I should really leave this be, but...

What is it they say about bullies being able to give it out?

Benjanun Sriduagkaew bragging about harassing Rhianna Pratchett back in 2008

Benjanun Sriduagkaew folding up and whimpering (and lying her head off) about Spool Pidgin posts that mock her. 2014.

On a serious note though, if you're someone, especially a person of colour who's suffered online harassment from Benjanun there are ears out there for you. As this link shows, you are from alone. You don't have to keep suffering alone. Together we can build a safer, happier community without the venom and hypocrisy.

The Commonsense Clarity Of Orson Scott Card

"Obama would certainly respond to a nuclear strike on Tel Aviv and Haifa with a call for negotiations..."

-Orson Scott Card in his column 'Unlikely Events'




"Obama is, by character and preference, a dictator. He hates the very idea of compromise..."


-Orson Scott Card in his column 'Unlikely Events', four paragraphs later. 



 

Kicking Against The Pricks: Thoughts On That Vox Day Troll Fiasco

"Come, my armies of light! Sally forth and attack Pidgin's Landing. With my unbridled genius, my athleticism and that mouse I designed that didn't sell very well because it had too many buttons, we shall soon overrun that most loathsome blog!"

"Oh..."

                                                                               *


'It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.'

-Acts 26: 14 (KJV)


Well, not really. These troll-surges aren't half as bad as people make out. You hear about some bloggers shutting down comment rolls, terminating their blog or even losing their minds. I feel for those people, truly, but I don't get 'em (Though I'd hazard it's the repetition that ultimately snaps them. Trolls are a one note bunch. Or the racism and misogyny, of course:  I'm lucky there). For me it's fun. A breeze. A piece of piss as we say in Limeyland.

Which is phrase that links well to Vox Day. For some reason that previous post where I questioned the very existence of his wife stuck in his craw. He sharted about it on his 'Alpha Game' website (An 'alpha-male' development project that's best understood as a kind of penis cult inside an echo chamber). Therein he defined me as a 'gamma male', which is funny, because I swiftly became Chuck Heston in The Omega Man as his gormless followers descended on Spool Pidgin.

I'd like to tell you it was a tough, valiant battle but it was more a pull-the-trigger-with-left-hand-smoke-with-the-right Somme-type affair.

The first wave had no comprehension of irony or satire and were thus tragically cut down in their knicker-sniffing prime. Second wave realized  they should at least pretend to understand irony and satire and still got cut down. The third wave was more of a trickle by then, one that had no option but to criticize my weight and writing ability. This, readers take note, is the troll equivalent of boys and old men being sent out into the breach with rifles made in 1892. The last push. Not pretty.

Not that any of this should surprise us. Men who wish to become alpha males by taking instruction from another male aren't exactly brimming with self-awareness or wit. But all trolls, in my experience, are irony-vacuums, whatever their political stripe (If you ever find yourself in an Antarctic base with six other people, one of whom you suspect is a troll, just stick that episode of Brass Eye in the DVD player and see what happens). Your righteous fury can only ever feed trolls. Absurdity castrates them.

Oh, come on. I'm allowed to be a little smug...


                                                                            *


One troll explained that Vox Day resides in Italy these days. I nearly spat my cornflakes out with laughter. Daily, the Great Leader spouts about the Hispanic onslaught on America or the liberal junta crushing it from above and his readers swallow it whole. But he's not even there. He ran away. Much like Oswald Moseley (Britain's would-be fascist dictator whom Day oddly mirrors in character and appearance, sans 'tache) who scarpered to Paris, Day would probably counter this humdinger with 'You can't clean a dunghill while under it'. And, like Moseley, we can all sit back and giggle at the man's hypocrisy, which is only exceeded by his megalomania.

"So you wanna be an alpha male, huh? First you gotta get y'rself a rad black shirt. Then you gotta pose like someone out of Color Me Bad. Hey, no laughing at the back! The nineties ruled, scumbags!"

But I ask you; what happened to this man's galaxy-sized intellect he insists on telling us about? He thought, and still thinks, that I actually believe his wife doesn't exist. I guess his unquestioning belief in his own abilities sent him arse-over-tits with that one. It rendered the last paragraph of my post--where I reveal my conspiracy theory uses the same spurious, cherry-picking, confirmation-biased methodology as his daily dribblings--totally invisible.

(There was that photo of me breaking into 'his house' too. Didn't that set something off on his radar?)

But I shouldn't be all that gobsmacked. Most people, after all, know him as that dupe who thought John Scalzi was actually admitting to being a serial rapist.*


(*Then he added an extra two paragraphs to cover his ass, hoping no one would notice. See here.)


                                                                      *


Let's give the shit his due. Vox Day is highly capable at debating, as he repeatedly tell us. In his anti-atheist polemic, for instance, he's savvy enough to quickly dispense with the old 'atheists don't get theology' argument like the polystyrene fort it is. In all honesty I'd put money on him instead of me in a face-to-face debate.

Yet his tactical nous is scuppered by his being strategically flawed. His very worldview hamstrings him. You could be a modern day Demosthenes, but if you're seriously refuting a century and a half of evolutionary evidence you may as well be Stan Laurel.

Put simply, his beliefs constrain his understanding. With evolution this becomes painfully clear, even to a dunce like me. For instance, Day is under the impression some species are 'more' evolved than others (a misapprehension rooted in his racism, perhaps), and that the Coelacanth has somehow ceased evolving merely because its physical appearance hasn't changed. Any Cnut (No, not a spelling error, I promise) wishing to turn back science's tides surely has to be better informed than that.
 
Another example is his belief the Enlightenment was satanically informed. Well, in that case, good for Old Nick: the weight of evidence suggests a marked downturn in human violence from the Enlightenment onwards. Of course, that we should place any value in the words of a man who believes a supernatural being taints the affairs of humanity in defiance of the will of an omnipotent god is itself a good question. 

Whenever I read a Vox Day post I think of a fly trapped in an upturned cup, the cup being the self-oppressing nature of his own ridiculous and outdated worldview. The fly spins around and around at incredible speeds, often pulling some dazzling aeronautics, but never gaining enough momentum to smash its way out.

Or, to put it another way, he may call us to his potty to show us a turd that resembles Michelangelo's David, but it IS still a turd.


                                                                        *


I have regrets, serious doubts actually, about dragging his wife into it. She is, ultimately, a real life human being who never did me any wrong (That said, I hope against hope that she is a product of his mania; Vox Day refuses to believe in marital rape, and so one has to logically assume he has no moral qualms with sexual assault as long as the paperwork's kosher). 

Mostly, though, I shouldn't have brought her good looks--or otherwise, were that the case--into it. Two bickering heterosexual male bloggers always seem to end up doing that.  I could argue 'Well HE started it', but that's no reason to copy the dick is it? Besides, you're a blog reader, not me and Vox's dinnerlady. So apologies for that ugly bout of objectification. High time I got on board the good ship 21st century.

Vox Day would probably tell you that last paragraph is quintessential 'gamma man'. He always says that sort of thing after the fact, of course. I don't know why he doesn't just write out a comprehensive list of all Gamma man's attributes and thus save himself a lot of bother. 

This is how Vox Day dresses when he blogs. Note terrified eyes as he searches the horizon for N.K. Jemisin piloting a Blitzspear. (Sorry; one for the 2000 AD fans)

So, yes:  I doubt. And Vox Day never does. Neither do all his cronies who left steaming lumps of brainwrong in my comment lounge. White, male and well-off (Day's dad was a millionaire CEO; how else do you think Day can lounge about in Italy or fritter cash on a gaming mouse no one wants?) they are unaccustomed to it. They all found a slipshod and superficial philosophy that fits them comfortably and saw no reason to explore beyond it because that would require actual work. They don't even see any of that as a weakness.

Still, we can all take heart in this thought:  Once, centuries past, men like Vox Day and his followers ruled the world unquestioned. Nowadays they are reduced to barking--uselessly--at nobodies like me. 



 

When Nice Writers Say Unpleasant Things

"Execution needed;
A bloody vessel for your peace.
If man makes death then death makes man
Tear the torso with horses and chains...

All I preach is extinction."

                                                   -Archives Of Pain, The Manic Street Preachers

For reference, here is the article K Tempest Bradford alludes to (though I'm loathe to link to right wing newspaper, The Daily Mail. British readers will already know the DM doesn't exactly have the best track record on women's rights, but that's by-the-by) 


You know, I think it's the fact my opinion can only be contextualized as a judgement of the poor girl that's most depressing. In regards to the current state of the left (well, SF's left), I mean. The old order changeth, and the new order coarsens daily.

I'm not judging the girl, that much should be clear to anyone. Killing her prior and would-be rapist was a wholly understandable--and immensely brave--act of defence that no right-thinking, merciful court would ever condemn. Her neighbors showed, and continue to show, astounding compassion in protecting her.

But let's get one thing clear:  there is nothing, absolutely nothing, to celebrate, to heft up like a shining standard and call 'a correct response' in this tragic and depressing story. It's a series of horrific, de-humanizing events; the first lot unimaginably sadistic, the rest a necessity that must have left all involved psychologically scarred for life.

Let's look at that first sentence again:


'In my view, this is the correct response to rape.'


Now that's a right wing opinion, however you cut it. In fact it's about as right wing as it gets: a knee jerk, old testament-infused call to culture-wide violence untethered from any court system, mental health considerations or enlightenment values. It fits far more comfortably in the mouth of  Limbaugh, Hannity or Littlejohn than any SF fandom progressive (which, on any other day, K. Tempest Bradford is. From what I see she does a lot of good work). And, like any gore-hungry statement uttered by those three conservative 'pundits', it has to swiftly duck behind a wall of brutalized innocents to justify itself.

 
'In my view, this is the correct response to rape.' 


You can see its attraction though (It was re-tweeted and favorited numerous times). It appeals to that little worm in our hearts--mine included--that desires nothing more than a monotone retribution with all of life's uncomfortable nuances shaved off. It's why the Deathwish series was so popular. Indeed,  the first film's essence is caught in that sentence and improved, going so far as to cut out the middleman protagonist.     


'In my view, this is the correct response to rape.' 


I'm no expert on Papua New Guinea, but I'll take it as read raping one's child is counted as an abhorrent act there, as with any human society.

So how does it happen? How does someone become an incestuous serial rapist?

Well, first you have to be an extreme sociopath and one becomes a sociopath either through deformities in the brain prior to birth, being brutalized as a child or a cocktail of both.

Let's, for the sake of argument, accept a duality of the mind and body a moment. Now let's place K. Tempest Bradford's or Rochits Loen-Ruiz's mind--at the point of expulsion from the womb--into the girl's father's skull at the point of his birth. They would be rapists by now. As would I, as would you. The neuro-chemical and social realities of that scumbag's life would guarantee it.

Unpleasant to think that isn't it? As humans, we try to avoid these facts, despite science shining it in our face. It goes against thousands of years of spiritual and common sense thought. And yet we have always suspected retribution to be ultimately hollow, haven't we? Scientific fact proves that hunch. Scientific fact, increasingly, suggests our species do a little growing up.


'In my view, this is the correct response to rape.' 


I passed through my city centre before writing this, imagined how a modern society obedient to Bradford's spur-of-the-moment opinion might actually look (Recall she isn't just alluding to New Guinea. She means rape per se, in whatever context, whatever series of events. Presumably not all rapists would be killed by their victims in situ. Indeed, most deaths would have to be manufactured at some later time for practicality's sake).

Would all this justice be enacted on a plinth beside the town hall clock? The progressive crowd nurturing and encouraging the tenth rape victim into taking the first swing? Or would it be more private, more tasteful? A small installation on the edge of town, perhaps?

An absolutely histrionic, hyperbolic vision, I'll readily admit. But in my defense, it's bleedin' difficult to procure any other extrapolation from such an absolutist statement.


'In my view, this is the correct response to rape.' 


Do you want know what I think the 'correct response' to rape is? For what it's worth?  I mean in an ideal world (mine and not K. Tempest Bradford's)?

Rapists would be identified monitored and sectioned from society before they even came remotely close to their first victim. They would be treated with dignity in that sectioned off place because we as a society are not the sadistic, predatory beasts that they are. They would be studied, scanned, psychoanalyzed and cross-referenced in the hope that some day a cure--chemical or genetic--might emerge and allow them to become fully-functioning members of society or, in lieu of that, that the next generation of these beasts shall never emerge.

Is that weird of me to believe that? Wrong? Because, to me, to desire anything else is to mentally permit the cycle of brutality and suffering to continue forever. It is to condone it, if only subconsciously. That poor girl in Papua New Guinea did the right thing, but she didn't justice she deserved. Nothing 'correct'. Nothing like it. No one in that story did.

My 'correct response' may be a cloud cuckoo land, something absurd and impossible to reach. But running toward that--surely--has to be preferable to falling back into the same old right wing vengeance fantasy, no matter its liberal veneer. 


   

Vox Day Round-Up: Schrodinger's Spacebunny

 Narcissistic, nineties-obsessed, corpse-in-waiting Vox Day has--all you SF snark-watchers will no doubt have noticed by now--exceeded himself this time, racially insulting author and fully-rounded adult N K Jemisin in scenes reminiscent of a cage-humping baboon howling itself to climax.

Greater minds than mine have commented already, though I will note that, for someone so creationist and anti-evolutionist (I suspect he has a personal stake in the latter) Day is surprisingly quick to wheel out Neanderthals as proof of his racist (and scientifically selective) theories. As ever, science is but a Chinese buffet to libertarians.

(Except, as the Waffenwonder says here, not a jot of his bile was racist. Vox Day tip: if you say something racist but don't SAY it's racist the PC brigade can't touch you. Not a bloody leg to stand on, mate. Go on; try it in your daily life!)

Oops, but I digress...

All this hideousness provoked me into ad hoc research (ie: cyber-stalking). I noticed Vox Day has a wife he refers to as--not Brunhilda, surprisingly--but 'Spacebunny'. Spacebunny. Yup.

Wanna see a picture?

Oh, don't look at me like that. Day posted this picture on his own blog in a noble attempt to prove his wife was more of a 'hottie' than some other fantasy writer's (rumor has it if you've the hottest wife of all they hand you a Nebula award).

To recap, Spacebunny is married to this:

Intrigued, I typed Vox Day and Spacebunny into Google images, in the hope of finding a photo of them together so I might produce a set of commemorative plates in the style of HRH Charles and Diana. No such photo emerged. So I tried 'Vox Day wife'. Same again.

Then I noted another odd thing: both times the same old photo of Spacebunny emerged. In fact it appeared to be the only photo of the woman. A professionally-taken modelling photo apparently. Hmm...

She has a life outside Vox Day (as do we all, thank Baal's balls). Check her (locked, 50- followers) Twitter account:

Note her photo.

And a Pinterest account with absolutely no personal or personally-taken photos, exceppppt:

She sometimes emerges from her star-warren to have a go at people too. See this meme someone made about her antics:

It suggests an almost identical argumentative style as Vox Day's. And... what's this? Whoever made it used THAT photo. Like they even had a choice...

(At this juncture, one might also ask how someone so clearly camera-cozy appears on no other photo with a name to it?)

Just to be thorough, I then acquired Day's address, caught a Delta Airways flight and negotiated with his front door. Still no evidence. No one was home, not even in the safe behind his signed and framed Charles And Eddie tour poster.

Faster than one can say 'elaborate sock-puppet', I'll bet you're ahead of me on this.

"But," I hear you cry (actually, I don't hear you; it's just a cliched figure of speech) "why would Vox Day lie about having a classically attractive significant other? Why go to such lengths? And how can you possibly hear me, sat as I am by my computer on a whole other continent?"

Well, I'm not saying that. Not even slightly, not even in the face of the fact Vox Day has a reputation for manufacturing sock puppets and fake reviews.

But... hypothetically... why might he?

As well as his stodgy fantasy novels and by-the-numbers critiques of atheism, Mr Day has leaped on the 'game' cashcow-cum-bandwagon:  a burgeoning and lucrative business where some superficially charismatic, rohypnol-rattling 'dude' teaches us lesser men how to 'man up' and 'score perfect-ten chicks'

But--again, hypothetically--what if an 'alpha dude' had no 'perfect-ten chick'? Why, that'd be humiliating! But would he just stare into the mirror and consider oblivion? Heck no! He's the alpha-dude! He'd either go out and 'score' a dazzler or--and, boy, this is an uncharitable thought--construct a false inamorata with her own Twitter account and everything. Oh, and give her a name like 'Spacebunny' because a proper name might be checked.

Anyhoo...

Before Vox Day's minions (real and sockpuppety) pop up in here to burn me alive in a wicker model of their leader's phallus, I should add this post is no less spurious, cherry-picked and unscientific as anything on Vox Day's blog. Bullshit, it's technically called. But if Vox Day can say NK Jemesin isn't fully human, then I can say Vox Day's wife doesn't even fucking exist.

Follow up post here:  http://jamesworrad.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/kicking-against-pricks-thoughts-on-that.html?m

"You know, darling... I never did get what that last paragraph of Worrad's was about."

"Screw him, Ted. We have us. And Jesus. Jesus with a flaming broadsword."

The Peculiarly Lonely Task of Defending Mrs Dawkins

Yep, another day another Twitter drive-by.  I'm not proud of it (I swear!) and normally these days I wouldn't post it here or, well, anywhere.

But here's the thing. Mr Alan 'Bobo' Lynch flung his first filthy tweet here through the bars of his cage right in the middle of another Richard Dawkins brouhaha (Very probably unknowingly: I wouldn't credit the guy with riding any particular zeitgeist, only a garishly-painted collapsing car with twenty of his mates climbing out of it) that one of Dawkins's tweets kicked off.

You can find a good clear summary of the micro-blog skirmish here (You'll find me in the comments wasting people's time as per). In roughest summary it was about RD being sexist/racist or at the very least being perceived to be sexist/racist. To be embarrassingly honest I'm not confident enough to argue it either way. I don't have the noble pugnaciousness of a natural social progressive warrior and neither do I sit around in mens groups sniffing my comrades' armpits and screaming 'Misandry!' at anyone suggesting, y'know, that the world might just,  just, be biased toward men.

(Hopefully, this here post proves I'm not some zombie to every stroke of Richard Dawkins's keyboard either)

So I merely lurked, watching the acid and vim fly from the safety of my cyber-thicket. What I noticed was Alan Lynch's first tweet floating in the top twenty tweets concerning RD at that point in time. 'Mannn...' I thought, 'You are soooo going down, pal,' happy in the knowledge (at least) one of the social justice peeps would dispatch him with suitable humour.

I got on with my life then went back about two hours later to see him burn. Lynch was now in the top thirty; a drop, admittedly, but still (for whatever reason; I don't pretend to grasp how twitter works in its entirety) riding high in the charts. And wholly untouched. Like a bleedin' Ming vase in the Guggenheim in fact. And that's where I leaped in and lowered the tone. Well... someone had to.

B-b-b-but... what happened? Here was a clear-cut misogynist attacking a woman for her physical appearance slap-bang in the middle of a raging debate about whether someone else was being technically misogynist or not. Clearly it would be wrong of me to pick out any individual SJW for such flagrant dereliction of duty because, well, they might not have seen it. But when one considers possibly hundreds of SJWs were engaged with the subject of Dawkins--and Alan Lynch went unchallenged--one can't help but feel short changed, cheated even. That cliche about action in relation to words and all that.

(A part of me, an ugly cynical part, wonders whether if some, SOME, of the people challenging Dawkins moved over Lynch's mindburp and swiftly forgot about it because he was a temporary ally of sorts. Dawkins was the enemy, after all, and anyone who worked toward psychologically destabilizing Dawkins was all for the greater good, no matter their message.

Hey, I said it was an ugly part...)

Personally speaking, it drained the life out of proceedings. Suddenly, what had until recently been a collective of individuals perceptively harrying Dawkins's preconceptions became oddly akin to a chunk of hipsters saying 'Gawwwwd, RD ACTUALLY thinks Doolittle is The Pixies FIRST album!!! #LOL!!!'

It's not a massive #fail (to use a tired internet wit-prosthetic a moment) but it IS a #fail. Such soft-bellied complacency erodes us all and is symptomatic of assuming one always owns the moral high ground. Truth is, no one gets the deeds to any moral high ground. Rather, it has to be earned. And earned daily.

And you thought Spool Pidgin was piss-poor blogging!

An almost hypnotically cringeworthy article from the Huffington post. Grace Ellen Jones--a good fashion expert, something she should have kept to--seemingly hasn't learned from The Wire's Omar Little when he famously said- 'You come at the King, you better not miss'. I don't think she even tried to aim.



If you're gonna (very publicly) critique one of the most undisputed pieces of science ever, at least have the decency to actually read about it, not listen to what you're pals are mumbling at weed parties.



Quote- 'we are not actually the apex of human evolution, as Darwin's linear theory would have us believe.' 


Evolutionary theory does NOT claim this, not even slightly. There is no 'apex', no 'pinnacle' to evolution.



Then there's a bit about Neanderthals being our direct ancestors (Not true), 'incontrovertible' evidence human civilization is older than science say it is (Why let carbon dating get in the way of things, eh?), the generous use of the words 'quantum' and 'consciousness' (Bullshit's 'Get out of Jail Free' cards) and, before you know it, the Mayans and their bleedin' calendar arrive.



Now I'm not having a go at her lack of credentials, not at all (I don't have any either regarding evolution, just a classics degree). But if I had to write a critique about Alexander McQueen I'd at least have the decency to read his Wikipedia article, wouldn't you? It'd be the sensible thing, not to mention that it might just prevent me showing my ass to the internet at large.



I guess it's the Huffington Post I'm mad at. They should be more responsible than this, or at least tell Jones to do more research. I hate to say this, but even The Sun or The Daily Mail wouldn't print this. Is The HP simply incompetent, or might it be that putting 'Darwin was Wrong' as a title guarantees loads of irate comments, in turn generating revenue from advertising?

Precisely why I'm venting here and not over there. Apologies...