily biasing things in his own favor.

There is an additional contrast between Morton and Gould worth noting. To conjure up Morton’s mistakes, Gould lovingly describes the action of unconscious bias at work: “Morton, measuring by seed, picks up a threateningly large black skull, fills it lightly and gives a few desultory shakes. Next, he takes a distressingly small Caucasian skull, shakes hard, and pushes mightily at the foramen magnum with his thumb. It is easily done, without conscious motivation; expectation is a powerful guide to action.” Indeed it is, but careful re-measures show that Morton never made this particular mistake—only three skulls were mis-measured as being larger than they were and these were all either Amerindian or African.

The same can’t be said of Gould. He came across distressingly objective data of Morton, and by introducing biased procedures (no sample size below four) he was able to get appropriately biased results. And by misrepresenting the frequency of Nordic vs Amerindian subpopulations, he was able to create an illusion of bias where none existed, by mere emphatic assertion (no one bothered to check).

Where are the unconscious processes at work here? Is Steve flying upside-down on auto-pilot, unconsciously making the choices (substitute Nordic for Tropical, delete all samples smaller than four) that will invite the results he wants while hiding his bias? Is the conscious organism really completely in the dark while all of this is going on? Hard to imagine—but at the end the organism appears to be in full self-deception mode—a blow-hard fraudulently imputing fraud, with righteous indignation, coupled with magnanimous forgiveness for the frailties of self-deception in others.

In response to the criticism of Lewis et al, the keeper of Gould’s Tomb—his longtime editor at Natural History, Richard Milner—had some choice comments in defense of Stephen. Gould acted with “complete conviction and integrity” (that is, with full self-deception). “He was a tireless crusader against racism in any form.” (In what way is misrepresenting the true facts about population differences—and then hiding this misrepresentation—a contribution to anti-racism?) And then, fully in flight, he says that any bias was “on the side of the angels”. Who of us is in any position to say what is on the side of the angels? We barely know what is in our own self-interest.

Quelle surprise. Anti-racism is intrinsically anti-science.