#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
Tumblr takes on 4chan. It goes about as well for them as you would tend to assume. Less than one day to go from #shutdown4chan to “PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DELETE YOUR SELFIES!”
It reminds one that feminists have no idea what post-Christian society has in store for women. Literally no idea at all.
This plaintive protest, in a nutshell, explains why there can never be any significant mixing of various population sub-groups that will be successful over time. Not without the rule of a militarized aristocracy at a bare minimum, and a strictly limited voting franchise at best.
“I’m at the breaking point,” said Gretchen Gardner, an Austin artist who bought a 1930s bungalow in the Bouldin neighborhood just south of downtown in 1991 and has watched her property tax bill soar to $8,500 this year.
“It’s not because I don’t like paying taxes,” said Gardner, who attended both meetings. “I have voted for every park, every library, all the school improvements, for light rail, for anything that will make this city better. But now I can’t afford to live here anymore. I’ll protest my appraisal notice, but that’s not enough. Someone needs to step in and address the big picture.”
Now, this is a woman who cannot grasp the connection between her votes for “anything that will make this city better” and the consequent increase in her property tax bill. How can one reasonably argue that she should be permitted to vote? She is literally non compos mentis with regards to basic politics.
And she is high-functioning in comparison to millions of other voters! If nothing else, she has managed to provide for herself and pay her mortgage for 23 years. That puts her ahead of tens of millions of people.
The worst thing is the probable consequences of her selling her house. She’ll move somewhere less expensive, and then promptly resume voting for the very things that forced her to move there. Because she does not understand cause and effect.
It appears I may have erred in describing NK Jemisin as “an educated, but ignorant half-savage”. I was clearly too generous in giving her the benefit of the doubt, as she is, by her own admission, “all savage and damned proud of it”.
This is why I say I was premature in calling for a reconciliation. Reconciliations are for after the violence has ended. In South Africa the Truth & Reconciliation Commission came after apartheid’s end; in Rwanda it started after the genocide stopped; in Australia reconciliation began after its indigenous people stopped being classified as “fauna” by its government. Reconciliation is a part of the healing process, but how can there be healing when the wounds are still being inflicted? How can we begin to talk about healing when all the perpetrators have to do is toss out dogwhistles and disclaimers of evil intent to pretend they’ve done no harm?
(Incidentally: Mr. Various Diseases, Mr. Civility, and Misters and Misses
Free Speech At All Costs, if you represent the civilization to which
I’m supposed to aspire then I am all savage, and damned proud of it. You may collectively kiss my black ass)….There are some signs of hope, I guess: SFWA did throw that one bigot
out, though plenty more remain. Chip Delany’s been honored as a SFWA
Grandmaster some fifty years after one of his novels was rejected for
serialization in ANALOG because its editors didn’t think anyone could
relate to a black protagonist. WisCon invited me here to be one of its
Guests of Honor, five years after I ragequit the Concom over the
Elizabeth Moon affair. We are talking about what’s happening. We are
fighting back. But I am desperately afraid that Delany’s prediction
will continue to prove true, and that the violence will escalate as more
of us step up and demand that our contributions be recognized, our
personhood respected, our presence acknowledged. If that’s the case,
then we haven’t seen the worst of it yet. And we need to prepare.So. If they think we are a threat? Let’s give them a threat. They
want to call us savages? Let’s show them exactly what that means.
Yes, because history is absolutely rife with examples of how well savages fare when faced with civilized opposition. I note, with no small amusement, that Jemisin has now publicly conceded the truth of everything I wrote in that controversial Twitter-linked post last summer. She has not only conceded her barbarism and her inability to grasp the fundamental nature of SF/F, but the nonsensical nature of her call for “reconciliation” in SF/F as well.
Last summer, I wrote: “Jemisin clearly does not understand that her dishonest call for
“reconciliation” and even more diversity within SF/F is tantamount to a
call for its decline into irrelevance. Nor do the back-patting Samuel
Johnsons wiping their eyes and congratulating her for her
ever-so-touching speech understand that.
There can be no reconciliation between the observant and the delusional.”
Even the most skeptical critic must admit that I warned everyone the pinkshirt inquisition would not end with me. Don’t let that “plenty more remain” escape your notice. Remember, this is the woman who would read out Robert Heinlein himself out from the SF genre on the basis of his being “racist as fuck“, as well as “the average American” and “most of science fiction fandom” too.
I, for one, welcome this escalation. I think it is a wonderful thing that the other side has finally admitted the ideological conflict they have long denied. I find it encouraging that they now openly confess they seek to “Make them uncomfortable. Shout them down. Kick them out.”
Disnearations of civilization indeed.
Nicolas Kristof has learned absolutely nothing from the reaction of Boko Haram:
Women’s rights advocates in Nigeria noisily demanded action, and social media mavens around the world spread word on Twitter, Facebook and online petitions — and a movement grew.
The #BringBackOurGirls hashtag, started on Twitter by a Nigerian lawyer, has now been shared more than one million times. A Nigerian started a petition on Change.org, calling for more efforts to find the girls, and more than 450,000 people around the world have signed it.
Nigerian women embarrassed the government by announcing that they would strip off their clothes and march naked into the Sambisa forest to confront the militants and recover the girls….
All of us can respond more directly. Boko Haram, whose name means roughly “Western education is a sin,” is keeping women and girls marginalized; conversely, we can help educate and empower women. Ultimately, the greatest threat to extremism isn’t a drone overhead but a girl with a book.
Mother’s Day is this Sunday, and, by all means, let’s use it to celebrate the moms in our lives with flowers and brunches. But let’s also use the occasion to honor the girls still missing in Nigeria.
One way is a donation to support girls going to school around Africa through the Campaign for Female Education, Camfed.org; a $40 gift pays for a girl’s school uniform.
Kristof is acting as if the young women are not legitimate military targets. But that is the entire point. He, and many others like him, have made them legitimate military targets by intentionally turning them into weapons in a cultural war. And he had better pray that Boko Haram does not follow al Qaeda’s lead in bringing the West’s cultural war on the South and East back to the West.
At Virginia Tech, one mentally disturbed immigrant managed to kill 33 college students. A small team of Boko Haram activists could probably manage to kill at least five times that number should they target an American university. And the latest news out of Nigeria makes it clear that they are at least one step ahead of the likes of Kristof et al.
Islamist insurgents have killed hundreds in a town in Nigeria’s northeast this week, the area’s senator, a resident and the Nigerian news media reported on Wednesday, as more than 200 schoolgirls abducted by the militants, known as Boko Haram, remained missing.
The latest attack, on Monday, followed a classic Boko Haram pattern: Dozens of militants wearing fatigues and wielding AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenade launchers descended on the town of Gamboru Ngala, chanting “Allahu akbar,” firing indiscriminately and torching houses. When it was over, at least 336 people had been killed and hundreds of houses and cars had been set on fire, said Waziri Hassan, who lives there, and Senator Ahmed Zanna….
Gamboru, a town of perhaps 3,000 people, “is now burned into ashes,” Mr. Hassan said. “I saw it with my own eyes, 171 dead bodies, scattered around.” At least 18 police officers were killed, but Mr. Zanna said there were no military forces in the town because all had been drafted in the search for the schoolgirls.
Perhaps the Nigerian government actually knew what it was doing when it didn’t drop everything to engage in a fruitless search for the young women, who may not even be inside the country’s borders anyhow. Regardless, in the end, there can only ever be one result between those who “fight” by public posturing and those who fight by taking arms.
UPDATE: The US military cannot get involved as it is prohibited by law from collaboration with Nigerian security forces.
Strangely enough, all the Senatorial tears and Nicolas Kristof columns don’t appear to have convinced Boko Haram to stop targeting girls:
Suspected Boko Haram gunmen kidnapped eight girls from a village near one of the Islamists’ strongholds in northeastern Nigeria overnight, police and residents said on Tuesday. The abduction of the girls, aged 12 to 15, followed the kidnapping of more than 200 other schoolgirls by the militant group last month, whom it has threatened to sell into slavery.
Lazarus Musa, a resident of the village of Warabe, told Reuters that armed men had opened fire during the raid.
“They were many, and all of them carried guns. They came in two vehicles painted in army color. They started shooting in our village,” Musa said by telephone from the village in the hilly Gwoza area, Boko Haram’s main base.
A police source, who asked not to be identified, said the girls were taken away on trucks, along with looted livestock and food.
This can only mean one thing: a ribbon campaign. That will show the anti-educationists!
“Take one monkey, train it to
wear a fedora and hypnotise it in to believing it is a Towering Literary
Intellect. I give you N.K. Jemisin.”
– Damien Walter
Shocking stuff! A straight white male calling an African-American woman a monkey! I am as agog as I am aghast! Oh, wait a minute… it seems there was a minor typo there.
“Take one monkey, train it to
wear a fedora and hypnotise it in to believing it is a Towering Literary
Intellect. I give you John C. Wright.”
In any event, it is more than a little amusing to see such a complete non-entity striking a pose as the literary superior to one of the greatest living science fiction masters. I would direct you to Mr. Walter’s work for the purposes of fair comparison, but unfortunately, he hasn’t published so much as a single novel. This behavior might appear inexplicable to the rationally minded, but it is in fact entirely predictable.
Because Damien Walter illustrates the primary point made in “Restless Heart of Darkness”, the final essay in John C. Wright’s brilliant and #1 bestselling TRANSHUMAN AND SUBHUMAN:
I realized why it is that the current mainstream modern thought, despite its illogical and pointless nature, is so persistent, nay, so desperate. I realized why these Moderns never admit they are wrong no matter how obvious the error, nor can they compromise, nor hold a rational discussion, nor a polite one, nor can they restrain themselves. They can neither win nor surrender….
The unwillingness of the Progressives to discuss their beliefs is because one of their beliefs (the most outrageously false of all, and most easy to prove false) is that they are superior beings, superior by virtue of their greater intelligence, broader open-mindedness, higher education, finer sentiments, and greater compassion, surrounded by yowling and filthy yahoos. These Progressives, who have never read a word of Aristotle, much less read him in Greek, boast that they cannot discuss philosophy honestly with a psychotic yet retarded Neanderthal like me, due to my inferior nature. Well, I cannot argue with their assessment of my education, except to say ἀντικεῖσθαι δ᾽ ὁ ἀλαζὼν φαίνεται τῷ ἀληθευτικῷ· χείρων γάρ.
Tom Simon adds some not inapt comments after dealing with a different individual exhibiting very similar tendencies to Damien Walter:
I used to deal with trolls for a living (saddest job I ever had), and I can tell you that it probably isn’t masochism. More likely, he is so socially inept and so incapable of reading emotional clues from text, he actually thinks that his words are inflicting righteous damage upon us, the heinous foe, and that he is returning to his lair covered in glory after causing us all to writhe in soul-deep agony at the sudden exposure of our horrible, horrible guilt. And he is so plug ignorant of the art of dialectic that he actually believes he is winning his arguments with us.
Moreover, as a person who despises religion, theology, philosophy, and history, who knows nothing about art, literature, science, technology, or any of the useful trades, he is gloriously unequipped to appreciate any mode of thought but his own – and his own mode contains no actual thought, just an angry clashing of slogans without ground or consequent, like Nietzsche on cheap drugs. Therefore (hello again, Dunning and Kruger) he imagines that his own mental slush is superior to all our thoughts; that we disagree with him is, to him, proof of our imbecility.
At least Mr. Simon’s troll was willing to attempt to engage in discourse, however ineptly. Which does put him ahead of Damien Walters, the current president of the SFWA, the former 3x president of the SFWA, and numerous other would-be luminaries of the field.
Chris KluweVerified account @ChrisWarcraft
4:27 PM – 29 Apr 2014
“I’m talking, no one takes his money, sells him anything – nothing. Let’s see how racist he is when he can’t buy food.”
Apparently Zyklon B showers aren’t enough for him, as Sparklepunter openly seeks to shun and starve the Jew.
We see it in history and we see it in real-time. It’s not an exaggeration. Leftists literally want to kill those who possess undesirable opinions, and they never stop and think for a moment of the possibility that the consequences might run the other way. And yet, we can see that by their own reckoning, the worst IMAGINED excesses of the medieval Catholic Church of which they so often complain are more than justified.
Since Chris Kluwe is an anti-semite openly advocating the starving of Jews, summoning those ghastly images of emaciated men and women at Dachau and Auschwitz, I think it is obvious that the NFL commissioner has no choice but to impose a lifetime ban from the NFL on him.
This is vastly amusing. John Scalzi has lobbied for Hugos for years,
on behalf of himself and others. This is the second year of Sad Puppies.
Charles Stross has openly engaged in what he calls “Shameless Hugo
nomination touting” and the Toad of Tor has publicly declared that
science fiction awards are nothing but “a giant signal saying ‘this is
what we love, this is what we value'”. Dozens of pinkshirts have primly announced that they don’t intend to read anything by anyone of whom they disapprove.
And David Gerrold somehow
concludes that the politicization of science fiction is my fault?
Coming back to the starting point of the column — if we accept that
science fiction awards should not be politicized, then the columnist is
blaming the wrong people. He should start by blaming Vox Day the guy who politicized this year’s process in the first place.
Either Gerrold has lost it or I have powers far beyond my ken. For example, here is a Hugo-related post from 2010 that lists “Tor.com’s Hugo Award-eligible works” and pushes Tor novels, editors, and artists.
4. Irene Wednesday March 10, 2010 12:27pm EST
Hi Spera,This post was meant to be specific to the works that Tor.com has published.
But that doesn’t mean would love for you to consider Tor novels, editors, and artists. You can check out the Tor corporate site here.
Oh my. Anyhow, I found the angst of a fellow Hugo nominee who professes to oppose “award campaigns” to be somewhat amusing:
Let me be clear: Vox Day is a despicable person whose repeated racist, sexist, and homophobic behavior towards specific members of the genre community as well as the community as a whole should make all decent human beings recoil from his presence. That I received my first Hugo nomination on the same ballot that bears his name leaves a vile taste in my mouth. That the rest of the fiction ballot feels, as several people have noted, as if it’s recapitulating the culture wars only makes this nomination worse, and confirms me in my feeling that the only people who benefit from award campaigns are those with large and devoted fanbases–whether those fanbases are motivated by love of a particular writer, or the desire to stick it to the lefties (or, as is most likely, both).
– Abigail Nussbaum, April 20
Or at least, she opposes them when she isn’t successfully running one of her own, or pimping out the “dozens” of others by various would-be nominees:
Even as the award eligibility phenomenon gains steam (and respectability), more and more people are also using the internet to create a more broadly informed voter base. Dozens of people are posting their Hugo ballots and recommendations (to take a by no means exhaustive sample: Nina Allan, Thea and Ana at The Book Smugglers, Liz Bourke (1, 2, 3, 4), the bloggers of LadyBusiness, Justin Landon, Martin Lewis, Jonathan McCalmont (1, 2), Aidan Moher, Mari Ness, Ian Sales, Jared Shurin, Rachel Swirsky (1, 2, 3), Adam Whitehead). Blogs like Hugo Award Eligible Art(ists) seek to inform people (like myself) who have little grounding in the category, and make them acquainted with worthwhile nominees. Existing projects like Writertopia’s Campbell award eligibility page collate information that makes it easier to nominate for an award whose eligibility requirements can seem tricky even if you’re an old hand at this Hugo stuff. If you’re someone who is interested in voting as more than a single author’s fan, it has never been easier to gain a broad appreciation of the field and its practitioners, even the ones who aren’t superstars.
I still don’t know whether award eligibility posts are part of the problem or simply a ineffective distraction. I do think that the efforts I’ve been seeing in the last two months have a real chance of being part of the solution, and I mean to join in. In the next few weeks, I’ll be posting my own Hugo ballot, a few categories at a time. (I’ll also be posting links to works that I consider worthwhile on my twitter account.)
– Abigail Nussbaum, March 6
The ironic thing about the complaints that Larry and I somehow bought our nominations is that while my massive and energetic campaign consisted of a single and straightforward post, a blogger at Tor.com actively waged a successful cheerleading effort on behalf of the Tor-published Wheel of Time series:
Therefore, O my Peeps, I exhort you: if you can and will, please
consider nominating the Wheel of Time series as a whole for the Hugo
Award for Best Novel, and spread the word so that others might do the
same…. So go! Join! Nominate! Vote! Participate! And maybe help make Hugo
history, eh? I can think of worse things to do with your time!
Of course, the Dread Ilk know my actual position on liberals giving awards to each other:
Everyone has different goals. Rabbits need the group affirmation that
these sorts of political awards offer them. Not-rabbits don’t.
Psykosonik once beat out Prince for Best Dance Record at the Minnesota
Music Awards for a song I wrote; I didn’t know we’d won until months
later because not only did I not bother going to the ceremony, my bandmates who attended didn’t even see fit to mention that we won because they knew I didn’t care. I
didn’t even know I had been a three-time Billboard top 40 recording
artist for about 16 years until I looked it up a few months ago when I
was pointing out the dirty laundry of the “New York Times bestselling”
authors.When you are fortunate enough to experience success, you learn to value
certain aspects of it and to disvalue others. My objective is to write a
great epic fantasy series that is capable of creating the same feeling
in its readers that Dune once created in me. That’s why I simply laugh
when people claim I’m jealous of McRapey, or I’m imitating George
Martin, or my feelings are wounded that A Throne of Bones wasn’t
nominated for any awards.* Because in the game I’m playing, those things
don’t even enter into it. They’re not relevant to my metric for
success.
That being said, I have thoroughly enjoyed being nominated for the Hugo this year and I sincerely hope that this is merely the first of many such nominations for me and other fine writers upon whom the rabbits gaze upon in terror. I am very much looking forward to attending WorldCon this year and spending lots of quality time with my fellow Hugo nominees there, such as Mr. Charles Stross, who writes: “As a matter of policy I do not talk down/diss Hugo nominees when I myself am on the shortlist. But I shall be waiting for Vox Day in the Hugo Losers Party wearing a
kilt and a shit-eating grin, with a bottle of 90-proof distilled
schadenfreude that’s got his name on it.”
I don’t know. Sounds a little rape-culturey to me. For a nice roundup of the rabbits striking various poses and feeling the heat, check out Far Beyond Reality. And since it’s starting to get boring, I think that’s enough about the Hugo Awards for now until I’m able to read through the packet and decide for whom I’ll be voting.
*As it happens, the book was nominated for the 2013 Clive Staples Award.
Damien Walter, the Guardian contributor who wrote the hit piece about Larry Correia’s blog post without linking to it, and who has never professionally published a novel, reviews “Opera Vita Aeterna” and it says considerably more about the reviewer than the work reviewed.
I have judged the work not the man, and found it to be an incoherent rant disguised as an unconvincing non-story.
Because I am cruel by nature, I found this amusing. Because I am human, I found it tragic as well. Consider the perspective from which he reads:
I was 30 and, by any measure, deeply unhappy. I’d been pushing down a
lot of horrible emotions from a damaging childhood, grief from many
losses, and had trapped myself in a life I didn’t fit in to from a
desperate need to fit somewhere, anywhere. I had no kind of spiritual
practice at all. I was a standard issue atheist, and any encounter I had
with religion was edged with inherited and unexamined scorn.
Consequentially, I really had no tools to process the pain I was
feeling. Today, my argument with the radical atheist rhetoric of people
like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett – both of whom I had read
heavily at university – is that it leaves the bulk of its believers
utterly amputated from their own emotional reality. It certainly had me.
I was miserable, and in trying to escape from the causes of the misery
I’d driven myself, repeatedly, to the borders of emotional collapse
where I had, at long last, collapsed.
Unfortunately, his behavior makes it readily apparent that he has not yet found his way out of his emotional mire. As I pointed out in my tweet to him in response: “Given your deep unhappiness, Damien, it’s not surprising that you found a story about PHILIA incoherent and unconvincing.”
“Opera Vita Aeterna” is a story about love. The love of a friend, the love of knowledge, and the love of God. It should surprise absolutely no one that damaged and deeply unhappy people, who are by their own admission “utterly amputated from their own emotional reality”, cannot relate to it. They cannot even recognize it as a coherent story.
Of course they find it incoherent and unconvincing! Of course they find it a non-story! For they are lost in misery, their hearts are empty, and they cannot see by the light that comes from within. Regardless of what he may think of the literary quality of the story, I hope that one day Damien will at least be able to comprehend what the story is about.