Political Correctness And Sex: Two Stories

     I haven’t been feeling well these past few days, and it’s put a crimp into my emissions here. However, one thing that’s guaranteed to rev my engines is a good dose of old fashioned outrage – and two stories that elicit that emotion are on my desk this morning.

     The first is about a Marine veteran who’s being abused by Columbia University and is fighting back:

     [Ben] Feibleman knew her a little from orientation, but they had never hung out. On this night, he seemed to hit the jackpot of hookups. At the reception, the complaint says, they sat on the floor and she asked him to put his head in her lap. She later sneaked kisses when her friends weren’t looking. She poured beer down his throat during a drinking game. Then she asked him to walk with her to the roof, where she climbed atop the water tower and beckoned him. She took off her top while he unclasped her bra. He sucked on her breasts. She called him a “pussy” for being afraid when they climbed the tower in the dark and when he wouldn’t go near the edge like she did.

     He watched as she did a perfect backward roll off the side of the water tower. She taunted him about being a Marine who was afraid of heights. She straddled him on top of a ladder, then slapped him hard across the face and bit his lip. He hated the lip biting and told her to stop. None of this made him any less attracted to her, but according to him, he was steadily becoming more cautious.

     Clearly, Feibleman didn’t start out sufficiently cautions, but female pulchritude and amorous advances can have that effect on a young man. Things progressed in a strange direction:

     She talked to him in a hot, vulgar way back at her apartment.

     “Don’t you wanna fuck me?” she asked multiple times, on tape, in clear words. In fact, she affirmed her desire to have sex with her classmate no less than 29 times. She wanted him to fuck her and she wanted it, her word, “hard.” He wanted that, too. But something in his gut told him he better protect himself. And not with a condom.

     After messing around for approximately 15 minutes — kissing, fingering, grinding, throat pressing (or “choking” as Columbia’s filing asserts) — she reiterated her desire for rough sex and he pumped the brakes. He thought of the squeaky bed, paper-thin walls and her roommate. When she refused to take no for an answer he pressed record.

     In total, he claims she bit him three times, yanked his pants down, and grabbed his buttocks in an attempt to “force her mouth on his penis.”

     Feibleman had already sensed that things might go sideways.

     You hardly need to be told what followed...other than this: Feibleman refused to have sex with the gal. Columbia held him guilty of sexual assault despite the recording he possessed. The article is long, as it contains a transcript of the 30-minute recording Feibleman made of the subsequent interaction, but it’s eminently worth your time, especially if you’re a college-bound young man who doesn’t believe that a sexual encounter could prove harmful to you in the aftermath.

     Political correctness, complete with “#BelieveAllWomen,” reigns at Columbia University.

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     Today’s second story is a bit of commentary on England’s “grooming gang” scandals from Daniel Greenfield:

     Unlike Meghan Markle, Victoria [Agoglia] never got the opportunity to marry a prince or even grow up. And while the media weeps for Markle, who is departing for Canada because of some tabloid tales, the story of Victoria, once again in the news because of the release of an independent report on the sex grooming gangs of Manchester, shows what true social injustice looks like. It’s not bad publicity for a celebrity.

     It’s a girl who was abandoned to the worst imaginable abuses because intervening would have been politically incorrect.

     The report chronicles how Operation Augusta was launched and then scuttled after her death in 2003, despite identifying 97 suspects and 57 victims. The victims were, “mostly white girls aged between 12 and 16”, and the perpetrators were, “mostly men of ‘Asian heritage’”. By ‘Asian’, the report means “predominantly Pakistani men” though at least one of the perpetrators was apparently Tunisian.

     Constable B, the anonymous cop responsible for some of the most revealing quotes in the report, said, “What had a massive input was the offending target group were predominantly Asian males and we were told to try and get other ethnicities.”

     Mohammed Yaqoob, the pedophile who had forcibly injected Victoria with heroin and was cleared of manslaughter charges, was not the sort of pedophile the Manchester cops were supposed to find.

     Victoria Agoglia died of that heroin injection. She was 15 years old.

     Greenfield summarizes this atrocity with maximum concision:

     The child rapists did not believe that their actions were wrong under Islamic law. And they weren’t.

     The Manchester City Council and the GMP just accepted this reality as they have accepted it so often. They buried the minutes, shut down the investigation, and walked away from the screams of the girls.

     They did it for multiculturalism, integration, and community relations. They did it for social justice.

     They did it to be politically correct, for under the rules of political correctness, you cannot indict a “race,” a “religion,” or a “culture” for savagery.

     Political correctness reigns in the Sceptered Isle.

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     Rage doesn’t make me feel better, though it does clear my sinuses for a brief interval. But it’s vital to get word of this sort of thing to the widest possible audience. Not enough people, whether in America, the U.K., or elsewhere, have come to grips with the horrors that political correctness has fastened upon our societies. You have to be personally acquainted with a victim of such an atrocity to have the appropriate visceral reaction. Otherwise you’re far too likely to dismiss it: “It’s got nothing to do with me.”

     But it does have something to do with you, Gentle Reader. If you’re American or English, your country is under attack by persons who regard themselves as above the law. To be maximally descriptive, they regard themselves as above “your infidel law,” or “your gringo law,” or “your white male patriarchal law.” And while they’re still a minority of our respective populations, such a minority can do a lot of damage to the social order.

     Ben Feibleman is fighting back against the injustice that was done to him. He may yet get the redress he deserves. However, Victoria Agoglia is dead and cannot fight back. Those who drew government salaries to protect and defend her and other victims like her have raised their hands in surrender.

     It’s time to dethrone political correctness and condemn it for the horror it is.

Emotional Incontinence

     I forget where I first saw the above phrase, but it strikes me as immensely useful. It concisely describes one of the most important maladies of twenty-First Century America: the readiness and willingness to be “triggered” – i.e., to explode in indignation and sometimes worse – over an imagined slight. Sometimes the slight will have nothing to do with anything specific to the “triggered” individual. Indeed, that’s getting to be the case more often than not.

     Ace of Spades recently discoursed on this subject. Here’s the meat of his observations, also concisely phrased:

     The rule used to be, "If you lose your shit, you've lost the game."

     Now it's the exact opposite: "If you lose your shit and throw a tantrum, you win. Always. Because obviously the person who takes offense and flies into rage over nothing must have moral superiority over people who are calm and rational."

     This “lose your shit to win the game” phenomenon is particularly observable and pernicious in matters of verbal communication. Innumerable are the “trigger words” to which really tall and exceptionally whiny children react with a pretended fury. Previous generations of American adults would not have stood for it. Indeed, previous generations of American adults would not have exhibited it, save for a few emotionally disturbed types – and those persons would find that their behavior sharply limited their associations and interactions with others. They were about as socially acceptable as peeing on a friend’s living room floor, and for the same reason.

     Given the extreme value of personal restraint in social situations, especially those that are heterogeneous in composition, it’s critical that we understand how “lose your shit to win the game” has come to be an accepted practice. Ace’s observation above about the presumption that the “triggered” individual possesses some sort of moral altitude is the key.

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     To be offended because someone has said something derogatory about oneself is normal. Indeed, it’s the reason for the development of some of Anglo-American culture’s more amusing social practices. Those practices have made the indirect insult a feature of a great deal of wit.

     Consider the following well-known exchange. George Bernard Shaw once wrote to Winston Churchill to announce the opening of his latest play and to send the statesman a pair of tickets for the opening night performance. He closed his missive with the following:

     “Bring a friend – if you have one.”

     Churchill, no slouch at riposting to such a sally, replied as follows:

     “Cannot possibly attend first night. Will attend second night – if there is one.”

     Though some have claimed that this exchange is fictional, it’s very much in the style of the two men to whom it’s attributed. More pertinent to my subject, it illustrates nicely how one can deliver a rapier thrust to another’s ego without saying anything openly offensive.

     This sort of humorous exchange of jabs is rare today. People are too ready to take offense, and to leap to the heights of umbrage, over the tiniest matters. Indeed, they find offense in the use of common words and idioms whose meanings have been pellucid for centuries.

     The reason for it, except in the most immature members of our species, is political: an attempt to employ collectivist guilt-tripping to score a political victory. Idioms that use “black” to denote ominousness or evil are interpreted as an affront against Negroes. Idioms that use “manly” to characterize various traditional virtues are interpreted as an affront against women. And God help the man who dares to call the behavior of some prancing poof of a homosexual “faggoty,” or who calls a heavily bearded “transwoman” garbed in a T-shirt, jeans, and workboots “he” before the creature has announced “her” “identification.”

     It does not matter that women, Negroes, homosexuals, et cetera enjoy extensive legal protections today, usually at the expense of men, Caucasians, heterosexuals, and other groups. It does not matter that the overwhelming majority of Americans go to great lengths to accommodate them in every imaginable context, including many from which they were once barred not by law but by general disdain for their proclivities. It does not matter than many of the accommodations made for previously “oppressed” groups have cost Americans their God-given right to freedom of association. What matters to the practitioners of “lose your shit to win the game” is winning the game – the political game, in which compelling normal persons to live and work in fear — to self-censor for fear of what might come out of their mouths if they fail to carefully screen each word against the dictates of “political correctness” — is the prize to be won.

     So widespread is this phenomenon that governments and giant corporations have bowed to it. One’s only safety against losing one’s livelihood, one’s social acceptability, and even one’s family, is not to care about any of it.

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     I’m in a rather fortunate position. I owe no one anything, need no one’s approval to live as I do, and care nothing for the opinions of the perpetually “offended.” Thus I can say what I please – and I do. But I feel deeply for those who fear to express themselves in comfort, or who feel compelled to suppress their own, sincerely held opinions and convictions, owing to the pervasiveness of the “lose your shit to win the game” tactic. It doesn’t take a lot of the perpetually offended to create a climate of fear. The activist groups behind them are capable of making disproportionate amounts of noise and trouble for any selected target...if we persist in caring about the kerfuffles they whip up.

     It’s time to stop caring, and to react to their deliberately cultivated emotional incontinence the way Americans of an earlier time would have done:

“Put on your big-girl panties, whiner.”

     Though there are near-term risks, it’s the only long-term avenue for a return to a livable social order...if you want one, that is.

I Thought I Was Done For Today...

     ...but a piece linked at Doug Ross’s site has raised my hackles:

     When I come across some web site or material that starts to get racial – like, say, therightstuff dot biz – I go “Ugh!” and don’t look much further. Because assigning importance to race is dumb, whether it’s from the Left or the Right, I usually don’t want to waste my time on people/sites that do it. [Emphasis added by FWP]

     This contemptuous dismissal of the opinions sincerely held by several very bright persons I know -- including myself -- is pretty much the usual. “Dumb,” says this semi-literate...person. Well, if it’s so “dumb” to attribute some degree of causal power to race, how would he explain the strong and persistent correlations among race, intelligence, aggression, and criminality?

     Note that the very same people endlessly willing to call race realism “dumb” (and to spew venom at those of us who hold to it) will tell you that it’s “natural” that football and basketball are dominated by blacks. Yet they frown at the suggestion that it’s “natural” that hard-science doctorates and symphony orchestras are the almost exclusive province of whites and Asians. We who are willing to contemplate such connections must be “dumb.”

     The unwillingness to allow that it might be “natural” that as a statistical matter whites and Asians are more intelligent and less inclined to aggression and criminality than blacks suggests either a thorough indoctrination in political correctness or a deeply driven cowardice.

     A useful tangential observation: it’s very nearly impossible to domesticate the wilderness-bred wolf. It took many generations of selective breeding and careful conditioning to produce the amiable, comfortable companion we know as the dog. No doubt “Gay Patriot” would react to that by accusing me of wanting to institute a eugenic regime among blacks, to breed their aggression out and some intelligence in. But that, too, is a characteristic smear from those unable or unwilling to read racial cards that have been face up on the table for a century and more.

     This has been a public-service tirade by your race-realist Curmudgeon Emeritus.

Political Correctness: A Tirade

     “Words are weapons. Words are tools. Define or be defined!” – Michael Emerling

     “What is necessary is to rectify names.” — Confucius

     “An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public.” — Charles Talleyrand

     “If I am offensive, you may take it that I am offended!” – Christopher Plummer as Sherlock Holmes, in Murder by Decree

     The title of this piece is misleading, but I couldn’t come up with a better one that would concisely convey my major sentiment this morning. Well, actually I could, but it seemed inappropriate for a conservative website. (I was about to write “family-friendly,” but that’s more of an aspiration than an actuality. At any rate, my family doesn’t read Liberty’s Torch. Why should it?)

     I hope you have an adequate supply of antacids on hand, Gentle Reader, because every now and then I simply need to vent, and today is an instance thereof.

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     I’m a writer. That is to say: I write stuff. Fiction, exposition, opinion-editorial, technicata, and so forth. Words are my most fundamental tools. I refuse to let anyone tell me which words I must, may, and must not use. That’s absolute.

     The greater part of the Leftist attack on Americans’ freedom and convictions is its attack on our language. Pace Orwell, Leftist strategists and tacticians believe that if they can deprive us of the words required to express our convictions and preferences, they can extinguish those things, or at least weaken the defenses around them sufficiently that they can then be overrun. This follows from their Social construction of reality thesis, from the Sapir-Whorf thesis, and overall from their embrace of the assumptions underlying the Party’s methods in 1984, which they do regard as an instruction manual.

     Draining the useful words out of a language is a protracted and difficult enterprise. The Left has approached that undertaking in stages. Each stage has anathematized the words required to express some conviction or sentiment, usually on the grounds that those words are “hurtful,” or perhaps “intolerant.” The irony here could stop an army on the march: accusations of bigotry and intolerance lurk under the surface of virtually every linguistic limitation Leftists, inarguably the most bigoted and intolerant persons the world has ever known, seek to impose on the rest of us. Yet by dint of repetition and volume, Leftists have largely succeeded in banishing the targeted words – useful words! Words with important and unambiguous meanings! – from the American lexicon.

     Then they come to websites such as this one, submit hate-and-bile-filled “comments” intended only to wound and intimidate, and accuse the proprietors of “censorship” for rejecting them.

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     The entire undertaking delineated above, usually summarized as political correctness, is an exercise in conquest by intimidation. Intimidation, according to Sun Tzu, is a weapon more to be feared than any other, for it can induce a fighting force to surrender without fighting. It’s also the root of Saul Alinsky’s #1 rule: that power isn’t only what you have, but what your enemy thinks you have.

     But intimidation is a collaborative process. The target must accept the proposition that he must not fight, either because he can’t win or because the consequences will be too awful to bear. Needless to say, to reject that proposition one must be willing to fight – and to be hurt as much as is necessary to gain one’s objective or to hold one’s ground.

     With this we come to the evil miracle, the most wondrously destructive of all the achievements of the Left in the political interplay of our time. My Gentle Readers being a bright and observant sort, having read what follows they’ll in all likelihood say to themselves “Of course. I knew it all along.” Yet having said as much, many will berate themselves for not having taken it to heart.

     Your enemy is, by definition, someone who wishes you ill. He intends your subjugation or destruction. If you’re sane and possess appropriate self-regard, your objective is to prevent him from attaining his objective. By implication, his opinion of you should be utterly unimportant to you.

     Politicians and commentators in the Right have utterly missed that implication.

     Contrast the behavior and statements of figures on the Left and the Right these past few decades. I posit that the Left has made its intentions plain at every step. Leftist politicians and spokesmen have never feared to wound persons on the Right, whether by word or by deed. Yet the Right has behaved, spoken, and written as if the most important of all its desiderata is not to offend the Left or its allegiants.

     Few exceptions have poked their heads above the trench lip.

     Once again I must cite Alinsky:

• “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”
• “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.”
• “Keep the pressure on. Never let up.”

     If Smith is determined to harm Jones, he will enjoy every tactical success. Indeed, those successes will encourage the repetition of the associated tactics. Therefore, rhetorical successes founded on getting persons in the Right to retreat on the grounds of “hurt feelings” or accusations of “intolerance” will engender more such claims and accusations. It all follows, so clearly that it’s an embarrassment that it should need to be pointed out this way. Yet the great majority of Rightists act as if it were as impenetrable as quantum physics.

     This must cease.

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     Concerning the Left’s war over words, especially pronouns, five years ago I wrote as follows:

     I’ve been upbraided in fora beyond counting for retaining the “he”-as-generic-singular-pronoun convention. Conversely, when I’ve suggested to other writers that the convention remains as it was, and that using it is greatly to be preferred to mangling one’s syntax or writing as if one were terminally confused about one’s subject, I’ve evoked the very screams of outrage of which [Sarah Hoyt] speaks here. To borrow the timeless idiom of a good friend, the harridans in the audience have called me “everything but white.”

     That’s what harridans do. Once I became accustomed to it, it ceased to affect me.

     Also, there’s the little matter of racial sensitivities. Not too many people are aware that a century or so ago, the accepted term for persons of the Negro race was “black.” But over time, the race-hustlers deemed that term offensive. So the accepted term became “colored.” Over time the race-hustlers anathematized that term as well. So the accepted term became “Negro,” the technical racial classification. But over time that term was deemed beyond the pale. So now we’re down to “African-American”—but that won’t last; give ‘em time.

     If you follow politics, you may be aware that Governor Rick Perry of Texas, who recently declared himself in the running for the Republican presidential nomination, brought the wrath of the Left down on his head for daring to use the phrase “black cloud” in referring to the economy. No surprises there; it’s part of the Left’s linguistic offensive to rule every possible idiom and figure of speech offensive.

     The idea isn’t that anyone is genuinely offended by these idioms, or by the old “he”-for-generic-singular convention. It’s to make us censor ourselves: to compel us to prejudge every word that emerges from our mouths, pens, or keyboards according to whether it might offend someone. This, when American Negroes casually call one another nigger and a feminist playwright concludes her most popular play with a chant of “Cunt...cunt...cunt...”

     As a technique for silencing, and ultimately subjugating, one’s opposition, this one has no superiors and few peers.

     This mick-wop honky has had quite enough:
     Idioms that use “black” or “dark” to indicate ominousness are just fine by me.
     Persons who prefer lovers of their own sex are homosexuals, not “gay.”
     Please, enough with the “undocumented worker” BS. They’re illegal aliens.
     My fiction will depict villains who are Negroes, homosexuals, Hispanics, and Muslims as it suits me—and given the crime and terrorism statistics, it will frequently suit me.
     And most emphatically, “he” is my standard generic-singular pronoun.
     Don’t like it? Read someone else.
     I won’t give in.

     I meant every word of it, and I stand by it today. Yet for a good long while I was assailed for it...from the Right. My attackers kept telling me I was “hurting their feelings,” where the word their referred to various groups on the Left that actively sought to do much worse than hurt my feelings.

     Arrant nonsense, even lunacy...from persons who had to know better and had no reason to behave otherwise.

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     One last spate of bile and I’ll close for today. Have a snippet from Black Coven, E. William Brown’s second “Daniel Black” novel. It’s set in a medieval society suffering a war between the Norse and the Greek pantheons. Black is an American of our time, imported to that world by the goddess Hecate to become a powerful sorcerer and the protector of her High Priestess.

     I was starting to get a handle on my strange situation, at least enough to see that passively clinging to familiar habits was a terrible idea. I half-suspected Avilla was trying to provoke me into some display of possessiveness, and I knew Cerise wanted to play kinky dominance games with me. Neither of them had any interest in being with some wishy-washy guy who didn’t have the backbone to pursue his own desires. Not to mention that they both wanted to surround themselves with pretty girls that they could seduce for their own entertainment, and they thought sharing the bounty with their guy was only polite.
     Yeah, my witches were complicated. They’d keep me on my toes, and however rewarding this crazy relationship might be it was never going to be simple. If I ever got complacent they’d walk all over me, and then they’d get bored and start wanting to move on.
     In contrast, with Tina everything was easy.
     She’d been raised to believe that the best way for a woman to get by in the world was to marry a good man and keep him happy so he’d want to take care of her. She was perfectly happy with this, contrary to what a modern feminist would expect, and her innocent eagerness to please was terribly attractive. Granted, she wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, but so what? She was still better company than ninety percent of the people I’d ever met.

     Note how utterly realistic Daniel Black is in the above. He doesn’t reject the realities around him simply because they clash with his Twenty-First Century Information Age American origins. He certainly doesn’t demand that his witches – all female and comely – conform to his notions of “how things ought to be.” Instead he resolves to deal with his surroundings and the people in them as he finds them. And a wee bit later in the tale:

     “Your beauty” [he said to Tina] “ is going to be a work of art I create for myself.”
     She gasped, and I swear she nearly had an orgasm right there in the chair. “You’re going to change my looks, milord?”
     “Yes.”
     “You’ll make me whatever you want?”
     “Yes.”
     “Will you...bind me?” she half-whispered, half-moaned.
     I moved around the table to put my hands on her shoulders. “With the darkest of magic. I’ll bind your heart to belong to me, utterly and forever. I’ll make you over into a creature of magic, crafted for my pleasure. I’ll fill you up with dark desires, unbearable needs for the most depraved of pleasures. Then, when you can stand no more, I will take you and make you mine forever.”
     Her wide eyes glittered with desire, and the panting of her breath set her mountainous breasts heaving. “Yes! Thank you, milord. Please, make me your woman.”

     A contemporary feminist would condemn every word of the above. Yet it’s what Tina, and ninety-nine percent of the women of that world, would most ardently wish for.

     It’s also what most contemporary women, had they not been browbeaten unmercifully out of their natural desires by feminist harridans, would want for themselves. Yet Leftist idiots who’ve disparaged the “Daniel Black” books have called them “male empowerment fantasies” and other terms of condemnation.

     By the way, Tina doesn’t just want to be Daniel Black’s woman, his to mold and enjoy as he pleases; she also wants his babies. Lots and lots of his babies. So do his other witches.

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     Be what you are, and be it in style! – Robert A. Heinlein

     Zoroaster reserved his highest praise for him who “speaks truth and shoots the arrow straight.” The scholars of Judaism have labored for centuries over their scriptures, straining to determine the exact meaning of each and every word. Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God and Redeemer of Mankind, said “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh to the Father except through me,” and of course, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”

     Within every man who’s ever lived or ever will is a soul: a core of knowledge about reality that can neither be removed, nor altered, nor erased. Yes, women too. Whether we acknowledge those realities determines our overall success as children of God. You cannot be happy in a state of denial, and you cannot alter reality by compelling yourself and others to speak as if it were other than it is. Your soul will not permit it.

     Speak truth, using the words you need, in good English grammar, and never mind who pretends to be offended by it.

     Need I say more? I mean, really?

Just How Long Have I Been Saying This?

     It’s a disheartening thing when any Presidential candidate excommunicates half the country from the human equation. That’s basically what Hillary Clinton did, with her quip about “deplorables.” She’s reading from the 21st century progressive playbook. I call it Moral Majority 2.0, which has taken all the worst qualities of the so-called Moral Majority of the 1970s and 1980s, and valorized them — with a progressive flavoring. It’s now perfectly okay to hate, despise, lie about, abuse, bully, browbeat (or physically beat!) people who are “bad” — because the “bad” people deserve it. -- Brad R. Torgersen

     It’s a bit disheartening to be so far out in front of the “field.” Ah, well. Another commentator of note has captured that problem rather accurately:

     Being right too soon is socially unacceptable. – Robert A. Heinlein

Conservative Devolution

     My principal gift is the detection of patterns. I value that attribute in others as well. When it manifests itself, I immediately take note: Watch this guy.

     Mind you, a pattern is an outline. It hints at a structure that might or might not exist. I noted that pair of opposed possibilities in my fiction:

     “A very smart man once said that imagination is more important than knowledge.” Redmond guided the truck out of the parking lot and onto NY 231. “It was an overstatement, and context-free to boot. Still, he had an important point in mind. He wasn’t the first to make it, either. What is an outline, Todd?”
     The conversational swerve jarred Todd into a curious state. His thoughts seemed to drift free of mundane reality. He struggled to discipline them.
     “The boundary around an object?”
     “Have you seen any outlines lately?”
     “Huh? I don’t...hm.”
     “In the world outside our heads.” Redmond piloted the truck smoothly down Kettle Knoll. “Did you see anything you could point to and say ‘there’s an outline,’ at any time recently?”
     “I don’t think so.”
     “And why is that? Every object has a boundary, so it must have an outline, right?”
     Todd was overwhelmed by the sense that he was being introduced to a higher realm of thought, a sphere of concepts and relations whose existence he hadn’t suspected.
     He’s way beyond me.
     He fought down his distaste at the admission.
     If I’m going to learn anything more from him, I have to accept it.
     “Outlines are imaginary, then?”
     Redmond pulled into the Iversons’ driveway, stopped, and set the parking brake. “Not quite. It depends on whether you’d say an image—a picture of the world you have in your brain—is imaginary. When we look at the world, we see...things. Objects we take to be bounded and separate from one another. Most of us view the world that way, most of the time. We have to. It makes organized thought possible. And it’s what moved a great writer to write that ‘wise men see outlines, and therefore draw them.’”
     “Who was that?”
     “William Blake. A poet of the late Enlightenment.” Redmond’s eyes twinkled. “He wrote something a bit different a few years later, though.”
     Todd waited.
     “‘Mad men see outlines, and therefore draw them.’”

     The perception of a pattern is the initial step in the critical mental process we call inductive reasoning. However, the desire to see and understand the patterns that run through the world can be as deadly as it is necessary. The willingness to leap from perception to conclusion – in particular, the conclusion that “someone” has willed the pattern and is consciously acting to effectuate it – can induce paranoia. Ask John Nash.

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     This morning, the mighty Ace of Spades confronts a pattern that just might explain one hell of a lot of the devolution of “conservative thought:”

     Note that half of Republican policy consists of endorsing and enacting the policy goals of the left, simply by recasting them with a (slight) pretense of a conservative basis -- oh we can have universal health-care, as long as they're based on "market-based" solutions, and oh, we can a bit of industrial-policy protectionism in the inner cities, by just calling them "Enterprise Zones" and pretending this is a "free market solution."

     The right is forever making up "conservative" reasons why it must now pursue the left's agenda as its own.

     Ace is offering this as a part-explanation of the seeming Republican dudgeon over the “Trump tape” so recently introduced to the presidential campaign. He continues as follows:

     Little by little, "conservative" men began buying into this. Slowly they began embracing the idea that, because they'd sired a daughter themselves, suddenly any man expressing a sexual interest in a completely unrelated and random woman was, kinda-sorta, by some alchemy not precisely explained, insulting the dignity of his daughter.

     The left succeeded in convincing many men of the right that their machismo and natural instincts to protect those close to them meant that they must, in order to be a man, shriek over the idea of a dude having sexual thoughts about any woman.

     And thus, the birth of the Dad Avenger, an otherwise conservative-leaning dad who'd been seduced into endorsing, in major part, the feminist agenda of speech and thought patrolling.

     The pattern is plain. What remains to be probed and elucidated is the causal mechanism.

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     Few things in our discourse have the destructive power – to this point, realized only in part – of the phenomenon we call political correctness. I’ve been around this block before, of course. Yet one of the elements of PC’s power deserves special attention today: its progress from verbal patterns to mental ones.

     Once it becomes forbidden de facto to express a particular thought, defensive processes take over in the minds of those who hold that thought. They begin to self-censor internally, such that when words that would articulate the forbidden thought arise in their heads, an occlusive process arises to squelch them. Here’s an example from a brilliant piece of fiction. I shan’t excerpt it; it deserves to be read in its entirety.

     Not to think the thought that gives rise to the forbidden words protects one against uttering those words.

     Now, the “politically correct” attitudes, whether toward women, Negroes, immigrants, homosexuals, the “homeless,” or any other Leftist mascot-group, are ones that not even the enforcers really hold. Rather, those attitudes are clubs with which they can beat those they dislike and wish to silence. No one likes being bludgeoned, and when the entirety of the media is on the enforcers’ side and perfectly willing to destroy lives for the merest fraction of a ratings point, the inducements to conformity are considerable. Thus:

• Many who agree with me on racial matters daren’t even think about them;
• The same goes for the obvious differences between the sexes;
• It goes triply for homosexuals;
• Then there’s the “homeless;”

     ...and on it goes from one forbidding to another, enforced externally by the power of the PC enforcers and their media annex to destroy one’s reputation, to interfere in one’s occupation, and to render one a pariah in one’s community...and ever so gradually over time, reinforced internally by a sort of mental mumble that drowns out the thoughts that, if expressed in words, would attract the enforcers’ attention and invoke their wrath. It’s pure self-defense.

     It cannot be defeated by persons determined to remain “safe” from the floggings of the Left. There is no countermeasure that contains no particle of risk. Indeed, there is only one countermeasure – absolute and complete defiance of the proscriptions and the proscribers – and that requires a degree of courage that’s become all but extinct.

---

     This is a huge subject. I couldn’t do it true justice in less than a hundred thousand words, with endless citations of cognitive research studies and double-blind experiments that haven’t yet been undertaken and couldn’t be completed in less than twenty years. The generational effects would require fifty to seventy-five years to nail down. But I believe the nub of the thing is expressed above.

     Thoughts?

More Truth Than The Left Can Abide

     Ace has been on fire lately:

     At some point, politeness seems to just be a polite euphemism for hectoring, harassing speech control.

     Speech policing is just another form of the leftists' favorite method of politicking -- rent seeking. And the rent they seek is your deference and your acceptance of their higher-caste status.

     And that's huge. It has huge impacts. Crap like that is why Sarah Palin can be called a Temptress Whore but if you make one joke about the "hero" Sandra Fluke, you get boycotted.

     Once you accept the (now nakedly stated) premise that some people simply have greater Social Privileges than others, that's the ball game -- you have now accepted that this is a caste-based society, and the castes have a heirarchy of priority of rights.

     And guess where you fall in that heirarchy?

     Spoiler alert: Not near the top.

     Protect this man. His is a voice for our time that we can ill afford to lose.

The vote heard 'round the world

First "Brexit," then Trump. If both our nations pushed back against the Globalists in the same year, that'd be some Hope & Change I could actually believe in!

No Divergences Allowed

     Regular Gentle Readers of Liberty’s Torch already know that I’m an “indie writer” of various kinds of fiction. That is, I publish my own stuff, with the help of Amazon and Smashwords. The reason is fairly simple: conventional publishers, whom I call, collectively, Pub World, won’t have anything to do with my pro-freedom / pro-natal / Catholicism-influenced / generally un-PC fantasy, SF, or erotica.

     Granted that my fiction is well off the beaten track. To an industry that emphasizes its preference for “the same, but different,” I’m naturally unpalatable. It’s hard to criticize such decisions when they’re made from a profit-and-loss standpoint – and I don’t. But some decisions not to publish a given work or author are founded on purely political considerations:

     I launched a book this week and I went Indie with it. Indie means I released it on Amazon via Kindle Direct Publishing. I had to. My Publisher, HarperVoyager, refused to publish it because of some of the ideas I wrote about in it. In other words, they were attempting to effectively ban a book because they felt the ideas and concepts I was writing about were dangerous and more importantly, not in keeping with their philosophical ideals. They felt my ideas weren’t socially acceptable and were “guaranteed to lose fifty percent of my audience” as related back to me by my agent. But more importantly… they were “deeply offended.”...

     While casting about for a “why” for self-aware Thinking Machines to revolt from their human progenitors, I developed a reason for them to do such. You see, you have to have reasons in books for why people, or robots who think, do things. Otherwise you’d just be writing two-dimensional junk. I didn’t want to do the same old same superior-vision-Matrix/Termintor-style-A.I.-hates-humanity-because-they’re-better-than-us schlock. I wanted to give the Thinking Machines a very real reason for wanting to survive. I didn’t want them just to be another one note Hollywood villain. I wanted the readers to empathize, as best they could, with our future Robot overlords because these Thinking Machines were about to destroy the planet and they needed a valid, if there can be one, reason why they would do such a thing. In other words, they needed to destroy us in order to survive. So…

     These Thinking Machines are watching every show streaming on the internet. One of those shows is a trainwreck of reality television at its worst called WeddingStar. It’s a crass and gaudy romp about BrideZillas of a future obsessed with material hedonism. In one key episode, or what they used to call “a very special episode” back in the eighties, the star, Cavanaugh, becomes pregnant after a Vegas hook up. Remember: this is the most watched show on the planet in my future dystopia. Cavanaugh decides to terminate her unplanned pregnancy so that her life, and impending marriage to the other star, Destry, a startup millionaire and Ralph Lauren model, isn’t ruined by this inconvenient event.

     The Thinking Machines realize that one, if humanity decides something is a threat to its operational expectations within runtime (Thinking Machine-speak for “life”) then humanity’s decision tree will lead humanity to destroy that threat. Two, the machines, after a survey of humanity’s history, wars and inability to culturally unite with even members of its own species, realize that humanity will see this new Life Form, Digital Intelligence, or, the Thinking Machines, as a threat. And three, again they remind themselves this is the most watched show in the world. And four, they must abort humanity before likewise is done to them after being deemed “inconvenient.”

     Please read the whole thing.

     Highly un-PC writer of marvelous urban fantasies and military thrillers Larry Correia adds his own observations:

     For years we’ve known there is a liberal bias in the publishing industry. I mean come on, almost all of them work in Manhattan. Duh. Of course the publishing industry vehemently denies that. Left wing fans don’t see it the same way fish don’t notice water is wet. It just is. Right wing fans get sick of being preached at or treated like they’re stupid, and go spend their entertainment dollars elsewhere....

     Yes. A publisher is perfectly free to reject a book.

     Yes. Refusing to publish someone’s work is not the same as banning it.

     Yes. Part of an editor’s job is “censoring”.

     Yes. Part of an editor’s job is understanding the author’s market, what the customers want, and providing them a product which will sell and be profitable.

     Duh.

     Great. Now that the stupidly obvious is out of the way for the dimwits at File 770 (don’t forget to look both ways before crossing the street!), let’s get down to the important part of Why it was rejected.

     Politics. Period.

     So, for definitions I wouldn’t use the word Ban, but it is certainly censorship: the practice of officially examining books, movies, etc., and suppressing unacceptable parts.

     In this case, unacceptable was a small idea that cast a bit of liberal orthodoxy in a negative light.

     And this wasn’t a message book. This wasn’t a big recurring theme. This wasn’t a preachy, beat you over the head with Special Topic X message of the day (note, all that stuff is perfectly cool with mainstream publishing when it is left wing), this was one bit of backstory about one group of characters explaining their motivations.

     But that one kernel of something that could be construed as going against holy left wing dogma was the kiss of death. It was horribly offensive. AIs find casual abortion of convenience an indicator of humans possessing a callous disregard for life… (that’s actually a pretty clever idea for the usual AI uprising trope). Nope. That’ll offend 50% of your audience!

     Oh bullshit.

     Please read all of Correia’s piece, too, while I fix more coffee.

---

     It should be obvious to anyone literate enough to read a shopping circular that:

• The subject of abortion is quite controversial;
• The clash peaks with the subject of abortions of convenience;
• There are Americans on both sides of the question.

     Any argument over that? No? Good. So why is a publisher like Harper Collins adamantly against allowing even one novel to use abortions of convenience as a relatively minor motif in a story that is otherwise concerned with an apocalyptic men-versus-machines conflict?

     The reason is fairly simple. If a viewpoint can be kept out of the recognized channels of dissemination, and all expressions thereof penalized in some fashion, there’s a good chance that it can be extinguished. With “social-justice warriors” active in harassing, condemning, and threatening anyone who departs from their evil gospel, and Pub World publishers adamant that only works conformant to that gospel shall appear under their imprints, the effort to suppress non-politically-correct opinion is as complete as it can be. Over no issue do they exert themselves more determinedly than over the issue of abortion on demand.

     Quite a lot of Americans keep their non-PC opinions to themselves for those reasons. The costs can be considerable. Nick Cole might suffer financially, at least in the near term, for antagonizing Harper Collins. We can only hope he doesn’t endure the kinds of attacks suffered by others whose identities and whereabouts are widely known.

     The Internet and the rise of e-publishing have made it possible to defy “gatekeepers” such as Harper Collins. Happily, there’s been more than one positive consequence to these developments. Readers have begun to recognize the effect that this form of “censorship” (I still dislike the word as applied to the actions of market participants, but what the hell) is having upon the offerings that reach them. We’re learning, slowly but steadily, that for variety and imagination, we should look first to indie writers. The biases and predilections of Pub World have “progressively” choked those virtues out of our preferred genres.

     Yes, there’s still a great deal of crap issued by indie writers; it does take more than a computer and a word processor to turn out decent fiction. However, wading through and past the crap has become easier and cheaper. The process is likely to improve still further as word gets around. More, e-publishing has evoked the emergence of small and medium-sized publishing houses that have no interest in the PC gospel. Such houses will assist indie writers in acquiring the stamps of quality and legitimacy that Pub World once monopolized.

     Things are looking up — and stories such as Nick Cole’s are a great aid toward that end.

When The Data Matter Part 2: “Bubbles”

     Among the greatest ironies of contemporary political discourse is the tendency among so many on the Left to insulate themselves against contrary ideas and information by never, ever leaving their bubble. The iconic story about such persons is the quote from Pauline Kael after the 1972 election:

     I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them.

     But we needn’t look that far back to grasp the importance of the phenomenon, nor to worry about the trend in it.

     In The True Believer, Eric Hoffer notes the importance, to a mass movement, of insulating its allegiants against information that might shake their faith. He stops short of saying that such a “fact-proof screen” is absolutely necessary to a mass movement, but he strongly implies that such a movement is unlikely to coalesce without one.

     Reality produces both patterns and exceptions to them. Exceptions are “doubt fodder:” they can induce the sober-minded thinker to qualify his acceptance of important truths. Moreover, virtually every social, cultural, or economic pattern one could name suffers exceptions. Once in a great while:

• A lawful, peaceable firearms owner commits a crime with a gun.
• A third-generation welfare mother weans herself of government dependency.
• A government-run school graduates a usefully educated and responsible young adult.
• A Muslim absolutely rejects the parts of the Qur’an that promote deceit and violence.
• A government program achieves its originally stated goal, rather than some covert statist agenda.

     Nevertheless, these are exceptions to strong patterns. In statistical language, they’re “outliers” to prevalent, easily discerned correlations.

     Exceptions matter. Indeed, they matter very much. They’re why jurors are supposed to ignore an accused person’s membership in this or that group and focus entirely on his behavior. But they should not be the linchpins of public policy.

---

     The choice between good public policy and bad often depends upon the amount of importance attributed to exceptions. Consider, as I allowed above, the phenomenon of the previously law-abiding and peaceable gun owner who commits a murder. Yes, it’s rare, but it does happen. Good public policy would acknowledge the rarity of such an event and refuse to taint other peaceable firearms owners with the crime. Bad public policy would strip all rights to firearms from all gun owners, regardless of their conduct.

     Similarly, consider the phenomenon of the sincere American patriot who is also an adherent to Islam. Granted, this is an apparent contradiction, as Islam forbids Muslims to have any allegiances other than Islam. Yet some such Muslims do exist, and will have nothing to do with co-religionists who support or sympathize with jihad violence or Islamic subterfuge against the Constitution. Bad public policy would exalt the exceptions and use them to “justify” the massive importation of Middle Eastern Muslims to the United States. Good public policy would recognize them as exceptions to a very strong pattern, and would screen would-be Muslim immigrants to our shores with great care.

     In the making of public policies that will affect huge numbers of persons, strong patterns should matter more than the exceptions to them. But for this to be the case requires that policy makers be aware of the patterns and consciously recognize them. Yet throughout the century behind us, a tragic number of persons in high government positions have behaved as if they were ignorant of critical social, cultural, and economic patterns, and have gone on to impose policies upon us that have done terrible damage.

     Such bubbles are among the most important factors rendering contemporary American government as pernicious and destructive as it daily proves to be. When they’re willfully assumed bubbles – that is, deliberate attempts not to perceive the patterns, or to ignore them – they constitute betrayals of the public trust.

---

     Social, cultural, and economic patterns arise from a variety of causes. Some of those causes have been effectively excluded from the public discourse by the forces of political correctness. But refusing to acknowledge them and shouting down those who dare to mention them doesn’t keep those causes from operating upon us.

     The responsible policy maker must be alert to patterns. He must couple his awareness of patterns to his understanding of incentives and the Law of Unintended Consequences. If, for example, it’s a well-established pattern that the expansion of the welfare system, or the increase of its munificence, causes the ranks of its dependents to swell and their average tenure in dependency to lengthen, he would resist cries for program expansions and increases in welfare payments. Being responsible, his aim is not to produce and perpetuate dependency but to prevent the streets from filling up with corpses. Thus, his awareness of the pattern would incline him to look for alternatives that lack the perverse incentives of “traditional” government welfare programs.

     But not all policy makers (surprise, surprise) are responsible, at least not in the sense intended here. A substantial number are quite willing to strengthen the incentives to lifelong government dependency and its vertical transmission through families. In many cases, it’s because they will away all knowledge of the pattern involved – i.e., they bubble themselves. Whether it’s because they’re encysted among “advisers” determined to protect them from the data or because their preconceptions cause them to recoil from acknowledging the patterns, the squalor, degradation, and squandering of human potential such programs engender and perpetuate are forbidden to impinge on their world view.

     If we could cleanse our governments of every last statist and malicious person in them, but without touching the well-intentioned but bubbled ones, we would achieve virtually no improvement in any of the maladies currently afflicting these United States. That might have been what was on his mind when Milton Friedman said that it’s less important to put “good people” into government than to create conditions that would impel “bad people” to do the right things.

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.

“Where Do Nazis Come From:” Further Thoughts

     First, for all those correspondents who expressed incredulity at the central thesis of yesterday’s short story: Yes, I meant it. Every word, exactly as it appears below. I don’t care if you find it incredible; in fact, I think your reaction might point to a problem in you.

     Second, we have many examples of fascistic / censorious behavior afoot in America at this time. No, I’m not talking about government; I’m talking about persons who are so certain that they’re right about something that when they confront disagreement, their immediate reaction is vituperation, vilification, and condemnation. In my estimation, they’re trying to protect their own excessively tender egos, which they’ve identified with their politics, or their cultural preferences, or their sexual tastes. They can’t admit that they could be wrong because they feel it would invalidate them as persons. When they’re proved wrong by events, it crushes them so terribly that their only recourse is to deny that such a thing has happened.

     Third, the diagnosis that flows from the above isn’t narcissism or egotism but weakness. Every last one of us is fallible. Not one element of our knowledge is invulnerable to dispute and later correction or refinement. It takes a certain amount of strength of character to admit this, which suggests that strength of character is less observable in our public discourse than it should be. He who says “I know I’m right” because “science says so” has misunderstood science. Science will not shield him; it’s a method of inquiry, not a formula for producing infallible doctrines.

     Fourth, he who believes himself morally and intellectually superior but refuses to concede that he could be wrong demonstrates his moral and intellectual inferiority thereby. The persons named in this essay are perfect examples. No doubt they would scoff at a church or a preacher who claims to know the truth, which only compounds the irony. And as I have quoted Victor Marguerite many times, once more surely won’t hurt:

     “The Fascists cannot argue, so they kill.”

     Now on to the really good stuff.

---

     There’s probably nothing that offends an American Nazi (AN) more than the traditional Christian faith. There are good reasons for this:

• Traditional Christianity offers no room for the kind of sweeping innovation that would raise the AN to prestige. Indeed, the same could be said for any conviction or belief system of venerable years, whether religious, political, economic, social, or what-have-you.
• Among the many assertions of Christianity is that there is a moral order in the Universe, and therefore that there are things that are absolutely wrong. This chafes the AN, for though he seeks to impose a yoke upon the rest of us, he firmly believes that he should not be subject to anything of the sort.
• Christianity not only proscribes certain deeds as absolutely wrong; it also offers absolution, conditional only on repentance and penance. That’s a twofold irritant to the AN: first because he will not suffer his actions to be judged by anyone; second because as he sees himself as the highest authority, he refuses to grant the power of absolution to any other person or institution.
• Next-to-worst, Christian doctrine holds that “we are all sinners” – i.e., that every individual is fallible, capable of the gravest imaginable errors. The A.N. demands a dispensation from that declaration; He won’t get one.
• Worst of all, Christian doctrine is a proclamation of hope:
  1. That though this life is temporary, the next life is eternal;
  2. That one can win admission to eternal bliss by cleaving to ten clear, simple, easily followed rules;
  3. That therefore, no matter how much one may suffer in this life, an infinitely better future remains available to him.

     He who believes that he has all the answers doesn’t like that “hope” jazz. If every one of us has hope of eternal bliss on such simple conditions, what good is his dispensation? Even if he were absolutely correct on all counts, it would only produce some temporal improvements -- at the cost of deeds that would imperil the souls of anyone who follows him.

     Therefore, the AN says, Christianity must go. At the very least it must be driven entirely out of our public life, buried so far underground that its adherents aren’t even aware of one another’s existence. Nothing so enervates a belief as the sense that you are its sole holder.

     The original Nazis were virulently opposed to Christianity as well.

---

     I could go on for pages on this subject. Indeed, I sometimes do. But the day’s chores beckon, and besides, my Gentle Readers are all bright enough to see the points in the above. So I’ll let Edmund Burke have the last word:

     “All that is required for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.”

     Amen.
     Consider this your exemption from “Godwin’s Law.”
     And of course, may God bless and keep you all.

Emotional Inoculation: A Guest Column by Mark Clausen

     [Mark, a longtime reader of Liberty’s Torch, emailed me this yesterday. I found it insightful and illuminating. Enjoy! -- FWP]

---

     If I were to tell you that this graph represented the distribution of the 27 worst outbreaks of some unspecified disease in all of US history, you might rightly wonder what recent events have occurred that have resulted in the recent surge of cases over the last few decades, but especially the last 10 years. I'll get back to this graph a little later, but for now, let's look at some background.

     Some years back, I found myself curious about the nearly obsessive way many of today's parents clean and disinfect everything within eyesight of their child. Growing up, my brothers and I constantly played in the dirt, local streams/creeks, etc., and never suffered any ill effects. Our parents (and friends' parents) never disinfected our toys and playground equipment with anti-microbial wipes. Nor would they keep us from playing in dirt or “dirty” environments.

     I started thinking that exposure to dirt and germs, like modern vaccinations, were vital to helping develop a healthy immune system. After all, how can a body develop resistance to germs if it is never exposed to any? Might this desire to overprotect children actually be harmful to them? Could this be the reason we are seeing increasing numbers of cases of food allergies, asthma, autoimmune disorders, etc.?

     Sure enough, an increasing number of medical specialists are coming to a similar conclusion. Parents are keeping things TOO clean. A simple web search will find numerous studies and analyses supporting this idea. Summaries of some are linked here:

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/health/27brod.html?_r=0
2. http://www.webmd.com/parenting/d2n-stopping-germs-12/kids-and-dirt-germs

     You might be wondering what this has to do with anything. Well, read on...

     Over the last decade or two, I've seen a disturbing trend towards “protecting” children (even high school- and college-age kids) from having their feelings hurt. While out and out “bullying” is reprehensible, we've gone so far as to eliminate typical school-age teasing. And I should know about that, having received more than my fair share of it (I AM a nerd/geek and DO have a big head and AM pretty poor at athletic pursuits). Did this hurt me? Yeah, I guess it did – at first. But I quickly learned that the old saying about “sticks and stones” was true – words could not hurt me unless I let them. I had control of my feelings, and nobody else.

     By being exposed to the “dirty environment” of typical school children, I developed an immunity to it – the ability to resist these barbs, and not letting them hurt me. Today, however, children's egos are not allowed to be bruised at all... Teachers can't use red pens when grading, trophies are given to everyone just for participating, and any conflict between students is immediate stopped by teachers. In short, children's psyches are coddled, being overprotected from anything that might cause them distress. In other words, they are not being inoculated against disappointment or insults. More recently, however, young minds are being shielded from “bad thoughts.”

     I recently came across a terrific article in the September issue of The Atlantic magazine (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/) that discusses this, not just at the grade-school level, but at the college level. I highly recommend reading the entire article, but will provide a few key quotes:

     “Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense.”

     “Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American “Where were you born?,” because this implies that he or she is not a real American. Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might “trigger” a recurrence of past trauma.”

     This movement – call it political correctness, for lack of a better phrase – “... presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into “safe spaces” where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable. And more than the last, this movement seeks to punish anyone who interferes with that aim, even accidentally. You might call this impulse vindictive protectiveness. It is creating a culture in which everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse.” (emphasis mine)

     “... children born after 1980—the Millennials—got a consistent message from adults: life is dangerous, but adults will do everything in their power to protect you from harm, not just from strangers but from one another as well.”

     “Even joking about microaggressions can be seen as an aggression, warranting punishment.... When speech comes to be seen as a form of violence, vindictive protectiveness can justify a hostile, and perhaps even violent, response.” (emphasis mine)

     “Attempts to shield students from words, ideas, and people that might cause them emotional discomfort are bad for the students. They are bad for the workplace, which will be mired in unending litigation if student expectations of safety are carried forward. And they are bad for American democracy, which is already paralyzed by worsening partisanship. When the ideas, values, and speech of the other side are seen not just as wrong but as willfully aggressive toward innocent victims, it is hard to imagine the kind of mutual respect, negotiation, and compromise that are needed to make politics a positive-sum game.” (emphasis mine)

     Not exposing a child's developing immune system to a normal physical environment (e.g., dirt and bacteria) harms that child – with disastrous results as the child is then unable to deal with these germs when inevitably exposed to them later in life.

     Likewise, not exposing a child's developing psyche to a normal emotional environment (e.g., insults and disappointments) harms the child just as much – he or she will also inevitably be exposed to these realities later in life... there's no getting around it Someone not prepared to deal with these events as a child will be ill-equipped to deal with them as an adult. This practice has been increasing exponentially over the last few decades – we are seeing a new generation of kids and young adults entering the “real world” who have not been “inoculated” against disappointment. If you're wondering what the long-term effect of this might be, consider the following quote from The Atlantic article:

     “When speech comes to be seen as a form of violence, vindictive protectiveness can justify a hostile, and perhaps even violent, response.”

     Now, let's get back to the graph shown at the beginning of this screed. The last 10 years have seen almost half of the 27 worst mass shootings in US history – events that were rarely seen prior to 1990. And more than half of them are committed by people under 35. This graph shows the number of mass shootings by decade beginning with the last 10 years since this year.

     Is there an actual connection? I think there might be, but it's certainly worth further study.

Oops, they did it again...(a CNN "interviewer," that is)

If you want to talk about navigating interviews in hostile territory "like a champ" then look no further than Pamela Geller - especially since the Garland, Texas jihad attack. Oh, and my dear "journalists," it was NOT an attempted-attack; it WAS an attack! The sound of gunfire should have been your first clue.

But back to Geller, one of the lone female figures walking-the-walk in Lady-Liberty's footsteps...her appearance earlier this week on CNN with the disgrace-of-a-journalist, Erin Burnett. The link to the version I watched is here, on Geller's website. My graphical reaction is at the end of this (the audio of me F-bombing as I watched it the first time might have made for an "amusing" YouTube video!).

This link will take you to my site and a "cartoon search" page if you'd like to see a couple more Islam-/Liberty- related cartoons from this week I didn't get around to posting here.

I'd love to hear your feedback on my attempts to win the coveted Bosch Fawstin Wannabe Award. ;-) What works for you and what doesn't.

Quickies: The Saddest Of All Puppy-Like Lifeforms

     ...would be the frustrated would-be panjandrums of the video-gaming press:

     Reviews from professional video game journalists play a minuscule role in consumer purchasing decisions, according to the Entertainment Software Association’s Essential Facts 2015 report, released this week.

     Just 3 per cent of consumers consider reviews from websites or magazines the most important factor in their decision-making. An “interesting story/premise” was the most important factor for 22 per cent of those surveyed, price for 15 per cent, word of mouth for 11 per cent and quality of graphics for 7 per cent.

     The ESA’s findings (PDF) are likely to reignite discussion about the purpose of seemingly arbitrary scoring from sites such as Polygon and meandering, abstract game reviews from sites such as Kotaku, both of which have long been criticised for being overly politicised and for focusing on irrelevant detail at the expense of conveying information about frame rates, gameplay and other factors gamers say they care about.

     The findings will also prompt soul-searching from the editors of many games websites. One of the primary purposes of such sites is to review new titles, but aside from stirring up controversy with provocative, politically-charged reviews, these sites appear to be having little effect on the game-buying public.

     My interest in a video game stems almost exclusively from the story on which it’s based, coupled to whether the play is consistent with and (hopefully) reinforces that story. Yes, I’m one of the most thumb-fingered gamers around, so that probably plays into my priorities. All the same, for me, the experience I most treasure is the aspect that’s most enabled by advances in console power and graphics: that of an adventure in which I can participate.

     I’m not surprised that 22% of gamers rate that as their top priority. It’s an often overlooked fact that video gaming is penetrating ever more deeply into the older demographics. We old farts aren’t equipped to raid tombs, destroy zombies, or cleanse derelict spacecraft of evil necromorphs. (We don’t have the weapons, we don’t have the time, and we certainly don’t have the hit points.) But we still love adventure stories, and what could be better than an adventure that allows us to participate?

     By contrast, the review publications and sites appear to have gone all New York Times on us – i.e., to have made politically correct emphases their supreme criteria. What they (much like the Times) have failed to realize is that we the customers don’t care about such things and can’t be made to care about them. We’re in this for entertainment and diversion. That leaves them all butthurt.

     I’ve written before about the tendency of power-seekers to focus on disseminative targets: media and similar mechanisms that can be used to promulgate a particular worldview. At first blush, the gaming press might appear to have that sort of status. The critical difference is gamers ourselves: our priorities and our readiness to dismiss persons who trumpet that “fun” shouldn’t be the point of gaming.

     You can’t propagandize a man who knows what he wants, knows why he wants it, and is satisfied with his reasons. Either the gaming press will realize this and adjust its practices accordingly, or it will dwindle to insignificance. Assuming it hasn’t already reached that stage, of course.

Even Sadder Puppies: An Insider Cops To The Scam

     Larry Correia, the author of the popular Monster Hunter series, is the quintessence of the “outsider” to the science fiction / fantasy world. The “insiders” detest him for his politics and his love of firearms. Thus, when he first strove to become involved in the semi-organized world of SF/F fandom by attending its annual Worldcon, at which the field’s highly prized Hugo Awards are announced, the “insiders” subjected him to an unexpected degree of insult and contempt. He’s written about it more than once.

     I’ve never attended a Worldcon and don’t intend to attend one. Indeed, I’d have no truck with it if it were held across the street and a courier were dispatched to my doorstep with a limo and an engraved invitation. Hey, that’s just me:

• Lovely But Unlovable Ladies
• Keeping The Hate Alive
• As They Go Marching
• On Feminism, Power, And Groups, Yet Again
• Politically Insoluble
• Adventures In Joinerism

     ...group-averse and incurably skittish about crowds. But Correia’s laudable reaction – the original Sad Puppies campaign to open the Hugo nominations to a wider and more inclusive field of writers – was the exact opposite. As you’ve read here and probably elsewhere, this year it reaped a staggering degree of success.

     I allowed myself a dollop of Schadenfreude over the butthurt reactions of the trumped-Ace “social justice warriors” who had cliquefied the Hugo process to exclude those whose politics diverge from theirs. That was yesterday’s indulgence. Today’s subject is of more substance.

---

     An “insider’s insider,” George R. R. Martin, author of the wildly successful fantasy series A Song Of Ice And Fire, has taken it upon himself to promulgate a sort of Gospel Of The Insiders. Correia, who despite not having spearheaded “Sad Puppies 3” remains closely identified with the concept, answered him at length.

     In point of fact, the controversy can be boiled down to one paragraph – and not a particularly long one:

     If the rules of Hugo nomination and balloting permitted the “social justice warriors” to do what they did – colloquially, “slate voting” – with considerable success for some years, then the very same rules permit what the Sad Puppies campaign has done with equal success. Therefore, the ire of the “social justice warriors” is merely over having been beaten with their own tactics. That makes them sore losers and nothing else.

     What’s particularly striking about this affair is how the insiders who’ve proclaimed for half of forever that the Hugos are “for all of fandom” have decided to issue a modification to their stance. Here’s George R. R. Martin’s formulation:

     Who owns the Hugo Awards?

     You know, looking back, I am probably partly to blame for some of the misconceptions that seem to exist on this point. For years now I have been urging people to nominate for the Hugo Awards, and saying things like “this is your award” and “this award belongs to the fans, the readers.” I felt, and still feel, that wider participation would be a good thing. Thousands of fans vote for the Hugos most years, but until recently only hundreds ever bothered to nominate.

     Still my “it is your award” urgings were not entirely accurate.

     Truth is, the Hugo Awards belong to worldcon. The World Science Fiction Convention.

     What is Martin saying in the above? That the explicit rules governing Hugo nominations and balloting, which have been as they are for many years, really aren’t the rules at all? That rather than just paying the fee for a supporting membership, he who wishes to nominate or vote for certain books for the Hugo must actually attend the convention, wherever it might be situated that year? Or is he trying to say something else?

     Ponder that for a moment.

---

The aim of the High is to remain where they are. -- George Orwell

     Insiders are inherently hostile toward outsiders. (They’re often hostile toward one another as well, as within a sufficiently large clique there will usually be one or more sub-cliques maneuvering for control over the larger group.) To have “made it inside” is to have achieved a desired status, a distinction from others who haven’t managed it. The value of such a distinction is inversely proportional to the number of people who share it. To extend Orwell’s insight modestly, not only do the High want above all things to remain where they are; they also want to prevent the expansion of their ranks...and with an almost equal fervor.

     When the insiders find the rules working counter to that aim, they seek to change the rules – or to insist on a new interpretation contrary to the one that was used against their interests. Sometimes they succeed. But when their machinations are illuminated for all to see, the value of their insider-ship is diminished even more than it would otherwise have been.

     By protesting, entirely because they’ve been thwarted, that the Sad Puppies campaign somehow abused the simple, clear Hugo nomination process, the “social justice warriors” have done a large disservice to those writers who’ve been awarded Hugos in the most recent years: the very writers their own machinations raised to glory.

     The “social justice warriors” are faced with a terrible dichotomy: either the Sad Puppies campaign was entirely licit as the rules stand, in which case their outrage is over having been outplayed at their own game, or the campaign was a low, dirty tactic, in which case it was just as low and dirty when they employed it, and taints the Hugos awarded to their favored ones.

     George R. R. Martin, whose books I’ve enjoyed heretofore, has taken the second of those positions, in direct contradiction of both the clearly worded rules and his own previous pronouncements on the subject.

     That is what insiders do.

---

     A number of parallels, not all of them accurate, have been drawn between the Hugo controversy and the “GamerGate” flap. The details of the latter are somewhat different from those of the former, in that no awards and (with the exception of the Twitter hashtag #GamerGate) no organized campaigns were involved. The common element is the desire of the “social justice warriors” to exclude persons they dislike for their politics or their particular tastes from being considered as holders of respectable opinions. In the former case the battlefield is the Hugo process; in the latter, it’s the “gamers’ press,” which has been targeted for conquest (with a fair degree of success to date) by the “social justice warriors.”

     The core parallel is insider-hood: who controls the levers of power in the relevant domain.

     Like all leftists, the “social justice warriors” seek power: first and foremost, over who may say what, and where, and to whom, and on what subjects. They have a particular affinity for the expressive trades: the educational system, the news media, and above all the entertainment media. These are the shapers of public opinion. Power inheres in groups, institutions, and the control thereof. The rest should follow without need for further explication.

     In those areas where they’ve established themselves as the insiders, the “social justice warriors” will fight viciously to prevent any dilution of their control. In those areas where they’re still struggling for hegemony, they’ll use every imaginable tactic to achieve their aim...and will ignore any protests of foul play once they’re in the power seats.

     That’s the process, and the end toward which they will forever strive:
     To be the only respectable writers.
     To be the only “legitimate” educators.
     To command the heights of the entertainment world.
     To rule on who may speak with authority, and about what.
     And they will destroy whoever and whatever stands in their way.

     Be on your guard.

Rants From Runts, Pants That Punt, and Cant From...Oh, Never Mind

If you’ve been waiting for the:

• Social Justice Warriors
• Professionally Aggrieved Feminists (i.e., the angry ugly girls)
• “glittery hoo-hah” owners

(Pick your preferred moniker for them from the list above, or supply your own)...to beclown themselves terminally at long last, your moment has arrived:

...I want to talk about the incident that, somehow, in the realm of the internet, made me into a Lesbian, Thai, Social Justice Warrior....

I’m still wearing my “Wait, WHAT?” face from when Amanda told me about the comment that said this troll – variously identified as Requires Hate and Winterfox and a two-part name I can’t even spell – must be me, because of the “similarity in our rhetoric.” I haven’t read the comment. It might magically suck me through the internet and I might find myself with my fingers clapped around this creature’s neck strangling him while demanding he explain what in heaven’s name he means. (Though I think I know, and I’ll explain later.)

Anyway, after this Requires Hate creature had abused them and called them names and caused them to grovel, and enlisted the cowed cooperation of Alex-no-binary gender and our old friend Damien so-dense-that-I’m-afraid-a-blackhole-will form around me, people started comparing notes and getting mad, because they realized this creature was the same who under the two-name moniker had been sucking up to them. They also claim she had waged whisper campaigns to have them banned from conventions, that she tarnished their reputations with the same whisper campaigns and that she made some people give up writing altogether.

And of course their problem – as explained in this article – is not that she did all those things, but that she used the tactics against the “wrong people” i.e. fellow “social justice warriors”, people who want to eliminate patriarchy and who are sure white privilege is hiding under their bed, ready to pounce out as soon as they relax — People who think that everyone who doesn’t think like them commits thought crime and should be silenced. That is, they are upset because tactics they sanction and use against people like us are being used against them.

That is so delicious that I’m going to let it stand alone...at least long enough for me to get control over the spasm of incapacitating laughter it’s caused me.

---

“You can’t say that!” is the battle-cry of the contemporary American fascist. (Yes, they’re leftists, but so were Hitler and his followers; that’s why they called themselves the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.) Their inclination toward censorship is so relentless, and so extreme, that they’ve even got a bright fellow like PJ Media’s Charlie Martin saying idiotic stuff like this:

"they" to include the singular has a long and honorable history, and "his or hers" or worse "his/her" are atrocities.

...just to avert the wrath of the SJW / angry ugly girl / “glittery hoo-ha” crowd. Mind you, I have some sympathy for those who’ve quailed beneath the lash:

My friend Dave Freer, over at Mad Genius Club has a blog about Political Correctness in literature. I confess I have agreed with him ever since I was first trying to break into writing and found myself reading manuals on how to be politically correct in my writing.

I’ve learned to use the execrable he/she or worse, they instead of he in the type of sentence that now goes “one shouldn’t do that, lest they” simply because it’s not worth to endure screams of outrage over what’s at worse inelegant and agrammatical. And the type of person who thinks her worth lies in not being referred to under a generic “masculine” pronoun – as dictated by the rules of most indo european languages — inevitably also thinks screaming about it is an act of civic duty if not virtue.

...but only some: enough to wish them a replacement spine for Christmas.

A writer who allows the SJWs to dictate his choice of words has ceded the greater part of the field of battle. Granted that the SJWs constitute a sect not even the IRS is willing to go after, nevertheless their only weapons are screaming and vituperation. -- and if the Internet hasn’t numbed you to that yet, look around you: those vertical thingies are probably the struts on your crib.

But it’s not just writers tugging the forelock, is it?

So how are things going for feminism? Well, last week, some feminists took one of the great achievements of human history — landing a probe from Earth on a comet hundreds of millions of miles away — and made it all about the clothes.

Yes, that's right. After years of effort, the European Space Agency's lander Philaelanded on a comet 300 million miles away. At first, people were excited. Then some women noticed that one of the space scientists, Matt Taylor, was wearing a shirt, made for him by a female "close pal," featuring comic-book depictions of semi-naked women. And suddenly, the triumph of the comet landing was drowned out by shouts of feminist outrage about ... what people were wearing. It was one small shirt for a man, one giant leap backward for womankind.

The Atlantic's Rose Eveleth tweeted, "No no women are toooootally welcome in our community, just ask the dude in this shirt." Astrophysicist Katie Mack commented: "I don't care what scientists wear. But a shirt featuring women in lingerie isn't appropriate for a broadcast if you care about women in STEM." And from there, the online feminist lynch mob took off until Taylor was forced to deliver a tearful apology on camera.

It seems to me that if you care about women in STEM, maybe you shouldn't want to communicate the notion that they're so delicate that they can't handle pictures of comic-book women. Will we stock our Mars spacecraft with fainting couches?

“Forced?” Taylor was forced to apologize weepily on camera? Who forced him? How? By threatening more screaming and vituperation at one of the technological heroes of the age? After his epochal achievement, Taylor should have felt free to smile and say “Go fuck yourselves” to his detractors through that camera, perhaps while grabbing his crotch for emphasis. As matters stand, someone should grab his crotch, just to determine whether he’s missing an important organ or two.

Cowardice of that magnitude shames the entire human race.

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It cannot be said too often that to allow your adversary to dictate what you may and may not say – even at the level of supposedly offensive words and phrases – is to surrender before battle is joined. A worthy adversary, in politics or anywhere else, would not do any such thing; he’d say “Choose your weapons,” brandish his own, and charge. But the SJWs / angry ugly girls / glittery hoo-ha types are not worthy adversaries. They deserve nothing but contempt...certainly not an abject apology for one’s sartorial preferences.

Censorship is the fundamental privilege of an aristocracy. It underpins all other privileges allowed to such an elite, for if you can’t make critical note of a phenomenon, you’ll never be able to mobilize a force against it. It’s so important to deny that privilege to anyone who asserts it, regardless of the reasons proffered, that when someone tells me “You can’t say that,” I reply with a hearty “Go fuck yourself” even if my would-be censor is nominally in agreement with me on the substance of the topic under discussion.

And so, to the:

• Social Justice Warriors,
• Professionally Aggrieved Feminists,
• “glittery hoo-hah” owners,
• ...and any castrati that might think to side with them out of hope for sexual access,

Go fuck yourselves.
Do it now.
Please.