Tag: trainwreck

The Ebola exponent

This, combined with socionomics will explain why we’ve been seeing all the pandemic-related television shows of late:

Right now we’ve had more than 5,000 cases of Ebola, and at least 2,600 people have died. Some scientists, like Alessandro Vespignani at Northeastern University in Boston, are taking numbers like that and putting them into computer models to see where this epidemic is going. “For instance, in our modeling, by mid-October, we’re already between 10,000 to 25,000 cases,” he says.

Five thousand cases of Ebola is bad; 10,000 to 25,000 is unbelievable. And that’s where the exponential curve comes into play. “Well,
an exponential curve is a curve that doubles every certain amount of
time,” Vespignani says. And with this outbreak, cases are doubling every
three to four weeks. So if help doesn’t arrive in time — and
the growth rate stays the same — then 15,000 Ebola cases in mid-October
could turn into 30,000 cases by mid-November, and 60,000 cases by
mid-December.

Meanwhile, aid efforts are hampered, to put it mildly, by the local fauna:

The bodies of eight people, including several health workers and three journalists, have been found days after they were attacked while distributing information about Ebola in a Guinean village near the city of Nzerekore, according to Reuters.

“The eight bodies were found in the village latrine,” Albert Damantang Camara, a spokesman for Guinea’s government, told Reuters on Thursday. “Three of them had their throats slit.”

Quarantine and closing the borders, as Sierra Leone is doing, would suffice to keep Ebola out of the West. So, naturally, the globalists in office prefer to literally import the disease and expose thousands of soldiers and aid workers to it in Africa, thereby risking a global pandemic, rather than simply leave the independent African nations to their own resources and permitting the epidemic to safely run its course.

And if the World Health reports that the statistics are being underreported are correct, the exponential curve may already be in effect.

Fallout from the Rice debacle

Since Ray Rice was suspended indefinitely for one punch aimed at an adult woman, how can the NFL avoid indefinitely suspending All Day for “child abuse”:

Vikings running back Adrian Peterson will not play on Sunday against the Patriots after he was indicted on a charge of injury to a child. The Vikings announced the decision to deactivate Peterson on Friday, two hours after news broke that he had been indicted by a grand jury in Houston.

The move comes during the same week that the NFL has come under withering criticism stemming from the video showing Ravens running back Ray Rice beating up his wife. The Ravens released Rice and the NFL suspended him indefinitely.

It’s far too early to know whether the Vikings could release Peterson — a notion that would have been absolutely unthinkable a few hours ago — or whether the NFL could suspend him indefinitely. But in this week like no other in the NFL’s history, nothing can be ruled out.

This highlights the absolute absurdity of Goodell’s insane new standard. If they’re concerned about damage to the league, the number of people wearing Ray Rice jerseys at the recent Ravens game should give them a clue about how people will react to kicking a Hall of Fame running back out of the league in his prime.

And let’s face it, this “child abuse” is every bit as serious as the “domestic violence” of the Rice case:

According to the report, Peterson said he did it to punish the child for pushing another one of Peterson’s children while they were playing a video game. The report says Peterson grabbed a tree branch, removed the leaves and struck the 4-year-old repeatedly.

The child’s injuries reportedly included cuts and bruises to the child’s back, buttocks, ankles, legs and scrotum, along with defensive wounds to the child’s hands. According to the report, Peterson texted the boy’s mother and acknowledged what he had done and that she would be “mad at me about his leg. I got kinda good wit the tail end of the switch.”

According to the report, the child told authorities, “Daddy Peterson hit me on my face” and said he feared Peterson would punch him in the face if he found out police knew about the incident.

Adrian Peterson shouldn’t be deactivated or suspended. Goodell had better reinstate Rice right quickly and then announce that it is not the NFL’s job to police its players’ domestic relations or he’s going to find himself accused of running a racist, predominantly white league sooner than anyone believes possible.

Also, fire Roger Goodell. His constant efforts to supplicate to the female non-fans is actually harming the league now.

A non-starter

A good idea doomed to failure by the rapacious US tax bureaucracy:

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is slated to introduce legislation next week
that would revoke the U.S. citizenship of anyone fighting or providing
support to terrorist groups working to attack the United States. Cruz said he is filing the Expatriate Terrorist Act in reaction to
the threat posed by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). It would
provide another level of protection to prevent foreign fighters from
re-entering the United States, he said.

Prediction: once the IRS realizes that this legislation would provide an cost-efficient means for expatriates to get rid of their US citizenship, it will become a non-starter. In fact, with the recent 400 percent increase in administrative fees, (it now costs about $2,500 to drop your citizenship even though it’s about a two-minute process) it would probably cost less to do it by simply donating to ISIS.

PZ admits he’s wrong

And then promptly proceeds to dig the hole deeper. Based on his National Merit status, he’s got to have the raw cognitive capacity to do better, but it’s sometimes hard to believe because he so regularly renders himself functionally stupid. It’s as if he’s got some sort of religious derangement syndrome that handicaps his intellectual faculties. 

“The other day, I said that his book, The Irrational Atheist, was self-published. I was wrong. He actually bamboozled a publisher into taking it on.”

As one might expect, PZ is characteristically gracious about admitting his error. TIA was originally headed for publication by Crown Forum when a bigger name, David Berlinski, proposed a similar book just as Crown was on the verge of sending me a contract to write it. The editor decided, reasonably enough, that one book on the topic would be sufficient for their needs and chose Berlinski over me. I gave Glenn at BenBella a call to see if he was interested and he snapped it up right away. No bamboozling was required. It seems strange to have to explain this, but most publishers are very happy to receive book proposals on interesting subjects from popular bloggers. I’ve had standing offers from publishers who are pretty much willing to publish whatever non-fiction I want to write for years.

One of the few remaining Pharyngulans is so desperate to try to DISQUALIFY me that he suggested I paid BenBella Books to have it published. Never mind the obvious fact that I had previously contributed to several BenBella anthologies. Or the 100+ reviews and the fact that after six years, the Kindle ranking for TIA is still respectable at  “#28 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Religion & Spirituality > Atheism” 

The Devil’s Delusion, on the other hand is at  #42 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Religion & Spirituality > Atheism. But it has 237 reviews, so one has to conclude that Jed made a reasonable call in going with Berlinski. I suspect TIA might have done even better than TDD did with the benefit of Crown’s marketing muscle behind it, but I can’t criticize the decision, even in in retrospect. Remember, the call had to be made prior to either book actually being written.

“I said it was ridiculous for him to claim that he was cited in scientific publications, when what he was really doing was claiming that people who didn’t cite him at all were actually citing him. It’s bizarre, but he’s doubling down. He claims that Scott Atran was using his ‘data’ about the number of religious wars, which he had to have gotten from his book. I think we can safely lay this one to rest: Vox Day/Theodore Beale is not the source of any data or hypothesis published by Scott Atran in Nature.”

Who said anything about Scott Atran in Nature? PZ brought up Atran, not me. Look, I don’t read Nature. I don’t follow Scott Atran. I don’t hunt for references to my historical proof that religion doesn’t cause war. People simply happen to send me news about things they think might be of interest to me on a regular basis. The only reference I ever noticed myself was the recent one in the New York Times. Anyhow, as was brought to my attention two years ago, I was the original
source of the data Atran cited in a 2012 article called “God and the
Ivory Tower”.

Moreover, the chief complaint against religion — that it is history’s
prime instigator of intergroup conflict — does not withstand scrutiny.
Religious issues motivate only a small minority of recorded wars. The
Encyclopedia of Wars surveyed 1,763 violent conflicts across history;
only 123 (7 percent) were religious”
– “God and the Ivory Tower”, August 6, 2012

“He claims to have inspired other studies…. Strange. I am not autistic to any noticeable degree, and have never been diagnosed as such. That makes it odd to claim I am the inspiration for a “hypothesis”.”

It’s a little more noticeable than PZ thinks. Self-awareness is not his strong suit. From a 2007 post entitled The socially autistic atheist: “Based on Wired Magazine’s observation that atheists tend to be
quarrelsome, socially challenged men, to say nothing of the unpleasant
personalities of leading public atheists such as Richard Dawkins,
Christopher Hitchens and Michel Onfray, one could reasonably hypothesize
that there is likely to be a strong correlation between Asperger’s and
atheism. It’s by no means a scientific test, but it is interesting to
note the coincidence that 59 of the virulent atheists over at Dr. PZ
Myers place report an average score on the Asperger’s Quotient test of 27.8. And this does not include the two individuals who actually have Asperger’s but did not report any test results.”

As PZ himself said: “I took the test and scored a 24, an “average math contest winner.” You need a 32 to suggest Asperger’s, and a 15 is the average. So there. I don’t have Asperger’s, I’m just cruel and insensitive.”

Hence the term “socially autistic” rather than “autistic”. The adjective modifies the noun. It’s not surprising PZ’s AQ score is higher than the norm on the autism spectrum because he is observably a “quarrelsome, socially challenged” man. I scored 14, by the way. Unlike PZ, I possess empathy, athletic experience, and social skills that help temper my high intelligence. I’m not as literal and pedantic as one might conclude from reading the blog, that is just an artifact of having had scores of people like PZ scouring my every written word looking for something, anything, to attack and use to DISQUALIFY for over a decade.

“Most importantly, there is no citation of Theodore Beale, or Vox Day, or The Irrational Atheist, or ‘that misogynistic asshole on the internet’. You’d think this would be rather obvious: you don’t get to count it as a citation if you aren’t cited.”

I was curious when I saw a report of the study in the news, so I emailed one of the authors and asked her if her team had derived the hypothesis from TIA or from this blog. She emailed me back, confirmed that they had in fact gotten it from TIA, and asked if I would like to be cited. I thanked her and told her it wasn’t necessary because I was merely curious if it was sheer coincidence or not. I’m not a scientist and I’m not at all concerned about petty scientistic credential games. I’m certainly not concerned with their little rules about who get to take credit and how. The facts are what they are. I deal in reality, not scientistry.

“And the final damning straw: the much vaunted paper by Hooker that claims a vaccination/autism link, that was promoted by Vox Day, has been retracted. He’s basically wrong about everything.”

No. I have not been wrong about anything he’s addressed here. I am smarter than PZ Myers and one reason he hates me is that I demonstrate this so easily every single time he pushes his godless corpulence up from the ground long enough to get slapped down again. The reason Dr. Hooker’s paper was retracted was not because it was flawed, but because he obtained much more conclusive proof of his claim that the CDC was hiding apparent evidence of a specific vaccination/autism link.

On the very same day that PZ was erroneously claiming I was wrong about this “final damning straw”, Dr. William Thompson, a senior scientist at the CDC, issued a statement through his lawyer proving that I was right to take Dr. Hooker’s assertion about statistical fraud at the CDC seriously.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE-AUGUST 27,2014

STATEMENT OF WILLIAM W. THOMPSON, Ph.D., REGARDING THE 2004 ARTICLE EXAMINING THE POSSIBILITY OF A RELATIONSHIP  BETWEEN  MMR VACCINE AND AUTISM

PZ Myers must be a remarkably dishonest man on the basis of his long-held, oft-expressed opinion that I am prone to dishonesty. One would think that after all these years of nipping at my ankles, he would have learned by now that while I do occasionally make mistakes, and I do occasionally take at face value reports that turn out to be false, I do not lie when I am writing on the blog. Not because I’m perfectly honest, but because I’m not perfectly stupid.

I also make a habit of doing the sort of look-before-you-leap research with which PZ never bothers. Which is why when he’s saying one thing and I’m saying another, the very safe bet is on the latter.

Anti-racism fosters rape, child abuse

It is easy to prove that the material costs of anti-racism are CONSIDERABLY worse than the material costs of racism:

The sexual abuse of about 1,400 children at the hands of Asian men went unreported for 16 years as staff feared they would be seen as racist, a report said today.

Children as young as 11 were trafficked, beaten, and raped by large numbers of men between 1997 and 2013 in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, the review into child protection revealed. And shockingly, more than a third of the cases were already known to agencies.

But according to the report’s author: ‘several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist’. The landmark report exposing widespread failures of the council, police and social services revealed:

  • Victims were doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, terrorised with guns, made to witness brutally-violent rapes and told they would be the next if they spoke out;
  • They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten and intimidated;
  • One victim described gang rape as ‘a way of life’;
  • Police ‘regarded many child victims with contempt’;
  • The approximate figure of 1,400 abuse victims is likely to be a conservative estimate of the true scale of abuse.

Anti-racists not only actively celebrate predatory relationships, they regularly demonstrate that they have no problem whatsoever with child abuse, whether it occurs within the same race or is interracial. Moreover, what they falsely decry as “racism” is quite often nothing more than the exercise of the Constitutional right of free association.

Hypothesis: the degree of an individual’s anti-racism is directly related to the anti-racist’s inability to emotionally connect to his own kind.

If you think that you possess the higher moral ground because you are anti-racist, think again. You are observably enabling widespread crime, particularly rape and child abuse, and are quite literally doing material harm to your own nation.

Africa belongs to them

It is becoming increasingly obvious that all of the international do-gooder efforts in Africa for the last 100 years have not only been pointless, but were actually counterproductive:

Mob Destroys Ebola Center In Liberia Two Days After It Opens

A mob descended on the center at around 5:30 p.m., chanting, “No Ebola in West Point! No Ebola in West Point!” They stormed the front gate and pushed into the holding center. They stole the few gloves someone had donated this morning, and the chlorine sprayers used to disinfect the bodies of those who die here, all the while hollering that Ebola is a hoax.

They ransacked the protective suits, the goggles, the masks. They destroyed part of Tarplah’s car as he was fleeing the crowd. Jemimah Kargbo, a health care worker at a clinic next door, said they took mattresses and bedding, utensils and plastic chairs.

“Everybody left with their own thing,” she said. “What are they carrying to their homes? They are carrying their deaths.”

She said the police showed up but the crowd intimidated them.

“The police were there but they couldn’t contain them. They started threatening the police, so the police just looked at them,” she said.

And then mob left with all of the patients.

“They said, ‘The president says you have Ebola, but you don’t have Ebola, you have malaria. Get up and go out!’” Kargbo said.

The West is going to pull out of Africa sooner or later. Sooner, if the current Ebola epidemic is any indication. This means that Africa will be right back where it was in the 1940s, only now the African nations are unable to feed themselves because their populations have been massively inflated beyond what their maintainable infrastructure is able to support.

The only thing that the Western aid workers have been able to accomplish in the current crisis is bringing Ebola back to their native lands.

A Hitlerian purpose

I missed this Goldman column the last time around, which is probably just as well. It is historically false, morally bankrupt, and should be deeply offensive to a broad range of people across the political, racial, and religious spectrums:

The essay below appeared in Asia Times Online on April 8, 2008. Apropos of the Ferguson riots it is reprinted below. It should make no-one happy. The crippling failure in American culture, I argue, is our refusal to come to terms with our own Civil War. This failure afflicts the conservative movement. For example: Last June I had the privilege to teach a course at the annual Acton University in Grand Rapids, MI. One of the keynote speakers was Judge Andrew Napolitano, whom I admire and whose remarks in the main I applauded. But Napolitano argued in passing that Lincoln had done a terrible thing by fighting the Civil War: surely, the judge said, he could have found a better way to end slavery than by tearing the country apart. That is utter nonsense for two reasons: the first is that a large part of the South was willing to die to preserve slavery, and the second is that the European imperial powers were already conspiring with elements of the South to expand slavery through Cuba, Mexico and Central America. If Lincoln had not fought the Civil War in 1861, the French invasion of Mexico in 1862 would have established a link with the Confederacy and prevented a Northern blockade.

Perfectly intelligent and well-motivated men like Napolitano ignore the obvious about the Civil War because it is still too horrible to contemplate. More broadly, the conservative movement continues to tolerate a revolting form of nostalgia for the slave era euphemistically called “Southern Traditionalism.” ISI’s middle-brow list of “Fifty Greatest Books of the 20th Century” includes a biography of Gen. Robert E. Lee, labeled “The tragic life of a great Southern traditionalist beautifully chronicled by a great Southern traditionalist.” The ISI list is mostly mediocre, but this is offensive in the extreme.

Below I demand of Americans “a higher threshold for horror.” 

An uncanny parallel links the fate of young African-Americans today and that of the young white men of the slave-holding South in 1865. Both cohorts have lost a terrifying proportion of their number to violence. One third of black Americans between the ages of 20 and 30 passed through the criminal justice system in 1995, according to the Sentencing Project, a prisoners’ advocacy group. Nearly a third of military-age Southern men military age were killed or wounded during America’s Civil War.

It is a measure of the inherent good-heartedness of Americans that they evince a low threshold of horror. Three hundred thousand Confederate dead and millions of ruined African-American lives are too awful to contemplate. Some part of Senator Barack Obama’s appeal derives from America’s revulsion over the destruction of a generation of young black men; electing an African-American president would assuage part of the guilt.

From this great suffering arise two genres of American popular culture, the Gone With the Wind ilk of Civil War epic, and the “Get Rich or Die Tryin’” brand of gangsta tale. Both try to take the edge off the revulsion and placate the dishonored dead by turning them into folk-heroes. That is understandable, but also unfortunate, for America still has a great deal of killing left to do around the world, and might as well get used to it.

“Get Rich or Die Tryin’” would have been a good epitaph for the Confederate dead, who fought for land and slaves, not for “states’ rights” or the sanctity of their soil. Slave-owners along with want-to-be slave-owners had it coming. The Union general William Tecumseh Sherman who said after he burned Atlanta, “I fear the world will jump to the wrong conclusion that because I am in Atlanta the work is done. Far from it. We must kill three hundred thousand, I have told you of so often, and the further they run the harder for us to get them.”

Given the sad history of racial oppression in the South for a century after the Civil War, the only thing to regret is that Sherman didn’t finish the job. I stopped watching the film version of Gone With the Wind after Scarlett O’Hara saved her plantation from the tax-collector. I wanted her to pick cotton until her back broke.

I don’t think it would be a big surprise if there were more than a few blacks and Southerners who read this grotesque nonsense that did not conclude that perhaps it was not Sherman or the American justice system, but Adolf Hitler who didn’t do enough killing. Remember, this is the same individual who asserts that because the Chinese harbor such instinctive respect and admiration for his people, China and the Jews “share a common purpose, to transcend tribalism through a unifying civilization”.

In other words, what Spengler is saying is that the purpose of the Jewish people is to crush all nationalism through slaughter.

But to be clear, it is obvious that not all Jews agree with him, least of all the Israeli who brought it to my attention.

A close call

Unless you lived in Minnesota 30 years ago, I can’t possibly explain how insane it sounds to hear that there are Africans living in Coon Rapids. I wonder how long it will be before they decide that the name of the town is racist:

Ebola victim who sparked fears of a worldwide outbreak was American: Father who died of incurable virus in Nigeria after taking international flight was going to visit his children in Minnesota…The couple, who both hold US citizenship are originally from Liberia and Decontee arrived in the country with her family in 1991 and Patrick came in the early 2000s. The couple are part of the large Liberian community in Minnesota, who moved there in the aftermath of the nation’s two civil wars in the 1980s and late 1990s.

The imported Somalis are bad enough, what with their suicide bombers and the occasional “gas leak” explosions that mysteriously blow up their residences. But Ebola-carrying Liberians too? This is Night of the Comet-level lunacy.

I’m as familiar with the melting pot mythology and Ellis Island rhetoric as anyone else. I get the idea that time plus geographic location is supposed to magically transform people from anywhere into something they previously were not. But seriously, even if you are one of those people whose grandparents were immigrants and are emotionally tied to the idea that you are too a Real American like George Washington because you are resident in a certain geography and there is a piece of paper that says you are, do you really think this is all going to end well? If so, how?

What, specifically, is the positive end result that is somehow going to be produced by establishing Mogadishu on the Mississippi and sending 30 underage Guatamalans to every town in America? Do you see America remaining the same, is it changing for the better, or for the worse? And if diversity is good, then why has every country in the world been predominantly homogenous until very recently?

Perhaps if the unfortunate Mr. Sawyer had lived long enough to bring the Ebola virus to Coon Rapids, that would be enough to convince the American public that this whole “we is the world” sentiment is fundamentally misguided. But I doubt it.

Divergence

I always find it interesting to learn what people actively hate about about a book or story. Here are two reviews of two award-nominated stories that illustrate the vast divide in the SF/F community today. First, Scooter reviews “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love”:

There comes a point in the evolution of any intelligent species where it develops the ability to destroy itself. Mankind arrived at this danger point in 1945 with the invention of the atomic bomb. The science-fiction and fantasy community has now reached the same apocalyptic milestone with Rachel Swirsky’s invention of the dino-porn revenge fantasy tale.  While nukes can merely bomb mankind back to the stone age, “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love” threatens to blast the credibility of the fantasy genre all the way back to the Cretaceous. 

The story itself, however, never takes us to a place so exotic. Instead, the narrator of this 966-word Hugo-nominated flash fiction story has an extended monologue imagining her husband as a five foot ten T-Rex who becomes a Broadway singer and hangs out in pool halls. From this description, and the ridiculous title, one might expect the piece to be a parody of the inter-species romance trope found primarily in fan-fic. In a way, that’s exactly what we get.  In overwrought pseudo-poetic prose, the narrator envisions feeding her lizard-lover a live-goat, serenading him with lullabies, and jealousy presiding at his wedding to a genetically engineered dino.  At one point the narrator even inexplicably transforms into a flower. 

Underlying all the silliness is an attempt at profundity so inept that Swisky manages to unintentionally exploit the silliness of the premise and deliver on the chuckles. The titular therapod of the story turns out to be a paleontologist who was beaten into a coma by a bunch of generic bigots shouting generic epithets for generic reasons. The narrator is reimagining her weak hubbie as an alpha dinosaur with the carnivorous capability to enact revenge against his attackers.    

“If you were a dinosaur, my love, I’d teach you the scents of those men. I’d lead you to them quietly, oh so quietly. Still, they would see you. They’d run. Your nostrils would flare as you inhaled the night and then, with the suddenness of a predator, you’d strike. I’d watch as you decanted their lives—the flood of red; the spill of glistening, coiled things—and I’d laugh, laugh, laugh.”

The power of short fiction hinges primarily on a strong ending:  a good punchline, a sudden reversal, or anything that packs an emotional wallop. In that respect, Swirsky does not disappoint. Her climax finally answers the two questions the reader has been asking since the beginning:  how in the hell is this considered a fantasy story, and why has it been nominated for a Hugo? The answer is that Swirsky has redefined the entire fantasy genre. Fantasy does not need to have internal consistency; the only requirement is that it be set in “a world of magic where anything [is] possible”. In other words, it doesn’t have to make a lick of sense. 

Forget world-building. Forget character development. Forget that limitations make a story more interesting. Now a Hugo-nominated fantasy story can just be someone’s weird daydream – about anything whatsoever – so long as it contains clichés that fit into the culturally approved narrative. To her credit, the bestiality in the story is – if not impossible – at least dimly recognized as unideal. But it’s her new insight – that details are not important to storytelling – which promises to be the pink sci-fi/fantasy equivalent of the atomic bomb. Perhaps Swirsky will one day look upon the devastation wrought upon the genre’s readership, and like Oppenheimer, misquote the Baghavad Gita:  “I am become Dinosaur Porn, Destroyer of Fantasy Worlds.”

On the other hand, Justin A. Bacon thinks just as poorly of “Opera Vita Aeterna”:

Easily one of the worst pieces of fiction I’ve read lately. The “world-building” consists of thinly veiling the Catholic Church by inconsistently swapping out the names and terminology and then slapping in some magic-wielding elves. (You might think that magic-wielding elves would have some sort of meaningful impact on the beliefs or teachings of the Church, but they don’t.) The “plot” would be stretched thin on a very short story, but it takes a truly prodigious amount of “talent” to stretch it over the length of a novelette: An elf shows up at a not-Catholic monastery and says, “I killed your missionary. Now I’d like to stay here and study your God.” He decides to stay for several decades while he single-handedly illuminates an entire copy of the not-Bible by himself. This is interrupted by a single scene in which he asks the head of the monastery a question about his religious faith, prompting the head of the monastery to respond by literally cribbing Thomas Aquinas at interminable length. No one in the monastery has their faith or their lives remotely affected by the elf. The elf leaves for a bit and everyone in the monastery is brutally killed by some other elves. Then the elf yells at a statue of not-Jesus Christ.

It’s not so much a story as it is a train wreck of bad writing, bad plotting, bad world-building, and bad characterization.

Both reviewers have clearly read the stories they are reviewing; these are not fake reviews. But what is interesting is that both of them think so poorly of stories that others think very well of. Are the differences purely ideological or is there more to it? I tend to suspect the latter; it might be informative to know what Mr. Bacon thinks of “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love” and what Scooter thinks of “Opera Vita Aeterna”.

NB: I don’t think it is fair to criticize Bacon’s lack of awareness of the impact of the magic-wielding elves on the beliefs of the Church since he clearly hasn’t read Summa Elvetica and what is actually there in “Opera” is pretty subtle. On the other hand, it is fair to observe that if he thinks everyone in the monastery was killed by “some other elves”, he was not reading very closely.

Learning to read: a new policy

I deleted yesterday’s post about Catholic charity and the Children’s Invasion of the southern US border because, for the second time this week, some idiot couldn’t bother reading closely enough to grasp who had written what.

The first time, a cretin attributed to me what Tom Kratman had not actually written. Tom expressed a sentiment, I articulated my surprise that his sentiment had not included a certain action, and from this the cretin somehow concluded that I was advocating the action. This was not true; for all that I think very poorly of progressives, I have never advocated crucifying them en masse. As it happens, I would never advocate crucifying anyone, for much the same reason that the Apostle Peter insisted upon being crucified upside down. I prefer to sentence progressives to living in the hellholes their policies have created, with no possibility of escaping them to Californicate other more sensibly governed communities.

The second time, a moron attributed to John C. Wright what I had written. I pointed out an absolutely undeniable fact: the US military would be perfectly justified in defending the borders of the nation by machine-gunning absolutely everyone attempting to invade. The estimated 235,000 illegal immigrants (which counts only those who are expected to be apprehended) considerably outnumber many invading armies of the past; the Immifada is three times bigger than the First Crusade, which was considered an “enormous” army by medieval standards. It is exactly the size of ARMIR, the Italian 8th Army that defeated the Soviets at Serafimovič before being targeted and destroyed in Operation Little Saturn by the 1st and 3rd Guards Armies.

It should be obvious that this is a military and historical and Constitutional perspective on the situation, not a theological or religious one, still less derived from the Catholic Catechism on charity.

As it happens, I do not advocate the machine-gunning of invasive immigrants, particularly not when they have been tacitly invited into invading by an exceedingly dishonest administration. I was merely pointing out that it is a legal and civilized option, and one, I will add, that would be preferred to surrendering and simply accepting the invasion as a prelude to eventual civil war and societal collapse. I favor the immediate humane and civilized repatriation of all the invading immigrants, just as I favor the humane and civilized repatriation of all post-1986 amnesty immigrants from all nations not preferred in the pre-1965 immigration regime. A commitment was made to the American people as part of the 1965 reforms, a commitment that was violated as egregiously as any ever made by politicians. Americans have a right, indeed, they have a responsibility, to hold their government to that commitment.

I don’t blame Mr. Wright in the slightest for not wishing to have his views twisted and misrepresented so completely. Whether that was done in ignorance and carelessness, or intentionally in a vicious attempt to slander him, I do not care at all. In the future, if you falsely attribute to one individual the views and statements or another, your error will be immediately noted. If you do not delete the statement of your own accord after the error has been pointed out to you, the comment will be spammed.

Look, it’s really not that hard. Simply read through the entire post, and preferably, the linked piece as well, before you think to leave a comment here. This is a terrible place to utilize the idiotic practice of skimming until offended, then blurting out your literally uninformed reaction to whatever you imagined you read. There are few things I despise more than comments that begin: “I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but….”

You haven’t? Then don’t write anything, don’t say anything, don’t even try to THINK anything, until you do. And before you decide to criticize anyone, take the time to ascertain that the individual you are criticizing actually wrote what you think they wrote.