Tag: trainwreck

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.

The unnecessary decline of Nokia

This is a fascinating essay on the disastrous, and ongoing, collapse of Nokia.  It’s intriguing to see how giving the wrong guy the power to make decisions at the wrong time can prove brutally catastrophic.  Imagine, for example, if Nokia, rather than Google, had embraced Android back in 2005.

This is not complex stuff. If your company has a strategy built on three pillars, and all three are working – congratulations! You are in the rare position of succeeding in all you do, please do promote your head of strategy and give your CEO a big bonus, you may even have a young Steve Jobs in your organization. Your company is grabbing massive market share, you make huge profits and you are growing beyond your wildest dreams. Congratulations, enjoy this, it won’t last forever.

If you have two of your three pillars working in your strategy, but one is failing, then you quietly shift away from the one failing part, you emphasize the two that are strong, and focus there. You don’t fire your strategy guy, he got it more right than wrong, and you celebrate your CEO. You then quietly, behind the scenes, do a ‘recalibration’ of your strategy, where you find a new third leg to replace the failing one, but you do this quietly, behind the scenes. Because most of your strategy is succeeding, its full steam ahead. The CEO is doing a good but not stellar job, keep him, but don’t give him any big bonuses for this performance. This, by the way, is kind of typical of most companies, part of the strategy is working but not all. This company should be profitable and growing. But its likely only to be growing at the pace of the industry, ie it would be holding its own roughly, in market share.

If you have two of your three pillars in your strategy failing and only one working, then its time to do the mea culpa, announce clearly that you are in trouble, and rapidly shift away from the two failing parts but convince your investors that yes, the one good part will keep you alive, please stay with us, this will be turned around. The strategy guy who cooked up this failing mess needs to be reassigned to non-strategy work and the CEO is probably over his head, you probably need a new CEO. But if you really belive the CEO is up to the task, he or she should be a change CEO and at this stage, the existing strategy MUST BE changed, it cannot bring success to the company if two of your three legs are failing. The one succeeding part cannot sustain you for long. This kind of company is in trouble, or on the brink of trouble, it is probably bleeding market share and probably making losses. It may even be shrinking in size already.

If you have three of your pillars in your strategy failing. All three failing, you must IMMEDIATELY STOP pursuing that strategy, as every day in it, brings you closer to death, to yes, bankruptcy, to oblivion, to complete failure, to junk status as a company, to being a takeover target. If your three pillars in your strategy are failing, you must fire immediately the strategy guy and replace not just the strategy head, but your whole strategy. If every leg of your strategy fails, then yes, ANY new strategy is better. Whatever you did before is better, whatever your competitors are doing is better, anything is better than pursuing a strategy that is 100% failing. The CEO who executed a strategy where all three legs fail, is clearly incompetent, and must be fired immediately. If the Board waits, then the Board is either asleep at the wheel, or incompetent, or in collusion with the incompetent CEO. If the Board waits in firing the CEO of a company where the whole strategy is failing – that Board must be fired instantly as well. This is elementary stuff. A company that finds its three pillars of its strategy all failing, is shrinking in size, is losing customers, is losing market share, is losing consumer and investor confidence, finds its share price rated junk, and is obviously generating increasing losses. This company is at least on the brink of bankruptcy and depending on how much cash it has on hand, it may prolong its life a little, but as long as the company pursues a 100% failing strategy – the company will kill itself.

It’s an object lesson how even the most cash-rich, market dominant company can rapidly decline.  I think it will be interesting to see if Apple or Microsoft is the first of the two 80’s giants to follow suit.  My money is on Microsoft, as long as Ballmer is running things there.

5772nd verse, same as the first

The Jews never seem to learn from their own history:

Circumcision is one of Judaism’s most important laws and for
generations of faithful it has symbolized a Biblical covenant with God. But in Israel, more and more Jewish parents are saying no to the blade. “It’s such a taboo in Israel and in Judaism,” said
Gali, nursing her six-week-old son, about the decision not to have him
circumcised.

When I was a kid reading the Bible, I always found it to be inexplicable how the Jews would no sooner be saved by God than they would do something bound to piss Him off and land them in some nasty soup.  Now that I am older and a bit more versed in the perversity of human nature, I merely wonder what the inevitable consequence of their willful disobedience is going to be.

And yet some say religion doesn’t provide any predictive models….

The Laffer Curve at work

An Instapundit reader illustrates both the perils of blindly raising income tax rates and the financial pointlessness of many married women working:

After the election, my wife and I are going partial Galt. We’re in
California, so our state income tax went up in addition to what’s sure
to come out of Washington.

My wife quit her job last week. I increased my participation in a
tax deferment plan offered by my employer to bring my taxable income as
close to $250K as possible. We’ll be cutting back a little, but the
government is going to getting a whole lot less.

My wife’s entire salary barely covered our tax bill – she was 100%
slave to the government, while I was a 10% slave. Now she is 100% free,
and I’ll be a ~35% slave As a couple, 17.5% of our time is slaving on
the government plantation from an astounding 55% previously.

My wife is deliriously happy, our children are delighted to have mom
home, the dog gets more walks, and I find not spending money rapturously
satisfying. 

Statist theoreticians and bureaucrats never seem to understand that humans always modify their behavior in response to prospective stimuli.  And when they finally do, after failing to achieve the results expected, they usually make the mistake of attempting to forcibly limit human options, thereby falling into exactly the same trap.  And the smarter and more productive the individual, the more his contributions are required, the more likely it is that he will figure out a way to refuse to participate.

Here is a trivially easy prediction.  California will collect less tax revenue than estimated in 2013 despite its newly raised rates that theoretically will cause it to collect more.  Moreover, it will probably collect less than it did in 2012, and its budget deficit will rise.

Smells like game over

Despite not being at all a Muslim in any way, shape, or form, so help him, um, Moses, Obama actually managed to lose the Israelis:

Mitt Romney was running for president against Barack Obama in Israel, the former Mass. governor would win in a landslide.
A new poll released by The Times of Israel on Thursday showed that 45
percent of Israelis would vote for Romney, compared to 29 percent for
the president. 

As we saw from the commenter at McRapey’s, when you’ve lost the Israelis, you’ve lost the American Jewish vote.  I’m a little saddened by this tragi-comic ending, as I just don’t think a Romney administration is going to provide even one-fifth the comedic appeal of its predecessor.

VDH describes Krugman and his kind

VDH on the naive and ignorant mindset of the left-liberal elite

In the elite liberal mind, there is instead a sort of progressive Big
Rock Candy Mountain. Gasoline comes right out of the ground through the
nozzle into the car. Redwood 2x4s sprout from the ground like trees.
Apples fall like hail from the sky; stainless steel refrigerator doors
are mined inches from the surface. Tap water comes from some enormous
cistern that traps rain water.  Finished granite counter tops
materialize on the show room floor. Why, then, would we need Neanderthal
things like federal gas and oil leases, icky dams and canals, yucky
power plants, and gross chain saws — and especially those who would dare
make and use them? 

For some, especially those who are well-educated and well-spoken, a
sort of irrational furor at “the system” governs their political
make-up. Why don’t degrees and vocabulary always translate into big
money? Why does sophisticated pontification at Starbucks earn less than
mindlessly doing accounting behind a desk? We saw this tension with
Michelle Obama who, prior to 2009, did not quite have enough capital to
get to Aspen or Costa del Sol, and thereby, despite the huge
power-couple salaries, Chicago mansion, and career titles, felt that
others had far too much more than the Obamas. “Never been proud,”
“downright mean country,” “raise the bar,” etc., followed, as
expressions of yuppie angst. The more one gets, the more one believes he
should get even more, and the angrier he gets that another — less
charismatic, less well-read, less well-spoken — always seems to get
more. 

So do not discount the envy of the sophisticated elite. The unread
coal plant manager, the crass car dealer, or the clueless mind who farms
1000 acres of almonds should not make more than the sociology
professor, the kindergarten teacher, the writer, the artist, or the
foundation officer. What sort of system would allow the dense and easily
fooled to become better compensated (and all for what — for superfluous
jet skis and snowmobiles?) than the anguished musician or tortured-soul
artist, who gives so much to us and receives so much less in return?
What a sick country — when someone who brings chain saws into the Sierra
would make more than a UC Berkeley professor who would stop them.

And lest you think he exaggerates about the inability of the left-liberal to understand concepts as basic as where things come from, consider this recent offering from Paul Krugman, among the most elite members of the left-liberal community.

Both Dean Baker and Josh Bivens weigh in Robert Samuelson’s outburst at the New York Times for saying that the government can too create jobs. (He went so far as to call it “flat-earth” thinking). Sadly, Samuelson’s attitude is widely shared — even, at least rhetorically, by Barack Obama.

So let me not focus on Samuelson’s piece so much as on the general proposition. What can it possibly mean to say that only the private sector can create jobs?

It could mean that government jobs aren’t “real” jobs — presumably that they don’t supply something of value to society. Samuelson disavows that position, I think — and rightly so. After all, the bulk of government workers are in education, protective services, and health. Do you really want to say that schoolteachers, firefighters, and nurses provide nothing of value?

What Samuelson is saying, what hundreds of economists have recognized for literally centuries, is that schoolteachers, firefighters and nurses PRODUCE nothing of value.  This should be obvious, because none of them PRODUCE anything at all.  Think about it.  Suppose that everyone was either a schoolteacher, a firefighter, or a nurse.  How much wealth would be collectively produced by them?  Absolutely nothing.

Schoolteachers, firefighters, and nurses are all societal luxury goods.  They are costs, at most they may allow for the leveraging and development of more efficient productive laborers, but in themselves, they produce absolutely nothing.  Their productive value is zero.  This is something that can be easily observed by anyone who has ever seen someone teaching, firefighting, or nursing.  And yet, the most elite of the elite left-liberals genuinely cannot grasp this.  Nor is he the only one, as Baker and Bivens demonstrate.  Samuelson is too kind when he mocks them as flat-earthers.  At least the flat earthers can reasonably observe that the earth looks flat from their vantage point.

John Scalzi squicked me out too

Sometimes, the world is a vastly amusing place.  It’s at times like these that I think perhaps Dr. Pangloss was right and this is the best of all possible worlds.  John appears to be having some belated regrets about google-bombing himself, but you know, that’s the risk you take when you write “satire”.  If our revered SFWA President doesn’t like to see “John Scalzi is a rapist” floating around the Internet, then perhaps Mr. Scalzi should refrain from writing articles on the Internet in which he rhapsodizes about the pleasure he takes in raping women.  It’s a difficult concept, I know, but I’m confident that our fearless leader will one day figure it out.

I find it particularly funny that he claims I’m flailing about and providing unintentional comedy gold:

Blogger Joé McKen catches one of my regular detractors making a spectacularly dumb move, and then watches him flail about, trying to rationalize his unintentional comedy gold. No, I’m not going to link to the detractor’s site directly, because among other things the site is full of racism, sexism and general ick; McKen’s got the links if you want them, and all the relevant details if you don’t.

Over on McKen’s site, one of the commenters there, who is also a frequent commenter here, wonders about whether my detractor could be on the hook for libel. Certainly the detractor’s headline for the particular blog entry in question (“John Scalzi is a rapist”) is factually inaccurate; the detractor is (now, at least) aware it’s so; presuming McKen’s account of event is accurate, which I have no reason to doubt, it wasn’t published with the intent to be satire or hyperbole nor has much chance of being considered so now; and obviously, being branded a rapist, and having it believed, would be detrimental to my public and private life. So if I had a mind to sue my detractor for libel, he might have to hope I am enough of a public figure that it would obviate all those other factors and he wouldn’t be squashed like a bug.

But why sue? I’m happy to have him leave it up as a testament to his both his credulity while he thought it was true, and his mendacity now that he knows that it’s not. It’s a cogent reminder of what both his opinion and credibility is worth.

Credulous, mendacious, and libelous.  There’s a combination one doesn’t often see.  I’m pleased to know that he’s happy I’m leaving it up, though, because the thought of taking it down had never even occurred to me.  The fact of the matter is that John Scalzi announced to the world that he is a rapist.  He is on record at his site declaring as much.  He can claim that his admission is “satire” until he turns blue if he likes, but the fact of the matter is that you cannot come out and say the sorts of things that he does and subsequently complain that your statements have been quoted at length and taken at face value.  It would certainly be interesting to see him attempt to see me “squashed like a bug”:

“He libeled me, your honor!”

“How so?”

“Well, um, he kind of quoted me….”

“He QUOTED you?”

“Yeah, but he KNEW what I was saying wasn’t true!”

“And how do you know he knew that?”

I most certainly do not know that John Scalzi is not a rapist.  I didn’t know it then and I don’t know it now.  He said he is, now he says his previous statement was factually inaccurate… for all I know, John spends his evenings raping his cats in between making calls on behalf of the Obama campaign in Ohio.

His argument becomes even more confusing since he’s also claiming a) I didn’t understand his satire, and, b) there is no reason to doubt my own post was not published with the intent to be satire or hyperbole.  So, apparently we’re to believe that I knowingly libeled him by quoting him about something I believed to be true.  At this point, I’m left to conclude that John’s best defense against having it generally believed that he is a rapist is that anyone reading his increasingly convoluted thoughts on the matter will assume he is a teenage girl.

Now here is the punchline.  John is amazed how deeply he got into the head of a rapist in writing the piece:

“I wrote it from the point of view of a rapist, I think obviously in
retrospect, because it would have a stronger impact if I did. A couple
of people have asked me (not entirely unwarily) how I could get into the
head of someone like that. The short answer is, folks, fiction is what I
do. I try to put myself in the heads of a lot of different people. I will note that in this case, I was very happy to get out of that particular head as quickly as possible. I don’t often squick myself out writing a piece, but this is one time I definitely did.”

He definitely squicked me out too!  I mean, John is such a good and talented writer that I truly believed he was an actual rapist when I read his piece.  It was a shockingly powerful piece.  It was one of the most hauntingly powerful pieces of writing on the subject I have ever seen.  It touched me in places I have never been touched before, without my consent.  He raped us all with his words and I feel hurt, violated, and confused.  I am still convinced that John Scalzi is a rapist, despite his unconvincing ex post facto denials, because obviously no fiction writer, even a best-selling, talented writer like John, could possibly have made up anything THAT convincing.