If only gay/lesbian-advocacy science fiction writers could marry...

...Science Fiction writer Marion Zimmer Bradley was a monster according to her daughter.

I liked her Darkover books, but I knew that she was pushing the party line.  Someone once described meeting her at a SciFi Convention as like meeting someone you drop a net on.

The Science Fiction Writers of America is looking like a Stalinist-era Operation...

...is it turns the non-leftist Christian runner-up of its last election into a "non-person."

The SFWA's official announcement of my expulsion doesn't happen to mention me or why I was expelled.  The SFWA President didn't provide a reason in his email to me either.  That was interesting in light of this belated addition to the official announcement:

Amended to add: 

We will continue to omit the expelled individual’s name and the details of his behavior on advice of counsel.

They can't mention the reason, of course, because that would reveal that their action was either a) highly selective, or, b) ideologically driven. 

SFWA Board Report

Response to SFWA Board

Meanwhile, Jemisin makes it clear, in her uniquely civilized way, that she's got others on her hit list:

//I’m still thinking about how much I’m willing to put up with, and for how much longer. 

For the time being, though, I’ll remain a SFWA member. By expelling Mr. Beale, and making a clear choice to offend at least one bigot this one time, SFWA has done the bare minimum of what it must to retain relevance to the bulk of its membership. Much, much more needs to be done, and I suspect the organization will always be reactive to change rather than proactive in this area. Frankly I don’t expect better of a group that took 10 weeks to decide whether a member who spread hate speech in its name was deserving of the label “professional”. But at least for now SFWA might manage to stay relevant enough, to enough people, to last awhile longer. I guess we’ll have to see.//

Some time ago, I warned several SFWA members who were on the political left but concerned about the precedent an expulsion would set that my expulsion would not mark the end, but rather the beginning of the ideological cleansing. The mediocre feminist members of the organization, virtually none of whom should ever have been permitted to join in the first place, have nothing better to do than play sex police and ideological enforcer.  They love having an excuse to be outraged and if they can't find one, they will manufacture one. I may be the first to be expelled by the rampaging rabbits, but it seems very unlikely I will be the last.

Which is usually the way it works on the left.

More on that NYT Ad.

Vox Day writes:


It's hard to illustrate their cowardice more precisely than the NYT's rejection of an anti-Islamic ad copied directly from an anti-Catholic ad previously run in the newspaper:

Bob Christie, Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications for the New York Times, just called me to advise me that they would be accepting my ad, but considering the situation on the ground in Afghanistan, now would not be a good time, as they did not want to enflame an already hot situation. They will be reconsidering it for publication in "a few months."

So I said to Mr. Christie, “Isn’t this the very point of the ad? If you feared the Catholics were going to attack the New York Times building, would you have run that ad?”

Mr. Christie said, “I’m not here to discuss the anti-Catholic ad.”

I said, “But I am, it’s the exact same ad.”

He said, “No, it’s not.”

I said, “I can’t believe you’re bowing to this Islamic barbarity and thuggery. I can’t believe this is the narrative. You’re not accepting my ad. You’re rejecting my ad. You can’t even say it.”

We used the same language as the anti-Catholic ad. The only difference is, ours was true and what we describe is true. The anti-Catholic ad was written by fallacious feminazis.

This is exactly the sort of thing that Christians should do every single time anti-Christian propaganda is put forth through the mainstream media and every time anti-Christian views are displayed by irreligious individuals. Force them to publicly expose their hypocrisy. Force them to admit that they are actively taking sides in the cultural war. Force them to finally recognize that they are not secular and neutral as they feign to be, but are actively working against the survival of Western civilization.

The savage bite of the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

When you're only mediocre, you think you are a genius.

Vox Day explains:

The difference between the mid-wit and the genuinely intelligent is usually fairly easy to identify. The mid-witted individual tends to compare himself to those below the average and concludes that because he isn't like them, he must be a genius. The genuinely intelligent individual compares himself to the great minds of the past - with which he is familiar, having experienced many of their works - and concludes that for all his intellectual superiority to the great mass of relative retards presently surrounding him - he is nothing particularly special. The tragedy of the mid-wit is that he lives in a world that simply doesn't exist and is constructed flimsily out of his unimaginative imagination due to his failure to either observe the real world or think about it. His is is a very plain and simple world, and because he is not only comfortable in it, but important in it, he reacts with fear and hostility when he is forced, for one reason or another, to confront the fact that it does not exist.

Intelligence doesn't concern name-checking authors nor does it consist of being literate or even well-read. And even if one has been granted unusual cognitive capacity by the grace of God or the roll of the genetic dice, it remains little more than potential until one proves that one can actually do something, preferably something worthwhile, with it. Just as the mere fact of height doesn't make one a basketball player, the mere fact of high intelligence doesn't make one a genius, a philosopher, or anything else except a statistical oddity.

Genius is neither a state of being nor the possession of potential, it is the completion of material intellectual accomplishment. Mozart had enormous musical gifts, but even such a prodigy would not have been a genius had he not troubled to take the time and effort required to compose his music. Newton had one of the most astonishing minds ever possessed by homo sapiens sapiens, but he would not have become one of the most awe-inspiring geniuses of history had he never stopped to think about his casual observations of the material world. Genius is not born, it is self-created.

I suggest that before you can reach a place that requires effort, you must first realize that you are not already there.

Sport Poisons Everything, or....

...so much for the utopia promised by Richard Dawkins and Christoher Hitchens, or...

Post-modern soccer fans still find ways to threaten each other with violence in Post-Christian Europe.

The story is how fans of the [Catholic] Celtic Glasgow soccer team are being threatened with mailbombs sent by the fans of [Protestant] Rangers Glasgow soccer team.

Except they call it "football."

Silly Europeans.

Here's the section from the story on why the essentially pagan fans still manage to nurse hatred based on religions that they have long-since abandoned:

In time, the animosities found expression in the two soccer teams, and in the so-called “90-minute bigots” who pack the stands. Celtic, which plays in green-and-white stripes, was founded in 1888 by a Catholic priest, partly to counter religious persecution. Rangers, whose colors are the blue, white and red of Britain’s Union flag, drew mostly Protestant support. From the start, the underlying loyalties — Protestant and Catholic, British and Irish — lent strong passion to their encounters. Yet these seem to have intensified even as their original causes have eased. Religion has declined in an increasingly secular Scottish society, and 13 years have passed since Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland concluded the Good Friday agreement that has brought at least a fragile peace.


That has led Devine and others who have studied the issue to say that the enmities now are more tribal than religious, and fueled by poverty and social breakdown. Glasgow, Scotland’s largest city, has pockets of poverty that are among the most extreme in the developed world. The Catholic minority, particularly men from 18 to 35, has traditionally been among the poorest, and has suffered “a bigoted anti-Catholicism in certain sections of society,” Devine said.

In the most deprived areas, encompassing crumbling public housing towers ravaged by joblessness, and alcohol and drug abuse, male life expectancy is 54 — four years lower than in war-torn Sudan — according to World Health Organization figures.

In the soccer rivalry, the resentments have often found expression in violence, but soccer authorities have been slow to act. Rangers were fined $12,000 last week by UEFA, soccer’s governing body in Europe, after its fans continued singing sectarian songs at high-profile matches, including one that urges those of Irish origin to “go home,” and another, “The Billy Boys,” that includes the refrain “We’re up to our ears in Fenian blood,” Fenian being a derogatory term for Irish republicans. Celtic supporters have refrains of their own, including “The Fields of Athenry,” an old Irish republican ballad.

Several points:

First, isn't it reassuring that reality can mess up the best theories of intellectuals, such as Hitchens and Dawkins, who assure us that we will immantize the eschaton once we get rid of religion.

Well, apparently not.

Second, kudos to post-modern, post-Christian Europe in creating a culture with a male life-expectancy that is shorter than "war-torn Sudan."

Seems like they could use a religious revival, or a shot of Pentecostalism, to revive their flagging work ethic.

Third, the ability of human beings to "tribalize" based on sports isn't new.  It was a mainstay of the politics of the Eastern Roman Empire to keep the population divided between the Reds, Greens, Blues and Whites - and woe betide the Empire when these sport factions united.

[Via Vox Day.]

This is kind of unsettling to one of my cherished prejudices.

I had always had the unspoken assumption that the Nazi leadership was really stupid, because it seems that they would have had to have been stupid to believe the nonsense that passed for truth in Nazi ideology.

I know, of course, that this is my socially-conditioned prejudice.  I know intellectually that the ideas of eugenics and race and Social Darwinism were the common currency of the educated elites throughout America and Europe prior to World War II, and by "educated elites," I'm including free-thinking leftists like H.L. Mencken, who had quite the thing for Nietzsche.

Vox Day points to the results from IQ tests administered to Nazi leaders at Nuremberg:

Not that it is likely to, but the results of the IQ tests performed by an American Army psychologist at the Nuremberg Trials should put at least a slight damper on the often-heard atheist appeals to intelligence. Especially since at 121.72, the average IQs of the National Socialist leadership was more than a standard deviation higher than the 103.09 mean IQ reported for atheists:

IQ of Nazi leaders, cited from: Gilbert, G. M.: Nuremberg Diary. New York: Signet Book 1947, p. 34; Wechsler-Bellevue

Hjalmar Schacht, Reich Minister of Economics: IQ 143

Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Foreign Minister of Germany: IQ 141

Hermann Göring, President of the Reichstag and Reich Minister of Aviation: IQ 138

Karl Dönitz, Commander-in-Chief of the Kriegsmarine: IQ 138

Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and War Production: IQ 128

Alfred Jodl, Chief of the Operations Staff of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht: IQ 127

Alfred Rosenberg, Commissar for Supervision of Intellectual and Ideological Education of the German National Socialist Workers Party: IQ 127

Rudolf Hess, Deputy Führer: IQ 120

In my mind, Hess and Rosenberg will always be high-functioning morons.

Actually, I'm still surprised the Hess did so well. A person who decides it would be a good idea for the second ranking leadier of a country to fly solo into an enemy country duing a war sounds like someone with a room temperature IQ at best, and a very cool room at that.

...which in light of his IQ score makes you wonder if there really wasn't something more to his flight....

...nah, what kind of game is it that puts such an intelligence asset into the hands of the enemy?