Tag: SJW

Anti-GamerGate attacks the Honey Badgers

The SJWs came for the Honey Badger Brigade yesterday:

Early this morning, Fan Expo Canada banned Honey Badger Brigade (HBB) from the Calgary Comics and Entertainment Expo (CalEx). Security staff approached the HBB booth, ordered us to leave, and refused to state the reason why unless Alison Tieman agreed to speak to them away from the other members of the group, without recording. They informed Alison that they had received complaints on social media, including 25 allegations of harassment. No evidence was presented, no request was made for information from HBB, and no specific incident was cited until further questions were asked of security.

Upon further questioning, security mentioned the Women in Comics panel discussion from the previous day, where Alison was given permission to speak. Alison spoke briefly in relation to a topic brought up by the panelists. Accusers, however, claimed that Alison derailed the conversation. Alison and myself were in attendance, and you can listen to Alison’s statement in the panel here on YouTube. You can hear Alison, myself and indeed the entire panel in the full discussion record.

As you will hear, there was no harrassment. Expo staff and mob rule, in their crusade for ending harassment against women, harassed the Honey Badgers despite having no evidence of any policy violation.

This is what we are up against. This is why I will never back down, why I will never ever apologize for thinking, speaking, and writing freely. This is why I am the Leader of #GamerGate and why you should be too.

The real crime of the Honey Badger Brigade, for which they were successfully attacked, was not “reportedly disrupting panels”, but rather “associating with GamerGate”.

Think about it. A group of women were just harassed and driven out of a convention for being guilty by association. And the SJWs claim that we are the intolerant ones, we are the uncivil ones, we are the ones harassing women, we are the ones trying to drive others from the public discourse. Meanwhile, the moderates claim that the problem is our tone, that we’re simply not being nice enough, that if only we didn’t express our “problematic” views but kept them quietly to ourselves, everything would be all right.

Horseshit. Absolute and unadulterated horseshit.

Notice that they wanted to isolate Alison, and speak to her away from the others and without recording. Sound familiar? Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that I am an arrogant, cruel, and ruthless badthinker who eminently deserves every “shitbag” “asshat” “jackass” “dipshit” insult and every denigrating and disqualifying “mentally unbalanced” “racist” “misogynist” “sexist” “anti-Semitic” “homophobic” “Nazi” “white supremacist” description that has been hurled my way by SJWs from New York City to New Zealand for the last 10 years. Even if all of those accusations were perfectly true, how would that explain the coordinated assault on the Honey Badger Brigade?

Did that take place in response to me? If I was just a little nicer, if my rhetoric dripped with pure honey rather than pure contempt, if I lovingly laved Teresa Nielsen-Hayden’s warty folds with my tongue and dutifully nominated John Scalzi and Charles Stross and Patrick Nielsen-Hayden for awards so those three giants of modern science fiction could add to their collective total of 39 Hugo nominations (only 8 more than Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke combined), would that have somehow prevented the Honey Badgers from being attacked by SJWs and expelled from Calgary Expo?

Several tweets from this morning suggested one of the exhibitors was
proudly demonstrating banners and shirts for GamerGate. It was quickly
revealed this was The Honey Badger Brigade…. Calgary Expo has been actively responding to comments and criticisms
about its decision on Twitter, expressing it had no desire to allow a
GamerGate-themed booth onto the show floor.

This is a cultural war, everyone. And if you’re not fighting it, you’re losing it.


The reason the SJWs went after the Honey Badger Brigade instead of #GamerGate is the same reason they went after Sad Puppies instead of Rabid Puppies. The more publicly acceptable the face of their opposition, the more they are determined to silence and separate it from their most implacable opponents.

It didn’t work with Larry and Brad. It won’t work with the Honey Badgers either. #GamerGate will not abandon them. What do you say, Rabid Puppies? What do you say, Dread Ilk?

Support the Honey Badgers and join the #GamerGate email campaign against the sponsors of Calgary Expo. Send one email, just one polite little email, to start. I have. That’s all it takes… because we are legion.

The refutation of Freud

In case you weren’t convinced that psychology is a pseudoscience, this should do the trick:

Let me be perfectly clear: Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen (who really seems to more or less have tagged along on Larry’s coattails) are not in the same league as Theodore Beale. Larry and Brad are frightened, well fed little puppies sitting on top of a large pile of meaty bones and snarling because there are one or two they can’t have, and feeling justified in their fear because some skinny kittens have managed to slip away with a few of the bones and gnaw on them in peace.

Theodore Beale, on the other hand, is Cerberus sitting on top of the bone pile breathing fire and wreaking mayhem for the joy and the attention of upsetting everyone, puppies and kitties alike. I’ve been searching for ten years now and have not found a single redeeming characteristic in Beale. He’s a vile person with vile opinions, and he’s an absolutely atrocious writer. If it weren’t for the fact that he was raised with money and privilege, he would almost certainly be serving twenty to life somewhere, because he either acted on or got caught acting on his beliefs. He is someone outside the scope of psychotherapy. If you were to ask him, he would tell you there is nothing wrong with him, he’s just fine the way he is – and that is why he is outside the scope of therapy.

He doesn’t need to be saved, society needs to be protected from him – and then maybe someone (not me) can work on saving him. And I speak as someone who works with violent people, entitled people, people who abuse, on a regular basis. If he were free to act on his impulses with impunity, people would suffer. I can only be grateful he’s not particularly impulsive.

Right now, it serves Theodore Beale very well to borrow the Sad Puppy meme and create his own offshoot, the Rabid Puppies. He is getting attention and hate, and he thrives on that. It’s what he lives for. For now, while they serve his purposes, he is keeping the Sad Puppies protected from his fire – until they no longer serve his purposes.

And I suspect Correia and Torgersen know it. They are very careful to walk the line between distancing themselves from him and not distancing themselves too much. They have only recently acknowledged that it wasn’t the Sad Puppy slate that swept the Hugo nominations this year, it was the Rabid Puppy slate. They haven’t admitted (at least publicly) that it was Beale’s invitation of Gamergaters – people who are perfectly willing to commit illegal acts including doxxing and making rape and murder threats (and in at least one case, an attempt) – to exclude specifically women, and specifically minority women, from their own particular fandom (video games).

And yet (Correia and Torgersen claim) it is not about sexism. It is not about racism. It is about fighting against ideological purity. To borrow a meme, it is about ethics in gamer journalism.

Here’s the final, worst piece of all of this. By now, the Sad Puppies have realized what they have unleashed. They realize (at least privately) that they overreacted, that they were the bad actors against an opponent that only existed in their heads – but they can never publicly admit it, not without having the hell hound they unleashed turn on them. If they distance themselves from Beale too much, they risk being slapped by the same forces that they opened the door to theHugosfor. They might be subject to doxxing and threats and actions. They will have Beale’s venom spewed over them.

Yeah, somehow I doubt Larry and Brad are shaking in their boots that I am going to attack them. I know the SJWs would love it if I would do so. But that’s not going to happen. I didn’t fall for the divide-and-conquer tactics when they tried to get me to disavow Roosh and Roissy, and I’m not about to fall for it now.

You don’t need to be best friends to be allies. You only need to be shooting in the same direction. The weakness of the moderates, and the reason they are so reliably ineffective, is that they would much rather shoot at their allies than at their enemies.

The amusing thing is the way the “psychotherapist” tries to turn a very real enemy into something that is supposedly existing only in our heads… even as that enemy has been shrieking in full-throated outrage against us for the last two week. And then, she turns around and blames everything on #GamerGate, when there are only two confirmed #GamerGaters in Rabid Puppies, myself and Daddy Warpig.

The lesson, as always, is this: SJWs always lie.

Let them shriek. It won’t be the last time. Cerberus has a LOT more bones to crack.

Messages from the SJWs

A number of writers have some messages for Straight White Male publishing:

1. “Diversity is not publishing the one story. It’s publishing multiple stories from people of diverse backgrounds.”
—Karissa Chen

2. “My main characters are not always black.”
—Sophfronia Scott

3. “Read less straight white men.”
—Natalie Eilbert

4. “We read. (And buy books.)”
—Lisa Lucas

5. “Get over it.”
—Susan Orlean

6. “Be honest.”
—Yahdon Israel

7. “Listen.”
—Lauren Hilger

8. “We owe you nothing.”
—Amanda Bullock

9. “Grow up.”
—Roxane Gay

10. “Look out the window.”
—Jane Ciabattari

11. “Sit down and let us abolish you.”
—Franny Choi

12. “Ain’t nobody got time for that!?!”
—Ru Freeman

13. “Chill.”
—Morgan Parker

14. “Asian American author with an Asian American editor.
—Matthew Salesses

15. “She’s coming for you.”
—Emily Bell and Amelia Gray

16. “Plz stop.”
—Rowan Hisayo Buchanan and T Kira Madden

17. “We are not tokens.
—Rowan Hisayo Buchanan and T Kira Madden

18. “You have not doomed us. You’ve doomed yourselves.”
—Saeed Jones

19. “Pay attention to the world. (—Susan Sontag)”
—Jynne Dilling Martin

20. “Hire women. Diversity makes you strong.”
—Annelies Zijderveld

21. “We don’t need you.”
—Jayson P. Smith

22. “Take a vacation (a long one).
—Chelsea Reimann and Meg Day

23. “Don’t assume that you are at the center.”
—Cheryl Strayed

Are you still buying the “oh, we are just poor homeless writers who only want to join the discourse and find a place at the table” propaganda? They are fascists, they want control, and any publisher who was foolish enough to permit these entryists a place at the table will soon find that he’s been pushed to the side, if he hasn’t been already.

Diversity is self-destruction, because a house divided against itself cannot stand.

Meanwhile, publishing is actually 74 percent female and rising. As recently as 2010, the industry was 70 percent female.

It’s no secret that lots of women work in publishing. But just how
many more women work in publishing than men? In PW’s recent Salary
Survey (Aug. 2) one statistic stuck out: 85% of publishing employees
with less than three years of experience are women.

Total Responses: 1,584
70% Female 30% Male

Under 3 Years Experience: 164
85% Female 15% Male

3 to 6 Years Experience: 388
82% Female 18% Male

That was then. This is now: “Women accounted for 74% of the publishing workforce and men only 26%.”

The International Lord of Hate fisks GRRM

The results are pretty much as you’d imagine:

MARTIN : Scalzi — look, I know Scalzi is liberal, and I know that the
Puppies seem to hate him, though I can’t for the life of me understand
why — but whatever you think of the writer’s politics, REDSHIRTS is a
light, fun, amusing SF adventure, an affectionate riff off of STAR TREK,
Ghu help us
 

CORREIA: No, I think he’s a fine of working a popularity contest.
Redshirts was a light read, but I’m on record already disagreeing about
amusing or fun and leave it at that. As for not understanding how my
side could possibly dislike this man, here is him being gracious in
victory the night last year’s final Hugo awards were announced: 

John Scalzi @scalzi
I’m not going to lie. I’m going to be THRILLED to snarkread the whiny “I
didn’t want it anyway” nonsense that will squirt forth tomorrow.
John Scalzi @scalzi
WE ARE GOING TO MAKE THE HUGO SLATE A REFERENDUM ON THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE FICTION (loses) THE HUGOS DON’T MATTER ANYWAY
John Scalzi @scalzi
SHUT UP I AM NOT CRYING IT’S THAT LITTLE FLECKS OF GUNPOWDER FELL INTO
MY EYEBALLS SOMEONE GET ME A FLAMING SWORD SO I CAN FLICK THEM OUT
John Scalzi @scalzi
WHO IS CALLING ME PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE I AM ALL AGGRESSIVE DON’T YOU SEE
THIS HUGE GUN I HAVE WITH ME AT ALL TIMES (breaks down, sobbing)
John Scalzi @scalzi
AND NOW I WILL IGNORE THE HUGOS AGAIN UNTIL NEXT YEAR WHEN MY FEELINGS
OF PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE INADEQUACY ANGRILY WELL UP ONCE MORE
John Scalzi @scalzi
I’VE LEARNED MY LESSON AND MY LESSON IS THAT WE DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH
PATENT RACIST SHITBAGGERY ON OUR SLATE WHAT THAT WAS GOOD WRITING MAN
John Scalzi @scalzi
ITS PROOF THAT ALL THE FEMINISTS NEED TO DO TO WIN AWARDS IS WRITE BETTER STORIES ACCORDING TO THE JUDGEMENT OF THE FANS SHEEESH
John Scalzi @scalzi
I NEVER WANTED THE AWARD THAT’S WHY I’VE WHINED LIKE A KICKED DOG ABOUT IT FOR A COUPLE YEARS RUNNING.

Simply can’t imagine why my side doesn’t care for him… But
anyways, we’ve got plenty more examples of him being classy if you’d
like them.

MARTIN: I try to assist other authors (and artists, and filmmakers, and fan writers) as well, by recommending their works on my Not A Blog. Sometimes it works. More often it does not. If you do the same thing, I doubt anyone will have a problem with it.

CORREIA: They sure minded when I did that last year.

MARTIN: The backlash you are getting now is because you went way beyond that. Yes, all completely legal… but your campaign, your slate tactics, did not just get some authors you overlooked onto the ballot, it pretty much drove everyone else off the ballot. In the three short fiction categories, there are no choices but your choices (well, yours, and Brad Torgersen’s, and Vox Day’s). You say you just wanted a seat at the table. But you kicked over the table, and took ALL the seats.

CORREIA: So we obeyed all the rules, but violated the secret gentleman’s agreement you guys had in place. You know that we didn’t expect to sweep the categories. Some of the categories that were swept weren’t even because of Sad Puppies, but by Vox Day’s separate campaign that I had absolutely zero control over.

MARTIN: Your public platform was all about restoring “quality” to the
Hugos, and yet one of your standard bearers was the worst piece of
writing on the ballot. (In my opinion, of course. All of this is
opinion).

CORREIA: So, I let something you don’t like get onto the ballot, and
that destroys every other work on the ballot, and it also destroys every
other work on the ballot the next year, and I’m assuming it destroys
every work on the ballot forever. Those are some harsh double standards
you’ve got there.

But it doesn’t really matter, because Vox is off doing his
own thing. You tried to shun a man who is incapable of being shunned. He
got kicked out of the market, so went and built his own market. The
more you go after him, the stronger he gets. I don’t think you guys
realize that most of me and Brad’s communication with Vox consists of us
asking him to be nice and not burn it all down out of spite.

That’s almost entirely true. Brad and Larry understood that the Dread Ilk are formidable even as the other side was pretending that my readership is nothing but me and my imaginary wife. Although it isn’t spite that tempts me to burn it all down so much as my sheer love of chaos. Chaos always favors the fast-thinking and tactically nimble. My favorite quote from Larry was this: “I nominated Vox Day because Satan didn’t have any eligible works that period.”

Now, I know some of you are annoyed that Larry and Brad are not responding to the attacks of George Martin and other SJWs by publicly swearing blood brotherhood with me. Don’t be. They live in that community and have to find a way to abide them. We don’t. Larry and Brad are not my pack, the Dread Ilk and the Rabid Puppies are. Science fiction fandom is not my family, #GamerGate is.

They are allies. But they are not responsible for me and they have no control over me. That’s really all they are pointing out to the other side. Of course they don’t agree with me on everything, no one here does either.

One more thing. Larry also understands exactly what I am doing. This is only the beginning. We have laid the foundations for a towering structure that will one day loom over their gates and leave their walled gardens in its shadow. They don’t need to worry about us burning down their little tor. They need to worry that we won’t even see any reason to bother.

This blog goes to 23

 In which George Martin is slapped back into reality:

 nathancherolis
Apr. 12th, 2015 03:37 pm (UTC)
Re: Vox Day the anarchist
George… do you have any idea how many people read Vox’s blog and love it?

The traffic widget is right there for all to see George.

The man has what is arguably the most read blog in all of science fiction. It may be the most read science fiction website of any type.

People keep underestimating him. People keep thinking that he cannot possibly be this popular and have this many supporters.

Accept it. He is. He does.

grrm
Apr. 12th, 2015 08:06 pm (UTC)
Re: Vox Day the anarchist
Maybe so. If that’s true, it is terrifying.

Rabbits. They are so predictable. You’d think they would understand that is why it is called the Evil LEGION of Evil, not the Evil CENTURY of Evil or Evil COHORT of Evil. And he’s still insulting you, my readers and supporters, even after being warned.

grrm
Apr. 12th, 2015 08:44 pm (UTC)
Re: Who’s sufficient enough conservative to denounce Day?
Yes, generally speaking, “ignore the troll” is a good approach.

But with Vox, as with Hate, it does not seem to have worked. Ignored, they just grow, bigger and bigger, attracting more and more toads to their respective ponds.

 I’m sure everyone here will be shocked to learn that this fearsome chief rabbit is waddling away as fast as he can rather than engage in the honest dialogue for which he was calling.

 douglas_wardell
Apr. 13th, 2015 12:34 am (UTC)
On Day, Denouncements and Debates
While I’ve only been a lurker here, I’ve been reading your blog slightly longer than Vox’s and I will lose a great deal of respect for you if you decline the opportunity to debate him on the topic(s) of your choosing.

As for why I don’t denounce him, the things you’ve stated about him are falsehoods and misrepresentations of his positions. To be fair, he does sometimes bait the hook in such a way that the casual observer may misinterpret his positions to be much more inflammatory than they really are, but that’s a far cry from what he’s actually being accused of here and elsewhere.

Beyond that, any fair examination of speech from him and about him will make clear that the torrent of “hate-speech” is not flowing in the direction you assert.

If you disagree with me, you might as well debate your assertions with Vox point-by-point since he’s made the offer. Either you find out you were wrong and the accusations were unfair, or you prove your points and get at least some of the condemnation you’ve been calling for. Either should be a win for you.

grrm
Apr. 13th, 2015 04:34 am (UTC)
Re: On Day, Denouncements and Debates
What I have asserted is that “torrent of hate speech” is flowing in both directions. That’s why I explicitly linked Vox Day and Requires Hate in the same post.

You know, it is not as if Day’s statements were misreported, or distorted, or hard to find. They are all right up there on the internet. Anyone can find them in a few moments of Googling. They say what they say. Dancing around and saying, “yes, but they did not mean what they seem to mean” is ingenuous at best.

I can already tell you the result of a “debate” between me and Vox Day. Those who lean left will say I won, those who lean right will say he won, and positions will only harden.

The debate should be between VD and someone like Correia or Torgensen, between a Rabid Puppy and a Sad Puppy, to determine who really speaks for this “movement” and what its goals are.

George knows what they mean. The amusing thing is that someone did bring Jemisin’s statements to his attention, and he promptly began trying to argue context. Context! I’m sort of curious as to what context would make statements like “George Martin is racist as fuck” or “George RR Martin is a self-described pedophile, rapist, kitten-abuser, and a few other flavors of sex criminal” acceptable.

It says it on the Internet, it must be true! He also responded to the International Lord of Hate, mostly by discounting his personal experiences, although he does appear to be realistic about the consequences of open conflict in the SF world.

[[CORREIA: If the people attacking us don’t chill out, more of my people
are going to get pissed off, and it might hit a 12 or 13 next year.
:)]]

OH, believe me, I know. And we’ll go right up to 13 with
you. And Vox Day and his band of not-so-merry-men will go right to 23.
And then the Hugos will pretty much be dead, and the world of science
fiction will be that much the poorer.

That does sound like us, doesn’t it? Forget 11. THIS BLOG GOES TO 23!

Kenneth Branagh is Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Apostle John may be black now, but I don’t think Hollywood can truly claim to be colorblind until Branagh plays Martin Luther King, Jr., Jet Li plays Nelson Mandela, and an Esquimaux plays Othello.

From Idris Elba’s gritty portrayal of London detective John Luther, to Dennis Haysbert’s calm, cool and collected President Palmer in “24″ (oh, to have a black president like THAT!), to Denzell Washington and Morgan Freeman in just about any role, black actors have enriched the big and small screens, adding richness, humor, depth and, well, color to our entertainment experience.

So why did I cringe a little when I first saw Gambian actor Babou Ceesay as the Apostle John and Chinese/Zimbabwean actress Chipo Chung as Mary Magdalene standing beside the mother of Jesus during Sunday’s NBC broadcast of the first episode of “A.D. The Bible Continues”? Did my inherent, inborn “racism” as a Southern white dude (go ahead, insert your favorite toothless, ignorant redneck joke here) finally subconsciously kick in, robbing me of the rich, diverse, multicultural experience the filmmakers were obviously trying to bring me with their forward-thinking casting?

Why must every historical movie these days, particularly those that deal with biblical topics, be subjected to a diversity “litmus test”? With apologies to Afrocentrists everywhere (OK, not really), while it’s possible there were black people in the vicinity of Judea during the time of Christ, there is no way, absolutely no way, John the Apostle was black. No serious historian believes this.

Of course, by then, the SJWs will be demanding that Whoopi Goldberg play Romeo. Because transist.

Who is the racist, George?

So, who is more reasonably deemed “racist as fuck”, a white man active in science fiction fandom who created one of the most racially iconic scenes of the last decade and is openly trying to exclude a Native American from the science fiction world, or a part-Mexican Native American who dares to respond to people attacking him? I remember seeing that scene myself and thinking: “seriously, the white girl Christ?”

Last summer, in the finale of Game of Thrones’ third season, mother of dragons Daenerys Targaryen stood outside the walls of Yunkai waiting for the slaves she just freed, hoping to convince them to join her army as free men. Daenerys, the white-blonde queen traded moons ago to the Dothraki by her brother, moves into the crowd of outstretched brown arms as they chant “mhysa”, which, we learn, means “mother” in their native tongue, and is carried into the crowd as the camera pulls back to show her floating in the middle of this sea of arms like the bright planet in a constellation of darkness.

I turned to my husband and said: “No one at HBO remembers the visual impact of slavery, I guess?” It was at that moment I decided to stop watching it. I’m aware that Game of Thrones is a TV show, a work of fiction, but having invested in it for three seasons, I no longer trusted the creators to bridge the gap of thoughtful conversation between action and intent. How much misogyny and racism are we expected to put up with in the name of entertainment?

 
Save us, little white girl!

The man who came up with this imagery is calling me racist? And doing so because I generously described a deranged black woman as a “half-savage” after she described Robert Heinlein as “racist as fuck”, most of science fiction fandom as “racist as fuck” and me as “a self-described misogynist, racist, anti-Semite, and a few other flavors of asshole.” I tend to doubt Martin has any idea who and what he is defending when he attacks me.

I am not. And no doubt Dr. Martin van Creveld, the brilliant Israeli military historian I have the honor of editing and publishing, would be very surprised to learn about the anti-Semitism I supposedly proclaim so loudly. I know I was. Needless to say, I have never described myself as any of those things. Nor am I any of those things.

As it happens, my novelette that was nominated for the Hugo last year, “Opera Vita Aeterna” from The Last Witchking, is about a deep and abiding friendship between two individuals of different races, an elven sorcerer and a human monk. It is not a story of hate, but of three loves, the love of knowledge, the love of God, and the love of a friend. Another short story in that mini-collection, “The Hoblets of Wiccam Fensboro”, is a story about a reluctantly righteous goblin saving innocent hoblets from the hoblet-hating orcs who occupy his village.

I am absolutely nothing like Requires Hate. When Martin says “Make no mistake. Vox Day and Requires Hate are twins. Mirror images of one another.” he not only makes a mistake, he lies.

John O’Neill says I’m the most hated man in SF, but honestly, I don’t think we’ve even come close to maximizing the hate yet. All we need now is for George Martin to have a heart attack from the stress brought on by attacking #GamerGate, thereby enraging all the Westeros fans who haven’t given up hope that Martin has a Secret Master Plan to salvage the series and reverse the disaster of the last two books. Of course, the Torlings would inevitably put it all down to my cunning plan to market Castalia House in general and ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT in particular.

“Vox Day is ruthless! George RR Martin’s untimely death just proves he will STOP AT NOTHING!”

Anyhow, this tweet amused me: Be especially nice to @GRRMspeaking at the moment. He’s getting much flack right now. 

Do you think? Because I was deeply moved by his plight, I felt I would be remiss if I failed to respond:

@GRRMspeaking My response to you is here: http://voxday.blogspot.com/2015/04/who-is-racist-george.html … I think it is clear who is, and is not, “racist as fuck”. #SadPuppies

@GRRMspeaking Now those you called “toads” will respond. Only they’re not toads. They are the Dread Ilk and they are wolves.

George Martin baits the hook

Anyone who read A Dance with Dragons is aware that George R.R. Martin has lost it. Hell, I wrote A Throne of Bones partly because, after finishing that tedious, pointless slog of a poorly edited doorstopper, my first thought was, “I’m no great writer, but dammit, even I can do better than that shit.”

It seems a few people agreed, as ATOB has a higher rating on Amazon than ADWD, 4.2 to 3.9.

Anyhow, it’s probably a mercy that instead of further mutilating his literary legacy, he’s decided to spend the last few days waxing ignorant with regards to #GamerGate, Sad Puppies, Rabid Puppies, and the Hugo Awards. I was particularly amused by his belated Appeal to Divide and Conquer.

I do believe that there are decent, honest, well-intentioned conservatives in our field, many of whom are deeply involved in the Sad Puppies movement. Brad Torgensen and Larry Correia among them; my disagreements with them so far have been on the issues, but I don’t believe that they are racists, sexists, misogynists, bigots, or haters. But I do have a question for you:

When are you going to do something about Vox Day?

Make no mistake. Vox Day and Requires Hate are twins. Mirror images of one another. The Toad of the West, the Toad of East, each of them spewing forth the venom of hatred and violence, poisoning any attempt at honest dialogue. Requires Hate had her acolytes and enablers, and so does Vox Day, and it is from those toads that they derive their power.

Liberals and moderates and “SJWs” can denounce Day all they want, and it only serves to generate more hate, more division, more death threats. His followers will just shrug that off. But if some respected figure from the right were to speak up, well, maybe someone would listen. But do we have a conservative in the house with the courage and integrity of Laura Mixon, someone honest enough and brave enough to denounce the excesses of their “own side?”

First of all, the only Toad in science fiction is The Toad of (formerly) Tor, Teresa Nielsen Hayden. Second, neither the Ilk nor the Dread Ilk are toads. They are intelligent individuals who are entirely capable of thinking for themselves, and unlike the foolish Mr. Martin, they’re not stupid and gullible enough to swallow every false narrative put forth by SJWs in the media. Nor do they deserve to be insulted by a fat old fool who can’t be bothered to learn any of the salient facts before deciding to pontificate on the subject.

And third, it is amusing that Mr. Martin seems to seriously believe this is the first time any of us have seen this sort of Two-Minute-Hate Bait before. “Why, Mr. Decent, Honest, Well-Intentioned Conservative, if only you will join us in our ritual denouncing of today’s Emanuel Goldstein, we will be nice to you and pretend to respect you… for as long as we need you.”

Just how dumb does he think everyone on the right side of the political spectrum is anyhow?

Every member of the Evil Legion of Evil has been offered this deal if only they will abjure their Supreme Dark Lord, most of them multiple times. Every single one of them has spurned it, whether they agree with me about anything or not, because they all know exactly how forked the tongue is that speaks such deceitful promises.

Hell, I was offered the same deal myself if only I would disavow Roosh of Return of Kings and Reaxxion. To which my answer was simple and straightforward: “No, absolutely not.” This isn’t even the first time an SJW has broached the idea publicly:

  •  “There’s only one way to deal with people like Day, who see themselves as above basic human decency, and that is to cut them out of the community like a tumour. Shun them, ignore them, no-platform the hell out of them. Our conventions, our fanzines, our anthologies, our community is not open to people whose racist arguments could have come straight from the mouths of slave-owners.” (April 19, 2014)
  •  “How do you bring the weight of community disapproval on someone who isn’t part of the community?” (March 30, 2015)

Give a man a platform and he will speak his mind. Deny him a platform and he will build his own… and you will never silence him again. Rabbits always think that the only possible response to being shunned is to a) submit or b) vanish. The problem, of course, is that some of us aren’t rabbits.

And that’s why the SJWs are desperately appealing to Entertainment Weekly and George RR Martin and The Guardian and anyone and anything else that will swallow their false narrative. They are terrified because they know we are in the process of building a platform and that will mean they no longer have any influence or control over us. Over any of us.

As for Mr. Martin, it’s observably two books past time for him to hang it up and hand over A Song of Ice and Fire to Brandon Sanderson or Joe Abercrombie. Although my personal vote would be for R. Scott Bakker, just because it would be hilarious to see a horde of shape-shifting, black-seed spewing rape demons unleashed on Westeros without warning. What’s the point of featuring pointless nihilism if you don’t embrace it to the full?

Perspective

One thing I thought particularly worthy of note is what a small proportion of #GamerGate tweets are in response to the Hugo Awards. And notice that they didn’t move up until several days after the initial #SadPuppies spike.

That’s what I find so amusing about the SJW panic about those they call “thugs” in their midst. Not even a tenth of #GamerGate is paying any attention at all to the Hugo Awards yet, and that’s already enough to send them shrieking and running. This is still a period of calm as far as GG is concerned.

But if the SJWs want to be sure to grab #GamerGate’s attention, I suppose a coordinated media blitz full of ludicrous lies about people are an effective way to do it. It certainly isn’t anything we haven’t seen before.

I do have to give one SJW some credit, however. In addition to urging sanity on the more violence-prone SJWs, Mary Robinette Kowal also has a sense of humor. In response to Patrick Nielsen Hayden learns about the 2015 Hugo Awards, she wrote:

I never thought I’d say this, but you’ve made me laugh at something you intended to be funny. So, thanks for the chuckle. This was hilariously over the top.

The American Spectator covered the developing story:

The controversy over the Hugo Awards contains elements of a good
dystopian science fiction story. Unfortunately, the media brat-fit over
the successful effort to rescue escapist fantasy literature from its
political pursuers comes not from the pages of Brave New World but from Slate, Salon, and Entertainment Weekly.

Like
sports, video games, and cake baking, science fiction strangely finds
itself in the crosshairs of ideological killjoys. Perhaps it was only a
matter of time and space before the genre obsessed with time and space
became a culture-war battlefield.

“To many of the people involved in this industry, politics and message trump entertainment or quality,” Larry Correia, a New York Times-bestselling bard of monster stories, tells The American Spectator.
“But most people buy entertainment because they want to be entertained.
Many longtime readers fell away because they were tired of being
preached at or having their values insulted.”

It’s pretty good. It even contains a quote from yours truly. “We believe that the Best Novel award should actually go to the best
novels,” Vox Day says of his modest aim. “The best works should be
awarded, not only works by the best-connected.”

Who but a lunatic could possibly object to that? And, as I’ve noted, we can make a powerful objective case that the works awarded this year will be better, by every objective standard, than in recent years.

Sun Tzu and the SJWs

In the podcast interview last night, I made a comment about how SJWs have been able to apply one element of Sun Tzu’s strategic recommendations to great success throughout the culture. And, when I thought a bit more about it, I realized there is also a second element that their deceitful nature allows them to successfully implement reliably without even being aware of it.

The first is this:

It has been said aforetime that he who
knows both sides has nothing to fear in a
hundred fights; he who is ignorant of the
enemy, and fixes his eyes only on his
own side, conquers, and the next time is
defeated; he who not only is ignorant of
the enemy, but also of his own resources,
is invariably defeated.

The second is this:

War is a thing of pretence: therefore,
when capable of action, we pretend disability;
when near to the enemy, we
pretend to be far; when far away, we
pretend to be near. Allure the enemy by giving him a small
advantage. Confuse and capture him. If
there be defects, give an appearance of
perfection, and awe the enemy. Pretend
to be strong, and so cause the enemy to
avoid you. Make him angry, and confuse
his plans. Pretend to be inferior, and
cause him to despise you. If he have superabundance of strength, tire him out;
if united, make divisions in his camp.
Attack weak points, and appear in unexpected
places.

Remember, SJWs ALWAYS LIE. Deceit is not second nature to them, it is their first and most reliable instinct. They will lie when they do not have to. They will lie when there is no reason to. They will lie when their lies are easily detected. They will lie when their lies are bound to be exposed. They will lie and and dissemble and exaggerate and spin with such shameless abandon that the average individual will find it almost impossible to believe they are doing so.

And because war is a thing of pretence, their deceitful nature makes them very successful in conflict as long as their enemy does not realize how deceitful they are, anticipate their inevitable pretenses, and take advantage of them.

Sun Tzu says: “victory is to the side that excels
in the foregoing matters.” That means that if you do not anticipate SJW deceit, if you are not proactively prepared to penetrate, expose, and defend against their lies, you will lose to them.

But defeat is not inevitable, it’s not even likely, given the first element. Due to their deceitful and self-deceptive natures, SJWs neither know themselves nor their enemy. I’ll have a post later today demonstrating this: their descriptions of me and my motivations are risibly far off the mark. Because they are emotional and for the most part limited to the rhetorical level, no amount of information is capable of changing their minds, so SJW failure tends to reinforce itself rather than be corrected. (That’s why they always double-down right up until they give up.)

This ignorant self-delusion is significantly to our advantage. The problem conservatives have is that while they know themselves, they fix their eyes only on their own side and remain ignorant of the enemy. Thus the conservative “conquers, and the next time is defeated”. The conservative knows himself and mistakenly assumes that his enemy is just like him.

Because they know neither themselves nor us, the SJWs will be “invariably defeated” so long as we identify them and see them for what they are: liars and self-deceivers. We have the ability to win every conflict with them, and yet we will inevitably lose everywhere we refuse to see them for what they are or refuse to take the field.

And, by the by, this is why reading books like A HISTORY OF STRATEGY is so often useful. One simply never knows how the intellectual seeds planted by the author will sprout in one’s mind.

UPDATE: Case in point:

神乃木荘龍 ‏@SoryuKaminogi
.@voxday You’re abysmally stupid and yet somehow disturbingly malign. Like a crocodile or a cancerous hangnail. 

Notice how their rhetoric is incoherent. They have to cling to the idea that their enemy is stupid – to do otherwise would risk harming their fragile self-esteem – but somehow this “abysmally stupid” opponent is a dangerous risk. This can only be explained by attributing the danger to evil that goes well beyond the pedestrian variety, and reaches the level of disturbing malignity.

So, they choose to believe in a very stupid, very malignant enemy rather than an intelligent opposition. Needless to say, this violates the first principle mentioned above, which is to know your enemy. They simply don’t know themselves well enough to permit them to do that.