Tag: trainwreck

John Scalzi still justifying sexism

And droidism. And racism. And homophobia.

In my piece on how not to be a creeper, I made a point that today I’d like to expand on just a little; I’ll explain why in a bit. Here’s the point:

2. Acknowledge that you don’t get to define other people’s comfort level with you. Which is to say that you may be trying your hardest to be interesting and engaging and fun to be around — and still come off as a creeper to someone else. Yes, that sucks for you. But you know what? It sucks for them even harder, because you’re creeping them out and making them profoundly unhappy and uncomfortable. It may not seem fair that “creep” is their assessment of you, but: Surprise! It doesn’t matter, and if you try to argue with them (or anyone else) that you’re in fact not being a creep and the problem is with them not you, then you go from “creep” to “complete assbag.” Sometimes people aren’t going to like you or want to be near you. It’s just the way it is.

This apparently has struck some to be dreadfully unfair, with the implication being that other people responding to folks (usually men) as creepers when in fact they’re trying to make an effort to be charming and witty and fun (or whatever) is some sort of special case in the interaction of human beings, and that such mismatches between intent and reception hardly ever happen in other situations.

To which my response is: you have got to be kidding me. Outside of the realm of possible potential creepiness, you don’t get to choose how other people respond to you, either. In any context. Indeed, regardless of your efforts to present yourself in a certain way, it is almost certain you will come across to some other people as not that way at all, and possibly the opposite of that way entirely.

On the one hand, Scalzi is absolutely right. We don’t get to choose how others feel about us or respond to us. John, for example, responds poorly to both this blog and its readers, referring to them collectively as “a feculent miasma of male self-regard”. That’s absolutely fine, it is simply his opinion, just as the idea that a woman who teaches Lesbianism in Hindu Film is convincing evidence that women are every bit as interested in the hard sciences as men is also his opinion.

You may understand if I tend to consider his opinion to be less than entirely dispositive.

So why am I objecting to what Scalzi is saying if I agree with it? Because he doesn’t actually mean it. Not only that, he doesn’t even realize that he doesn’t mean it. He is dimly aware that something is wrong, which is why he is attempting to “expand a little” on his previous point, but he still doesn’t grasp what it is. He’s appealing to a right in which he does not actually believe.

What Scalzi inadvertently did in his point two was to defend the right of free association. Which would be fine, only we know from Scalzi’s smug soft leftism that he supports absolutely nothing of the sort. Whereas he is absolutely fine with telling those condemned as “creeps” that they simply have to live with their rejection by others, I strongly suspect he is absolutely opposed to telling those condemned as “sluts” or “faggots” or “towelheads” or other behavior-based labels to do the same, much less those whose labels are purely identity-based.

And this is the point that he has resolutely evaded with his irrelevant forays into “false equivalence” and “unfairness”, even though his mention of droids indicates that he must have at least a vague idea of what he has done. Despite the fact that he has presented an argument that justifies all sorts of sexism, racism, and droidism, I don’t believe John Scalzi is actually sexist, racist, or anti-droid, he is merely a glib and inconsistent hypocrite who is willing to use an argument when it happens to suit him, then abandon it when it doesn’t. Now, I readily admit that it is possible I am wrong and Scalzi does support the right of those made uncomfortable by the presence of blacks, women, gays, or anyone else to expect those who make them uncomfortable to go away and leave them in peace, in which case I will of course retract the accusation of hypocrisy and inconsistency. I invite Mr. Scalzi to clarify his actual position on the subject.

As for the actual subject of “creepiness”, the problem is that as a gamma male, Scalzi simply doesn’t understand women or the socio-sexual hierarchy well enough to even understand what it is. As this aspect of the discussion is predominantly Game-related, I address it on Alpha Game.

John Scalzi justifies sexism

Mr. Scalzi attempts to defend female rejection of men as “creepers”, amusingly without realizing how perfectly it can be turned around and applied to male rejection of women in a manner that he would probably consider sexist:

Acknowledge that you don’t get to define other people’s comfort level with you. Which is to say that you may be trying your hardest to be interesting and engaging and fun to be around — and still come off as a creeperstupid slut to someone else. Yes, that sucks for you. But you know what? It sucks for them even harder, because you’re creepingpissing them outoff and making them profoundly unhappy and uncomfortable. It may not seem fair that “creep”“stupid slut” is their assessment of you, but: Surprise! It doesn’t matter, and if you try to argue with them (or anyone else) that you’re in fact not being a creepstupid slut and the problem is with them not you, then you go from “creep”“stupid slut” to “complete assbag”“complete bitch”. Sometimes people aren’t going to like you or want to be near you. It’s just the way it is.”

Congratulations to John. He has managed to concoct a soundly sexist argument for simply banning women from DEFCON or any other predominantly male gathering. After all, if the dorks there don’t like women or want them near them, it’s just the way it is…. Men have precisely the same right to arbitrarily label women “stupid sluts” and treat them accordingly as women have to arbitrarily label men “creeps” and do the same.

Now, some men are genuinely creepy and I’m certainly not defending anyone’s right to behave in an uncivilized manner. But at the same time, it should be noted that women cannot be granted a right to free association that is denied to men.

UPDATE: Scalzi is either too lazy or too much of a pussy to think through his own arguments. He writes:

You know, I saw in a Google search that you wrote on this piece at your blog, and I thought to myself, “oh, great, now I go have to deal with some dumbass comment from him on the site.” And I was right! For your next trick of bad equivalence, why don’t you put the word “droid” in parentheses and congratulate me for coming up with a valid excuse for banning R2D2 from the Mos Eisley cantina?

If this is really what you’ve come to say, don’t really need to be on this thread, VD. Shoo. Everyone else, best to leave VD uncommented upon.

He also added this:

[Deleted because the point this jackhole was purporting to make was just an excuse for him to call women obnoxious things on my site. Hi there, trolls from VD’s site! Just because you wallow in a feculent miasma of male self-regard over there doesn’t mean you get to port it over here — JS]

It is fascinating to see that John Scalzi has devolved into such an intellectual pussy that he almost immediately concludes those who disagree with him must be trolls. And in support of my earlier charge of his sexism, what a sexist assumption to assume that all of the readers at VP are men! This is what happens when you run an echo chamber, you get sloppy, lazy, and eventually become unable to defend your opinions. It’s particularly embarrassing in this situation, because I am simply pointing out the obvious logical consequences of his statement, which can be easily understood by looking at the word “creep” as a variable rather than being distracted by his “false equivalence” defense.

The equivalence or lack thereof is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter how Scalzi defines “creep” or to whom he applies the term. His argument works just as well for justifying the social stigmatization of “droids”, “negroes”, “homosexuals”, “girls with cooties”, or anything else that might make an individual uncomfortable. That’s not bad logic, and if he genuinely think it is, then I certainly invite him to identify the specific logical error or logical fallacy in it… if he can.

It is amusing to see him talking about “bad logic” as there is a reason I tagged this under “trainwreck” in the first place. Of course, this is the genius who once cited a female professor teaching “Lesbianism in Indian Film” at the University of Minnesota in order to defend the idea of female interest in the hard sciences.

Spanking is child abuse

But apparently chemical lobotomies are nothing more than good parenting:

The researchers found that doctor visits between 1993-1998 and 2005-2009 that involved a prescription of antipsychotic medication for children jumped sevenfold — from 0.24 to 1.83 per 100 people. For teens, 14 to 20 years old, the rate rose from 0.78 to 3.76 per 100 people, and for adults, it just about doubled, from 3.25 to 6.18 per 100 people….

Dr. Peter Breggin, a psychiatrist from Ithaca, N.Y., and an outspoken critic of widespread antipsychotic use in children, said these drugs damage developing brains

“We have a national catastrophe,” said Breggin. “This is a situation where we have ruined the brains of millions of children.” In controlling behavior, antipsychotics act on the frontal lobes of the brain — the same area of the brain targeted by a lobotomy, Breggin said. “These are lobotomizing drugs,” he added. “Of course, they will reduce all behavior, including irritability,” he said….

Between 2005 and 2009, controlling “disruptive behavior” accounted for 63 percent of the reason antipsychotics were given to children and almost 34 percent for adolescents, the researchers found.

To say nothing of what they do to long-term cognitive capacity. Between widespread chemical lobotomies and ubiquitous vaccines, I’m amazed that anyone still believes that medical “science” is genuinely focused on attempting to help children grow up to live healthy and productive lives.

It would be informative to know how these children on antipsychotics do on IQ tests before and after their brains are bathed in chemicals for years.

Send the Sikhs to safety

It seems that the Onion’s parody of Michele Bachmann’s fake response to the Wisconsin shootings wasn’t actually all that far off. Two-thirds of those killed weren’t Americans, which is why the savages are now attempting to attack the U.S. Constitution.

Top State Department officials including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have been working behind the scenes to assuage Indian anger following the attack on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin over the weekend by an Army veteran and alleged former white supremacist.

Indian government officials and Sikh leaders across India were outraged by the attack that left 6 dead, including 4 Indian nationals, at a Sikh temple near Milwaukee and called on the U.S. to do more to protect Sikhs living in the United Sates. Clinton called Indian Foreign Minister S.M. Krishna from her stop in South Africa Monday after Krishna criticized the U.S. for failed policies and a growing trend of violent incidents against religious minorities….

Protests broke out in several Indian cities in response to the news of the attack, some calling for stricter U.S. gun laws. Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal wrote to India Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to urge the Indian government to press the Obama administration to do more to protect Sikhs living in the U.S.

First of all, the Secretary of State’s message to the Indians should be a very short and succinct one. “Fuck you, fuck your emigrants, and if they don’t like our gun rights, then they can go home to live in unarmed filth and fear among your rabid, feral dogs.”

No country has as many stray dogs as India, and no country suffers as much from them. Free-roaming dogs number in the tens of millions and bite millions of people annually, including vast numbers of children. An estimated 20,000 people die every year from rabies infections — more than a third of the global rabies toll.

If the Indians were willing to fight for their own freedom to carry guns, they could save tens of thousand of lives by simply shooting the feral dogs that attack them. But they’d rather run their mouths trying to interfere with how Americans live in the USA than do anything about the squalor, filth, and tyranny of their own country. The Obama administration should agree to protect the Sikhs by putting them on a plane back to India.

It’s a mystery!

Massachusetts can’t figure out why its health care costs are growing:

Give Massachusetts credit for setting audacious health care goals. It took the lead in guaranteeing near-universal health insurance coverage for its residents, providing a template for the federal reforms to follow…. But when it comes to controlling health care costs, Massachusetts has no advantage, and in fact is starting behind most other states. Its costs are among the highest in the nation, and they have been growing in recent years at 6 percent to 7 percent while the economy has been growing at less than 4 percent.

The amusing thing about America’s left-liberals is that they are so “thoughtful” and “nuanced” and “complex” that they can’t see blatant causation when it is right in front of them. These are the sort of people who stare at a light, wonder what is meant by the red color, and then conclude that it must mean they are supposed to drive ahead. The subsequent car accident, of course, is nothing more than sheer happenstance and bad fortune.

Can you imagine if these jokers tried to run a restaurant?

“Bill, I’m confused. We’re serving more people, but for some inexplicable reason, we suddenly don’t seem to have enough food anymore.”

Gary North still hates Americans

Gary North is apparently foolish enough to continue shopping around that inept and deceptive article wherein he blatantly lies about the opponents of free trade and the arguments and critiques they present. Previously on Lew Rockwell, the same article is now featured by the Mises Institute:

I have found over the years that when I debate with people who promote tariffs, meaning sales taxes on imported goods that are enforced by people with badges and guns, they always adopt arguments that apply only to America’s side of the border. They refuse to adopt those very same arguments for people on the other side of the border.

I challenge defenders of tariffs to state their arguments in terms of both of the people who want to trade, not just the American. The ethics and economics of restricted trade surely apply to the person who wants to trade on the other side of the invisible line known as a national border. If the arguments for restricted trade apply to the American economy, then surely they apply to the other nation’s economy. Logic and ethics do not change just because we cross an invisible judicial line. I take this position because I want the pro-tariff person to face the implications of his position.

Of course, Mr. North doesn’t hold himself accountable to the same standard as he flees from the obvious and inescapable conclusions that are logically dictated by his dogmatic free trade positions. Despite his challenge, I can almost guarantee he won’t address this argument for restricted trade, which transcends economics and applies to Americans, Frenchmen, and Chinese alike. Consider:

1. Free trade, in its true, complete, and intellectually coherent form, is not limited to the free movement of goods, but includes the free movement of capital and labor as well. (Note, for example, that the “invisible judicial line” doesn’t magically become visible when because human bodies are involved.)

2. The difference between domestic economies and the global international economy is not trivial, but is substantive, material, and based on significant genetic, cultural, traditional, and legal differences between various self-identified peoples.

3. Free trade is totally incompatible with national sovereignty, democracy, and self-determination, as well as the existence of independent nation-states with the right and ability to set their own laws according to the preferences of their residents.

4. Therefore, free trade must be opposed by every sovereign, democratic, or self-determined people, be they American, Chinese, German, or Zambian, who wish to preserve themselves as a free and distinct nation possessed of its own culture, traditions, and laws.

I invite Gary North or any other advocate of free trade to dispute or attempt to correct that argument. Now let’s consider the facts. Free trade advocates often claim that there is no reason for any difference between the U.S. domestic economy and the international economy. They believe there should be no more barriers between sovereign nation-states than there are between the several and united American States. And yet, look at the difference between labor mobility in the USA versus the European Union.

In the former EU15, only about 0.1% of the working age population changes its country of residence in a given year. Conversely, in the US, about 3% of the working age population moves to a different state every year,

These institutional and cultural differences suggest comparing internal geographical mobility in the US with the situation within EU Member States rather than between Member States. In doing so, the figures narrow the ‘mobility gap’ between Europe and the US. Between 2000 and 2005, about 1% of the working age population had changed residence each year from one region to another within the EU15 countries, compared to an overall interstate mobility rate of 2.8%-3.4% in the US during the same period of time.”
– Peter Ester and Hubert Krieger, “Comparing labour mobility in Europe and the US: facts and pitfalls”, 2008

What this means is that US workers are about 3x more willing to change their state of residence than European workers are willing to change their region of residence within national borders, and 30x more inclined to change their state of residence than Europeans are inclined to change their country of residence, even though the US state-to-state change likely involves a bigger geographic move than the EU country-to-country one.

It should be noted that increasing this country-to-country labor mobility rate within the EU is not only a major goal of the EU economic advisers, but the explicitly stated reason for this goal is their belief that increased labor mobility is required in order to increase economic growth.

Now, let’s look at what that annual 3 percent intra-US mobility translates to in terms of the overall population. The statistics are as follows for Americans between the ages of 25 and 44:

US overall 50.5 percent
East 54.3 percent
Midwest 65.0 percent
South 47.3 percent
West 40.2 percent

This is why the Midwest has changed much less over the last 40 years than either the East Coast or the West Coast; more Midwesterners stay in the Midwest and maintain their laws and cultural traditions. But more importantly, note what this signifies for the USA if the apostles of free trade were ever able to achieve their goal of permitting international trade to take place on the same terms as American domestic trade in a manner that realized the anticipated economic benefits: very nearly half of all American workers would be expected to leave the USA by the average age of 35!

This vast exodus of young Americans would say nothing, of course, of the hundreds of millions of non-American workers who would be expected to enter the USA, with all of the various consequences to be expected as a result of immigration that is an order of magnitude larger than the current wave.

The logic of free trade is inescapable. It amounts to a choice between a steadily declining living standard if free trade is limited to goods and capital versus the total destruction of the nation and the replacement of a majority of its population within a single lifetime if it is pursued to the full beneficial extent of the concept.

To paraphrase North, if you still refuse to give up the idea of free trade as a desirable means to increase the wealth of nations, then you should at least admit to yourself and others that you favor the total destruction of national sovereignty, the elimination of the U.S. Constitution, and the end of America and other historical nations. It’s time to come clean. You favor the politics of ein Welt, ein Recht, ein Volk.

In much the same way that those who support high tax levels cannot understand the counter-intuitive fact that the higher tax rates do not always lead to higher tax revenues, free trade advocates fail to understand that reducing national trade barriers will not always lead to increased wealth or liberty. If one believes that America was ever any sort of paragon of wealth and freedom, then it is obviously insane to advocate any policy that will cause America to return to the global average with regards to either, even if that policy would tend to raise the global average to some degree.

A crisis wasted

The Obama administration needn’t have gone to all that trouble to shoot up that Denver theater:

The weeks-long conference at the United Nations to produce an Arms Trade Treaty is ending without the creation of a treaty. None of the draft treaties which have circulated in the past several days came remotely close to finding consensus support. The impossibility of achieving consensus involved a wide variety of issues and nations, far beyond the Second Amendment concerns that have been raised by many American citizens.

What an embarrassment! To go to all that trouble and get nothing out of it but a few million more concealed carry permit holders. Don’t those troublesome member states and NGOs realize that the White House can’t override the Second Amendment without a solid international treaty to use as an excuse?

In defense of mass murder

I find myself contemplating quitting. No, not the blog. And not writing in general. But it is really incredible to see how few people at WND are interested in substantive matters like a conceptual revolution in economics versus other, considerably less significant issues.

There are all of two comments on today’s WND column. That’s less than one-twentieth of how many comment on any given column. And it’s not the WND readership, it wouldn’t be any better if I wrote for Salon, the New York Times, or the Daily Show. I mean, it’s not that I don’t understand MPAI, I coined the acronym after all. But that’s true for varying degrees of “most” and sometimes the percentage is just a little higher than I can fathom. I mean, the world is on the brink of a total economic meltdown, and still no one gives a damn about why? I feel like Jonah staring at the walls of Nineveh, stomping up and down the beach, gesticulating wildly and saying: “Go ahead and do it, Lord, let them have it, you know they deserve it!”

Seriously, I’m not sure I can deal with trying to pretend I don’t think a world where the best-selling novel is Twilight fan fiction deserves to perish in fire and ice. I used to wonder to whom the old Norse pagan religion held any appeal, but now I understand completely. If I read one more idiot Republican bank apologist claiming that the root cause of the financial crisis was Democratic politicians forcing banks to provide home loans to minorities, I may climb the Rainbow Bridge, wrest the horn from Heimdall and blow it myself. Then I’ll sit there and cheer for the frost giants and fire demons.

I’m considering a literary experiment of sorts. I’m wondering how much more interest would be expressed in the dumbest, most lowbrow column I can get past the editors devoted to the simple and straightforward concept of Obama being bad. Bad for the nation. Bad for the world! Bad. So bad. I’m thinking of calling it: Obama is Bad. Subtitled: Obama is really and truly very bad for America.

And if the column hits Drudge and results in an offer from Fox News to host my own cable news show, I’m going to give up op/ed, study genetics, build a lab, and start creating customized killer viruses.

Hultgreen-Curie strikes again

Yet another pioneer is struck down by the infamous Hultgreen-Curie syndrome:

Maria De Villota, 32, from Spain, was taking part in her first test for the F1 team at Duxford Airfield in Cambridgeshire this morning when she inexplicably crashed into a support truck for her team after completing her opening lap. After treatment by trackside paramedics, she was taken to the local Addenbrooke’s Hospital. One of only two females in test-drive roles at F1 level, she was running the rule over the Marussia car which will be raced by Timo Glock at the British Grand Prix in Silverstone this weekend.

Inexplicable… and yet somehow entirely predictable.

German court finds Muslim guilty; Jews suffer most

I was pretty sure when I read this that we could count on some hysterical reactions from those who can detect anti-semitism in cloud formations:

German Court Declares Judaism A Crime

Hard to believe, but that’s what the decision handed down by the regional court in Cologne, Germany means: circumcising a child under the age of consent is a crime, notwithstanding the religious beliefs of the parents…. Jews believe that the circumcision of infants is a necessary act; the command to circumcise male children at the age of eight days is the first command that God gives Abraham to mark their covenant; for thousands of years this has been a foundation of Jewish life. To ban infant circumcision is essentially to make the practice of Judaism illegal in Germany; it is now once again a crime to be a Jew in the Reich.

First of all, no one seems to have any problem with ignoring the religious beliefs of the parents when it comes to circumcising girls, so it seems more than a little bit hypocritical for anyone to simultaneously claim that there is a religious right to chop off part of a boy’s body off, but not any part of a girl’s body. Does Mr. Mead support the right of female circumcision for those Muslims who practice that?

Second, there are severe restrictions on religious freedom in Germany. One cannot homeschool there, wear a headscarf, or be excused from classes on evolution for religious purposes, so it seems a bit much to expect to be able to cut pieces off other people’s bodies there on that basis. If you want to practice your religion in freedom, Germany is simply not the place for you. This is neither news nor rocket science.

Third, circumcision is not Judaism, as should be obvious given the fact that many Christians and Muslims are circumcised and are not Jews. So, it is simply false to claim that Germany has declared Judaism to be a crime. And fourth, why do Jews still want to live in Germany anyway? One finds it hard to imagine that the Germans have not made it sufficiently clear that they do not cherish living with Jews among them any more than Israelis enjoy living with Sudanese in their midst.

UPDATE: I have zero sympathy for Jews whining about this court decision. They have no grounds for complaining about finding themselves on the short end of the freedom of religion law this time given this previous German court case: “In 1973, a Jew complained successfully that his freedom of religion was violated by the obligation to speak in a German courtroom decorated by a cross.“

Do you want your traditions to be respected? Then keep your nose out of everyone else’s.