Tag: society

SF/F Thought Police strike again

Or, why Uncle Timmy was disinvited from Archon:

I’m going to tell you a little story about a good man who has been slandered and libeled by one individual who is hiding behind the anonymity of the Internets. That good man? Tim “Uncle Timmy” Bolgeo.

You see, a pathetic troll whose name I’m not going to bother typing (because it’s a nickname that the individual hides behind because they’re afraid of owning up to their actions) has, after taking random snippets of conversations and tacky jokes that Uncle Timmy publishes on something called “The Revenge”, managed to get Uncle Timmy uninvited from Archon this year. Archon, apparently, is “listening to the fans” (the one who has slandered and committed libel, but we won’t get into that at the moment) and decided that it was in their best interest to not have Uncle Timmy as their Fan Guest of Honor this year.

Let’s ignore, for the moment, the forty years that Uncle Timmy has dedicated to fandom in the South and Midwest. Let’s forget that he started and ran Libertycon for 25 years, which is one of the more popular “small cons” around. Let’s ignore the fact that the man is extremely smart and is an engineer who has a sterling reputation (except when he’s playing spades. He’s a jerk when he plays spades). Heck, let’s even ignore the fact that Uncle Timmy is an old, fat white dude who started a scholarship for a fan and friend (a black man) after he died tragically while trying to help someone.

Oh, wait. No. Not only no, but hell no. All these facts are pertinent to the lie being spread that Uncle Timmy is one big old Southern racist redneck who hates science.

I told you none of this was about me, none of it ever had much to do with me. But now you know why I have never backed down to the petty pinkshirted grotesqueries. SFWA, Archon, Rutgers, Smith, Brandeis, Haverford, it’s all the same. It’s all about control of the narrative, control of the organization, and control of the lines of communication.

That’s why toleration is not an option. That’s why preening oneself on refusing to take a stand is moral cowardice. Those are merely slow forms of surrender and submission. Sad Puppies was the first time the pinkshirts have been punched in the mouth in decades and they reacted like a vampire to Holy Water. But it was a mere splash, when what is needed is an inexhaustible firehose.

On a related subject, Sarah Hoyt addresses the triumphant vaginalism of the SFWA, which celebrates the fact that its membership did not vote an award to a single white male this year.

UPDATE: Apparently I am wrong and the Nebulas were all about me.

It’s so heartening and amazing that so many women authors won! I know
there has been a lot of drama about sexism and racism in science fiction
circles lately and I feel like all of these women winning such a high
prize is just awesome. The Vox Days of the world are going to be nearly
apoplectic with anger but they can go fuck themselves. Women in sci-fi
for the win!
– trynewideas, ULauren Davis Monday 12:11pm

Apoplectic? Quite the contrary, I am VASTLY amused. I hope they are successful in setting up the multicultural Matriarchy of their absurd fantasies. I love the fact they actually gave an award to Swirsky’s ridiculous dino-porn revenge fantasy and I wish they’d gone one step deeper into self-marginalization and only given awards to gay black women writers. They are actively killing off the market for pink science fiction and they don’t even realize they are doing it. These women are in sci-fi the same way a cancer cell is in the human body. The only victory they will find is self-extinction. They can hand themselves hundreds of awards, thousands, but they will never receive the respect they so desperately crave.

Because the map is not the territory.

Slouching towards barbarism

In his book A Troublesome Inheritance, Nicholas Wade points out what he believes to be two of the most important steps in building an advanced Western civilization. The first is the more fundamental one:

How then was the profound transition made from the chimplike society of the joint ancestor to the hunter-gatherer societies in which all humans lived until 15,000 years ago and in which kinship was a central institution? The likely steps in this process have been persuasively worked out by the primatologist Bernard Chapais. The critical behavioral step, in his view, was formation of the pair bond, or at least a stable breeding relationship between male and female….

Having a dad around makes all the difference to social networks. In highly promiscuous societies like those of chimps, an individual knows only its mother and the siblings it grows up with. With pair bonding, people know not only their father as well as their mother, but all their father’s relatives too. The males in a community now recognized both their daughters and, when their daughters dispersed to a neighboring group, a daughter’s husband and his parents.

The development of the heterosexual pair bond, which eventually developed into monogamous marriage, appears to have been crucial in the development of tribalism. It therefore follows that the modern sexual free-for-all and the weakening of the vital pair bond involved is not only dyscivic, but downright dehumanizing.

The second significant step Wade identifies comes much later, and enables the escape from tribalism. This was accomplished most successfully, and fully, in England, but also took place in East Asia:

The entry to the modern industrial world has two principal requirements. The first is to develop institutions that enable a society to break away, at least to some substantial extent, from the default human institution of tribalism. Tribalism, being built around kinship ties, is incompatible with the institutions of a modern state.

The break from tribalism probably requires a population to evolve such behaviors as higher levels of trust toward those outside the family or tribe. A second required evolutionary change is the transformation of a population’s social traits from the violent, short-term, impulsive behavior typical of many hunter-gatherer and tribal societies into the more disciplined, future-oriented behavior seen in East Asian societies and documented by Clark for English workers at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

But this break from tribalism required a eugenic and eucivic mechanism, one that Wade rather generously labels “natural selection”: the English rich consistently having a little more than twice as many children as the poor.

As it happens, Clark has documented four behaviors that steadily changed in the English population between 1200 and 1800, as well as a plausible mechanism of change. The four behaviors are those of interpersonal violence, literacy, the propensity to save and the propensity to work….

“The surname evidence confirms a permanent selection in pre-industrial England for the genes of the economically successful, and against the genes of the poor and the criminal,” Clark concludes. “Their extra reproductive success had a permanent impact on the genetic composition of the later population.”

Clark’s data provide substantial evidence that the English population responded genetically to the harsh stresses of a Malthusian regime and that the shifts in its social behavior from 1200 to 1800 were shaped by natural selection. The burden of proof is surely shifted to those who might wish to assert that the English population was miraculously exempt from the very forces of natural selection whose existence it had suggested to Darwin.

If Wade and Clark are correct, this has terrible implications for the profoundly dyscivic mechanisms we are witnessing across the West today, where the dependent classes and the imported barbarians have considerably more children than the productive classes. While this part of the book is more logic based on statistical and historical observations than science, its scientific aspects are fairly firm. Blank slatists attempting to dismiss it unread, (the ever-inept PZ Myers being but one example), will soon find themselves forced to take scientifically indefensible positions.

We can play that game

Remember, any time you see someone pop off about Christianity or say anything negative about anyone on the Right who isn’t a straight white male, one has a duty to register a complaint with the appropriate speech police. Those are the new rules of the game, after all, and there is NO PLACE IN SOCIETY for anyone who expresses a negative opinion about God, or Christians, or the UK Independence Party.

An education official was visited by police because he had upset Ukip on Twitter. Officers knocked at Michael Abberton’s door to question him about a mocked-up poster he had placed online that criticised the Eurosceptic party’s policies.

They asked him about his ‘intentions toward Ukip’ and suggested he should tell no one that the visit had taken place.

Mr Abberton, a Green party member, said police had overstepped the mark. The Cambridgeshire force said it had acted over a possible breach of electoral law. But their heavy-handed actions were condemned by civil rights campaigners and politicians from across the political spectrum.

That sort of thing works much better on the r/selected anyhow, which makes it some QUALITY black-knighting. Because, remember, there is NO PLACE IN SOCIETY for people who do not believe the things that we believe.

If you seriously want to knock a feminist back, drop that line on her. They literally have no idea how to respond to being targeted that way. Not when there is NO PLACE IN SOCIETY for her.

Live by the punch, die by the punch

I’m not sure which is more amusing, this young woman whining about her well-merited concussion or the people who are shocked that so many people aren’t sympathetic to a poor little woman who didn’t do anything except punch a rugby player in the face in the middle of a brawl.

Everyone with a warrior woman fetish should watch the video, repeatedly, until they get it through their heads that women simply cannot fight men. Too small, too weak, too slow. See the ragdoll-flopping and the way she goes limp? That’s from a single punch from a college-age man she assaulted who didn’t see her attack coming and clearly isn’t a trained fighter. She was lucky she only got a concussion; if he’d aimed a little lower, he’d probably have broken her jaw.

(Old martial arts trick: don’t aim for the cheekbones on a rear hand cross, aim for the jaw. It’s much harder to crush a cheekbone than to knock the jaw out of alignment. It’s instant incapacitation. Also, uppercuts work better to daze the opponent.)

This comment was the best: “I must be from a different era. I don’t hit women and I don’t like seeing
women being hit. Amazingly so many comments support the guy. Sick
world.”

I, on the other hand, very much enjoy seeing people who initiate violence smacked around, whether they are men or women. Although it is probably funnier when it is women getting flattened, because they seem to think that they have the right to initiate violence without suffering any consequences for it.

The thing is, it is very, very easy to avoid getting punched in the face. A) Don’t mouth off to anyone bigger than you are. B) Don’t hit anyone. If you are reading this, you are probably aware that I am not the nicest or most easygoing person in the world, but I have never, in my entire life, had anyone hit me back for anything I did or said. There is a very good reason for this: I am civil to strangers and I do not initiate the use of violence.

That doesn’t mean I won’t wash my hands in your blood if you hand me an engraved invitation by assaulting me, or that I won’t enjoy the sound of bones cracking and the rush of pure adrenaline that physical altercations provide… but I will not start anything. I may even turn the other cheek, if I am feeling particularly inspired. But that’s something to keep in mind. It is simply impossible to know if that quiet, polite guy in the corner, or that gentle giant sitting at the bar, is the sort of adrenaline junkie who happens to get off on the occasional burst of violence.

What most women don’t understand, either because they fear violence or don’t take it seriously, is that for many, if not most, men, it is a RUSH.

Legalizing prostitution

Dr. Helen considers whether legal prostitution would free men from sexual control by women:

How can it be legal to sell sex but illegal to buy it? Who are you selling sex to if no men are allowed to buy it? Of course, any time one sees a feminist of the Catherine MacKinnon ilk, all logic goes out the window as long as men are rounded up and put in jail. This is sick, twisted logic and has no place in a free society. It was a group of women who apparently banned prostitution in the US according to this Wikipedia entry:

    Originally, prostitution was widely legal in the United States. Prostitution was made illegal in almost all states between 1910 and 1915 largely due to the influence of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.

Perhaps women don’t want the competition from prostitutes for resources from men? Or they just feel disgusted that a man might be able to get sex so easily? I do wonder if men were able to go freely to prostitutes without fear of jail time if it would free them sexually from female and (and state) control?

It’s hard to think it would make too much difference, but then, the sexual marketplace does tend to look very different to a high status man to whom there are more sluts readily available than he can possibly nail than it does to a low status man who is working on a multi-year dateless spell.

The thing is, the Alphas and Betas don’t need more sexual access and I don’t see too many Deltas and Gammas availing themselves of whores because it’s hard to put a prostitute on a pedestal. It would tend to dispel the illusion of womanly virtue to which they cling, often in direct denial of the evidence.

My suspicion, and it is only that, is that legalizing prostitution might have a net virtuous effect on women, as the distinction between SMV and MMV would be more clear. In which case, the answer would be no, legalization would not free men from the sexual control of women.

In any event, there is no reason to ban prostitution except on grounds of religious morality, and if it is unconstitutional to ban everything from homogamy to abortion on those grounds, then I see no reason why the trade in sexual services should be limited in any way. Whether one pays the woman or not, the moral infraction committed is the same.

The Democratic electoral strategy

According to Instapundit:

 The way you turn states from red to purple is to make blue states so intolerable that a lot of people flee them for red states. Then those voters stupidly vote for the same disastrous policies in their new homes.

Sadly, he’s right. Because MPAI. The average idiot never learns that if you vote more power to the State because you want something, the State will use that power in multiple ways you don’t want.

This is why no one should be permitted to vote in state or local elections after a relocation for at least 20 years. After all, no one made them move there.

Fake revolutionaries reveling in sewage

The New York Post observes that post-Ramis comedians now flatter the powerful rather than skewer them:

Seventies comedy had a revolutionary undertone. It had a purpose. It had substance. It not only made you laugh, it put the world to rights. It was a snowball with a rock inside it.

How does the massive group diarrhea of “Bridesmaids” do that? What does pie-bonking tell us about society?

Today’s comics have abdicated their responsibility to take down the powerful. They tiptoe around President Obama, but comedy has to be fearless.

These days they’re more at ease mocking their social inferiors than going after the high and mighty. Comfortably ensconced inside the castle that Richard Pryor and George Carlin tried to burn down, they drop water balloons on the unspeakable middle-America drones of “Parks and Recreation” and “The Office.”

There’s a joke from “The Office” that’s typical of the contempt. Andy says, “I went to a little school called Cornell — ever heard of it?” It’s not a takedown from below but a sneer from above, in tune with Dwight Schrute’s pathetic insistence on his title of “assistant regional manager” when he’s merely “assistant to the regional manager,” and anyway anyone with “regional manager” in his title is a nobody by definition.

Cornell, to comedy elites and graduates of the 15 schools that outrank it, is a near-mediocre brand so lame that only a dope would brag about it. “The Office’s” first and second showrunners Greg Daniels and Michael Schur both went to Harvard, as did writer-actor B.J. Novak. Their colleague Mindy Kaling went to Dartmouth (which also unclogs its nose at the likes of Cornell).

Ramis’ death is a reminder that comedy has gotten too fat and happy, too rich and insulated, too therapeutic and self-adoring, too willing to mistake the meaninglessly crude for the spectacularly subversive.

Even comics who present themselves as the loyal opposition to the political leadership, like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, expend most of their effort simply repackaging Democratic Party talking points as jokes. The ’70s hang-’em-all anarchist spirit lives on only in the margins, in a few brave outposts like “South Park.”

It’s as if today’s comedy writers are sitting respectfully, stars in their eyes, as their beloved president sits amongst them like Charming Guy with Guitar in “Animal House,” gently strumming away and singing, “I gave my love a cherry.” If some free-ranging Blutarksyite came up and smashed the guitar, they’d stand up — and pound the rebel for interrupting such a beautiful, magical moment.

Then they’d go back to cracking jokes about those pathetic losers destined for unspeakable middle-management manufacturing jobs because they only managed to get into Cornell.

What happened? My guess is that the Baby Boomers got sufficiently powerful and were too self-absorbed to accept anyone poking humor at them. And they won’t tolerate any comedian who is willing to challenge their particularly bland and all-smothering form of evil.

Plus the more liberal the comedic establishment, the less humor it tolerates. That’s why they’re limited to the One Liberal Joke: “You know this guy? He’s not as smart as we are!”

Hilarity ensues….

Krinocracy in America

Or rather, the absence therein:

Ending a day that cast a glaring national spotlight on Arizona, Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican, vetoed a bill on Wednesday that would have given business owners the right to refuse service to gay men, lesbians and other people on religious grounds. Her action came amid mounting pressure from Arizona business leaders, who said the bill would be a financial disaster for the state and would harm its reputation. Prominent members of the Republican establishment, including Mitt Romney and Gov. Rick Scott of Florida, also sided with the bill’s opponents, who argued that the measure would have allowed people to use religion as a fig leaf for prejudice.

Not that we needed any additional confirmation that Mitt Romney was a social liberal and against the Constitutional right of free association, but this is just one more reason that conservatives were right to stay home rather than vote for the man. Meanwhile, a federal judge provides Texans with a good cause for revolution as he tries to overthrow the Texas State Constitution:

A federal judge in Texas struck down the state’s ban on same-sex marriage on Wednesday, ruling that the laws restricting marriage to a man and a woman violated the United States Constitution and handing gay-rights advocates a major legal victory in one of the nation’s biggest and most conservative states.

The judge wrote that the amendment to the state Constitution that Texas voters approved in 2005 defining marriage as between a man and a woman — and two similar laws passed in 1997 and 2003 — denied gay couples the right to marry and demeaned their dignity “for no legitimate reason.”

“Without a rational relation to a legitimate governmental purpose, state-imposed inequality can find no refuge in our United States Constitution,” wrote Judge Orlando L. Garcia of United States District Court for the Western District of Texas, in San Antonio.

As I said years ago, the DOMA people were right. Without writing the defense of marriage directly into the Constitution and thereby making it definitionally Constitutional, the wicked judges of the land would simply overturn any law, any vote, and, apparently, even the Constitution of a Sovereign State. We don’t live in a democracy or a nomocracy or even a Constitutional Republic, we live in a krinocracy where judges rule and freely legislate from the bench with about as much legal coherence and legitimacy as freestyling rappers.

What is interesting isn’t that the terminally aggressive lavender lobby is insanely overstepping its bounds, ensuring a vicious and well-merited swing of the pendulum, but rather the way it has educated foreign governments to realize that they dare not give their homosexual communities an inch, lest they immediately seize a mile.

I strongly suspect the recent political gains for gays in the United States are directly linked to the recently expanded criminalization of gays in India, Nigeria, and Uganda. And the foreign response is not only sensible, but advisable. I’m a “leave everybody alone” libertarian with no particular animus towards gays myself, but it is obviously preferable to see an increasingly obnoxious minority locked up and forcibly closeted than see both democracy and the freedom of association completely destroyed and thereby immanentizing the societal eschaton.

Actions always have consequences. We know that civil society can survive the mild societal oppression of gays, (and in the USA, it was mild by every historical standard). We do not know, and in fact, we have good cause to believe otherwise, that it can and will survive the intense suppression of democracy and free association by krinocracy that we are presently observing.

Put off the career, girls

Stickwick lays the smack down with all the doctoral authority that only a female physics PhD can wield:

I am a highly intellectual woman with a successful professional career, and I realize now what a mistake I’ve made by not settling down and having children early. I married 12 years ago, but put off having children in order to finish graduate school and establish my scientific career. Last December, at the age of 42, I had a baby daughter. I realize now that this would’ve been MUCH easier 10 or 20 years ago. It’s not only a struggle to care for a newborn at my age, but making the sudden shift from a woman who has, for decades, been very busy with intellectual pursuits and relatively unencumbered by responsibility to a stay-at-home mom has been unexpectedly difficult.

Read the rest at Alpha Game. However, I think she seriously underrates her intellectual activities as a stay-at-home mother, as will become readily apparent in a few months.

Progess towards regress

James Taranto correctly points out that the solutions to past problems may turn out to be even more severe problems in their own right.

The decline of marriage among poor and working-class Americans is a result of a variety of social and economic changes. Among them, as Lowrey notes, are “tidal economic forces,” namely “globalization, the decline of labor unions [and] technological change.”

She ignores the tidal social changes that have also contributed, namely the sexual revolution and the expectation that women will spend most of their adult lives in the workforce, which, as we’ve argued, reduced the incentives for both men and women to marry. It is no more feasible to turn the clock back on globalization or automation than on contraception or female labor-force participation. All of these developments represent progress, in that they were solutions to the problems of the past. All of them contribute to the problems of the present.

This is an interesting point, especially in light of the fact that female labor-force participation has been dropping steadily ever since it peaked at 60.3 percent in 2000. It has dropped 6.4 percent to 56.9 percent, a level not seen since 1988.

Those who argue that the clock cannot be turned back are simply in denial. Not only can the clock be turned back, we can be certain that the clock will be turned back whenever the progressive developments lead to an unsustainable situation. Globalization will end as soon as people in the wealthier countries understand that free trade necessarily means impoverishment and a decline to global norms.

(Remember, we haven’t seen any changes in perceived wealth as yet because people have been spending through their savings and maximizing their debt in order to maintain their current levels of consumer spending. Once the consumer spending begins to contract, the credit disinflation will give way to full-fledged credit deflation.)

Contraception was outlawed before and it will be outlawed again in some countries once it becomes clear that not only is the societal price for replacing children with semi-civilized immigrants too high, but such replacement policies are correlated with net economic losses rather than the long-assumed gains. All actions and policies have unintended consequences, which is why the simplistic notion of progress as an inexorable clock is simply misguided.