Tag: trainwreck

Mailvox: rabbits gonna rabbit

And Asher’s gonna asher:

“He’s not dumb but when I point out that without science and
philosophy everything that makes his art media possible wouldn’t exist.
It doesn’t even register with him.”

It clearly runs in the family.

“The most obvious possibility is that the “it” refers to science being a necessary condition for various art media used by my brother. However, the reference doesn’t make any sense given the context which is that I am aware of the scientific advances that make my brother’s visual art possible.

The other possibility for Vox’s “it” is that “things” don’t register for me. Fine, but that is, in itself, an empty reference. What things? Everything? Some things? If not everything then what set of things? Vox doesn’t make this clear, and, in doing so he ends up sounding like Amanda Marcotte.

Yes, science being a necessary condition for various art media is clearly the most obvious possibility.  And yes, I sound EXACTLY like Amanda Marcotte.

“Your “it” has no clear object of reference.”

It is sufficiently clear to the sufficiently intelligent.  I often find Asher’s take on things to be more than a little fascinating.  It’s rather like watching a retarded Spock in action.  His attempts at ad hominem are the best; they resemble someone attempting to trash talk in a language they’ve studied for three semesters in college.

“And I suppose you your mother find sex response to attract, yes?”

The finest in Gammawear

No doubt every Gamma male and woman who treasures her Gamma orbiters will want to run out and buy one of these fine emblems of totally not being a rapist.  Available in a wide range of pastel colors.  After all, you’re going to need something to wear when you’re on the dancefloor with your quad-gendered acquaintances grooving to the Pink Rabbit Posse.

100 percent cotton and 100 percent guaranteed to prevent sexually-transmitted disease.

Come see the violence inherent in the system

Help, help, I’m being threatened!  And by the SFWA South-Central Regional Director, no less.  At 3:30 AM, I was returning from a late night out with Silvio and the boys when I noticed literally hundreds of entries coming from a site belonging to leading science fiction author and international cross-dressing star Jim Hines.  Naturally, being the secure and self-confident image of modern masculinity, I immediately hastened to scour his site for every reference to me.

Imagine the horror and fear that struck me when I read the following:

lee_martindale wrote:
Feb. 1st, 2013 04:19 pm (UTC)
Ah, yes. Mr. Beale. When I decided to run for re-election as SFWA South-Central Regional Director, someone asked me what I would do if Mr. Beale won the Presidential election. I replied, “Ask my friends to start a bail fund.”

Naturally, I was panic-stricken by the violent implications of the Regional Director’s threat.  After I got off the phone with the local police, Homeland Security, the FBI, and Interpol, and managed to compose myself following an intense round of aromatherapy, some yoga exercises, and about a gallon of green tea, I posted the following in the Questions for Candidates section of the SFWA Forum:

Two questions for Lee Martindale: It was brought to my attention that
yesterday, you wrote the following on SFWA member Jim Hines’s web site: “When
I decided to run for re-election as SFWA South-Central Regional
Director, someone asked me what I would do if Mr. Beale won the
Presidential election. I replied, “Ask my friends to start a bail
fund.””

1. What did you mean by indicating that you would need a bail fund in the event of my election as SFWA President?(1)
2. Do you believe that threatening criminal activity and violence is appropriate for an officer of the SFWA Board?

I note that this is the second implication of violence an SFWA member
has directed towards me since I declared my candidacy. Two open
questions for everyone else:

1. Are these implied threats of criminality and/or violence acceptable behavior on the part of SFWA members, and in the case of Ms Martindale, current Board members?
2. Should Ms Martindale resign her position and terminate her candidacy due to her implied threats of criminal activity?

I find it hard to see how I, or any other elected SFWA official, could be
expected to work in a productive manner with Ms Martindale in the
knowledge that she may resort to criminal activity and physical violence
over a mere difference of opinion.

(1) Ms Martindale explained that she was, in fact, implying violence,
although she claimed that she only meant violence of the self-defensive
variety.

This post is dedicated to the memory of Bane.

McRapey exercises his male privilege

It’s a quixotic choice, to be sure, but I suppose we all have our issues.  Apparently confessing to being a rapist isn’t enough for John Scalzi, as the male-privileged SFWA President has now taken it upon himself to publicly mock women for the sort of covers they prefer to see on the books they write and buy.

“The pose-off, while for charity, has its genesis in Jim taking pictures of himself in the poses that science fiction and fantasy book covers often put women in to call attention to the point that these positions are absurd (whereas the positions men are put in on covers are generally substantially less so).”

The irony, as I noted at Alpha Game, is that what Scalzi and Hines are mocking in their gamma male cluelessness about women is not male sexism, but rather, female preferences.  The book whose “sexism” and “objectification” Scalzi is protesting in the photo above happens to be THE TASTE OF NIGHT, by Vicki Pettersson.  It is described thusly:

“Equal parts Light and Shadow, Joanna Archer must fulfill a destiny she
never wanted. Once a photographer and heiress to a casino fortune, she
is now dedicated to the cause of good . . . but susceptible to the
seductions of evil.” 

An heiress who is susceptible to seduction and bears no responsibility for her actions… does this sound more like a science fiction novel intended to appeal to men or a romance novel aimed at a female audience?  As it happens, THE TASTE OF NIGHT
has 47 reviews, by Jenna, Rita, Angela, Courtney, Phyllis, Jessica,
Patience, Rhona, Kelley, Kelly, Shalonda, Chica, Karissa, Michelle,
Debra, and Susan, among others.  Since Pettersson is, we are informed, a New York Times bestselling author, it should be obvious that her work, and the cover of her book that John Scalzi is lampooning, (which you can download as wallpaper in various formats from her website should you be so inclined), are very popular with women and appeal to female tastes.

The fact is that it is not men, but women, who are drawn to pictures of women posed in this manner.  Men, as a rule, like to look at young, pretty, naked, feminine, women posing with their breasts and buttocks on display, not thick, thirty-something man-jawed women wearing clothes, brandishing weapons, and striking aggressive and unlikely power-poses.  The urban fantasy/paranormal market that distinguishes itself from high fantasy, epic fantasy, and science fiction by utilizing such imagery is predominantly female.  It is women to whom such covers are designed to appeal, it is women to whom such books are sold, and by mocking those covers, John Scalzi and Jim Hines are exercising their male privilege to mock the women who write urban fantasy books as well as the women who buy them.

Now, there is nothing wrong with mocking the books on the grounds of literary quality or their covers on the grounds of aesthetics.  But to mock them with the mistaken impression that one is striking a blow against male sexism is not only to insult female preferences, it is to betray a fundamental misunderstanding of human socio-sexuality so profound that it should be no surprise that it took a pair of male science fiction writers to do it.

Perhaps the most amusing thing is that even after progressive women questioned their actions, prompting a little belated self-reflection, it is abundantly clear that they still don’t get it. I doubt I’m the only one to wonder if Jim Hines was initially inspired to launch his campaign after getting caught by his wife taking pictures of himself in her lingerie.

“No, honey, I don’t LIKE wearing your underwear, I’m just, um, protesting the objectifying of women in science fiction!  It’s, ah, for charity!”

And just to address the usual suspects, I will freely confess that jealousy is the only reason I am posting this.  I doubt that I could ever aspire to the transcendent gamma sex appeal that shines so gloriously from the image above.

Middle Earth misogyny

Since Tolkien came up in the interview, I would be woefully remiss if I did not provide a link to this spectacular example of why feminists should probably not be asked to review anything, but especially not anything written, filmed, or otherwise created by men.

I did not read The Hobbit or the Lord of the Rings
trilogy as a child, and I have always felt a bit alienated from the
fandom surrounding them. Now I think I know why: Tolkien seems to have
wiped women off the face of Middle-earth.

Has there ever been a movement more powerfully committed to self-parody?

Rape, corrected

The predecessor of this corrected infographic has been going around, and remarkably, it appears that even card-carrying feminists have begun to realize that writing fantasy fiction about rape statistics is no longer going to convince anyone of anything anymore.  I’ve corrected this on the basis of actual empirical data, which has shown that between 41 and 50  percent of all reported rapes are false reports.  And by false reports, I mean the purported victim has recanted and admitted that the charge was false, either voluntarily or when faced with a polygraph test.  Furthermore, DNA evidence has been used to show that a statistically significant number of reported, charged, and convicted rapists are, in fact, innocent.  Consider this 2009 article in the Forensic Examiner:

Very little formal research has been conducted on the prevalence of false allegations of rape. One study looked at the 109 cases of forcible rape that were disposed of in one small midwestern town between 1978 and 1987 (Kanin, 1994). The given town was specifically selected for study because the police department used a uniquely objective and thorough protocol when investigating rape complaints. Among other procedural safeguards, officers did not have the discretion to drop rape investigations if they concluded the complaint was “suspect” or unfounded. Every rape accusation had to be thoroughly investigated and included offering a polygraph to both the accuser and the accused. Cases were only determined to be false if and when the accuser admitted that no rape occurred.

The researchers further investigated those cases that the police, through their investigation, had ultimately determined were “false” or fabricated. During the follow-up investigation, the complainants held fast to their assertion that their rape allegation had been true, despite being told they would face penalties for filing a false report. As a result, 41% of all of the forcible rape complaints were found to be false. To further this study, a similar analysis was conducted on all of the forcible rape complaints filed at two large midwestern public universities over a 3-year period. Here, where polygraphs were not offered as part of the investigatory procedure, it was found that 50% of the complaints were false.

Charles P. McDowell, a researcher in the United States Air Force Special Studies Division, studied the 1,218 reports of rape that were made between 1980 and 1984 on Air Force bases throughout the world (McDowell, 1985). Of those, 460 were found to be “proven” allegations either because the “overwhelming preponderance of the evidence” strongly supported the allegation or because there was a conviction in the case. Another 212 of the total reports were found to be “disproved” as the alleged victim convincingly admitted the complaint was a “hoax” at some point during the initial investigation. The researchers then investigated the 546 remaining or “unresolved” rape allegations including having the accusers submit to a polygraph. Twenty-seven percent (27%) of these complainants admitted they had fabricated their accusation just before taking the polygraph or right after they failed the test. (It should be noted that whenever there was any doubt, the unresolved case was re-classified as a “proven” rape.) Combining this 27% with the initial 212 “disproved” cases, it was determined that approximately 45% of the total rape allegations were false.

The reality is that rape is a relatively uncommon crime in the United States; the one in five figures bandied about by feminists at candlelight vigils are pure and unmitigated fantasy.  Of course, it is not exactly a mystery why so many women are more than a little disposed to fantasize about rape.

An SFWA coverup?

Former SFWA president Michael Capobianco denies that the Nebula Award rules were changed in 2010 due to a perception of corruption.  He writes on Black Gate:

“The Nebula rules change was instituted not because of the
perception of corruption, but to change it from an award with multi-year
rolling eligibility to an annual award coinciding with calendar year.”

Is that so? Then why are the nominations no longer an open process and hidden from public scrutiny?  Why are nominations now capped at five per member when previously Active members were allowed unlimited recommendations? And, if we are to take Mr. Capobianco’s explanation seriously, how on Earth were those two changes required in
order to make the award coincide with the calendar year?

Since Mr. Capobianco claims that there is no issue of perceived corruption, I will send a request to the current President to post the full record of all the nominations for the 2012 Nebula Award for Best Novel on the SFWA web site on a page that is open to the public.

A candidacy is announced

Yesterday, I sent a notice to the SFWA’s head of the election committee, announcing that I am running for the office of president of the organization.  It is highly unlikely that I will win, of course, but I would like to be able to say that I at least attempted to do my part to salvage an organization that is speeding rapidly into irrelevance.

One reason I am running is to restore the independence of what appears to have become a captive house award that Tor Books authors give themselves on an annual basis.  This may not be the case, but the statistical evidence suggests that there has been considerable corruption in the awards process in the past and that the 2010 rules changes have actually made the problem worse.

The other reason can be seen in these two quotes by its current president, the Tor Books author John Scalzi.  He condemned himself in the very words with which he criticized his predecessor, Michael Capobianco back in 2007.

“Simply put, the professional organization of speculative fiction should
not be headed by people who believe their job is to hold back the
future. I believe strongly that Michael Capobianco sees it as his role
to hold back the future and to maintain the status quo in publishing and
in speculative fiction. That battle has already been lost; the
publishing world has already irrevocably changed from when Mr.
Capobianco last published. It’s time that SFWA moves forward with
leadership who understands this….  


[T]he answer to whether I support membership in SFWA for people who are
not published writers is no.* That’s not going to change. I don’t think
it’s useful and I don’t think it’s needed. SFWA should certainly make
itself useful in helping aspiring SFWAns make the transition into
published status, and to a good extent, it does that now. But at the end
of the day it’s an organization for professional writers, and needs to
be composed of professional writers.” 

Scalzi is a dinosaur.  He fails to understand that “professionally published” has been rendered a meaningless term by technological development and that science fiction writing now goes well beyond the simple medium of printed books.  The most influential science fiction writers don’t even write books, they write games.  Scalzi should know this, considering that he very recently got involved working for a company in the industry in which I have been active for 22 years.  And under the current qualification requirements, some bestselling SF/F novelists, whose work outsells most SFWA members, cannot qualify.

Scalzi is also a fascist ideologue who actively attempts to shut down all debate he personally finds distressing at every opportunity.  Consider the way in which he proudly declared that in 2012, he managed to avoid permitting anyone to present facts or arguments that might have disturbed the tender sensitivities of the rabbity readers at Whatever.


This year I also managed to arouse the ire of a whole stack of racist, sexist, homophobic dipshits with the above posts as well as several others. If I did nothing else with my year, this would have made it delightful to me. They also gave the Mallet of Loving Correction plenty of use when they would drop by the site and learn to their surprise that the sort of smug trollery that passes for thought in the land of epistemic closure doesn’t get past the door here. This is not a delight to me — trolls are always irritating — but whacking them so that the conversational level here remains high has its own grim level of satisfaction.


There is something deeply amusing about a man who claims that people pointing and laughing at him in contempt somehow translates to “ire”.  But it is deeply problematic for an organization to have someone who actively prides himself on the overt and intentional silencing of dissent – and is either delusional or dishonest enough to project his own closed-minded perspective on his critics – as its head.


As proof that it is John Scalzi who dwells in the land of epistemic closure and not those who disagree with him, I note the subsequent comment from one of his readers: “Thanks again for making this a safe place to visit and comment.”  Whatever is a safe place for the Rabbit People to visit and comment precisely because Scalzi practices the very epistemic closure that he feigns to decry. The quoted statement is virtually a textbook illustration of psychological projection.  He sees ire on the part of those who feel none because he is angry with them.  He sees closed minds and smugness in others because he is smug and his mind is closed to competing ideas.  He can’t conceive of honest dissent because he is himself dishonest and inclined towards conformity.

Now, it should be made clear that John Scalzi is not the problem with the SFWA, he is merely one of the symptoms of the ideological disease that has been gradually killing science fiction and fantasy in the print world for the last thirty years.  Thanks to technology, SF/F will survive, but not in its traditional form if its self-appointed gatekeepers continue to stress mediocrity and ideological conformity over the dangerous new visions that once characterized it.


It is unlikely that I will win the election; even if I win it is unlikely that I can do anything to salvage the situation.  The myopic Neo-Luddism and anti-intellectual ideology in the organization appears to be both deep and wide.  But I will present my platform to the membership on February 1st so that at least no one will be able to say that things could not have been different if the organization, and the literary genre, continues its downward spiral.

This is #GunControlNow

If you’re not already following me on Twitter, this extremely illuminating discussion of gun control is the sort of thing you are missing.  Gun control advocates, note that this is what often passes for your ‘reason’ and ‘common sense’. Colleen aka @mushadamama is a perfect example of the dialectically challenged individual Aristotle described as being incapable of following a chain of reasoning and therefore ineducable by reason.  As you will see, it is literally impossible to reason with them.

Note that I did not expect to convince the woman that she was wrong.  Telling a stupid person precisely how stupid they are is seldom a successful rhetorical device. But I wanted to see how far she would go before retreating into her rhetorical tortoise shell.  As it happens, she was willing to not only defy reason, but deny math itself, rather than even consider the possibility – or in this case, the undisputed statistical and mathematical reality – that her position on #GunControlNow was wrong.

voxday: Those who reject their own God-given and unalienable right to bear arms reject their own status as adult human beings.

fmudd101: I know right! Those child-like Europeans and Japanese with their low gun crime and murder rates.

voxday: Europeans have higher rates of gun ownership and much lower rates of gun crime and murder than African and Latin countries.

mushadamama: You can not compare their gun laws to ours. They are MUCH more restrictive. Wikipedia link.

voxday: The gun laws in Brazil and South Africa are even more restrictive. Yet they have far more gun deaths per capita.

mushadamama: Is that where you want to be? US is not first, so it’s ok? Link to murders with firearms by country.

voxday: Don’t be stupid. You can’t compare absolute numbers between nations of vastly different sizes. Look at per capita.

voxday: Also, the nations ahead of the USA HAVE STRICTER GUN CONTROL LAWS. The problem is racial, as I’ve already shown. 

mushadamama: The numbers I’ve given ARE per 100k population. Perhaps the stupid one is one who doesn’t read fine print.

mushadamama: Stricter gun control=less gun crimes. #fact

mushadamama: You’ve shown nothing. 

voxday: No, you stupid, stupid woman, they are not. The USA is #4 in absolute terms, #27 per capita.  Link to gun homicides and gun ownership by country.

voxday: That’s not a fact, you stupid, stupid woman. That is absolutely and provably false. 

voxday: You’re either lying or stupid, Colleen. White US rate=0.32/100k. Black US rate=12.5/100k. Link to US firearms homicide rate by race.

mushadamama: Yes, my chart is total gun murders @ 9369. Does not count accidents or suicides. US ranks 4th! My crime rate chart was per 100k.

mushadamama: Your chart, however, uses some kind of fuzzy math to come up with that
ridiculous #. I can only assume it is more of a probability.

mushadamama: Of which, I am not interested. We’re not playing lotto. People are dying. Your comments on race, I’ve tried to ignore…

mushadamama: Are we supposed to be relieved or delighted to know more black people are killed by guns than white people? I don’t understand.

voxday: NO! The math is 9,369 gun murders divided by 310 million pop, multiplied by 100,000. That is the correct per capita number.

voxday: You are supposed to understand legal guns are not the problem. So banning them, as they are banned elsewhere, WILL NOT WORK!

mushadamama: You’re a fool. If manipulating numbers makes you feel better, fine. But, it’s not the truth.

mushadamama: We are not going away this time. Those babies did not die for nothing. We’re going to stay loud until something changes.

voxday: Excellent. The more you talk, the less credible your position is. Everyone should read this exchange. #GunControlNow

That’s a bold move, Obsidian

Let’s see how it works out for him.  Obsidian takes exception to the way I am The Man keeping the Black man down by utilizing the blatantly raciss tactic of citing international crime and gun ownership statistics in response to the media stampede for more gun control:

The reason why 26 WHITE Women and children died last week; the reason why dozens of largely WHITE people died earlier this year at a movie theatre in Colorado; and the reason why upwards of 100 WHITE teenagers met a bloodsoaked end in Olso, was all due to having too many guntoting Darkies in White Lands.

Now, before anyone out there starts sending my hatemail, no one is more aware of gun violence on the streets of urban America more than me. Thus far, no one – not me, not anyone else in the media, not President Obama himself – has ever denied that urban gun violence isn’t a problem, and a huge one at that.

But isn’t it just a weebit fascinating that the Alt-Right, when they can get up the gumption to address the clearly depraved monsters in their midst (read: White Males With Problems), just happen to do it in a manner that would be identified, rightly, as deeply intellectually dishonest and highly disengenuous in any other context? Of the more than 60 mass shootings over the past three decades, some 44 of them have been committed by White Males – and when you have ads like these marketed to said White Males (name me all the gangbangers who use Bushmasters as their go-to weapon of choice? I’ll wait…), well, it all just makes one go, Hmm…

That’s an amusing attempt at rhetorical bluster, but I would be remiss if I did not inform Obsidian that demonstrating a complete failure of reading comprehension is not the ideal way to convince those one suspects of a belief in white superiority that they are incorrect.

But since he clearly did not understand what I was writing about in my recent posts, I will clarify the matter for him.  The reason people died in Connecticut and Colorado in the two mass shootings had absolutely nothing to do with gun-toting Darkies, much less their quantity or location.  Given the Oslo shooter’s confessed rationale, the situation there was caused by the presence of too many Darkies (for various definitions of “Darky”) in Norway, but had nothing to do with their toting of guns.  However, I was not addressing any of these specific situations, (especially not the Norwegian one, as I have no interest in or knowledge of Norwegian gun control laws), I was addressing one of the primary arguments for gun control that has been repeatedly made in the wake of the Connecticut shootings, namely, the idea that the moderate US firearms homicide rate is caused by the very high number of guns per capita in the United States.

There is nothing “deeply intellectually dishonest and highly disengenuous” about pointing out that the difference between the low firearms homicide rate of Canada and the Western European nations and the moderate firearms homicide rate in the USA is not related to the number of guns per capita in the population, but rather is a consequence of the racial makeup of the population.  In fact, it is absolutely necessary to point this out, because reviewing the differences between the various countries with low rates, moderate rates, and high rates clearly demonstrates that the proposed solution to the higher US firearms homicide rate will not, and cannot, be solved by European-style gun control.

Moreover, Obsidian fails to realize that mass shooting statistics he cites make perfect sense.  Why would it make him go hmmmm to realize that 73 percent of the mass shootings of the past 30 years were committed by members of a race that made up a similar percentage of the population over that time.  Is statistically proportional representation truly a deep mystery to him?

There are real problems to discuss with regards to why young white men commit acts of mass murder.  But they are completely unrelated to the arguments that the pro-gun control forces have presented, and to which I have responded.

Bringing nothing but rhetoric to a dialectical discourse is rather like
bringing a knife to a gun fight, then defiantly slitting your own
throat.  But that is what Obsidian is purposefully doing here, as he admits that he has no interest in actual debate.  He is simply trying to shut it down and prevent these straightforward and undeniable facts from being considered.

Here’s that intrepid White Man Blogger, Vox Day, advising his fellow WND readers on how to respond to calls of reason with regard to getting Bushmasters out of the hands of depraved White Guys:

“Don’t give them an inch. Cut them no slack. Punch back twice as hard. When they bring the knife of emotional blackmail to the argument, draw your .50 caliber Desert Eagle of facts, logic and history and blow them away without mercy.”

And they wonder why the Manosphere is regarded as a bunch of f*cking loons?

Really?

A number of my readers, online and off, have asked me: Obsidian, why do you waste so much time and energy on people who clearly have a disengenuous agenda? This is a very good question, and here’s my response:

Because history has shown us, again and again – that Evil – or in this case, downright Foolishness – can only exist, when Good Men, do nothing. By chin-checking these fools in the public square, I am letting them know that their days of just being able to say ridiculous crap with impunity are over. They sh*t all over our cherished freedoms in the name of “keepin’ it real” – yea, like Chris Rock said, keepin’ it real DUMB. These knuckleheads aren’t the next George Washingtons or Patrick Henrys; shoot, they can barely get laid and make a life for themselves, let alone be the standard bearers of freedom or liberty. They are not fit to participate in reasoned and intellectually honest discussion of the issues of the day, and should be roundly shouted down until they sitdown and STFU.

The idea that a man who claims my agenda is “disengenuous” and lacks the most basic reading comprehension skills can declare, with a straight face, that I am “not fit to participate in reasoned and intellectually honest discussion” is incredibly amusing.  The fact that his ancestors were once forced to ride at the back of the bus is no excuse for Obsidian to voluntarily ride on a metaphorical short one.

Obsidian isn’t chin-checking anyone in the public square except himself.  This is like watching a pudgy little kid walk up to Lebron James and threaten to dunk on him; it would be pathetic if it weren’t so damned funny.  He can whine and bluster and cry raciss all he likes, but no amount of the conventional African-American histrionics will alter the international statistics or the clear and undeniable conclusions that logic necessarily draws from them.