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Things that only exist in my head…

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Just a short aside during nanowrimo.

20 Wednesday Nov 2013

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in no-category

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It was inevitable that the Cheney sisters would fall out. Mary came out under the protection of pseudo-libertarian wealth but even the whitewash of pseudo-libertarian social policy wasn’t enough for Wyoming. So under the bus her sister directed a shove.

This generation of Cheneys had a choice: live as a united family of rich and shadowy oligarchs protected from the day-to-day consequences of their backroom power politics… or step more fully into the light of celebrity and resolve their contradictions. Being as much her father’s daughter as Elizabeth, Mary Cheney was unable to conveniently step back into the gloom. Elizabeth could have let our dark memories of her father fade and gotten on with her life of obscene wealth on the Board of Director circuit, but unlike Mary she is anointed with the hubris of the child who was both loved—as Mary surely was—and is the politically acceptable vessel of her father’s ambition to rule from the richest corner of the right.

The Stenographic Putsch

17 Thursday Oct 2013

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default, shartdown

Apparently the Tea Party was unable to stack the entire functional staff of the Capitol building entirely with crazy people, so it didn’t last very long.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/17/stenographer-led-away-house-representatives-budget-vote

It’s a good thing the staff aren’t elected. Who knows how many would be openly mouthing strange conspiracy theories simply to avoid being primaried.

Sleeping may be a good option for many

15 Tuesday Oct 2013

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default, shutdown

Because John Boehner is going to show his true colors very soon, and I’m fairly sure that his aged frat-boy act is going to turn venal and power-hungry very, very quickly. He didn’t just turn up as the leader of the Tea Party House out of random bad luck. He’s had years to slot himself in. He might have been fine with being Speaker for a House of Pork Barrel like in the old days, but the ball of crazy he’s riding right now is a ball of crazy he’s seen coming for more than a decade. And he’s not going to give up for something as abstract as the good of the country.

The goal of the anarchist far right is to cause a default. It’s been their goal for 20 years.

What should the Democrats do? For the abstract good of the little people Obama should invoke Article IV and let the House hurl itself upon another impeachment trial. But that might not be enough to break the anarchists so Democrats might be tempted to let the country default and milk the chaos in the elections of 2014. I see far too much risk in this. When this kind of thing happens, voluntarily, it’s a tossup whether a country recovers. I strongly hope the Democrats won’t tempt history by risking a fascist coup.

I am not a sleeper.

02 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in commentary, no-category

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default, delusion, shutdown, sleeper agent, the color orange

I shouldn’t take politics so personally and I shouldn’t feel so strongly the stretch of tenterhooks from the mean-spirited, delusional shitshow that is this nation’s Republican party, but I do. I live here, after all, and the empathetic fabric of my skin is stretched just as tightly as anyone’s. I grew up in Republican-land and I was even a productive member of their society. But actually being hard-working and productive didn’t mean I got credit for it. I didn’t. Every generation realizes, at some point, that working is only a tiny part of doing well in the rat race. It took me longer than most to figure this out. When I realized that hard work meant little, when I realized that I’d get much farther if I bought a giant shitty truck, gained 50 pounds and joined the pseudo-anarchist right-wing, when I realized that I’d have to repeat Limbaugh or Randian talking-points at work and around my buddies, I lost all desire to martyr myself to the Protestant work ethic. I refused to live my life as a sleeper agent.

A good way to make an enemy is to restrict opportunities to members of a club. The stupidest way to make an enemy is to restrict membership of that club to the dumb, the lazy, and the mendacious.

–

My strategic analysis of the current situation is that unless a discharge petition goes forward, John Boehner is going to have to ride this out to the end. The people who think he’s going to be a statesman and break the Hastert Rule are mistaken. He doesn’t identify with anyone; he and his are very well set up; there is no motivating impulse that will wobble him from his historic path. He might even see a path to the Oval Office. If so, then we are fucked because there’s no arguing with a delusional wannabe-tyrant. That seems like a stretch given Boehner’s orangey loucheity, but greater turns in history are known.

More specifically short-term, John Boehner has already lost in any reasonable scenario. His only option for a win is the unreasonable scenario. If no Rs vote to discharge a D bill, the next step would be for the executive to invoke Article IV to avoid default. If Obama invokes the constitution to make interest payments then Boehner must either choose to give up (giving up his majority and maybe his seat in the election) or keep going without a budget. He would have nothing to lose. A louche and callous character argues for destruction, in this scenario.

What does Boehner see at the end of this path? Will he throw a couple dozen Rs under the bus along with his majority? Is someone planning a coup? That really is the only option for the Tea Party right now. Anything less will be another humiliation for them. They can’t win national elections; they can’t win much territory without gerrymandering; their only option is to continue the shutdown, assume that Boehner won’t bend the Hastert Rule, and keep their fellows from breaking ranks, somehow. Do we instead get an entire year of shutdown even without a default?

An entire year until the next election is a long time. An actual slide into deep recession maintained by Boehner’s adoption of the Tea Party mantle is a path into uncertain darkness. Can the country hold out until the election, then through the lame-duck Congress all the way to January 2015? I don’t think it can. We’ll either get enough Rs signing a discharge of a continuing resolution, some kind of coup, or John Boehner acting like a human being. I predict the former, followed by a D-House next November. Then an attempted coup. Followed by Boehner crying real human tears that smell of citrus.

Reading

09 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in commentary, no-category

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Charles Stross

I cleaned out my research queue so I can catch up on some fiction I’ve been wanting to read: Stina Leicht’s Fey and the Fallen.

Leicht had a guest bloggo on Charlie Stross’s site a while back and what grabbed me about her writing was her humanity, her location (Texas) and her politics (humanist) despite the social pressures. That combination is important. It’s courageous, of course, but it’s also inevitable. It is now possible to dissent from conservative doublethink and state one’s dissent publicly with broad distribution. The social consequences still exist; stepping outside the role of self-hating-redneck is best done if you don’t rely on self-hating-rednecks for work or family.

So my appreciation of her blog was political. A while back I read and wrote a blub about Mur Lafferty’s Shambling Guide to New York City. At WorldCon last week Lafferty won the John W. Campbell award for new writers. Leicht was up for the same award and suddenly I felt guilty. I began following Lafferty because of her work on the Escape Artists podcasts. I mirror the ambition of her podcast, I Should Be Writing. I also use The Magic Spreadsheet to keep myself motivated and my wordcount up. But Stina Leicht has a wider scope on her blog.

The competition between new writers is played down to a degree (everyone gets a tiara) but I feel like my attention to Lafferty’s work was unfair given Leicht’s place in my feed. It’s not a competition, I know, and I lack both power and readers so the unfairness is just a feeling. Perhaps I should be more fair to me and begin submitting work. Maybe I could wear the tiara as a bracelet.

So I now have trade paper copies of Leicht’s two Fey and the Fallen books from Powell’s. More to come.

“What Can be Done in Syria” 2 pm, Conference Room 2e11, Free Coffee

29 Thursday Aug 2013

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in no-category

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civilians, counterfactual, protect the innocent

A follow-on meeting to http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/08/on-syria.html.

“Thank you for coming. And everyone thank Robert for requesting snacks as well as coffee and emptying out the Q2 entertainment budget. Remember, if we don’t use that line item, we lose it!”

“So… wow. Quite the turnout. Are all of you employees? It looks like ‘Bring-Your-Rich-Uncle-and-His-First-Wife-to-Work-Day’ out there.

AUDIENCE: laughter

“To begin with let me just say that Syria is the hypothetical Iraq that we didn’t invade. We left it in the hands of Saddam Hussein and in the last few years most of his generals have expired from sodomizing meth and smoking whores and the Baath Party is finally coming apart. Civil war is raging and the coke fiends are sniffing the sarin stockpile. Since we’ve avoided making the exact mistake in Syria that we made in Iraq we are in the happy situation of running this counter-factual experiment for real and figuring out how to topple The Brutal Dictator without actually sending in tens of thousands of troops and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians.”

“Perhaps we should back up a bit, though, and figure out what it would mean to roll back that goal. What if toppling the dictator wasn’t our precise goal? What if we were coming to it fresh, without all the justifications for the Iraq War still rattling around in our heads. What should our goal be for military action in Syria? … Put your hands up to be recognized, folks, that wasn’t a rhetorical question. Yes, of course, Captain America, front row.”

CAPTAIN AMERICA: “Protect the innocent!”

“Okay, Cap. Sounds good. I think we can all agree on that. Right? Anyone? Anyone rather I put down ‘fuck the innocent’?” Squeak of marker on whiteboard. “Protect… the… inno… sent. What else?”

MICHELE BACHMANN rises, blinking rapidly, “Keep Al Queda from winning!”

“From winning what sweetie? Yes, you in the back, clutching your beads.”

BEADS: “To keep the Muslin extremists from taking over Syria like they did Egypt and Tunisia!”

“Okay, let me jot this down here in red because I want to talk about it. This is the default position of everyone in the D.C. press corps, right?” Squeak, squeak, squeak, thump. “Period. Okay, so. Since a big part of the revolutionary force fighting Assad are Islamic radicals, this goal makes any intervention much more complicated. We would be defending civilians per Rule One and extending into Rule Two we would be defending and supporting fourteen different factions of secular revolutionaries. Further, this implies that we would be actively attacking Islamic revolutionaries as well as fighting Assad’s forces directly through surgical strategic and tactical strikes. So. Two, three, four fronts of military action in hundreds of random locations throughout Syria. Let me jot that down.” Squeak, squeak. “Four. Fronts. Times. One hundred.”

“Yes. And since from our perspective—looking down like gods from stealth bombers and drones and satellites in space—the battles will be fought on the ground between Assad’s forces and small groups in the rubble who have poor communications, mismatched gear, no proper badging, etc. And those small groups may be friend or foe, to be defended or contained or attacked. Right?”

“Okay, folks. How exactly is that supposed to work?”

ANONYMOUS: fart.

“So again, let’s go back and look at our goals.”

The Death of Advertising is the Creamy Center that Will Hold the Future Together

21 Wednesday Aug 2013

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in no-category

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die spammers die, optimism, the center does not hold

Every once in a while the author Stina Leicht will post the latest in a series of bloggos about the danger our society is in of being destroyed by the libertarian non-ethic. She focuses particularly on the lives of creatives.

I’ve restrained myself from commenting in support of these posts because I can’t face the depression. To respond properly I need to go to a very dark place, but a place I essentially live on the rim of.

Today it hit me after reading her latest The Center Does Not Hold that creatives can’t fight back because advertising has been the de-facto revenue stream for popular publications for almost two hundred years. This is especially true for journalists but it holds for everyone who rides the interface between the writing life, a living, and the day-to-day consumption of media by the general public.

Even here on my own blog: I was too cheap to upgrade to an advertising-free site so if you came here by a direct link you will see ads at the bottom. Sorry. I don’t get anything from the ads beyond the pleasure of resisting the shove to upgrade. WordPress doesn’t get anything either, to be honest, because no one reads this. Mostly it creates a spam queue full of automatically generated comments trying to lure me onto the SEO bandwagon. For the record, a worldwide purge of online griefers of the con-artist kind is a genocide I could get behind. Barbed-wire garrotes, gibbets, flaming truck tires, the whole bit. The hellscape I wish to rule over is decorated with the broken remains of human insectoids culled from strip mall back offices in the lands of  Flora and Russ.

Moving on, the rise of robust adblocking extensions, DVR, commercial-free cable TV and Netflix-style subscriptions are changing the world of advertising. Until twenty years ago ad-revenue was a cash cow for the media companies at the top of the heap. Deregulation allowed conglomerates to buy captive markets. This allowed them to cut costs by cutting coverage and quality without losing many consumers. Deregulation increased their leverage over advertisers too, raising their rates. It was the classic rentier ecosystem made more obnoxious by the conglomerates’ ability to keep the public from viewing exposés about their scam. Political support for maintaining the status quo was a trivial expense.

So in the early 90s Big Media had a license to print cash on newsprint and twiddle their bank balances using the broadcast spectrum. But since the rise of the Internet, no more! I for one welcome our adblocking and DVRing overlords underdogs. And the Youtube subscription channels? Bring it. At least that’s the theory.

Why am I more optimistic about the future for creatives? Because making production and distribution vastly cheaper levels the playing field between the subscription-for-quality-content model and the quick-n-dirty-content-as-a-vector-for-shoveling-shitty-ads. The greater demand for quality content (knock on wood) means that power will shift back toward creatives and their abilities.

There’s some distance to go yet and that distance will be paved with the coming rise of local ad-free subscription journalism in both dead tree and online forms. That’s a different topic for another post, though. Right now the paving doesn’t exist but I’m fiddling with blueprints and wandering around in the weeds with a machete, an armload of stakes and a spraycan of orange paint.

Is Philosophy Dead? Weekend Entertainment for Saturday, August 3rd

03 Saturday Aug 2013

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in commentary, no-category, reviews

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cognitive science, in our time, philosophy, raymond tallis, the death of philosophy

Weekends are the worst days of the week for reading blogs and adding podcasts to the listening queue. Monday is nearly the best because the Sunday evening premium-TV sexplosion pushes the culture forward and gives it new fizz for one more week. Monday is Increment Day. If I were religious I suppose Sundays (or Fridays, or Saturdays) would be full of online entertainment because of the soapbox potential for religious writers. I wouldn’t know. But for the rest of us consumers of media, Saturdays and pre-evening Sundays are the dead time of our week. We have to drink and riot sometime, I suppose.

So I’ve decided to make everyone’s weekends worse with my own guaranteed Saturday posts. It isn’t really worse for you, the reader, because you don’t exist. This is 2013, and unknown blogs are a few AU past passé. I’m fairly certain that the only hits I get are robotic or accidental. That said, ritual practice is what the Sabbath is all about and as an atheist I’ve missed out on that benefit of incrementing my week with a regular bit of writing.

Yes, Philosophy is Dead

I listen to podcasts from the BBC. I have several months’ worth of In Our Time episodes piled up on my hard drive that I dole out to my phone. I consume In Our Time… religiously. Well, not religiously. I binge on it, which is a way to practice religion but not a healthy way. But while I can take or leave many of the BBC’s other shows—I’m finding Bertrand Russell’s Reith Lectures from 1948 numbingly slow going, despite their historical interest—I do tend to at least give a chance to episodes of less well-formed shows like In Science (an as yet terrible replacement for the excellent Material World) or The Infinite Monkey Cage.

The Infinite Monkey Cage is often annoying in the same ways as In Science. In the show from December of 2010, “Is Philosophy Dead?“, the monkeys (a celebrity physicist, two comedians, and a pop-philosopher) line up against Raymond Tallis, an implacably rigid foe of cognitive science. Throughout the episode Tallis is forced back repeatedly to the point that philosophy is not dead because science will never “understand” consciousness. Without any cognitive scientists to consult, of course, there isn’t much active refutation of Tallis’s points. This is interesting for a situation where Tallis is essentially making the same point as theologians did six hundred years ago when they pointed out that natural science (still termed natural philosophy at the time) would never understand the movement of the cosmos around the Earth. The Infinite Monkey Cage could have made use of at least one advocate for science that was both engaged and hostile.

What makes this episode an illustration of why Philosophy-Capital-P is indeed dying, or at least dissolving into an introductory text to other disciplines, is the lack of rigor its practitioners can have in using its own terms in public discourse—this lack of rigor may be instead an expression of their contempt for the public audience. When “doing” philosophy back and forth to each other, philosophers’ usage of terms are deemed important enough to write entire books about them, but in public discourse Tallis is throwing around the word “understanding” as if it didn’t require a 100,000 word dissertation to fully explicate the particular gyrations Tallis puts the word through.

During this show Tallis uses “understanding” to refer to the conscious integration of an idea and goes further to claim that science does not, and cannot, ever understand consciousness. This is fine for as far as that goes but seems to belie the fact that modern and post-modern scientific advances rely on mathematical formulations that cannot be consciously “understood” in any sense, much less the sense Tallis is using. Just look at the field of quantum mechanics. Very few (none?) “understand” quantum mechanics in the way Tallis seems to demand. So science isn’t necessarily attempting to “understand” anything in the way that Tallis uses the term.

“Understanding” in Tallis’ sense can only be the conscious integration an idea so that its contemplation and manipulation is relatively automatic. This is achieved when the study of a subject results in the capacity to come up with a workable solution to a problem without turning the problem into an mathematical exercise and rigorously doing all the sums. The form of understanding Tallis is using, from studies done by cognitive scientists, seems to rely on internalized heuristics and emotional measures of confidence. So a baseball outfielder understands the motion of a baseball’s trajectory through practice and is tested on the field every game. He doesn’t do differential equations. The fielder develops his heuristics by chasing the emotional validation he gets from a successful test. So being able to catch the ball is a measure of the fielder’s gestalt, studied, but essentially practiced understanding. I’m sure Tallis would argue that conscious understanding has nothing to do with heuristics but he doesn’t really offer the kind of Vulcan Mind Meld short version of what he’s talking about… which proves my point.

When it comes to mathematical ways of understanding we already understand a few of the pieces of consciousness and we will come to understand more. At some point we’ll begin building consciousnesses. We’re already beginning to build heuristics about what a consciousness would look like using existing brains as models. It appears that much of the difficulty is in understanding the physical structure of brains that already exist. So far, experiment is restrained by technological limitations, not mathematical definitions.

Understanding the Death of Philosophy

Understanding in the sense I ascribe to Tallis really is the original product of philosophy. Philosophers laid down general rules and heuristics to the elite (with specially dumbed-down versions for the masses) which they can use as assumptions whenever they are tempted to duplicate the heavy lifting done by the philosophers. In this heuristic sense, understanding is the wisdom received from people who’ve worked things out in detail and (hopefully) tested their work.

In 400 BCE, this was the revolutionary product of the philosophers as they began their thousand-year-long assault on religion. For roughly the last three to five hundred years (after the ascendancy of philosophy over religion) understanding has been produced increasingly by scientists, engineers, and other technical people. The contribution of philosophy to understanding that has happened most recently is classified as mathematics and computational theory. Tallis specifically claims these as continuing to be parts of philosophy. For him, philosophy remains the superset of knowledge.

But it’s funny. People working on the edges of mathematical logic and computational theory don’t seem to apply their findings directly to the things that people who call themselves philosophers do. They have opinions about things like the ultimate meaning of everything, free will, materialism, and questions about the nature of consciousness and cognition, but the only concrete contributions that new mathematical and computational theories tend to make is in mathematics and computational theory. Experimental science is informed by the math but strikes out ahead of it and often finds much room in apparent mathematical contradictions. The math is narrowed down by experiment, not the other way around.

For the bleeding edge, then,  mathematical theory can be used to form heuristics for exploration. Presenting the heuristic sense of a body of mathematics to practitioners and finding possible wiggle-room is an area of philosophical reasoning that is useful, but subordinate to both the mathematics and the science. Imposition of heuristic divinations by philosophers on the hard sciences still happens, but more and more rarely. The crucial place where philosophical divination currently likes to steamroll the investigations of working practitioners seems to be in the field of economics. There the heuristic rulemakers still attempt to rule from the editorial pages of the Edwardian era.

Philosophy’s Zombie Unlife, or, What Is the Further Function of Philosophy?

First, philosophy cannot, as Raymond Tallis hopes, put itself forward to offer absolute statements about the limits and future of a scientific field. In this case, using what I assume is a kind of blanket application of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem—he offers no specifics—Tallis simply states that science cannot understand consciousness.

So what can philosophy do? Philosophy can only function to provide a framework for heuristic understanding of knowledge for laymen, students, and practitioners of a field attempting to educate themselves about the bits they aren’t directly investigating. Philosophy mediates between the novice and the mathematically-stated state of the art. Philosophy does not make management decisions about what is or isn’t possible. Philosophy provides heuristics made-to-order for the world and not the other way around. The function of philosophy, in a word, is to educate.

So the further work of philosophy is to create new heuristics and revise existing heuristics to facilitate gestalt confidence in a scientific subject for laymen, students, and practitioners. This includes mathematics but crucially cannot lose itself in the desire to self-referentially climb the pole of mathematical understanding to reclaim primacy. Philosophy, as a system of heuristics for inducing confident understanding, cannot be supplanted by mathematics simply because so much of mathematics does not lend itself to generating heuristics.

The applicability of mathematical concepts themselves cannot be so easily determined for experimental fields without the actual experiments being performed. Philosophy mediates this, but philosophical predictions that apply conclusions of one field to another have stepped outside the realm of heuristic integration and education and into divination. As heuristics, these divinations can be useful but they are only heuristics. They serve to educate and impart gestalt understanding but they can also be graded as to usefulness. A heuristic that says “understanding consciousness is impossible based on my meta-logical understanding of mathematics applied to cognitive science where the mathematics and meta-logic isn’t yet well understood” is a terrible heuristic, but that is essentially what Raymond Tallis is attempting to do. Without a good heuristic framework for understanding its conclusion the heuristic itself is not useful in any way. It communicates nothing and educates no one.

A good general heuristic would be one of the many that is already being used in the field of cognitive science: consciousness already exists in the human brain. The physical structure, state, and health of the brain seems to have a great influence on the state of consciousness, so it seems that further investigation of the physical brain will yield more understanding of consciousness.

Final Words to Philosophers

You don’t have much time, so be useful.

Seriously, though, public philosophers must be educators and communicators. They are lovers of wisdom, and public lovers of wisdom should command at least some respect. It’s not like you’re in Marketing. Also, as articulate and respected public lovers of wisdom, philosophers should take the field of education away from the increasingly right-wing bureaucrats of the public and private educational systems and the “educational materials” industry. Or conversely, if you are a teacher tired of being talked down to by an increasingly necromantic and corporate administration, recast yourself as a philosopher and develop heuristics to share with your students and your fellows.

A moment of tinfoil

23 Tuesday Jul 2013

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in no-category

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tinfoil

Tomorrow Congress will begin doing nothing about the NSA’s online dragnet of the online activities of innocent Americans. But what if they actually did do something about it? Well, if Congress were to remove funding for the surveillance of innocent Americans, the NSA would have to designate more people as something other than innocent in order to keep their infrastructure and contracts alive. And that is the cusp on which this nascent culture of black ops and private security corporations falls apart. At some point that decision to designate innocent Americans as nearly guilty would be recognized as the beginning of two paths: the Sisyphusian trail of ever more unpopular justifications for the public-private security state, complete with mountain and boulder, always leaving the state back at the decision point; or the much easier trail around the boulder and a selloff of the Homeland Security white elephant.

Another point is that if Congress does absolutely nothing about this issue—which is exactly what I suspect will happen—this inaction will split both the Republican and Democratic caucuses into their corporate-incumbent and non-corporate-insurgent wings. This is a bit of reflected light and hope to aim at 2014.

Calling for the Expulsion of Theodore Beale from SFWA

09 Tuesday Jul 2013

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in no-category

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Not being a member of the SFWA I hadn’t put much priority on finding out how much of a stain Beale is. “Spacebunny” … Um. For a libertarian he doesn’t have much conception of the idea of a voluntary organization if he is going to respond to cultural and electoral defeat in this kind of childish manner. And voluntary-ness goes both ways. The SFWA has already seceded from poop-smearing numbskulls like Beale; it makes me feel just fine that the other “libertarians” who defend him and throw around TANSTAAFL as a catch-all response find themselves socially on the outs. They are certainly free to add the SFWA to the tattered list of enemies hanging in the breeze out of the liner of their tinfoil hats.

Amal El-Mohtar

Recently, N. K. Jemisin delivered her Guest of Honour speech at Continuum in Australia. It is an excellent and important speech. In it, she mentions that roughly 10% of the ballots cast in the recent SFWA  Presidential election went to a man who is unabashedly racist, misogynistic, and just generally hateful in an astoundingly relentless sort of way. She does this in order to talk about how important it is to not be an enabler of that kind of hatred through one’s silence.

She doesn’t name him in her speech, and more power to her. He has, however, responded to her on his blog, so I will tell you here that his name is Theodore Beale, also known as Vox Day, whom I only encourage you to google if your day is suffering from a surfeit of happiness and sunshine. Here, however, are some relevant screenshots, posted with warnings for…

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