Marvel’s biggest screw-up in 2017

At least, according to the SJWs in the comics media:

#1: Marvel Chairman Ike Perlmutter continues to be good friends with, official advisor to, and financial supporter of President Donald Trump

Marvel has made a big effort to brush off criticism that they’ve abandoned their commitment to diversity in 2017 after saying that they heard from retailers that people didn’t want it and then canceling a crapload of books with LGBTQ and POC leads at the end of the year. Marvel editor Jordan White even took to Twitter to ask people to please keep buying Marvel books so that they can get their diversity back on in 2018.

But how can Marvel Comics be a positive force for social justice when their Chairman is good friends with Donald Trump and financially supported his presidential campaign? Do a couple of comic books with more representation even out financial support for a President that has tried to ban Muslims from entering the country, wants to deport immigrants, has openly bragged about sexual assault on tape, and done so many other terrible things that it would take a dozen listicles to name them all? For every dollar spent on a book promoting a positive social message, how many ended up in the coffers of the Trump campaign through donations from Perlmutter? What would the ratio need to be before any positive benefit is canceled out?

Right. THAT is certainly the problem. Any more questions about what convergence is?


The jar ran out

He tries so hard to be relevant. To be significant. To matter. But not all the agent- and publisher-pumping in the world can disguise the fact that the grand decade-long attempt to transform a blogger turned midlist writer of color-by-number Heinlein pastiche into a leading author has failed.

John Scalzi@scalzi
Actual thing I just said as I was cleaning my office: “Damn it, *now* where am I going to put this special citation from the Ohio House of Representatives?!?”

(it was under a pile of books before)

Artie Fufkin, Polymer Records@FrmerJoe
Actual thing I thought while reading this tweet: “Scalzi needs everyone to know that he got citations from the Ohio House of Representatives and Senate? How pathetic is that?”

John Scalzi@scalzi
(pats head)

That’s because you’re an asshole, child.

Artie Fufkin, Polymer Records@FrmerJoe
Wow! Killer comeback! I can see why your cutting wit is feared throughout the land.

This naturally raises the question, how would a dumpy little guy like Scalzi pat anyone on the head in the first place? He’s 5’4″ and nearly 200 pounds; he’s little more than a gelatinous blob of SJW, snark, and insecurity. Anyhow, I preferred this response.

Spacebunny Day @Spacebunnyday
Actual thing I said when I was cleaning out my attic: “Damn it, *now* where am I going to put my fifth place ribbon from my jr. high track and field day?!”

The most amusing thing about this exchange is that it’s the consequence of Scalzi’s attempt to address the very uncomfortable fact that VP is now nearly ten times more popular than Whatever by his own chosen metric of importance. IT’S LIKE THE BOUNDLESS HELL OF ELEMENTARY SCHOOL ALL OVER AGAIN! IT WASN’T SUPPOSED TO BE THIS WAY! NETFLIX! PARAMOUNT! MOBILE GAMES! SPECIAL FREAKING CITATION!

Well, Scalzi certainly is special, to put it mildly. Whatever happened to that jar of ZFG? It must have run out.


A Christmas parody

I’ve seldom been more proud of my progeny. We went to a local church tonight for a Christmas Eve service, but instead of the intellectually formidable young pastor who normally preaches there, it was a woman who apparently serves the church in some administrative capacity officiating.

As you might expect, she promptly began talking about herself, then talked about herself some more, then invited all the children to come forward in order to bask in her proximity. She proceeded to completely ignore the congregants in favor of trying to charm the children, prompting me to observe that women in religious leadership inevitably resort to either a) entertaining the children or b) sacrificing them.

After about half an hour of this performance art, one child commented that the ersatz pastor had yet to mention either God or Jesus Christ. And when she did finally get around to addressing Christmas, it was to tell the story from the perspective of a 12-year-old girl living in Bethlehem. For a moment, I thought I was going to have to physically restrain another child from going full “bullwhips in the Temple” on the woman; we finally left in the middle of her animated monologue about what that first Christmas would have felt like to her younger self had her she been there before any of the kids removed a shoe and winged it at her head. Nor were we the only people who walked out early.

The rest of the family was surprised when we returned home much earlier than expected, but as I pointed out, we would have had a considerably more genuine Christian experience had we simply stayed home and watched A Charlie Brown Christmas again. But for all of that, it was an early Christmas present for me in seeing first-hand how the younger generation is more than ready to go full Deus Vult on the cursed churchians.

And speaking of the unlikely Christmas cartoon classic:

Peanuts creator Charles Schulz was a man of deep faith, and was unwavering in his insistence that the Christmas special featuring his beloved characters also feature the reason for the holiday itself: the birth of Jesus Christ.

Schulz ingeniously developed the script so that Linus’ soliloquy about angels telling the shepherds the good news about the Savior’s birth is central to the plot. There is no way to edit out the Bible verse and still have the story make sense. Tweaks have been made to the special over the years — minor edits to color and sound effects, references to sponsor Coca-Cola removed after the original broadcast — but Jesus always remained.

And so we have this wonderful annual reminder of the true meaning of Christmas, delivered by a child’s voice in an animated cartoon.

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace and goodwill towards men. 


Like a prince to the slaughter

It is increasingly evident that Meghan Markle is going to chew up Prince Harry before she spits him out and walks off with millions. She is a female superpredator – there are even fairly reliable rumors that she did an amount of escorting before her big television break – and he clearly has absolutely no idea what he is in for. I find it astonishing that the monarchy is permitting him to marry this woman even though there is almost no chance he’ll ever get anywhere near the throne.

Prince Harry will not be taking part in the traditional royal Boxing Day shoot because he doesn’t want to upset his fiancee Meghan Markle.

The 33-year-old was just 12 when he took part in his first festive shoot but has pulled out because Miss Markle is a keen animal rights campaigner.

Miss Markle, 36, doesn’t like hunting and Prince Harry is said to have shocked gamekeepers at Sandringham after he informed them he won’t be there on December 26.

Instead, his brother Prince William, 35, and 69-year-old father Prince Charles, will take part in the shoot. A royal source told The Sun: ‘The Boxing Day shoot was always going to be a tricky issue. Meghan is a keen animal rights campaigner and doesn’t like hunting in any form. ‘Harry loves it and has always been out there on Boxing Day. But if it means breaking with long-standing royal traditions to avoid upsetting her, so be it.

This promises to be the worst ending for an English royal since King Charles I met the headman. And, you may recall, that started with an unwise wedding too. It’s just… embarrassing, really.


What ARE the odds?

Such a coincidence….

The third man killed in the deadly Amtrak derailment south of Seattle has been identified as an Auburn child pornography collector and an outspoken proponent of child sexual abuse, whose crimes were first detailed in a 2013 SeattlePI story.

The days since the deadly Amtrak derailment between Tacoma and Olympia saw two of the three fatally injured victims, Jim Hamre and Zack Willhoite, celebrated for their love of trains. Hamre, 61, and Willhoite, 35, were close friends and volunteers on the board of All Aboard Washington, a rail advocacy organization.

Benjamin Gran’s story is more complicated.

Gran, a leading member of an online forum dedicated to promoting the sexual abuse of children, served a federal prison term after he was caught with a vast collection of child pornography videos.

The Pierce County coroner’s office said Wednesday that Gran, 40, died of multiple traumatic injuries sustained in Monday’s crash. His death came six years after child pornography investigator came knocking on his apartment door.


Covering for the monsters

Inadvertently and out of good intentions, I have no doubt. But women like Claire Berlinski are covering for the monsters all the same:

We are a culture historically disposed to moral panics and sexual hysterias. Not long ago we firmly convinced ourselves that our children were being ritually raped by Satanists. In recent years, especially, we have become prone to replacing complex thought with shallow slogans. We live in times of extremism, and black-and-white thinking. We should have the self-awareness to suspect that the events of recent weeks may not be an aspect of our growing enlightenment, but rather our growing enamorment with extremism.

We should certainly realize by now that a moral panic mixed with an internet mob is a menace. When the mob descends on a target of prominence, it’s as good as a death sentence, socially and professionally. None of us lead lives so faultless that we cannot be targeted this way. “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.”

Your computer can be hacked. Do you want to live in the kind of paranoid society where everyone wonders—Who’s next? To whom is it safe to speak freely? What would this joke sound like in a deposition? Do you think only the men who have done something truly foul are at risk? Don’t kid yourself. Once this starts, it doesn’t stop. The Perp Walk awaits us all.

Given the events of recent weeks, we can be certain of this: From now on, men with any instinct for self-preservation will cease to speak of anything personal, anything sexual, in our presence. They will make no bawdy jokes when we are listening. They will adopt in our presence great deference to our exquisite sensitivity and frailty. Many women seem positively joyful at this prospect. The Revolution has at last been achieved! But how could this be the world we want? Isn’t this the world we escaped?

Who could blame a man who does not enjoy the company of women under these circumstances, who would just rather not have women in the workplace at all? This is a world in which the Mike Pence rule—“Never be alone with a woman”—seems eminently sensible. Such a world is not good for women, however—as many women were quick to point out when we learned of the Mike Pence rule. Our success and advancement relies upon the personal and informal relationships we have with our colleagues and supervisors. But who, in this climate, could blame a venerable Oxford don for refusing to take the risk of teaching a young woman, one-on-one, with no witnesses? Mine was the first generation of women allowed the privilege of unchaperoned tutorials with Balliol’s dons. Will mine also be the last?

Yes, and it should be the last. The grand feminist experiment in sexual equality has failed, brutally. It failed faster than communism. It failed faster than civic nationalism. It failed faster than multiculturalism. Feminism is literally the dumbest, most destructive ideology that has ever been invented, which is no surprise because it was invented by the most neurotic women history has ever known.

And the more we learn about (((Hollywood))) and Washington and Berkeley and London, the more it is clear that not only were those “moral panics” and “sexual hysterias” justified, they were merely scratching the surface of a diseased evil that runs much deeper and wider under the surface of society than most normal Americans realized. Consider the following passage from The Last Closet, in which one member of science-fiction fandom describes the reaction of the Berkeley science-fiction community to the public behavior of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s husband.

At first Berkeley was indifferent to Walter’s sex life. This gradually began to change. There were two main causes for this. At a GGFS meeting at the S’s, S walked into her son’s bedroom—age 13—to find him in bed with Walter with Walter’s arm around him. They were watching TV. (Walter is incredible.)  S wasn’t about to take this. She didn’t make a scene at the time, but from then on, someone else was anti-Walter. Thenceforth the S kids were under instructions to retire into their room and barricade the door with furniture whenever Walter was in the house. They did too. S wanted to ban Walter from the house entirely but Alva felt great reluctance to reject any fan.

Most people were rather amused by this incident, feeling that the kid could say “No” and even if he said “Yes” the experience probably wouldn’t hurt him any. After all, Walter is so child-like himself that it would be just as if the kid were playing around with another kid. And quite apart from the sexual connotations some people were outraged that an adult could prefer the society of children to that of adults, as Walter does.

The second cause was Walter’s sex play with 3-year old P. He had her trained up to the point where she would take off her clothes the minute she saw him. He would then “rub her down” and all that. I recall one occasion—a fairly large gathering at the Nelsons — in which he also used a pencil, rubbing the eraser back and forth in the general area of the vagina, not quite masturbating her.

What I have learned from editing Moira Greyland’s book is that where there is sulfuric smoke of this nature, there is not merely a fire, there is a raging inferno. What is really worse for women, sacrificing a few career opportunities for the evolutionary dead ends in the workplace or sacrificing women as young as three to the depraved appetites of sexual predators?


Happy Converged Christmas at Tor

This is hilarious. The Macmillan executives who just shut down Pronoun have got to be eyeing serious cuts at Tor Books in 2018. At least Pronoun did what it was supposed to do.

Black Excellence: Honoring Kwanzaa through Science Fiction and Fantasy

It may be the holiday season, but for many people that goes beyond just Christmas or Hannukah. In my case, it means honoring my ancestors and culture through Kwanzaa. I’ve celebrated Kwanzaa alongside Christmas for nearly two decades now. While I no longer go through the whole ritual of lighting the mishumaa saba (seven candles) in the kinara (candleholder) or setting out the mazao (crops) and kikombe cha umoja (unity cup) on the mkeka (mat), I still try to honor the Nguzo Saba (Seven Principles) on which Kwanzaa was founded. One of the ways I do that is by spending the week of Kwanzaa focusing on work created by African Americans, from television to movies to comics to books to businesses and beyond.

It’s always amusing to see people pretending to care about fake holidays for fake Americans. As for me, I like to celebrate Black Excellence during Kwanzaa by watching Serena Williams defeat an white girl half her weight in straight sets while listening to Puff Daddy’s greatest hits, after which I read one of SFWA Grand Master Samuel L. Delaney’s beautiful tales of true gay love between man and underage boy.

It’s a very special time of year.


Dems to the Frankengroper: resign

The Democrats have finally concluded that it is time for (((Al Franken))) to resign:

Fourteen Democratic senators and the DNC chief urged Sen. Al Franken to resign Wednesday following the latest sexual misconduct allegation against him. After the resignation calls, Franken’s office said the senator would make an “announcement” on Thursday. It didn’t elaborate.

 Earlier Wednesday, Politico reported that a former Democratic congressional aide is accusing the Minnesota Democrat of forcibly trying to kiss her 11 years ago, adding to a string of allegations against him. In a statement before the calls for his resignation started, Franken denied the latest accusation against him.

In a succession of statements Wednesday, 14 of Franken’s Senate Democratic colleagues — nearly a third of the party’s caucus — pushed for him to step down. Among them was Patty Murray of Washington, the third-ranking Senate Democrat.

Although it would be advantageous to Republicans if Franken tried to run for re-election, it would be even more satisfying to see the nasty little creep forced to resign in disgrace. His election was fraudulent and he never should have even been nominated by the DFL in the first place.


Mailvox: do not “correct” me

I so despise the sort of midwit who leaps upon every possible opportunity to “correct” someone in order to show off how smart he is, and in doing so, demonstrates his own ignorance. Add in a dash of smug passive-aggression if you want to maximize the annoyance factor. Here is a suggestion: if you think I’ve gotten something wrong, look it up. If the 14 years of this blog serve as a reliable guide, there is about a 98 percent chance you are wrong.

VD: We can only hope that he will treat them in much the same way Sulla treated his political opponents

valiance: The way *Marius* treated his political opponents, surely?

VD: No.

From Infogalactic: Sulla

At the end of 82 BC or the beginning of 81 BC, the Senate appointed Sulla dictator legibus faciendis et reipublicae constituendae causa (“dictator for the making of laws and for the settling of the constitution”). The “Assembly of the People” subsequently ratified the decision, with no limit set on his time in office. Sulla had total control of the city and republic of Rome, except for Hispania (which Marius’s general Quintus Sertorius had established as an independent state). This unusual appointment (used hitherto only in times of extreme danger to the city, such as during the Second Punic War, and then only for 6-month periods) represented an exception to Rome’s policy of not giving total power to a single individual. Sulla can be seen as setting the precedent for Julius Caesar’s dictatorship, and for the eventual end of the Republic under Augustus.

In total control of the city and its affairs, Sulla instituted a series of proscriptions (a program of executing those whom he perceived as enemies of the state). Plutarch states in his “Life” of Sulla (XXXI): “Sulla now began to make blood flow, and he filled the city with deaths without number or limit”, further alleging that many of the murdered victims had nothing to do with Sulla, though Sulla killed them to “please his adherents”.

“Sulla immediately proscribed eighty persons without communicating with any magistrate. As this caused a general murmur, he let one day pass, and then proscribed two hundred and twenty more, and again on the third day as many. In an harangue to the people, he said, with reference to these measures, that he had proscribed all he could think of, and as to those who now escaped his memory, he would proscribe them at some future time.” -Plutarch, Life of Sulla (XXXI)

The proscriptions are widely perceived as a response to similar killings which Marius and Cinna had implemented while they controlled the Republic during Sulla’s absence. Proscribing or outlawing every one of those whom he perceived to have acted against the best interests of the Republic while he was in the East, Sulla ordered some 1,500 nobles (i.e., senators and equites) executed, although it is estimated that as many as 9,000 people were killed. The purge went on for several months. Helping or sheltering a proscribed person was punishable by death, while killing a proscribed person was rewarded with two talents. Family members of the proscribed were not excluded from punishment, and slaves were not excluded from rewards. As a result, “husbands were butchered in the arms of their wives, sons in the arms of their mothers”. The majority of the proscribed had not been enemies of Sulla, but instead were killed for their property, which was confiscated and auctioned off. The proceeds from auctioned property more than made up for the cost of rewarding those who killed the proscribed, making Sulla even wealthier. Possibly to protect himself from future political retribution, Sulla had the sons and grandsons of the proscribed banned from running for political office, a restriction not removed for over 30 years.


Not a good start

After reading Tom Wolfe’s unstinting praise of EO Wilson, I decided I need to read the man’s work. Who could fail to be interested after this sort of billing?

He could be stuck anywhere on God’s green earth and he would always be the smartest person in his class. That remained true after he graduated with a bachelor’s degree and a master’s in biology from the University of Alabama and became a doctoral candidate and then a teacher of biology at Harvard for the next half century. He remained the best in his class every inch of the way. Seething Harvard savant after seething Harvard savant, including one Nobel laureate, has seen his reputation eclipsed by this terribly reserved, terribly polite Alabamian, Edward O. Wilson.

Fantastic. But as I am insufficiently learned to read his scientific work critically, I elected to begin with his philosophical work, specifically, The Meaning of Human Existence. And I was unexpectedly disappointed on only the second page. To say that it does not begin well for a man of supposedly superlative intelligence would be an understatement.

In ordinary usage the word “meaning” implies intention, intention implies design, and design implies a designer. Any entity, any process, or definition of any word itself is put into play as a result of an intended consequence in the mind of the designer. This is the heart of the philosophical worldview of organized religions, and in particular their creation stories. Humanity, it assumes, exists for a purpose. Individuals have a purpose in being on Earth. Both humanity and individuals have meaning.

There is a second, broader way the word “meaning” is used and a very different worldview implied. It is that the accidents of history, not the intentions of a designer, are the source of meaning. There is no advance design, but instead overlapping networks of physical cause and effect. The unfolding of history is obedient only to the general laws of the Universe. Each event is random yet alters the probability of later events. During organic evolution, for example, the origin of one adaptation by natural selection makes the origin of certain other adaptations more likely. This concept of meaning, insofar as it illuminates humanity and the rest of life, is the worldview of science.

What? All right, hold on just one sociobiologically-constructed minute. No one, literally no one, ever uses the word “meaning” that way. Even less so can this usage be excused in the case of an author who is writing in the intrinsically philosophical context of attempting to explain the significance of Man’s existence. Let’s reference the dictionary.

MEANING, noun

  1. what is intended to be, or actually is, expressed or indicated; signification; import
  2. the end, purpose, or significance of something

Hmmm. He has at least a superficial excuse. It appears that Wilson is playing a little fast-and-loose with the definition of “meaning” here. He is clearly using it in the sense of “what actually is”. That is (unexpectedly) fair enough, except for the fact that by selecting that specific meaning of the word,(1) he reduces both his statement and the thesis of his book to basic tautologies.

Consider the title: The Meaning of Human Existence. Now let’s incorporate this second, broader way the word meaning is used, according to Wilson: The Actual Is of Human Existence. What, one wonders, can we derive from Wilson’s bold statement that humans actually exist? Are we to assume it is a catalog of facts about humanity rather than a statement about the significance of humanity’s existence? It’s more akin to a bad comedy routine than a genuine philosophical statement.

“What do you mean by that?”
“What it is. What it actually is.”
“I know what you said. But what do you mean?
“What I said. What else could I mean?”
“Don’t you mean what else could I actually is?”
“Don’t you?”

In fact, I even suspect Wilson of cherry-picking this definition in order to beg the question he appears to be feigning to propose given the fact that it does not appear in other dictionaries, such as the Oxford online dictionary.

MEANING, noun

  1. What is meant by a word, text, concept, or action.
  2. Implied or explicit significance.
  3. Important or worthwhile quality; purpose.

But the definition provided is even worse than the self-parody it appears to be. Remember, Wilson didn’t directly state that meaning is that which actually is, he declared the second way the word is used to be is that the accidents of history “are the source of meaning”. So, he’s actually using the word meaning in his own definition of the word meaning. This is either intellectual incompetence or intellectual shadiness, and while I cannot say which is the case yet, I am now on high alert to the probability of either… or both.

Given this shaky – or shady – foundation, I do not have very high hopes for the philosophy that Mr. Wilson has constructed upon it. I completely understand why some find my intellectual arrogance to be unseemly and offputting, but honestly, can you not in turn understand how I come by it, given how often this sort of thing happens?


(1) One can legitimately groan at that one. It does nicely underline my point, though.