The Painful Truth

     (Not to be confused with the delightful Gerard Butler / Katherine Heigl rom-com The Ugly Truth.)

     I was ambling around the Web, basically avoiding all the things I knew I should be doing, and arrived at this entry at Ace of Spades HQ, where Ace cites This pathetic development:

     The Cleveland Indians will soon be no more.

     Following the path of the Washington Football Team, Cleveland has decided to remove its name, which many consider racist and insensitive, the New York Times reported Sunday.

     An official announcement could come as soon as this week, according to the outlet.

     That’s bad enough. However, it’s Ace’s reaction that got my gears turning:

     I keep waiting for the Woke Fever to break.

     I'm starting to think it never will break. Because people continue bowing to this madness. The normal people never make them pay a price for bowing to the lunatics.

     I thought about that for about five milliseconds before cracking through to the underlying reality. The “Woke Fever” isn’t about conviction; it’s about consequences. When Left-affiliated group L approaches private enterprise X and demands some accommodation, with an implied threat of economic damage via bad publicity, propaganda, lawfare, and boycotts, X must now reckon up its possible moves. X faces a “payoff matrix” that looks a bit like this:

X's payoffs:	L does nothing	L hits X hard
X tells L "bite me"	Probably 0	$$$ BIG COSTS $$$
X gives in	Small Costs	N/A

     There’s little to no likelihood of X gaining in any way from resisting L’s legalized extortion. There’s a strong likelihood that resisting L would lead to severe economic losses and, quite possibly, crippling lawsuits that would impede its operations for months or years. Giving in would avert the worst possible outcome, though it would entail some bearable administrative expenses...at least, in the short term. And these days business executives concern themselves with the short term almost exclusively.

     Does X have no moves that would punish L? At this time, I can’t think of any. What could the Cleveland Indians do to confront their SJW harassers with the prospect of losses of their own?

     So we get capitulation as the minimax move: i.e., the move that minimizes the Indians’ maximum possible loss. Were the Indians’ owners and managers to contemplate the long term, and to foresee a credible gain of revenue from standing strong – or a credible major loss from capitulating, though that’s less plausible – that might change the equations...but forecasting further forward than next week is chancy in today’s climate. Remember what Yogi Berra said about prediction.

     The “Woke Fever” is probably better thought of as the “Fear of the Woke:” corporate managers’ fear of what the SJWs could do to their targets through the tactics they’ve already tested and come to trust. The courts – including “the court of public opinion” – being what they are today, it takes a degree of courage uncommon in American boardrooms to defy the SJWs and stand one’s ground.

The Bullies Of The “Book Community”

     There are some things that cannot be said too often. Some of them are hardly said at all.

     Have you heard about the tragedy of Amelie Zhao? If not, it’s about time:

     Amelie Wen Zhao is a Young Adult author whose debut sci-fi/fantasy novel, Blood Heir, was set for a June release from a major publisher, as part of a three-book deal. When the deal was announced a year ago, Zhao, who is just starting her career, made her excitement public....

     Well, guess what? The book, which had positive buzz ( Barnes & Noble called it one of the most anticipated YA releases of the year ), has been the subject of a massive Social Justice Warrior pile-on on social media, as Jesse Singal discussed in a tweetstorm. Very few people have even read the novel, but the mob attacked it as racist for a variety of reasons, one of them being that Zhao created a fantasy world where “oppression is blind to skin color” (this, from the press release). It’s a fantasy world, and people haven’t even read the book, but the mob was certain that Blood Heir is racist, and that its author — a young woman raised in Beijing, but now living in New York City — ought to be shut down.

     And guess what? The SJW attackers got their wish: Miss Zhao voluntarily withdrew the book from its scheduled publication.

     Amelie Zhao seems to be a perfectly sweet and decent young woman with a real storyteller’s gift – and she had achieved a lifelong dream. But her SJW attackers have destroyed that dream out of...what? A desire for “justice?” There’s some sort of “justice” in bludgeoning an innocent young woman into surrendering her achievement?

     We both know the answers, Gentle Reader.

     Larry Correia lit into Miss Zhao’s attackers with a furious and exemplary incisiveness. It’s too good to excerpt; please read it all. Not that it will have the slightest effect upon those vicious monsters, but Monster Hunter Correia is the right man to give them the shellacking they’ve earned.

     Will Miss Zhao recover from this brutalization? Possibly in the long term. But the moral of the story “should” be “obvious.”

---

     I have no interest in the sort of Pub World acceptance Miss Zhao pursued and achieved. At this point I regard the conventional publishers with disdain. They’re dominated by SJW thinking. Worse, as Miss Zhao has learned the hard way, they make juicy targets for the SJW hordes.

     Indie is the way to go. With the exception of Baen Books, there are no traditional publishers with the courage God gave a cabbage. Moreover, the ongoing extinction of the brick-and-mortar bookstore in favor of Amazon and comparable outlets has reduced what a traditional publisher can offer a new writer in the way of marketing support to barely more than what a diligent indie can accomplish on his own. And not only does the indie writer retain absolute control over his book; he also gets to keep a much bigger slice of his revenues pie.

     Best of all, the indie writer is “bully-proof.” Anyone who can be shamed out of reading a book by SJW hysterics would be unlikely to read it in the first place and even less likely to enjoy it or recommend it to his friends.

     All that having been said, it remains the obligation of good men to whack the SJW bullies across the chops – preferably with a tire iron – whenever and wherever they poke their heads above the slime line. I salute Larry Correia for having done so unambiguously and thoroughly. There are other places where the job needs to be done, most notably in the ever more antisocial “social media” and in reviews at Amazon and other online outlets.

     It’s a form of support your preferred indie writers need quite as much as your dollars. Please don’t stint them.

The Remora’s Worst Mistake

     Before I attack today’s subject with my leaden rapier, allow me to notify you about a crisis of sorts. Mike Hendrix, the redoubtable master of Cold Fury, is in financial trouble. He’s been hit with a large car repair bill, and as he makes his living with his car – he works for Lyft – that had to come before all else. Unfortunately, Hosting Matters, where his blog is sited, is impatient about his arrears and has suspended his account.

     If you appreciate Mike’s stuff and have the means, please consider sending him a few dollars. His email address is tommygunmike@gmail.com

---

     A parasitic organism cannot afford to do its host lethal damage. That “should” be “obvious,” but as with many similar propositions, the power of wishful thinking can conceal it from us at the worst possible moments.

     An economic parasite that manages to kill its host will sometimes continue on for a while in seeming independence, but unless it secures a new host in short order, it’s doomed to penury and extinction. This is what appears to be happening in the field of fantasy and science fiction.

     The Phantom sets the stage for us:

     Saw this gem today. Everything wrong with science fiction is John W. Campbell's fault.

     Campbell was basically a racist garbage-person.

     Campbell supported slavery. And segregation. And believed black people were inherently intellectually and culturally inferior to whites. You know that whole, "But how could you possibly expect readers to empathize with a black protagonist?" thing? Something Campbell quite famously told Samuel R. Delany, in quite possibly its first documented incarnation. That whole "I don't care if they're white, black, or polka-dotted" thing white people say when they're trying to pretend they're not being racist? Campbell, while making apologetics for slavery no less, which was something he got up to a lot.

     It goes on and on like that. Campbell was a RAAAACIST!!! Heinlein was a RAAAACIST!!! Asimov, Hubbard, Clarke, all RAAAACISTS!!! Sure, baby. Sure they were.

     If you aren’t familiar with the name John W. Campbell, he was the highly influential editor of the great SF pulps Astounding and Analog for many years. He was personally responsible for mentoring (and bringing to prominence) Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and several other greats of the field. He was politically conservative, as far as I can tell from his editorials. Therefore, the SJWs who now dominate traditional F&SF publishing, professional organizations such as the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA), and the Hugo Award-granting World Science Fiction convention hate him with a white hot passion and are determined to make him an unperson.

     They’ve already set to work on Asimov, Heinlein, and other luminaries of the Golden Age, and have substantially scrubbed them from the awareness of younger F&SF readers, so why not Campbell? After vaporizing the great writers of the field, taking down an editor shouldn’t be much of an exercise.

     There’s probably no stopping them from carrying on with their pogrom. What will ultimately stop them is the economic consequence of their campaign. You see, they can’t tell a decent story. The lot of them are slowly discovering that no matter who or how indulgent your publisher is, or how many awards your fellow travelers award you, if you can’t or won’t entertain the reader, giving him at least some of what he reads F&SF for, he won’t be back.

     It’s not really about their politics. There’ve been left-wingers in F&SF for half of forever. It’s because along with doing their best to anathematize the old greats, they’ve made political propagandization their one and only aim. Their relentlessness about their politics –especially as regards that contemporary shibboleth “diversity” – has drained the entertainment value from their stories. Were writers in the Right to do likewise, they would be equally unreadable. Heinlein trended that way in his last few years, with the same consequences for the entertainment value of his novels.

     So younger readers are growing ever less inclined to scan the F&SF racks at Barnes & Noble for their entertainment.

---

     As usual, Sarah Hoyt has a pithy observation about the above:

     The vultures are fighting harder and harder over tinier and tinier scraps. And even they can’t convince themselves that they compare in any way, shape or form to the greats of the genre’s past. Hence the screaming. It’s akin to a child covering his ears and shrieking, so as not to hear the denial of his fantasies.

     Indeed. And you can bet your last dollar that the infighting, the finger pointing, and the recrimination will all get steadily worse as the scraps dwindle in number and size. The SJWs made the parasite's worst possible mistake – they succeeded in capturing SF's traditional publishers, professional groups, and award-granting organizations, and drove out the capable, properly focused writers who kept those organizations worthwhile — and they're paying for it in the most appropriate way.

     The independent writers movement will eventually eclipse traditionally published F&SF. Capable storytellers are available there; these days, I go nowhere else for my entertainment. Yes, it’s necessary to filter out a lot of crap, but indie pricing makes that an endurable undertaking. Moreover, indie writers are gradually adopting practices that make it straightforward to avoid most of the crap without having to pay for it, in particular posting substantial snippets of their books free of charge, just as Amazon has done.

     Meanwhile, the SJWs who’ve colonized and conquered traditional publishing, the Hugo Awards, and the Science Fiction Writers of America have some starving and dying to do. It’s what happens when you kill off your host with your poisonous excretions. They could have learned that by watching the demise of Venezuela, or for that matter the ongoing auto da fe of the Democrat Party, but it appears from here that those examples of their folly were of no interest to them.

Maintaining A Standard

     No matter who you are or what you do, you’ll always face temptations to violate your personal standards, or a standard to which you’ve subscribed as a member of some group. As an engineer, I faced innumerable temptations to cut corners for the sake of saving a little money or meeting an externally imposed deadline. As a supervisor, I often faced temptations to cut one subordinate an amount of slack I’d never allow to another. And as a writer, I’m often tempted to turn out a piece of schlock simply to get onto some currently popular bandwagon, or to hurry through some part of a story that stands between me and the part I really want to write. Character is one’s only defense against those lures.

     But there are temptations, and then there are temptations. Some of the most seductive are baited with money.

     Courtesy of the Web’s favorite Bookworm, we have an interesting potential project in media:

     There’s a dangerous movement at work in America today. The Left is demonizing men and diminishing the vital roles they play in families and communities. From a New York Times headline claiming men are becoming obsolete, to Hillary Clinton proclaiming that the future is female, the Progressive Left has declared a War on Men and Masculinity.

     However, they cannot hide from the facts. 63% of youth suicides, 71% of all high school dropouts, and 85% of youths in prisons grew up in homes without a father. The idea that our families, communities, and country would be better off when men are marginalized and pushed to the side, just doesn’t make sense.

     That’s why we’re launching a new media company called Lincoln & Grant. Our mission is to inspire men to pursue excellence and fight back against the war on masculinity. It’s time to bring hard-working, successful men back to our families and communities.

     Please read it all.

     I mention the Lincoln & Grant project for two reasons: first, because it’s a very worthy – indeed, a necessary – project that deserves to be brought to the attention of as many people as possible; second, because it presents a striking case of a project whose initiators clearly intend to maintain a high, strict standard and are guaranteed to face temptations to depart from it. The lure will almost always be money, whether directly or indirectly available.

     Potential high-dollar backers will suggest an admixture of inappropriate content. Potential advertisers will seek tie-ins that crosscut the magazine’s goals. Potential contributors well known from their labors in other venues will suggest other departures.

     The organizers and operators will need all the strength of character they possess to resist some of the lures that will be tossed their way.

     I intend to back this project at a high level, to gain the maximum degree of visibility into its evolution. The opportunity to watch it take shape, and to study its reactions to the temptations that persons and institutions with other agendas will float toward it, is irresistible. Though I sincerely hope it will succeed mightily, should it fail the process that corrupts it will be massively instructive.

---

     There are temptations baited with lures other than money. At this time the one of greatest importance is a negative one: the avoidance of confrontation and conflict.

     American society is beset by a sociopolitical disease. The infection is aggressive. The fatality rate is high. No reliable cure is available. The implications for the success of the American experiment are ominous.

     The disease vectors are individuals of leftist political stances whose aim is to impose their politics on every organization and institution in America. They’re not mindless viruses; they do what they do deliberately, with malice aforethought. Indeed, malice is in many cases the fuel that drives them: their hatred for anyone who dares to disagree with them.

     When persons of that stripe manage to gain entry into an organization, they immediately start to work at politicizing it in their preferred direction. It doesn’t matter whether politics has any relevance to the purpose of the organization. The infector’s purpose is politics and nothing but politics, regardless of whatever pretense they used to gain access to it. Often their intentions are opposed to the organization’s goals; they actively seek to degrade it, even if that would mean the loss of their positions, salaries, and status.

     They gain entry because good-hearted persons are seldom able to imagine not-good-hearted persons: i.e., persons whose agenda requires that others suffer loss. For example, an interviewer for a commercial company is unlikely to bother about a potential employee’s political orientation. External recruiters – personnel placement agencies – are wholly unconcerned with such things; they merely want their fees. This unawareness of the threat makes infiltration possible. Once infiltration is an accomplished fact, the good-hearted are often moved more by their desire to avert open conflict -- to maintain tranquility in appearance – than by their sense for what’s best for the company, or their standards of right and wrong.

     When the disease has attained a sufficient degree of penetration into its target, the organization’s nominal standards, whatever they may be, become secondary to the imposition of political conformity on the organization: all its people and all its practices. That aim is why the vectors strive for positions from which they can influence policy.

     I’ve written about this process on several occasions. Here’s the most recent example. Regardless of anyone’s particular politics, the disease itself is deadly to the standards of American organizations. No one can maintain his standards when political issues have a higher priority. He will be compelled to compromise them until nothing remains of them.

     If you have standards of your own, you would resist the idea of working for a company, or participating in some other group activity, that would compel you to set them aside. Yet that is what’s being done to uncounted good-hearted persons and their organizations.

     And so I look at the Lincoln & Grant proposal, and I ask: How will the disease choose to attack this brave new undertaking? You know it will; the Left cannot allow even one bastion of American values to remain uncorrupted – and this effort would oppose everything the Left strives for.

     We shall see.

The Expanding Theater Of Political Warfare

     About ten days ago, Kurt Schlichter wrote thus:

     [T]he terrifying truth is that liberals and their Never Trump enablers actually think this kind of tyranny is a good thing. You see, they think Normal Americans are so transcendently awful (and, even more importantly, that the elite’s power [is] so precious) that all is fair in order to stifle their opponents’ collective voice.

     Considerably before that, Robert Conquest formulated his Second Law of Politics:

     Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.

     About three weeks ago, I wrote thus:

     It’s most significant that the Amanda Green article about Larry Correia’s disinvitation from the Origins Gamers Convention is titled “It’s Time to Fight Back.” Yes, it most certainly is. But fighting back means more than merely repelling an assault. It requires the will to counterattack, to make the attacker pay a huge, disproportionate price for his insult. To this point, we in the Right have hardly even defended ourselves, much less mounted the sort of counterattacks that would have been appropriate.

     It takes more than the willingness to write baleful blog posts. And yes, I’m aware that that’s what this is. I’ve written it because it’s all that I, a lifelong recluse, can do. I can only hope that event organizers – perhaps those for DragonCon and similar gatherings – will hear the clarion.

     At the time, DragonCon appeared not to be colonized nor infiltrated by aspiring SJW tyrants. But just three days ago, Francis Turner noted that DragonCon has come under SJW attack. I can’t usefully excerpt his piece; please click over and read it for yourself.

     They’re not going to leave us alone.

---

     My Gentle Readers already know me for a crank. (There’s a reason I was appointed Curmudgeon Emeritus to the World Wide Web.) Cranks are best left alone; they respond to being prodded in...unfortunate ways. The reason, of course, is that being left alone – i.e., not being prodded, prompted, nudged, or otherwise interfered with – is what a crank most values. For this reason cranks avoid clubs, groups, crowds, professional associations, and gatherings of their relatives, especially the impecunious ones.

     Because of my cranky preferences, until I first began to follow contemporary political intercourse I would not have imagined that there’s an exact opposite to the crank: i.e., someone whose whole reason for living is to poke, prod, and generally puncture the tranquility of others. But there is. They’re known as “social-justice warriors,” or SJWs for brevity. And they won’t exempt anyone from their harangues.

     Neither will they permit us who differ with them, or who have other things than politics on our minds (on occasion, at least) a forum for the mutual enjoyment of a shared interest. Francis Turner’s piece illustrates that to perfection.

     The irony, considering how they harp on “safe spaces” for every sort of deviance from normality or rationality, is of cosmic magnitude.

---

     Tyranny cannot be firmly fastened upon a people accustomed to saying and doing what they please. The whole point of a tyranny is to suppress such sayings and doings. For many decades the Constitutional guarantees seemed to protect Americans from tyranny by emphasizing, as part of “the supreme Law of the Land,” that an American’s rights to say and do what he pleases are not to be infringed, abridged, or otherwise trodden upon by any level of government.

     But an aspiring tyrant – an intelligent one, at least – won’t try to excise those rights at a single snip. He’ll take the approach Mark Steyn illuminated in America Alone:

     If it were just terrorists bombing buildings and public transit, it would be easier; even the feeblest Eurowimp jurisdiction is obliged to act when the street is piled with corpses. But there's an old technique well understood by the smarter bullies. If you want to break a man, don't attack him head on, don't brutalize him; pain and torture can awaken a stubborn resistance in all but the weakest. But just make him slightly uncomfortable, disrupt his life at the margin, and he'll look for the easiest path to re-normalization. There are fellows rampaging through the streets because of some cartoons? Why, surely the most painless solution would be if we all agreed not to publish such cartoons.

     Steyn was speaking of Islamic terrorism, of course, but the tactic generalizes to any and every sort of incursion upon one’s rights to say and do as he pleases. To disrupt our lives at the margins is exactly what SJWs strive to do:

• By harassing us when and where we gather;
• By harassing us when we express ourselves;
• By harassing those who employ us for doing so;
• By harassing those who would assist us in finding one another.

     The SJW Left has made those tactics its principal tools. Harassment capitalizes on the commonplace distaste we have for confrontation. He who dislikes confrontation and fears that it may portend more can be bullied that way. Restaurateurs, publishers, media companies, colleges and universities, employers, and organizers of events intended to turn a profit tend to be pusillanimous in the face of such harassment. They give in as if by reflex.

     In this connection, we are strangely fortunate that “AntiFa” has gone from chosen to employ open violence. Clearly, violence must be met with greater violence; the organizers of conservative, libertarian, and free-speech gatherings are now aware of this. The SJW harassers have the more viable long-term approach.

     And they are using it to degrade and destroy virtually all of social life.

---

     We cannot abide this. Freedom cannot endure it. We must fight – and there is only one way to fight: no holds barred. Mere deflection will not suffice. We must punish our harassers so severely that they become permanently unable to harass or threaten us further:

• We must be utterly intolerant of SJW interference in our pursuits.
• We must rigidly exclude anyone who exhibits SJW opinions or behavior from our circles.
• Anyone who forms an organization of any sort, or who has authority within such an organization, must apply Conquest’s Second Law without exception.
• Harassment must be met with extreme counteraction. This is critical as regards attempts to silence and exclude us. Businesses, publishers, and organizers who fold in the face of SJW harassment and threats must suffer loss of profit and prestige greater than they feared they would suffer from the SJWs’ displeasure.
• Violence must be met with greater violence.

     If you value your freedom to say and do what you like – especially if what you like involves gathering with like-minded others – you are a front-line combatant.

     Take it seriously.

More Fun With Hugo

     The science fiction reading / writing community once agreed, albeit tacitly, that the point of our beloved genre was entertainment. You know: fun. Diversion. Scope for the imagination. Maybe, once or twice a year, a get-together with others who share our enthusiasm for this special landscape of the mind.

     Things have changed. The colonization and conquest of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) and of the World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) at which the once-coveted Hugo Awards are given, by Social Justice Warrior (SJW) snowflakes has permanently marred what was once a thing of pure enjoyment. In brief, they own Worldcon and the Hugos, and no one who differs with their crabbed, self-righteous ideology shall be permitted to participate meaningfully in them. Indeed, the SJWs will do their best to hound out of the Con anyone they regard as inimical to their hard-left / gender-war / race-and-ethnicity-war / homosexualist / anti-capitalist / anti-white / anti-freedom convictions.

     Not everyone who still regards SF as entertainment and a place where the imagination can roam freely is willing to accept that:

     A lot of what I do is point out that so much of these little cliques of Science Fiction writers focus their entire lives on (they certainly don’t focus on selling books) is how they make FAKE OUTRAGE stories out of something that shouldn’t be a story at all. The last week exemplified this as, incredibly, the community of internet science fiction writers collectively lost their minds when:

1.      A professional Science Fiction writer with the qualifications joined SFWA. This is a writer’s guild. I am a professional writer. It’s that simple. Not liking me doesn’t have anything to do with it. The entire point of the club in theory is to protect writers like me from suffering undue hate or illegal discrimination from the industry. Yet that didn’t stop File 770’s nasty hate brigade from going off the rails over my joining. A lot of the anger must have been because it very uncomfortable about themselves, as it really points to a LOT of ugly truths about them with some of the nasty things they said.
2.      A professional Science Fiction writer is attending a Science Fiction convention. Like with Diversity & Comics earlier this year, I was immediately targeted by low-level professionals to try to preemptively get me kicked out of the con for my mere presence. This is exactly why I have to wear a body cam to go to the con to begin with, some of these folk will almost certainly try to frame me for a crime, and I will have evidence to the contrary. Worldcon needs to step it up and make sure I’m protected from these crazies so my friends and fans can have fun.

     Now, I don’t know Jon Del Arroz. I haven’t read anything he’s written. My interest in this matter was piqued by a Facebook entry that came to my attention via fellow writer Marina Fontaine:

     Worldcon 76 has chosen to reduce Jonathan Del Arroz's membership from attending to supporting. He will not be allowed to attend the convention in person. Mr. Del Arroz's supporting membership preserves his rights to participate in the Hugo Awards nomination and voting process. He was informed of our decision via email.

     We have taken this step because he has made it clear that he fully intends to break our code of conduct. We take that seriously. Worldcon 76 strives to be an inclusive place in fandom, as difficult as that can be, and racist and bullying behavior is not acceptable at our Worldcon. This expulsion is one step towards eliminating such behavior and was not taken lightly. The senior staff and board are in agreement about the decision and it is final. If you have any questions or concerns feel free to share them here or in email at IRT@worldcon76.org

     The supposed violation of the Worldcon “code of conduct?” Del Arroz’s intention to wear a body cam, as he stated in the previous post. As I haven’t read the Worldcon “code of conduct,” I have no idea whether that’s prohibited by it explicitly or implicitly. However, if we accept Del Arroz’s testimony about what befell him at the Diversity & Comics convention, he has sound reasons to want the protection of an objective record of any encounters with hostile attendees. And we know from experience how hostile SJWs can be toward us Normals...especially en masse.

     Frankly, if I were involved in staging Worldcon, I’d be hurrying to distance myself from the idiocy of their decision to exclude Del Arroz. I’d be far more interested in getting the full scoop about what happened to Del Arroz at Diversity & Comics, with as many eyewitness confirmations as possible. But it appears that Worldcon is now “wholly owned” by the SJW snowflakes, who deem it their privilege to harass, threaten, vilify, and generally offend anyone they dislike without fear of any adverse consequence.

     However, the first error belongs to Del Arroz: He shouldn’t have announced his intentions. He gave those who despise him a rationale under which to exclude him. That was stupid. He ought to have known from previous events that they would be watching his site for any such.

     Of course, I could argue that joining SFWA and attending Worldcon are equally unforced errors. “Don’t be a joiner!” I cry once more. ("And stay away from crowds," choruses Ol' Remus.) Especially if the organization at issue is already as completely ruined as SFWA or Worldcon. But chacun a son gout.

Miscellaneous Round-up

I've been accumulating some links that I wanted to pass on:

[NOTE: the first link was wrong - I corrected it]

• For the numerically-minded - or, NOT for the SJW. A very nice explanation of why the polls are at such variance with reality.
• Warning - strong language. How to bring down the Left. Crudely put, but a lot of truth in this.
•  What REAL courage looks like - NOT that he supports America, but that he showed willingness to buck The Majority Wisdom (Trademark Pending, assuming that those SJW jerks can get of their oversized butts to do it). I no longer watch football (not that I ever did all that much), but - so are a growing number of football nuts (otherwise known as my family).
• An Oldie, but a Goodie.
• And on a Lighter Note: Ooooh, the Burn is BAD! BAKING BAD!

Just found this link to the ONE player who bucked the conformity.

The coach on that player's action:

When asked by a reporter about Villanueva coming out for the anthem, Tomlin said, “Like I said, I was looking for 100 percent participation, we were gonna be respectful of our football team.”

 The protesters are having a difficult time getting the photo op parameters working:

• Kapernick tried sitting, at first. But, that was so obviously disrespectful, that he went to the NEXT tactic
• Kneeling. However, some (myself and a few others) pointed out that he was USING a quasi-religious position for his own disrespectful ends.
• Now, many teams have gone for Solidarity-type poses - and, POSES they are. Standing players putting their hands on kneeling teammates' shoulders, arms linked - they are varied, but depend on coercing others to join in as 'semi-allied' allies.
• The Steelers were in a tough place. Pittsburgh may have changed since I lived there, but still remains hard-core AMERICAN. So, they hoped to bypass that by remaining in the tunnel. Oh, drat! ONE player decided to use HIS 1st Amendment rights to show support for America. The coach was NOT pleased, as this puts the rest of the team in the spotlight, by their absence.

This is gonna be interesting. I make a suggestion below:

I also made another comment about MLB, and who it wouldn't spread to that league.

Quickies: No Discussion Allowed!

Ashe Schow has the news:

     Two professors at the University of Northern Colorado were investigated after students complained that they were forced to hear opposing viewpoints.

     The complaints were made to Northern Colorado's "Bias Response Team," an Orwellian office on campus that asks students to report their peers and professors for anything that upsets or offends them. When the news outlet Heat Street made an open records request for some of the complaints, it discovered that two students had become so upset about having to hear an opinion they disagreed with they filed reports with school administrators.

     And rather than telling the students to buck up because they might hear those opinions outside of college or on the news or in the media, the schools told the professors to stop teaching that there's an alternate viewpoint.

     If I were given plenipotentiary power, and were to attempt to engineer a population that’s unable to defend its own convictions, I would:

1. Decree mandatory schooling for all young persons, preferably for sixteen years;
2. Render all schools subordinate to my decisions concerning what shall and shall not be addressed there;
3. Create exactly the kind of debate-averse climate – in which addressing opposing views is actually punishable – that the cited story describes.

     Note also that the overlarge infants being trained thus not to think will some day rise to the levers of power in government and business. They may not be your problem today, but they will most assuredly become your problem tomorrow.

     Parents of America: Guard your children’s minds against this sort of thing. Keep them out of the “educational system” – and yes, that includes our “institutions of higher education.”

“Representation:” A Quickie Tirade

     I’m thoroughly sick of social justice warriors. I know, I know: I should tell you something you didn’t already know. All the same, that’s my current irritant. Lately, when it comes to entertainment of any sort, the merest dab of SJWism will make me explode in fury. My cardiologist, of course, disapproves.

     I happen to enjoy movies quite a lot. I own over 400 of them. And I don’t give a rat’s ass about anything but how diverting they are: how imaginative, exciting, and well made. But then, I’m not an SJW. I don’t see everything through the lens of “justice for historically oppressed peoples,” “cultural appropriation,” “minority representation,” or any of the rest of their rot. And may I say it once frankly at least:

Most “historically oppressed peoples” deserved exactly what they got.
Some deserved even worse.

     (By the way, have you noticed how little concern SJWs have for the very worst oppressed of all oppressed peoples – the Jews? There’s a moral in there, somewhere.)

     Anyway, read this for the latest episode in this unending horror feature.

     Ghost In The Shell is the absolute pinnacle of its art form. There’s nothing else in the anime oeuvre to compare with it, especially as regards graceful writing and philosophical depth. Masamune Shirow will be remembered for centuries for the story. The makers of the anime can be justly proud of the finished work. That Hollywood should choose to make a live-action version is merely additional praise of the original.

     So what is this SJW concerned about? That central character Motoko Kusanagi, a round-eyed, big-bosomed cyborg, will be played by round-eyed, big-bosomed Scarlett Johansson, one of the foremost female action stars of today. “Whitewashing!” “Racial exclusion!” “Cultural appropriation!” “Insert your preferred SJWism here!”

     These...persons deserve nothing but contempt. They’re the true bigots and squanderers of cultural treasures – all cultural treasures. That a brilliant piece of anime, known mainly to devotees of the art form, should be picked up by a major Hollywood studio and cast with a terrific, somatically perfect leading lady is an act of high praise...but no! “The character has a Japanese name!” Therefore, by SJW rules, she must be played by a Japanese actress. Failing that, at least one with an epicanthic fold.

     Anyone who grants these cretins the smallest sliver of time or shred of respect is doing a disservice to the entire human race. Yet they seem to be everywhere. Whatever fuels them seems to be inexhaustible. They’re determined to politicize, and thus spoil, every form of entertainment we enjoy. Can we at least deny them any of our time or energy?

     Or have I somehow stumbled into their web by even noticing their existence?

     I hope there’s some Maalox^® left.

Quickies: The Future Of “Social Justice” Activism

     ...is on ludicrous display in this incident:

     Libertarian commentator Lauren Southern was assaulted and reportedly “covered in piss” by activists in the streets of Vancouver, in a new low for the regressive left. Her crime? Saying there are “only two genders.”

     The incident took place Friday evening in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia, during an “anti-fascist” protest against a visiting libertarian speaker.

     Southern, accompanied by her Rebel Media cameraman and a team from PressForTruth.ca, met protesters on the street and engaged them in a spirited debate about feminist anti-rape culture crusades and gender identities. Southern’s insistence that there are only two genders annoyed the left-wing activists, who accused her of being “hateful” and “transphobic.”

     The encounter, which was recorded by Press For Truth and can be watched below, concluded when a protester sneaked up behind Southern and, shockingly, poured a bottle of liquid, which Southern later said she believed was urine, over the libertarian commentator. A scuffle quickly broke out as two men attempted to restrain the protester, who was nonetheless able to flee the scene.

     If anything would more vividly reveal the utter vacuity of the SJW “community,” I can’t think what it might be. These people can’t argue for their positions. That renders them unable to tolerate a difference of opinion. Their impulse is to silence such dissenters, by whatever means are expedient. The use of excrement is typical of the mindset.

     What’s heartening is that Miss Southern was unfazed by the assault and continued as she had begun. Let’s hope her example inspires much more such staunch, carry-on-regardless conduct among libertarian and conservative activists. There’s no better counter for SJW activists’ puerility and intellectual defaults. They must be reduced to a self-parodying farce. The mature, coolly rational conduct of the Right will present an irresistibly preferable alternative.

Quickies: A Bit More From The Greshamite Perspective.

     After reading this brief piece by Christopher Chupik, it occurred to me that SJWs are aware of the application of Gresham’s Law to groups and employ it consciously. In effect, they use it to “cleanse” popular online fora of any non-Left sentiment that would otherwise be expressed there.

     Lies, vitriol, and slander are their preferred tools. When those fail, they recur to threats of violence. The end in view is always the exclusion of anyone who differs with them. They achieve their objective more often than not.

     Why? Well, from their perspective, it beats arguing for their positions, since their positions are the irrational whinings of a gaggle of intellectually challenged droolers, wholly opposed to both evidence and reason. From ours, it’s simply not worth the loss of dignity and self-respect that it would take to cope with their spittle-flecked emissions. From the standpoint of the forum operator or moderator caught in the toils, it’s beyond his control; he can’t force anyone to remain, and policing an oversized nursery full of idiots with Entitlement Symdrome is just too much like work.

     The most important consequence, of course, is that actual argument is nearly extinct. In the unlikely event that a Leftist position were to be rationally based and in need of analysis, that analysis would not occur. Thus, Leftists, the perpetrators of our partitioning into mutually hostile camps dripping with contempt for one another, are the chief losers: their idiotic emissions will be defeated by reality itself, while anything reasonable they come up with – I know, I know, it’s about as likely as a blizzard on Independence Day – won’t receive the testing it deserves.

     This is one of those days I feel just a wee bit glad to be an old man.

Quickies: The Gandhi Strategy

     So many people have railed against contemporary, politically correct censorship as engineered by the “social justice warriors” – three lies for the price of one, there – that the video embedded below constitutes mandatory viewing:

     Gavin McInnes has the courage of his convictions. He says what he thinks and does it under his right name. This is the indispensable characteristic, the sine qua non of a truly free society. Mark Steyn explains why:

     As Kathy Shaidle notes, many of the commenters to the McInnes video are talking past each other. There are always rational reasons for not flying under your flag. But cumulatively and objectively they have a corrosive effect. McInnes cites the stand-up mommy who, in response to the arrest of a parent who let her children walk home from the park unaccompanied, organized a "Leave Your Kids At The Park" day - to demonstrate to the statist control freaks that they can't arrest us all. Her name is Lenore Skenazy, not "WarriorPrincess437".

     The trouble is the opposite also applies: the more people who sit it out under handles like "Freedom Crusader" the easier it is to arrest the few who do put their names to it.

     ~I think of this, especially this month, in the context of the Mohammed cartoons. This weekend I shall be speaking in the Danish Parliament on the tenth anniversary of their publication. (See here for ticket details.) For the last few weeks Douglas Murray and I have been doing a mordant back-and-forth on how the only reason we're top of the bill is because everyone else is dead, or in hiding under 24-hour police protection. So there's no one but us to invite.

     Steyn’s concluding punch goes straight to the gut:

     If you don't stand up, you make it easier to silence the few who do.

     So: We now have Gavin McInnes, Kathy Shaidle, Mark Steyn, and an obscure Web commentator who’s hardly worth mentioning on the side of outspokenness under one’s right name. Anyone else?

Extremely Quickies: “Sad Puppies,” The Denouement

     Milo Yiannopoulos has the story:

     At the seventy-third annual Worldcon science fiction convention on Saturday night, social justice warriors did their best impression of the nightmare firemen of Ray Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit 451, choosing to burn down the Hugo Awards and damage science fiction instead of seeing works of heretical authors outside of their exclusive clique winning awards....

     According to fiery gaming and sci fi pundit @Daddy_Warpig, the opposition to the Sad & Rabid Puppies slates took the form of encouraging voters to choose “no award” for an award category unless a work with appropriate politics was available. Taking it a step farther, many SJW zealots proved their commitment to tolerance, openness and variety by vowing not to read a work found on a Puppies slate under any circumstances.

     Like the Deathstar’s visit to Alderaan, the results of Hugo Awards voting were ugly and unprecedented. 5 major categories including best novella and best short story went with “no award”. To put that in perspective, in the previous 60 years of Hugo Awards, a total of 5 “no awards” have been given previously.

     This could prove to be the death knell for the Hugos. I can only hope it isn’t the death knell for the SF genre.