Tag: Vibrancy is our strength

Prelude

Even the historically illiterate, stunted intellectuals of Red America are beginning to observe the signs of the eventual breakup.

Along with — and because of — dramatic social and demographic changes,
America is quickly dividing itself into two separate nations, regional
enclaves of rigid politics, as the idea of common national priorities
fades further into a distant past….  And the country’s seismic demographic and cultural shifts threaten to make our tribalism permanent.

There has been the rapid rise of minority populations and stagnation in the growth of the non-Hispanic white population in this country. Now, Hispanics represent a majority of all births in America, and last week The New York Times reported on census data that revealed that “deaths exceeded births among non-Hispanic white Americans for the first time in at least a century.”

In fact, according to an Associated Press report last week, which cited government reports: “For the first time, America’s racial and ethnic minorities now make up about half of the under-5 age group.”

But there were also some worrisome statistics in the report that could help to signal those children’s views on policy…. And, we are becoming less blindly religious and more blindly militaristic. (The former is a good thing; the latter, not so much.)

Blow is wrong about one thing: there is no “nation divided against itself”, because as I’ve previously noted, there are not merely two separate nations, there are four.  There are the Reds of progressive, secular America, there are the Whites
of traditional religious America, there are the Browns of third world
America, and there are the Blacks of feral America. They may broadly follow the racial demographics, but the lines are not hard; for example, Charles Blow is a black man who is clearly Red, rather than Black, just as David Brooks is Red, not White.

Given how people have expressed considerable doubt concerning my  negative outlook on the continued union of these four Americas, it should be interesting to see how they respond to a black, left-wing New York Times columnist who has, despite our very different perspectives, reached similar conclusions. Note, in particular, that damning admission: “because of dramatic… demographic changes”.

The fruits of diversity are bloodshed and war.  They always have been.  Populations of sufficiently differing time preferences simply cannot live together for long. And the only successful way to keep those fruits from ripening has is a powerful militaristic state willing and able to commit atrocities in order to keep the otherwise warring parties in line.  Consider, for example, the difference between segregation as it was practiced in the pre-1960s USA and the way it was practiced in the USSR and China.  Or the way it is presently practiced in Africa with the various tribes vying for power in the national government.

It won’t surprise me if those who oppose deportations now and are horrified by the WWII Japanese internment live long enought to one day find themselves supporting a Red American government that is engaged in internal deportations of Hispanics to its Aztlan Autonomous Oblast.

Ideological cleansing

In much the same way Sami Abu Al-Ala was recently calling for ethnically cleansing Egypt of Jews, a pinkshirt by the name of Amal El-Mohtar was calling for the ideological cleansing of SFWA the other day.  She appears to find me insufficiently enthusiastic about the equalitarian jihad and is obviously hoping to make use of Twittergate in order to expel me from the organization   I didn’t bother responding to her call initially, since El-Mohtar’s opinion is no more important to me than Al-Ala’s.

What was amusing about the post with which she followed up that call, however, was the shock and dismay it reveals about her discovery that many sane and intelligent individuals actually tend to agree with me rather than with the fascist pinkshirts of the SFWA.  A number of my critics quite clearly do not recognize how the numbers line up; they’re still babbling about the problem of giving me “a platform” and clearly failing to recognize that I already have a much bigger platform than most of my outspoken critics.  For all that the pinkshirts are desperately trying to pretend something else is at stake, this is a very clear test of where one stands on the freedom of speech and expression.

Anyhow, this brave pinkshirt is feeling drained and wearied and constrained in her speech and expression by the fact that people actually disagree with her about “the horrors” of my opinion, despite the fact that I paid her no attention at all.  So, clearly, that is a situation that requires rectifying:

There are roughly seven thousand things I would rather be talking about
right now, but nevertheless. This is very important to me.

On Wednesday I called for the expulsion of Theodore Beale,
aka Vox Day, from SFWA. The reasons and proposed methodology are
detailed in the link. In brief, he very obviously, knowingly, and
deliberately broke the rules over what kind of posts could be tagged for
inclusion in SFWA’s promotional Twitter feed by posting a racist attack
on N. K. Jemisin. This is not a one-time occurence, but part of a
pattern of behaviour that shows malicious contempt for the organization
as a whole.

While the vast majority of responses — through
pingbacks on the post, in e-mail, over Twitter — have been positive and
supportive, over the last few days I have seen the following in various
places on the internet:

– people refusing to acknowledge that there was anything racist or misogynistic about Beale’s post
–
people wringing their hands over how we shouldn’t ban people from
organizations for their opinions (when that is not the argument I am
making)
– people saying we should just ignore him — that banning him from the Twitter feed is enough of a reprimand
–
people being more outraged at the idea that I would call Beale’s post
racist than at the fact that he called a black woman “an ignorant
half-savage” who couldn’t possibly be “fully civilized” on account of
her ethnic heritage.

I have also seen people belligerently
questioning or deriding my command of the English language, my religion,
my ethnicity, and my nationality, as a consequence of having made that
post.

I would be remiss if I failed to note that like NK Jemisin before her, El-Mohtar is lying about me.  I did not deliberately break the rules concerning the Twitter feed, I simply forgot them.  Nor do I have contempt for the entire organization, as my contempt is reserved for the current set of SFWA officers who are steering the organization into self-parody and complete irrelevance, as well as for the pinkshirts, who are mostly relatively new and unaccomplished members attempting to ideologically cleanse the organization of dissenting opinions.

UPDATE: Since I hadn’t read the woman’s entire first post, I didn’t realize quite how cognititively handicapable she is.  Check out her bolding-for-emphasis:

Marking blog posts for inclusion that include threats or personal attacks or obvious trolling will also be grounds for removal. (Emphasis mine.)

The woman obviously doesn’t realize that “removal” does not mean “expulsion from the organization”, but rather, “removal of the offending blog from the Twitter feed”.  Which, you will note, has already taken place.

El-Moron also lies again when she claims that I have “repeatedly and aggressively used SFWA platforms to
broadcast and disseminate these views with obvious malicious intent.”  I used the Twitter feed once.  Ever.  And I never used any “SFWA platform”, because the Twitterfeed guidelines clearly state: “While SFWA does maintain the @sfwaauthors Twitter feed for the benefit of its members, ultimately the posts that appear in the feed are the responsibility of the authors of those posts, and are in no way endorsed by SFWA, nor do such posts reflect the opinions or policy of SFWA.”   It’s not as if I spoke as an officer of the organization, hijacked the SFWA Twitter account, posted anything on the SFWA web site or published an article in the SFWA Bulletin.

Finally, she doesn’t so much lie as display outright neuroticism by claiming “This last reads to me very much like a threat, especially coming from a
white man to a black woman in a country where public lynchings are a
matter of living memory.”

This last bit certainly helps explain why people have been deriding El-Moron’s command of the English language. First, it’s obviously not a threat.  I’m the only one who has actually, and repeatedly, been threatened here. Second, Jemisin made her speech in Australia.  Third, I live in Europe, not in the Americas.

Let rhetoric be silent when the readily observable facts gainsay its blather.

A befuddling mystery of decline

Zerohedge republishes Michael Snyder’s recounting of the way in which the city of Detroit has changed in only 53 years:


1 – Detroit was once the fourth-largest city in the United States, and in 1960 Detroit had the highest per-capita income in the entire nation.
2 – Over the past 60 years, the population of Detroit has fallen by 63 percent.
3 – At this point, approximately 40 percent of all the streetlights in the city don’t work.
4 – Some ambulances in the city of Detroit have been used for so long that they have more than 250,000 miles on them.
5 – 210 of the 317 public parks in the city of Detroit have been permanently closed down.
6 – According to the New York Times, there are now approximately 70,000 abandoned buildings in Detroit.
7 – Approximately one-third of Detroit’s 140 square miles is either vacant or derelict.
8 – Less than half of the residents of Detroit over the age of 16 are working at this point.
9 – If you can believe it, 60 percent of all children in the city of Detroit are living in poverty.
10 – According to one very shocking report, 47 percent of the residents of Detroit are functionally illiterate.
11 – Today, police solve less than 10 percent of the crimes that are committed in Detroit.
12 – Ten years ago, there were approximately 5,000 police officers in the city of Detroit.  Today, there are only about 2,500 and another 100 are scheduled to be eliminated from the force soon.
13 – Due to budget cutbacks, most police stations in Detroit are now closed to the public for 16 hours a day.
14 – The murder rate in Detroit is 11 times higher than it is in New York City.
15 – Crime has gotten so bad in Detroit that even the police are telling people to “enter Detroit at your own risk“.
16 – Right now, the city of Detroit is facing $20 billion in debt and unfunded liabilities.  That breaks down to more than $25,000 per resident.

It is, of course, a baffling mystery and no one has any idea what could possibly have accounted for the transformation of this once-great American city.  Perhaps one day, a future Gibbon will be able to decipher the great conundrum of Detroit’s decline and fall.  But in the meantime, we can at least take heart in the knowledge that the innocent and suffering denizens who live amidst the wreckage are, thanks to the effects of the housing crash on house prices, now finding it possible to move to suburbs such as Southfield that have thus far escaped the general decay of the city.

Thank St. Diversity that those poor, but totally civilized Detroit residents, who are without question absolutely capable of maintaining a self-sustaining and technologically advanced society as well as every other collection of humans on the planet, have been able to flee that inexplicably cursed geography.  I have no doubts at all that this change of location will also completely alter what can only be described as their coincidental misfortune of the last five decades.

Celebrate Diversity!

Mailvox: the lessons of history

JD demonstrates that one of the benefits of aging is that one has the ability to look back and determine who was, and who was not, correct:

At college in 1980, my Government Studies prof also served as Secretary
of the Socialist Workers Party of Minnesota (the real one, not the DFL).
We clashed over Robert Mugabe, just coming to power in Zimbabwe, he
asserting it spelled salvation and I, that it spelled ruin.

I
e-mailed him a year or two ago, asking if I could get a retroactive
grade increase since my predictions had proven more accurate than his.
His explanation was that he truly believed Mugabe was an agrarian
reformer whose program of taking land from Whites to give to Blacks
would benefit the country; but things just hadn’t worked out as hoped.

I
didn’t bother to send him the famous Heinlein quote about Bad Luck. And
I didn’t really expect the grade change. But it certainly was
satisfying to say “I told you so” 30 years later.

I doubt it will take until 2043 for “anti-racists” and those who are blinded by rage at the suggestion that not all human populations are equally civilized to ruefully explain that they truly believed that Africans were every bit as capable of maintaining and sustaining advanced technological civilizations as Europeans.

The question is: how many human beings will have to die by starvation and mass slaughter in America, Africa, and Europe before they consider the possibility that they might be wrong?  Based on how long it took the same sort of people to begin considering that perhaps communism was not, in fact, capable of economically outperforming capitalism, my estimate would be around 250 million.

It is an interesting question to direct towards my critics, though.  Is there any number of deaths caused by starvation and mass slaughter in a five-year period as a result of the structural breakdown of society in one or more countries that would convince you to at least consider my time-to-civilization hypothesis?  If so, how many?

Anti-racism and the Law of Unintended Consequences

Even Barack Obama appears to be aware that racism is not the credible culprit for the greater challenges facing Africa and Africans today, according to this 2009 article, which, for some reason, popped up today on The Telegraph’s Most Shared:

Ahead of a visit to Ghana at the weekend, he said: “Ultimately, I’m a big believer that Africans are responsible for Africa.

“I
think part of what’s hampered advancement in Africa is that for many
years we’ve made excuses about corruption or poor governance, that this
was somehow the consequence of neo-colonialism, or the West has been
oppressive, or racism – I’m not a big – I’m not a believer in excuses.

Mr
Obama, the son of a Kenyan, added: “I’d say I’m probably as
knowledgeable about African history as anybody who’s occupied my office.
And I can give you chapter and verse on why the colonial maps that were
drawn helped to spur on conflict, and the terms of trade that were
uneven emerging out of colonialism.

“And
yet the fact is we’re in 2009,” continued the US president. “The West
and the United States has not been responsible for what’s happened to
Zimbabwe’s economy over the last 15 or 20 years.

“It
hasn’t been responsible for some of the disastrous policies that we’ve
seen elsewhere in Africa. And I think that it’s very important for
African leadership to take responsibility and be held accountable.”

This touches on what I’ve written previously concerning the grand transocietal challenges posed by the time-to-civilization hypothesis.  The problem faced by the equalitarian crowd is that due to the civil rights movement in the USA and the independence movement in Africa, whites largely shed what Kipling once described as “the White Man’s Burden” and generally did the best they could to remove themselves from proximity to, and responsibility for, African-Americans and Africans.  In addition to the socially deleterious effects of the US and European welfare systems, this global racial disengagement appears to have largely removed the civilizational restraints that were previously imposed upon the various African communities against their will.

Moreover, the Caribbean immigration into Britain and the African immigration into the European continent created a situation where millions of Europeans came into contact with Africans for the first time in history.  There are three reasons that Europeans are much more open about the qualitative behavioral differences between Europeans and Africans than white Americans; the first is that there is no legacy of slavery to obscure and excuse the differences or inspire white guilt. The second is that, in Europe, it is almost impossible to not notice the vast difference in the crime rates between the various populations.  The third is that African-Americans are simply less African; nearly all African-Americans are either of Yoruba, Mandenka, Bantu, San, or Blaka descent, and they are on average 22 percent white.

I talk to two European policemen from time to time at the gym.  Both have told me that, aside from the occasional car crash, they spend all their time dealing with crime committed by Africans.  Not part of it, or most of it, but ALL of it.  I suspect that is a slight exaggeration, but not by much. Even I noticed, for example, that in a very small town where everyone knows everyone and there is virtually no crime, the arrival of a fairly small number of African “refugees” soon resulted in a large number of apartment burglaries and a bomb being used to access the money in an ATM machine.

Nor are Europeans inclined to tolerate such behavior.  Six months later, I was walking through the center of that town and realized that nearly all of the Africans I’d seen before were gone.  Deported.

It used to be at least potentially credible to blame racism for black social pathology when whites were, quite literally, systematically oppressing blacks, both in the USA and in Africa.  But the inescapable conclusion, if one looks at a broad measure of social health measures for individuals and communities over the time since African liberation took place, is that with a few exceptions, oppressive paternalism was genuinely in the objective interest of black individuals and communities alike.  I am not saying that it was right, or even justified, for Europeans and White Americans to have engaged in that oppressive paternalism, I’m merely pointing out that it appears to have been effective in terms of rendering those societies more functional, and, more importantly, sustainable in the long term.

Now, being a libertarian, I do not accept the idea that a cognitive or racial or aristocratic or scientific elite has any right or responsibility to rule over the non-elite, regardless of how disastrously hoi polloi may choose to govern itself.  The fact that post-colonial Nigeria can no longer feed itself and is producing 80 percent less in some agricultural sectors than it was when it became independent in 1960, (when it had 45 million people compared to 170 million now), is not anyone’s problem but Nigeria’s… at least not so long as international borders are maintained and immigration is not permitted.

The increasingly dangerous Nigerian situation illustrates the large scale human tragedy that is almost certainly bound to take place so long as it is widely believed that the partially civilized are capable of maintaining an advanced civilization on their own.  Not even the most firmly equalitarian individual believes that the mostly savage are capable of doing so; no one is selling nuclear power plants and satellites to Papua New Guinea.  In such cases, people are content to support intervention in a paternal manner, as they once did in Africa, and to labor to prevent the savages from burning sorcerers, engaging in constant tribal warfare, and eating each other’s brains.  But it is, at the very least, possible that the partially civilized are no more able to maintain advanced technological societies in the medium-to-long term on their own than the uncivilized.  The evidence tends to suggest that this is probably the case although we will not know with any degree of certainty until large scale societal collapses begin to occur.

I fully understand that what I am observing here flies in the face of more than sixty years of firmly held belief that independence and liberation would cause Africa to flourish, and that desegregation, civil rights, and black empowerment would enable the black community in America to better conform to the behavioral norms of the white community.  But that has not turned out to be the case, and indeed, advances in genetic science has increasingly tended to confirm many of those old 19th century beliefs concerning the importance of seeming superficialities such as cranial capacity and brain size, which are almost surely linked to the observably shorter time preferences that are so reliably disastrous with regards to economic decisions and social behavior alike.

I hope the reader will understand that I am neither advocating a return to paternalistic oppression nor claiming that one’s humanity is dependent upon one’s place upon the civilizational scale; there are certainly no shortage of whites who are observably post-civilized and whose behavior is increasingly feral in comparison with the behavior of their grandparents 50 years ago.  I am merely, in the same way that I raised concerns about the global financial system in 2002, six years before the crisis, observing that the failure of the equalitarian race model looks to have the potential for considerably more global trauma and human tragedy than was experienced during and after the global financial crisis of 2008.

I don’t have any solutions for this.  I don’t even have any specific recommendations, other than to immediately stop the mass migrations that will only make it vastly more difficult for the advanced societies to assist the less advanced ones when the crises arise. I’m only beginning to think about these patterns in a manner that might allow me to eventually develop some sort of metric to utilize in the way that I use Z1 credit to track the status of the US economy.

Most of those who consider themselves to be “anti-racist” will, no doubt, refuse to consider these readily observable facts until their consequences become undeniable.  But just as the “anti-fascists” have been seen to behave in a counter-productive and unexpectedly fascist manner, perhaps the smarter “anti-racists” will at least consider entertaining the possibility that they are not, by virtue of their ideological purity, rendered intrinsically immune from the Law of Unintended Consequences.

Presenting this summer’s distraction

If there were any doubts about the wisdom of the US getting militarily involved in Syria, the combination of the Benghazi, IRS, and NSA scandals appears to have resolved them:

The Obama administration has concluded that Syrian President Bashar
Assad’s government used chemical weapons against the rebels seeking to
overthrow him and, in a major policy shift, President Obama has decided
to supply military support to the rebels, the White House announced
Thursday. “The president has made a decision about providing more
support to the opposition that will involve providing direct support to
the [Supreme Military Council]. That includes military support,” Deputy
National Security Adviser for Strategic Communication Ben Rhodes told
reporters.

Well, it’s better than a false flag event.  It’s probably preferable to give the administration the easy foreign policy distraction they are seeking than force them to generate one.  And as an added bonus, the country will receive about 800,000 Syrian immigrants, which will help replace the now-declining native white population.

The Obama administration is considering resettling thousands of refugees who left Syria during the country’s ongoing civil war to multiple towns and cities across the United States, the L.A. Times reports. A resettlement plan under discussion in Washington and other capitals is aimed at relieving pressure on Middle Eastern countries straining to support 1.6 million refugees, as well as assisting hard-hit Syrian families…. The United States usually accepts about half the refugees that the U.N. agency proposes for resettlement.

More diversity = more better, right?

A black female fantasist calls for Reconciliation

NK Jemisin is publicly lying about me and a few other things in Australia as she blithely advocates the continued self-destruction of science fiction:

Right now American politicians are doing their best to roll back
voting rights won during our own Civil Rights movement. They are
putting in place educational “reforms” which disproportionately have a
negative impact on black and brown and poor white kids, and will
essentially help to solidify a permanent underclass. Right now there
are laws in places like Florida and Texas which are intended to make it
essentially legal for white people to just shoot people like me, without
consequence, as long as they feel threatened by my presence. So:
admitting that the land we live on was stolen from hundreds of other
nations and peoples? Acknowledging that the prosperity the United
States enjoys was bought with blood? That’s a pipe dream.

I want you to understand that what you’ve done makes me want to weep with envy, and bitterness, and hope.

So: segue time. Let’s scale down. Let’s talk about the community — the microcosmic nation — of science fiction and fantasy.

For the past few days I’ve also been observing a “kerfuffle”, as some
call it, in reaction to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ of
America’s latest professional journal, the Bulletin. Some of you may
also have been following the discussion; hopefully not all of you. To
summarize: two of the genre’s most venerable white male writers made
some comments in a series of recent articles which have been decried as
sexist and racist by most of the organization’s membership. Now, to put
this in context: the membership of SFWA also recently voted in a new
president. There were two candidates — one of whom was a self-described
misogynist, racist, anti-Semite, and a few other flavors of asshole.
In this election he lost by a landslide… but he still earned ten percent
of the vote. SFWA is small; only about 500 people voted in total, so
we’re talking less than 50 people. But scale up again. Imagine if ten
percent of this country’s population was busy making active efforts to
take away not mere privileges, not even dignity, but your most basic
rights. Imagine if ten percent of the people you interacted with, on a
daily basis, did not regard you as human.

Just ten percent. But such a ten percent.

And beyond that ten percent are the silent majority — the great
unmeasured mass of enablers. These are the folks who don’t object to
the treatment of women as human beings, and who may even have the odd
black or gay friend that they genuinely like. However, when the ten
percent starts up in their frothing rage, these are the people who say
nothing in response. When women and other marginalized groups respond
with anger to the hatred of the ten percent, these are the people who do
not support them, and in fact suggest that maybe they’re overreacting.
When they read a novel set in a human society which contains only one
or two female characters, these are the people who don’t decry this as
implausible. Or worse, they simply don’t notice. These are the people
who successfully campaigned for Star Trek to return to television after
25 years, but have no intention of campaigning for Roddenberry’s vision
to be complete, with gay characters joining the rainbow brigade on the
bridge. These are the people who gleefully nitpick the scientific
plausibility of stopping a volcano with “cold fusion”, yet who fail to
notice that an author has written a future earth in which somehow
seventeen percent of the human race dominates ninety percent of the
characterization.

Let me be perfectly clear.  I do not describe myself as a “misogynist, racist, anti-Semite, and a few other flavors of asshole”.  John Scalzi, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and Theresa Nielsen Hayden, among others, have described me that way.  Of course, John Scalzi also describes himself as a rapist, Patrick Nielsen Hayden took his wife’s name when he got married, and Theresa Nielsen Hayden is dumb enough to have claimed a prominent Game blogger with three Billboard-charting club hits “is not acquainted with actual women.”

Granted, Spacebunny and the fat frog that is Nielsen Hayden don’t look as if they belong to the same phylum, let alone the same species, so perhaps the key word is not “women, but “actual” in the sense of “grotesquely malformed”.

I therefore suggest that their assertions should be taken with at least a small grain of salt rather than credited to me. And it should be obvious that, being a libertarian, I am not actively attempting to take away anyone’s “most basic rights”.  Jemisin has it wrong; it is not that I, and others, do not view her as human, (although genetic science presently suggests that we are not equally homo sapiens sapiens), it is that we simply do not view her as being fully civilized for the obvious historical reason that she is not.

She is lying about the laws in Texas and Florida too.  The laws are not there to let whites ” just shoot people like me, without
consequence, as long as they feel threatened by my presence”, those self-defense laws have been put in place to let whites defend their lives and their property from people, like her, who are half-savages engaged in attacking them.

Jemisin’s disregard for the truth is no different than the average Chicago gangbanger’s disregard for the traditional Western code of civilized conduct. She could, if she wished, claim that privileged white males are responsible for the decline of Detroit, for the declining sales of science fiction, even for the economic and cultural decline of the United States, but that would not make it true.  It would not even make it credible.  Anyone who is paying sufficient attention will understand who is genuinely responsible for these problems.

Unlike the white males she excoriates, there is no evidence to be found anywhere on the planet that a society of NK Jemisins is capable of building an advanced civilization, or even successfully maintaining one without significant external support from those white males.  If one considers that it took my English and German ancestors more than one thousand years to become fully civilized after their first contact with advanced Greco-Roman civilization, it should be patently obvious that it is illogical to imagine, let alone insist, that Africans have somehow managed to do the same in less than half the time at a greater geographic distance.  These things take time.

Being an educated, but ignorant half-savage, with little more understanding of what it took to build a new literature by “a bunch of beardy old middle-class middle-American guys” than an illiterate Igbotu tribesman has of how to build a jet engine, Jemisin clearly does not understand that her dishonest call for “reconciliation” and even more diversity within SF/F is tantamount to a call for its decline into irrelevance. Nor do the back-patting Samuel Johnsons wiping their eyes and congratulating her for her ever-so-touching speech understand that.

There can be no reconciliation between the observant and the delusional.

UPDATE: It may amuse some of you to know that in making her false claim, NK Jemisin appears to have violated the SFWA Forum rules, which state: “[A]ll posts made here are confidential. Material may not be re-posted
outside these forums without the explicit permission of their authors.”   I am confident the moderators of the SFWA will be swift to deal with this violation of the organization’s rules.

UPDATE 2: The Spitefully Fascist Writers of America are on the job!  This post was resulted in the following email:  “Your blog feed has been removed from the @SFWAauthors aggregator due to violating of the policies of this service, specifically:  “Marking blog posts for inclusion that include threats or personal attacks or obvious trolling will also be grounds for removal.”” 

UPDATE 3: Now the SFWA moderators have, at least temporarily, wiped my comments off the SFWA Forum thread while leaving the attacks on me untouched.  What a pity that 20x more people will read everything here instead.  Keep this in mind when you’re trying to argue that there are no ideological gatekeepers in the SF/F publishing world.  They desperately want to silence all disssent, and they’re tremendously frustrated that they don’t have the wherewithal.


UPDATE 4: As always, I am quite willing to publicly debate Ms Jemisin, Mr. Sanford, or any other member of the SFWA concerning the issues raised here, be it on the SFWA Forum, this blog, or any other written venue.  And if all these passionate champions of human equality are afraid to defend their views in public, as were Messrs Myers and McRapey in the past, well, everyone knows perfectly well what that signifies, their protestations notwithstanding.


UPDATE 5: McRapey has the perfect solution to the Problem that Must Not Be Named.  He’s going to give money to ANOTHER charity. That will show me!  When did “donation” replace “education” as the left-liberal solution to all evils?

An innovative approach to education

I have to admit, I’ve been a bit skeptical of Jared Diamond’s claim that we of the civilized West have much to learn from the noble primitive cultures of Papua New Guinea.  However, their novel approach to public education does appear to have some aspects worth considering:

A teacher has been tortured and beheaded by her neighbours in a Papua New Guinea village because they say she was a witch responsible for the death of a sick villager. The angry mob brandishing guns, machetes and axes surrounded her house and pulled Helen Rumbali, her sister and two nieces away. They then burnt down the house.

No doubt the advocates of the Diversity Gospel are sad because they presently enjoy insufficient Papua New Guineans in their neighborhoods.  Which is a pity, because in addition to bringing more diversity and vibrancy with them, they would also provide what one can only presume is a highly effective means of dealing with recalcitrant teachers unions.

Mailvox: media and social science

CL puts my “Black is the Absence of Color” media theory to the test:

Testing your theory: when the media fails to
mention the of race of those involved in an incident, it usually means
the perpetrators are black.

No mention of race.
2. Article at WOKV.com:
sample: “Police tell Action News several smaller fights quickly
escalated and became a large brawl involving about 30 people.”
No mention of race.
What do we find?  A group of blacks fighting at the beach gathering.
Will continue testing….

Never let it be said that we are not devoted to the scientific method here at Vox Popoli.  Of course, for anyone who once lived within a short drive of Sawgrass, there was no need for science.  To know who was responsible, the only thing required was the mere mention of Jax Beach.

Blessings of the Diversity Gospel

This morning’s headlines from the UK:

Tensions on streets after slaughter of British soldier: War memorials defaced and mosque firebombed as EDL march on Westminster

  •     Bomber Command Memorial and Animals In War Memorial vandalised
  •     Police are unsure if attack was by Muslims or by far-right troublemakers
  •     1,000 EDL chant, sing and march from Trafalgar Square to Downing Street
  •     Police keep them apart from Unite Against Fascism counter-protest
  •     Mosque fire-bombed in wake of Lee Rigby’s execution in Woolwich

This is all just gentle prelude, of course, but things do appear to be heating up as we slowly inch our way towards summer. When UKIP starts echoing the EDL, that should indicate a significant corner being turned.  As it stands, things are much more violent in Chicago but talking to various Brits gives one the sense of a powderkeg sitting in the midst of some flying sparks.