Tag: trainwreck

The intellectually fearsome atheist

For some reason, Google occasionally emails me comments that people are making about Stefan Molyneux’s videos in which I’ve appeared. This one, by ismelljello, was particularly amusing.

Read the reviews of his book. It honestly compelled me to make a video series where i debunk his tired old arguments. If you’re going to peddle other peoples ideas, at least make sure they haven’t already been trounced.

He made a video series to debunk the tired old arguments of a book he hasn’t read. That’s… an interesting approach.

I have the distinct impression that he has absolutely no idea that The Irrational Atheist cannot possibly contain “tired old arguments” because they are new critiques of the arguments put forth by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Michel Onfray, among others.

It should certainly be interesting to discover how he proves that religion causes war and is worse than child molestation.

This is the danger of intellectual posturing. Sooner or later, you’re going to strike a pose that will catch the attention of those who actually possess the information you’re pretending to have. Never pretend to know what you don’t.

Another Democratic hack

It is looking increasingly apparent that national security will not be in good hands with Hillary:

A computer network used by Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign was hacked as part of a broad cyber attack on Democratic political organizations, people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The latest attack, which was disclosed to Reuters on Friday, follows two other hacks on the Democratic National Committee, or DNC, and the party’s fundraising committee for candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives.

A Clinton campaign spokesman said in a statement late on Friday that an analytics data program maintained by the DNC and used by the campaign and a number of other entities “was accessed as part of the DNC hack.”

“Our campaign computer system has been under review by outside cyber security experts. To date, they have found no evidence that our internal systems have been compromised,” said Clinton campaign spokesman Nick Merrill.

Later, a campaign official said hackers had access to the analytics program’s server for approximately five days. The analytics data program is one of many systems the campaign accesses to conduct voter analysis, and does not include social security numbers or credit card numbers, the official said.

The U.S. Department of Justice national security division is investigating whether cyber attacks on Democratic political organizations threatened U.S. security, sources familiar with the matter said on Friday.

The involvement of the Justice Department’s national security division is a sign that the Obama administration has concluded that the hacking was sponsored by a state, people with knowledge of the investigation said.

While it is unclear exactly what material the hackers may have gained access to, the third such attack on sensitive Democratic targets disclosed in the last six weeks has caused alarm in the party and beyond, just over three months before the Nov. 8 U.S. presidential election.

On the one hand, you would think Hillary would have learned her lesson by now. On the other hand, the sort of person who puts server belonging to the Department of State in her closet and insists on using Gmail as Secretary of State probably isn’t capable of learning that particular lesson.

Anyhow, the US government is in no position to complain about other people electronically spying on its officials, agents, and agencies, as it is the worst offender on the planet.

John Scalzi, political pundit

McRapey analyzes the Republican National Convention. Incompetence ensues.

The convention, generally, was the worst-run major political convention in a generation, and that should scare you. How is Trump going to manage an entire country when he can’t even put on a four-day show? (The answer, as we found out this week, is that he has no intention of managing the country at all; he plans to foist the actual work onto his poor VP while he struts about as bloviating figurehead.) Trump lost control of his convention and his message twice, once with Melania Trump’s clumsy plagiarism of Michelle Obama, which ate up two days of news cycles before Trump’s people found someone to be their chump for it, and then second with Ted Cruz, that oleaginous lump of hungering self-interest, who rather breathtakingly took to the stage of a nominating convention in order not to endorse Trump, in the most public way possible. That bit of low-rent Machiavellianism ate up another day of news cycles.

In the end, all the GOP convention has coming out of it are two massive failures of message control and Trump’s cataclysmic nomination speech.

And Nate Silver of 538 observing that Trump’s chances of winning the election have rising 40 points from a month ago. And Mr. Trump taking the lead in several national polls, including those from CNN and the LA Times. But while we’re on the subject of badly-run conventions, have we ever seen a national party chairman resign the day before the start of the convention?

Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Scalzi?

But that’s the Trump shtick: He doesn’t have policies or positions or plans

No, no positions at all. And who could possibly know what his policies on tax reform, healthcare reform, immigration, foreign policy, and trade could be? Of course, one should keep in mind that John Scalzi is an SJW, and what is it that SJWs always do? I seem to recall someone wrote a book about that.

Trump is still not likely to win — after everything, he’s still trailing Clinton.

Only in the polls taken a month ago. He’s doing rather well in the new ones, so much so that the media is now attempting to discount the very sort of “convention bounce” that we were previously told doesn’t exist anymore.

However, the best dismissal of John Scalzi’s worst attempt to engage in political punditry since his famous “I’m a rapist” post is from a Hillary Clinton supporter, who notes a certain irony about McRapey’s attack on the Republican candidate for President.

In a post about how Donald Trump’s modus operandi is to scare people into voting for him, I count *ten* instances where you tell us that Trump (and the Republican party more broadly) should scare/terrify us, that they’re dangerous, that they’ll bring disaster/tragedy to the country, and so forth.
– Brian Greenberg

Ted Cruz 2020

Even Apollo 1 had a better launch than Ted Cruz’s 2020 presidential campaign last night.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz was denied entry into billionaire GOP donor Sheldon Adleson’s suite following his speech at the Republican National Convention Wednesday night, Independent Journal Review has confirmed.

A former U.S. Senator inside the Adelson’s luxury box at the Quicken Loans arena told Independent Journal Review that Cruz approached the suite after he finished his speech that fell short of endorsing Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

Cruz was not welcome in the suite “because he’s a piece of sh*t,” the Senator said.

Cruz was stopped at the door because several attendees inside the suite were furious with his decision to not endorse Trump. An aide to Adelson then confirmed that Cruz was turned away. 

UPDATE: “Ted Cruz’s campaign chair Richard Black says that it’s doubtful he’d ever support Cruz again.”

UPDATE 2: Hear Ted Cruz attempting to rationalize his self-immolation on the national stage. Video at the link:

A delegate was upset that Ted Cruz didn’t honor his pledge and support Trump, telling Cruz that his word is his bond and that he should have honored his pledge.

Here’s how Cruz responded and it was awesome!

Cruz explained to the person why the pledge he made supporting the nominee was abrogated, pointing out that happened when Trump attacked his wife and his father and made this personal.

The delegate responded that this is politics and he needed to get over it.

But Cruz hit back hard, saying this is NOT politics and it’s not a game, that there is right and wrong and we must stand for what is right!

So noble! Of course, Cruz didn’t make this clear to the public at any time before standing at the podium, in fact, he didn’t even make it clear during his speech, which is why some of his foolish defenders are trying to claim that he did not, in fact, do what he obviously did. That’s what happens when you side with a snake.

Mailvox: stop posturing, morons

The ironically named General Noitall has no idea how clueless he is, but that doesn’t stop him from making confidently authoritative statements that are complete nonsense:

Flynn, under Trump, is set to be Sec. of Defense or, more likely, Chairman of the Join Chiefs. And as we know, Flynn “has no idea how to defeat ISIS”. Yet Trump has promised to take out the IS. What’s absolutely clear about Trump is that his understanding of the geopolitical nature of the world amounts to zero. His understanding of force deployment and use is zero. His experience with the military and dealing with the worlds leaders is zero. But, he does have Flynn.

We certainly know that General Noitall’s experience with the military is zero. How, pray tell, is a retired lieutenant general whose background is in intelligence ever going to become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?

For those who don’t know how it works, while the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is appointed by the President, he is usually selected from among the chiefs of staff – the four highest-ranking generals and admirals- from one of the four armed services. One seldom becomes CJCS without first being Army Chief of Staff, USMC Commandant, Chief of Naval Operations, or Air Force Chief of Staff, and more often than not, Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as well. These top officers almost invariably have a strong background of field commands, they don’t come from intelligence or logistics.

A three-star officer such as a lieutenant general or a vice-admiral is simply not in the running, particularly one who is not even in the service anymore.

That doesn’t mean Michael Flynn couldn’t be named Secretary of Defense, but then, if elected, Trump could just as easily name the science fiction author Michael Flynn too. Regardless, Michael T. Flynn won’t be commanding any military operations, much less all of them. He’s a civilian.

Look, you’re not fooling anyone when you strike knowledgeable poses concerning things you know nothing about, and make stupid pronouncements that only suffice to demonstrate your ignorance. So stop trying!

None of us know what Donald Trump is going to do when he’s elected. Possibly Trump himself doesn’t know. But I think we can be quite confident that he’s not going to follow Michael Ledeen’s idiotic lead and declare war on radical Islam, Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba, and whoever else Ledeen suspects might be in his imaginary Global Alliance of Evil.

Grrlbusters: lamer than expected

That’s not offensive to men, it’s just stupid, predictable, and not even a little bit funny.

When the punchline of your very expensive Grrrl Power movie, designed to prove that Women Can Too Be Funny in spite of the evidence to the contrary consisting of the entire written history of Man, builds up to a visual riff on… wait for it, wait for it… A WOMAN KICKING A MAN IN THE CROTCH, I think it’s safe to conclude that it’s going to fail.

And do so in a positively epic manner.

This is the sort of thing that happens when you’re dumb enough to let SJWs infest your organization. The problem isn’t that it’s going to be a failure. One has to take risks from time to time. But this failure was guaranteed from the very moment it was conceived.

As Stickwick observed, girl power is literal Idiocracy. A large collection of women spent $154 million to make a Ghostbusters-flavored OW MY BALLS.

The state of Star Citizen

Derek Smart provides a detailed, and devastating, summary of the current state of the troubled project:

The exodus of key talent from the four studios around the world has also been an on-going event this past year. To the extent that the project is so toxic, that at this point, anyone working on it has basically earned themselves a Black mark on their resume. Ridicule aside. But, in an unprecedented move, that hasn’t stopped two (John Dadley, Darian Vorlick) recent departures from immediately taking to social media to stress that the sky isn’t falling. Because, you know, it’s perfectly normal to bail on such a high profile project just as the general outlook is that it’s all falling apart, gamers are being screwed etc. A project which, as of this writing, has over 60 positions that it can’t fill. And this month alone, there are rumored to be at least four more high profile people looking to leave. But everything’s fine though. That’s just normal game development turnover you know. The thing about this industry is that we never – ever – forget.

Meanwhile, Sandi Gardiner, wife of Chris Roberts and “head of marketing” (<— lol!) was recently posting pictures of staff at the LA and UK studios on social media. Funny thing, some people (including the two aforementioned people) in those pictures are actually gone. And at least four are on their way out. I guess the teams over in Frankfurt and Austin, for all the hype they get for being key parts of the game’s development, don’t get their pictures taken.

Also in the past year, most of the media hype around the project has all but died down, as most (even those gamestar.de Shillizens over in Germany are heading South with their narrative) have started hedging their bets since all of this – sadly – has all boiled down to a “Derek Smart v Chris Roberts” narrative this past year. Even as they completely ignore the plight of gamers who unwittingly put their money into this crowd-funded project, and who previously had the security of refunds and financial accountability. Heck, even with the unprecedented ToS change that happened last month, very few in the media even wrote about that. And as a media contact said to me, simply put, nobody wants to deal with Shitizens descending on their sites and turning it into a war zone. Which to me begs the question: what about when the final collapse comes?

CIG/RSI has fermented so much ill will toward most of its very own backers, that when the Feds finally come calling, it won’t be because of anything that anyone has written, but from the many complaints that are being filed with various consumer protection agencies here and in various countries (Australians have it easy, nobody messes with consumers over there – get a refund!) where backers are frantically trying to get refunds.

And if your warning alarms haven’t started going off yet, recently in a new refund rejection letter template to backers, they have started saying that CIG is no longer the entity that should be reported to agencies regarding this project and/or refunds. They’re saying that RSI – a shell company before the past month – is now the one carrying the liability. This despite the fact that almost every single backer prior to the new ToS of June 1st, 2016, has a receipt for goods sold to them by CIG or one of the other many shell companies associated with this project.

There is more. There is considerably more. The upshot is that Derek and other skeptics were right to conclude, one year ago, that Star Citizen was not going to ship as advertised, and that the project is likely to end in a debacle of proportions that will make famous game industry failures of the past, including Battlecruiser 3000 AD, look like nothing more than modest appetizers to a royal feast.

The project has gradually morphed from overly ambitious project to troubled production to what appears to be an open pyramid scheme. At this point, it wouldn’t surprise me if it ended in recriminations, lawsuits, and criminal charges.

The bonfire of science

In which it is once more demonstrated that scientific evidence is VASTLY less reliable than other types of evidence, because, in most cases, no one ever bothers to actually check the results:

A whole pile of “this is how your brain looks like” MRI-based science has been invalidated because someone finally got around to checking the data.

The problem is simple: to get from a high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging scan of the brain to a scientific conclusion, the brain is divided into tiny “voxels”. Software, rather than humans, then scans the voxels looking for clusters.

When you see a claim that “scientists know when you’re about to move an arm: these images prove it”, they’re interpreting what they’re told by the statistical software.

Now, boffins from Sweden and the UK have cast doubt on the quality of the science, because of problems with the statistical software: it produces way too many false positives.

In this paper at PNAS, they write: “the most common software packages for fMRI analysis (SPM, FSL, AFNI) can result in false-positive rates of up to 70%. These results question the validity of some 40,000 fMRI studies and may have a large impact on the interpretation of neuroimaging results.”

For example, a bug that’s been sitting in a package called 3dClustSim for 15 years, fixed in May 2015, produced bad results (3dClustSim is part of the AFNI suite; the others are SPM and FSL).

That’s not a gentle nudge that some results might be overstated: it’s more like making a bonfire of thousands of scientific papers.

It is not even remotely reasonable to take scientific evidence at face value anymore, much less the pseudoscience so often being substituted for the results produced by genuine, if often flawed, scientody.

It is not even remotely surprising that the flaw the scientists failed to pick up in this situation was statistical, for as I’ve previously observed, most scientists have very little training in math or statistics, and despite their habit of regularly citing statistics, most of them are more or less statistically illiterate.

Never forget that while there are certainly some brilliant scientists, most of them are literal midwits as there are relatively few credentialed scientists with IQs over 132. A study of all the U.S. PhD recipients in 1958 reported an average IQ of 123; the Flynn effect notwithstanding, it is highly unlikely that the average IQ of today’s increasingly diverse and vibrant PhD recipients has risen since then.

Dunning-Kruger + Gamma = Aaron

The most intellectually challenged gamma at File 770, much to everyone’s surprise, doubles down.

I disagree. I think I’m very smart. And you’re dumb. I’m easily smarter than most people on this blog, including Vox. Vox said something pretty stupid, and instead of having the balls to man up, he doubled down. I’m not impressed. At all.

Easily smarter… than people with confirmed +3SD and +4SD IQs. I have no doubt whatsoever that he believes that, as he’s an example of both Dunning-Kruger Syndrome and Vox’s First Law in action.

What’s particularly funny about this is that he’s referring to this post. Notice how much of it is devoted to intelligence and immigration. Aaron, as wounded Gammas are wont to do, leaped to attack one minor point that he interpreted to be in error, then attempted to build an entire edifice of discredit and disqualify upon it, even going so far as to claim, on that basis, that “You always double down. I’ve never seen you concede any point at any time anywhere.”

No doubt this would confuse James Miller, Robert Murphy, and Thomas Woods, to say nothing of Ian Fletcher, to whom I have conceded considerably more than just a single point. Some other readers attempted to explain to Aaron that he’d missed the salient point, which he not only ended up rejecting but also claims I did not mean despite the readily available evidence to the contrary.

So, the immigration of stupid people has created conditions that make the super smart innovators have less babies, and that many of the super smart who have babies do so with Mexican fruit pickers and Somali gangsters and such like.

THAT’S what Vox meant when he said the immigration of stupid people has led to a lower average national IQ, and thus fewer smart people to be entrepreneurs.

If you SERIOUSLY think this is what Vox meant, then that’s a perfectly coherent position, although to my mind, not plausible.

But I for one, don’t think that’s what vox meant.

Of course it is part of what Vox meant, though only part, as should be obvious to anyone who is familiar with my writing about feminism’s effect on declining Western intelligence. One wonders what else I could have possibly meant, considering the following:


As the average IQ of the population declines, the number of members of the cognitive elite being born similarly decline. If the smart population mixes with the less intelligent immigrants, or even fails to breed at replacement levels, the ABSOLUTE number of smart people will decline. Do either of those scenarios happen to apply here?

Of course, both scenarios do. Aaron’s assertion of my “error” relied upon no native-immigrant intermixing and non-declining birthrates among the native cognitive elite, both false assumptions. What Aaron is exhibiting, in addition to the usual gamma “You are wrong and stupid due to incorrect assumptions on my part”, is typical SJW reasoning in action.They are binary thinkers, which renders complexity a complete mystery to them. That’s why they think that “well, it’s more complex than that” is a sufficient rebuttal, because the possibility of unraveling the complexities and successfully accounting for more than one influential factor is not only beyond their capabilities, but beyond their actions.

Notice how the SJW ends up relying upon his interpretation of what he imagines the other person to be thinking so that he can himself the victor, regardless of what every other observer concludes. The Secret King triumphs again, if only in his own head. But usually, the gamma doesn’t pay enough attention to what others are saying to even understand them correctly.

But isn’t that exactly the point? They’re in a position of weakness, so they’re using bluster and bravado to regain momentum. Thats what I said. File this under “making my point for me again” dpt. You’re good at that, vox.

No, it’s not exactly the point. Aaron failed to understand that I was correcting his statement that “pushing through their agenda in an even more ruthless and uncompromising way is the best tactic they have to deal with a moment of weakness”.  Yes, we both agree that the EU elite is in a position of weakness, which is precisely why bluster and bravado is not their best tactic if they wish the EU to survive. To the contrary, it’s a very risky bluff, which the Euroskeptics should call and exploit to the full, in order to destroy the entire edifice.

The sad thing about the gamma is that he neither knows himself nor his enemies. That is why he is, per Sun Tzu, destined for repeated failure:

YOU’RE answering ME, but it is *I* who engage in the detestable gamma behavior of never letting things go or lashing back – and since when are you known for letting go or refraining from lashing back? I get it. When you do it, it’s super duper genius rhetoric alpha Aristotle stuff, when anyone else, why, it’s a gamma. 

Yes, you are indeed a gamma male. No, you clearly don’t get it. Let’s consider the facts.

  • I very seldom write about Aaron or pay any attention to his activities. Even when I did, recently, he was not the topic at hand. The battle on A Game of Thrones was.
  • Aaron frequently opines about me and my various activities, as a search of File 770’s comments will demonstrate.
  • Aaron is here commenting repeatedly on my blog. That’s fine, but the point is, he came here to do it because he is still feeling butthurt about his risible defense of the LEEEROY JENKINS strategy in the Stark-Bolton battle. His response was so predictable that another game-savvy reader even predicted it.
  • I often respond to critics who comment on this blog. That was not a unique event.
  • I let go of most attacks directed at me. As numerous critics who comment here can testify, I don’t even reply to most of them, let alone lash back at all of them. Moreover, I am quite willing to let bygones be bygones, as numerous commenters with whom I have had differences in the past can also testify.

Unlike the gamma, I don’t dwell upon past injuries and insults, licking my wounds and biding my time until an opportunity to lash back presents itself. Nor do I feel any need to reinterpret past defeats as victories, or pretend to myself and others that my failures are successes. I don’t pretend to understand why gammas behave in this way, but I have observed the pattern of behavior often enough to be able to reliably predict it. Since most male SF-SJWs are gammas, it’s not hard to anticipate their reactions to any given stimulus.

UPDATE: Oh dear. Timing, it seems, is everything.

Aaron: It is masculine to admit when you’re wrong. Just very few people do it, and certainly not vox.

Two hours ago on Twitter:

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
Daikatana was, like my Rebel Moon designs, too ambitious for its own good.

John Romero ‏@romero
it wasn’t an ambitious design that was Daikatana’s problem

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
I stand corrected.