Tag: trainwreck

Take away their feminist cards

The women of SNL sell-out their sisters on behalf of Senator Fish Lips Frankengroper:

SNL Women Offer Solidarity  in Support of Al Franken

We feel compelled to stand up for Al Franken, whom we have all had the pleasure of working with over the years on Saturday Night Live (SNL).  What Al did was stupid and foolish, and we think it was appropriate for him to apologize to Ms Tweeden, and to the public. In our experience, we know Al as a devoted and dedicated family man, a wonderful comedic performer, and an honorable public servant. That is why we are moved to quickly and directly affirm that after years of working with him, we would like to acknowledge that not one of us ever experienced any inappropriate behavior; and mention our sincere appreciation that he treated each of us with the utmost respect and regard.

We send our support and gratitude to Al and his family this Thanksgiving and holiday season.

SIGNED BY
1.Jill Baylor, Production Assistant,1991-92
2.Shannon Gaughan Bowman, Writer, 1988-89
3.Beth Einhorn, Script PA,1987-1988
4.Cindy Caponera, Writer, 1995-98
5.Jane Curtin, Not Ready for Prime Time Player, original cast, 1975-80
6.Tracy Cooper Drippe, Script PA/ Script Supervisor,1986-1991
7.Suzy Drasnin, Production Staff/Photographer,1986-90
8.Juli Pari Frankel, Script PA, 1984-1985
9.Julia Fraser, Script Supervisor, 1978-1985
10.Tara Gardner, Writers Assistant, 1990-95
11.Iris March Gross, Broadway Video/SNL 1977-1985
12.Marcy Hardart, Assistant to Lorne Michaels, 1987-1990
13.Lori Jo Hoekstra, Writer’s Assistant/Weekend Update Producer, 1990-1998
14.Sheila Kehoe, Costume Dept, 1976-82
15.Marci Klein, Co-Producer, 1989-2014
16.Franne Lee, Costume Designer, 1975-80
17.Laila Nabulsi, Schiller’s Reel 1975-79; Associate Producer, 1985-1986
18.Laraine Newman, Not Ready for Prime Time Player, original cast, 1975-80
19.Mary Ellen Mathews, Show Photographer, 1993- present
20.Cristina McGinniss, Assistant to Lorne Michaels (25 years);Broadway Video,1979 – present
21.Marilyn Suzanne Miller, Writer, 1975 -1994 (intermittently)
22.Dinah Minot, Associate Producer,1985-1989; Co-Producer, Broadway Pictures,1989-96
23.Evie Murray, Assistant to Lorne Michaels & consultant, 1983-1994
24.Sarah Paley, Writer, 1979-80 (& The New Show 1981-82)
25.Sandra Restrepo Considine, Script Supervisor/PA – 1987-1993
26.Suzanne Rosenberg, Coordinating Producer/Weekend Update, 1983-2003
27.Suzanne Ross, Script PA, 1991-1993
28.Karen Roston, Costume Designer, 1975-1983
29.Mary Salter, Film Producer, 1977-1987
30.Claire Shirey, Script Coordinator, 1982-present
31.Rosie Shuster, Writer, 1975-1980;1984-88
32.Kiki Kazanas Steele, Script PA/Script Supervisor, 1985-1990
33.Pam Thomas, Consultant, 1980s
34.Bonnie Turner, Writer, 1986-1993
35.Christine Zander, Writer,1987-1993
36.Liz Welch, Talent Coordinator,1981-89

Truly pathetic. One would think that the fact that they were following in the Dunham Horror’s footsteps would have been sufficient to give them pause. It’s an interesting line of defense too. Perhaps the next bank robber charged with robbing a bank should consider requesting letters of support from all the banks he didn’t rob.

Besides, it’s not going to save him.

CBS Fires Rose.

The bitter last Boomer breath

This column by Kurt Schlichter confused me at first:

With all the awful things happening now – the discord, the anger, the stupidity – at least those of my generation can rest easy knowing that the Millennials are going to suffer after we’re gone. Sure, I’m going to die a lot sooner than them – unless someone invents some sort of expensive life extension potion that I can buy but they can’t because they will still be paying off their degrees in Oppression Studies and Virtue Signaling Arts until the year 2083. But at least I’ll know that we left them a suitably terrible world, since they are a terrible generation.

Millennials are the spawn we deserve – annoying, posturing, and frequently pierced. They are utterly convinced of their own moral superiority, and yet they don’t even believe in morals. Well, that’s not quite true – they just confuse morals with the increasingly bizarre patchwork of taboos and fetishes of the social justice weirdos they use as their moral compasses. When you ask people, “What’s the world’s biggest problem,” and they answer, “The structural paradigm imposed by cisgender Western males,” and you reply, “How about, I dunno, ISIS?” and they answer “Well, who are we to judge their culture?” it’s slappin’ time.

We warned them to stay off our figurative lawns, and now it’s time to figuratively tackle them like Kentucky libertarians.

Wait, what? The Millennials aren’t our spawn. I don’t quite… oh.

I was born during the last week of the Baby Boom, making me…older than the Millennials. So I straddle that useless generation and the useless one that followed. It used to be called Generation X, but no one calls it that anymore because it made no lasting impression. Obama was in my generation. We’ll never live that down. In any case, I remember when calculators were newfangled, phones were attached to walls, and Showtime was the bomb.

Oh, I suspect Generation X will make an impression that will last a lot longer than the Baby Boomers self-celebrated world-changing ever did. We’re going to clean up the mess that the two preceding generations made, with Generation Zyklon providing the footsoldiers.

Yeah, we messed up, but you Millennials reading this on your smartphones, which you can see without glasses or squinting, shouldn’t act so high and mighty. You had a chance to fix all of this and instead you’ve chosen to never move out of your parents’ houses and to just sit around and invent new pronouns for genders that don’t exist. A couple decades down the road, when I’m dead from chronic bitterness and drinking too much expensive cabernet that I buy with the Social Security money you’ll be toiling to pay me, you won’t have families or careers. You’ll be my age and still making coffee for the next generation of ingrates, the children of the immigrants and super-religious Christians who represent the only portion of America still making babies. You’ll come home to your used Mitsubishi love robot named Olive, reheat some Sara Lee avocado toast sticks, and watch Saturday Night Live as it tries to make fun of President Donald Trump, Jr.

The saddest thing about the Baby Boomers is that they STILL can’t accept the fact that they are old and uncool. Decades ago, when they were freaking out about turning 40, Generation X used to joke about how the Boomers were going to try to pull off the 70 is the new 30. But we didn’t think they would actually do it. And then they did. They’re STILL trying to sell Jane Fonda as a sex symbol and she’s practically embalmed.

But while we’re still here together, with me owning stuff and you struggling to afford your daily kombucha smoothie, we face many shared challenges. There’s that giant debt, and there are those foreign people who want to kill us, and there is the terrifying fact that we are at each others’ throats here at home. We know how this plays out if we don’t fix it – bad for me, but super-bad for you. Maybe we should try and square things away. Maybe we should stop assuming the worst about each other, start thinking about what unites us instead of what divides us, and work together to make a better tomorrow. Maybe.

Just shut up. Seriously. While there are individual exceptions, the Baby Boomers, as a generation, have literally nothing to offer the world except their merciful extinction. Maybe – no, definitely – they should accept the fact that they were the stupidest, most destructive, most foolish grasshopper generation human history has ever recorded, stop trying to defend their utterly indefensible record, and do their best to exit the historical stage in suitably penitent humility.

They won’t. But they should.

Generation X knows better than to expect anything from them. We knew better than to expect anything from them even when our grandparents were still around. And it is all too typically Boomer to take solace in “revenge” upon a generation whose only crime is to be young by celebrating the fact that, unlike most previous generations, they have left the world a much worse place than they found it.

The Great Reckoning

I rather like that name for the ever-expanding Hollywood Values revelations. Hollywood and the media are in serious trouble and they know it.

‘Fear is everywhere’: a quiet paranoia haunts post-Weinstein Hollywood
The industry is on edge as allegations of sexual misconduct reach dizzying heights. The question on everyone’s mind is: ‘Who will be next?’

Week five of the great reckoning and Hollywood is frightened and lost, drifting deeper into uncharted waters with no script, no direction and no sense how it will end.

Scandal was always part of the entertainment industry, a ritualised process of rumours, denials and hush money, publicists and fixers, banishment and redemption. But the vortex of sexual abuse allegations which started with Harvey Weinstein spins ever faster, whirling beyond control of the studios.

Who is next, asks the reporter in the Guardian? Apparently two Guardian editors.

The Guardian’s digital editor Ian Prior has been absent from work after female staff members reported harassment allegations to management, BuzzFeed News has learned. Guardian sources say Prior — the UK news organisation’s digital editor and former head of sport — is away from work while management investigate the allegations, made in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein revelations that have created shockwaves across Hollywood, the media industry and politics…. The latest allegations against Guardian editors come after BuzzFeed News revealed earlier this year a complaint had been filed against former deputy Guardian US editor Matt Sullivan.

Meanwhile, ESPN’s great experiment in attempting to SJW-converge American sports is collapsing.

ESPN will lay off more than 100 staffers after the Thanksgiving holidays, multiple sources tell Sports Illustrated. The layoffs, which were described by a person briefed on the plans, will hit positions across ESPN including front-facing talent on the television side, producers, executives, and digital and technology staffers. The SportsCenter franchise is expected to be hit hard—including on-air people—given the frequency of the show has lessened considerably on main network ESPN.

The network declined comment to SI on Thursday afternoon.

Though hiring has continued and the network remains one of the great destinations for jobs in sports media, ESPN has experienced significant layoffs over the last two years. In Oct. 2015 the company laid off roughly 300 employees, about 4-5{666e5e86189a1fe5e2247551e7a4443f43206d2d8b82140cfc9efd38c8e16ed5} of its workforce—a particularly brutal act of gutting given the long tenures of many of those who were cut.

These are glorious days indeed. Drive on through the false narratives, punch through the flimsy armor of distractions and dissimulations, and find the truth! Hunt the witches without mercy. Encourage those who have been victimized to Be Brave and Be the First! The God-Emperor wills it!

UPDATE: DC is going down hard. It’s not even a little bit surprising that some of the most SJW-converged shows on television were being run by a (((gamma))) given to sexual harassment:

Andrew Kreisberg, co-creator and executive producer of the CW/Warner Bros TV DC series The Flash, Supergirl, Legends of Tomorrow and Arrow, has been suspended from his duties by the studio today over allegations of sexual harassment. Tonight, WBTV also say they are launching an investigation into the accusations.

“We have recently been made aware of allegations of misconduct against Andrew Kreisberg,” Warner Bros. TV Group said in a statement Friday night. “We have suspended Mr. Kreisberg and are conducting an internal investigation. We take all allegations of misconduct extremely seriously, and are committed to creating a safe working environment for our employees and everyone involved in our productions.

Kreisberg has been one of the top lieutenants of Greg Berlanti, the boss of the CW/DC universe. He has been a key auspice on all DC series, with primary focus on serving as showrunner of The Flash.

“We were recently made aware of some deeply troubling allegations regarding one of our showrunners,” Berlanti Prods.’ principals Greg Berlanti and Sarah Schechter said in a statement. “We have been encouraging and fully cooperating with the investigation into this by Warner Bros.

“There is nothing more important to us than the safety and well-being of our cast, crew, writers, producers and any staff,” they added. “We do not tolerate harassment and are committed to doing everything we can to make an environment that’s safe to work in and safe to speak up about if it isn’t.”

According to people familiar with the situation, several staffers on The Flash have complained about Kreisberg’s behavior.

15 women and 4 men registering complaints. Shut them all down.

Plagiarism is plagiarism

Toddy-Cat isn’t quite sure that the Zman is a plagiarist.

“I’m not sure that not citing a source in a response to a blog comment actually rises to the dignity of ‘plagiarism’”.

That degree of uncertainty is fair, especially if you haven’t actually read the source yourself, as I have not. But, as Tublecane demonstrates, once you look at Stove’s actual words and compare them to the Zman’s words, you are forced to conclude there is nothing to be uncertain about:

I thought of the paraphrasing defense, but that doesn’t hold up. It’s not that Z-man comes off sounding like Stove because uses the same general form of argument, borrowing a phrase or two…. I believe it was deliberate. Compare:

thezman: “Much more is known now about the natural world, than was known fifty years ago…”

Scientific Irrationalism by David Stove, (p.1) “Much more is known now than was known fifty years ago…”

thezman: “…and much more was known then than in 1580.”

Stove: “…and much more was known then than in 1580.”

thezman: “So there has been a great accumulation or growth of knowledge in the last four hundred years.”

Stove: “So there has been a great accumulation or growth of knowledge in the last four hundred years.”

thezman: “This is an extremely well-known fact.”

Stove: “This is an extremely well-known fact…”

thezman: “Let’s call this (A).”

Stove: “…which I will refer to as (A).”

thezman: “A person, who did not know (A), would be uncommonly ignorant.”

Stove: “A philosopher, in particular, who did not know it, would be uncommonly ignorant.”

The remainder of the post veers away from Stove’s text, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it were stolen from somewhere else. Now, whether such a thing as plagiarism exists in internet comment sections, that’s a different matter. I say yes, because it’s publicly passing off someone else’s writing as your own.

Tublecane is correct. The Zman clearly attempted to pass off David Stove’s writing and ideas as his own in order to try to place himself in an intellectually superior position from which he could then pass judgment. It’s not merely a question of what he did, but why he did it in that particular manner. He is observably a plagiarist. This observation is further supported by the fact that the Zman didn’t understand the argument that Stove was making about Karl Popper, nor does he understand Popper’s positions, nor does he even understand the fundamental differences between a) logic, b) math, and c) science, let alone the current need for the etymological division of “science” into its three aspects of scientody, scientage, and scientistry.

Ogre agrees. “It’s absolutely plagiarism in the sense of “presenting the words of another as your own.” And that’s really the only kind of plagiarism we care about here. Whether it could be considered academic plagiarism (I don’t know) or copyright infringement (its not), its still a dishonest and unethical thing to do. Especially given the context in which it was presented. It’s just more evidence of his posturing–passing off another’s arguments and expressions as his own in order to bolster his perceived intelligence.”

As has been the case every single time I have exposed the pretenses and posturings of someone who has fans, some of those fans are attempting to change the subject away from the failings of that particular individual to my theoretical motivations in destroying that individual’s intellectual reputation. To those fans, I will simply point out that my motivations are irrelevant, the facts are readily observable to everyone, and that this is what I do every time anyone comes at me, be they friend or foe.

The Zman and his would-be defenders can dance and defend and distract and theorize all they like. It won’t make any difference. The point is that he’s not particularly smart, he’s not very well-read – it wouldn’t surprise me to learn he hasn’t actually read much of the Stove book past the first page since he clearly didn’t understand it – and most importantly, he’s not very honest. And his moral and intellectual failings have nothing to do with me, as I am merely one of the many people who has happened to observe them.

The main difference between me and most of those who wish to somehow minimize my influence or discredit me is not that I am at least a standard deviation more intelligent than they are, although that is often true. The main difference is that for 16 years I have had tens of thousands of opponents poring over my every word written in column, blog post, comment, tweet, and book, looking for every possible mistake they can exploit, and most of my critics have not.

So, even if I lacked both confidence in my own words and personal integrity, I know better than to ever make the sort of stupid, obvious, dishonest, and self-discrediting mistake that the Zman did in plagiarizing David Stove’s words and attempting to pass off Stove’s ideas as his own. At the end of the day, a man must decide whether he values his integrity or he values the opinions of others. My decision should be obvious from my mantra: MPAI.

Mailvox: posturing and plagiarism

Tublecane accuses the Zman of plagiarizing David Stove

If those paragraphs you quoted in your update are supposed to be Z-man’s words, uttered without reference to their source, oh boy. I thought they sounded familiar, so I checked my copy of David Stove’s Scientific Irrationalism and Z-man copies verbiage found on page one. Right down to the year 1580, the letter “A,” and the phrase “uncommonly ignorant.”

Stove, being much brighter than the Z-men of the world, wasn’t making an “everything scientists say is factual, so shut up” argument. He doesn’t even share Z-man’s opinion on Popperian falsifiabilty, though he lays into Popper and finds him guilty of launching a line of irrationalism (or a “postmodern cult,” as the subtitle has it) in the philosophy and historiography of science. A line which isn’t so bad with Popper but gets worse and worse as you go through Kuhn, Lakatos, and Feyerabend.

The point about accumulation of knowledge, which is robust in Stove’s book, is neither here nor there regarding the subject at hand. Z-man thinks he’s dealing with nihilists, and nihilists would have trouble with facts accumulating. But of course that has nothing to do with how you characterize varieties of “science” in the 16 Points. Science since 1580 could have simultaneously been more wrong than right and still served to advance human knowledge.

Upon closer inspection, Z-man explicitly mentions David Stove’s Popper and After, but in a separate post from the one in which he steals from it.

I call plagiarism!

Moreover, plagiarism that would be insulting to Stove, RIP, since he wouldn’t be caught making an argument as silly as Z-man’s.

I haven’t read any of David Stove’s books, so I can’t testify to the accuracy of the accusation of plagiarism. But it’s not particularly surprising to be informed that the argument the Zman’s was making is not his own, as 8 hours before Tublecane posted his comment, I had made this observation: “One definitely has the impression that the Zman has not read Popper, or even Kuhn, himself, but rather, has read what people have written about Popper.”

In any event, this demonstrates why it is important not to feign knowledge you do not possess, not to pass off the arguments of others as your own, and not to express opinions on subjects you do not know very much about. Especially on the Internet, someone is bound to eventually notice that you are an intellectual fraud.

They never learn

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
It’s only a matter of time before the rest of the #FakeRight AKA Dicky Spencer’s Dance Party is outed as gay Jews.

Eli Mosley‏ @ThatEliMosley
Don’t be jealous because @RichardBSpencer owns the rights to a book you want to publish you greedy book merchant. Stick to vyda and comics.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
We are helping an author whose own publisher won’t even RESPOND TO HIS EMAILS.  As we have done for other authors with other publishers.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
Richard Spencer has not responded to repeated requests for arbitration specified by the contract by the author. You know this, Eli.

Ember Wolf  ?‏ @EmberWolfTMNM
Have you and Concernovich been drinking from the same glass in the past day? There’s something in that water.

Eli Mosley‏ @ThatEliMosley
If you’re asking if they collude because they are saddened by their shrinking relevance compared to us, then yea. Same shit.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
And that was after TWO FREAKING YEARS of no royalty statements or payments. Totally irresponsible and incompetent.

Eli Mosley‏ @ThatEliMosley
So you’re admitting that you’re attacking him purely because of business reasons and not because you actually believe your own BS? Got it.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
No, the way he runs his business merely confirms his lack of integrity, which I had suspected on the basis of his political actions.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
You told me yourself that he is a complete fuck-up when it comes to details and organizational matters. Weren’t you supposed to fix that?

Keep in mind that the book in question came out in 2013 and currently stands at  #684,934 in Books and #651,423 in Kindle. These Fake Right clowns literally do not understand the concept of acting on principle or helping people simply because it is the right thing to do.

Which tends to lead one to suspect that when they accuse everyone else of being shills and merchants, they are projecting on that score too. What I can’t understand is what benefit they can possibly derive from clinging to the rights to the author’s book when they’re barely selling any copies anyhow.

And how is Richard Spencer going to accomplish anything at all when he can’t even successfully run a tiny publishing house that is a fraction of the size of Castalia House? It’s absolutely no surprise to me that his little marches and demonstrations have turned out to be debacles in light of what I’ve learned about his organizational capabilities.

Scientists can’t do science

One of the signs of a society in decline is the way in which its institutions are increasingly incapable of performing their primary functions. SJW convergence is one reason for decline, but declining intelligence and capability is another one. I suspect the latter may be the root cause of the latest scientific debacle.

Researchers warn that large parts of biomedical science could be invalid due to a cascading history of flawed data in a systemic failure going back decades. A new investigation reveals more than 30,000 published scientific studies could be compromised by their use of misidentified cell lines, owing to so-called immortal cells contaminating other research cultures in the lab.

The problem is as serious as it is simple: researchers studying lung cancer publish a new paper, only it turns out the tissue they were actually using in the lab were liver cells. Or what they thought were human cells were mice cells, or vice versa, or something else entirely.

If you think that sounds bad, you’re right, as it means the findings of each piece of affected research may be flawed, and could even be completely unreliable.

“Most scientists don’t intentionally publish findings on the wrong cells,” explains one of the researchers, Serge Horbach from Radboud University in the Netherlands.

“It’s an honest mistake. The more concerning problem is that the research data is potentially invalid and impossible to reproduce.”

Science is not, and should never be, considered any sort of truth-metric. It can only be judged by its actual real-world results, which is to say, science that has not advanced to the state of being transformed into engineering can NEVER be relied upon.

This also demonstrates why it is so vital to construct a solid and reliable foundation, because building upon intellectual sand means the entire edifice is eventually bound to collapse.

Actors ran interference for Weinstein

The sudden downfall of Harvey Weinstein is merely the very tip of the Hollywood iceberg. And it’s a really big iceberg of moral sewage and corruption:

In 2004, I was still a fairly new reporter at The New York Times when I got the green light to look into oft-repeated allegations of sexual misconduct by Weinstein. It was believed that many occurred in Europe during festivals and other business trips there.

I traveled to Rome and tracked down the man who held the plum position of running Miramax Italy. According to multiple accounts, he had no film experience and his real job was to take care of Weinstein’s women needs, among other things.

As head of Miramax Italy in 2003 and 2004, Fabrizio Lombardo was paid $400,000 for less than a year of employment. He was on the payroll of Miramax and thus the Walt Disney Company, which had bought the indie studio in 1993.

I had people on the record telling me Lombardo knew nothing about film, and others citing evenings he organized with Russian escorts.

At the time, he denied that he was on the payroll to help Weinstein with favors. From the story: “Reached in Italy, Mr. Lombardo declined to comment on the circumstances of his leaving Miramax or Ricucci, saying they were legal matters being handled by lawyers. ‘I am very proud of what we achieved at Miramax here in Italy,’ he said of his work for the film company. ‘It cannot be that they hired me because I’m a friend.’”

I also tracked down a woman in London who had been paid off after an unwanted sexual encounter with Weinstein. She was terrified to speak because of her non-disclosure agreement, but at least we had evidence of a pay-off.

The story I reported never ran.

After intense pressure from Weinstein, which included having Matt Damon and Russell Crowe call me directly to vouch for Lombardo and unknown discussions well above my head at the Times, the story was gutted.

Russell Crowe is hardly a surprise, but suddenly Matt Damon doesn’t look like such a good guy, does he? Read the whole thing, there are more details at the link. There should be no slacking off on the attention given to this issue, as it is a promising opportunity in the cultural war, especially given the way in which Hollywood is used as Satan’s pulpit.

When losing, lose harder

Having failed to learn from the failure of its initial show of force, Spain appears to be intent on losing the moral level of war and is doubling down.

Defense Tuesday ordered the sending of the Army to Catalonia with material and to provide logistical support to the Civil Guard and the National Police . 

This should end well and totally convince the Catalonians that they really, truly are better off as part of Spain. I doubt it escapes anyone’s attention that the Spanish government has shown itself completely unwilling to use its Army against the marauding immigrants invading the country.

Cracking under pressure

Brian Niemeier is more than a little amused by John Scalzi cracking under the combined pressure of his big, beautiful book contract and the God-Emperor’s presidency:

Scalzi’s “the dog ate my homework” post is yet another indication that #1-selling indie author Nick Cole is about to be vindicated once more. To quote Nick:

Okay.  As I’ve talked about before this before… this is what happens next:

  • Big Pub reduces its Author List down to servicing Cadillac Clients.  Many authors who think they’re something are about to be shown the door in the form of un-returned emails, unanswered calls, and not talk of future projects.  Already happening.
  • Amazon Opens Book Stores.
  • Trad Pub Authors attempt to seamlessly bring themselves, and their mojo, into Amazon and fail badly because they’re not used to the volume of work.  Marketing, Formatting, Editing, Social Media, and most importantly now: a tight release schedule of every 30-90 days.  Also Amazon picks the winners and its more interested in New Talent.

A cataclysmic paradigm shift is underway that will soon overturn the publishing landscape as we know it. Indie has been overtaking tradpub for years, and now the Big Five New York publishers’ sole advantage–their paper distribution monopoly–is about to collapse.

When B&N goes, it will take the tradpub midlist with it. You’ll know the old era is over when current tradpub authors start trying to go indie. But as Nick forecasts and Scalzi confirms, former tradpub darlings are woefully unprepared to handle the increased workload.

And that’s just on the writing front. Factor in the additional responsibilities of being your own publisher and marketing department, and consider how a guy who can’t finish a novel in ten months with the backing of sci-fi’s biggest publisher will fare in the new order.

Here’s the truth: Scalzi’s ongoing nosedive has nothing to do with who’s president or the current weather. It has everything to do with the fact that Patrick Nielsen Hayden handed him a golden ticket. Scalzi has never had to work in this business without Tor propping up his career. Now he’s losing favor to N.K. Jemisin, his last book underperformed, and he’s falling behind on his contract–all in the looming shadow of B&N’s failure.

I prefer to characterize my friend Nick Cole as a bestselling Castalia House author, but otherwise, Brian has described the situation rather well.

I’m sure you will understand that I found this comment to be particularly entertaining.

“The worst part of all this is that Vox called it when he was given the deal in the first place. And Scalzi, in his arrogance, set about to prove him right.”

The thing is, I wasn’t making the prediction out of any malice or SJW-style magical thinking. It was entirely obvious to me that an author whose primary skill was marketing himself to editors was not going to be successful once they stopped devoting excessive resources to propping him up and maintaining a false narrative about his skill and his success. Scalzi is, and has always been, a mediocre mid-list author with a penchant for juvenile vulgarity. If he submitted a manuscript to us under a different name, there is virtually no chance we would accept it for publication.

That being said, John Scalzi is very highly skilled and he is extraordinarily successful, just not at what he wants you to believe he is. The challenge facing him is that while those particular skills were integral to his success in a traditional publishing model that required currying favor with SJW editors and the pseudo-media of SF fandom, they are considerably less useful in the brave new world of publishing today.