fridgepunk: A sign on garrus' back reading "Shoot a rocket into my ugly stupid face" (Pony Jerusalem)
Wow, the Scottish Football Writer's Association is full of complete bastards, glad I don't have anything to do with them /wryface

One of the reasons why I haven't been doing much on dreamwidth over the past few months was that I got distracted by shinies elsewhere and didn't have the emotional energy to say much on people's stuff (largely because it would have come out as largely "YOU GUYS ARE GREAT DON'T BE SAD YOU ARE AWSUM I LOVE YOU GUYS DAAWWWWWWW{{{{{{youguys}}}}}}" and I'm apparently too english or too jewish to feel able to do that in public.

One of the shinies that comes to mind reading the Elder of Scotch Football Writer fandom is a cool place that's worth checking out if you have the spoons/forks/sporks to put up with the stuff they document; Shit Reddit Says (SRS).

Basically all Shit Reddit Says does is find comments on other high traffic reddit subforums (henceforth to be referred to as "subs" or "subreddits") that are 1) nasty as fuck in a misogynistic, classist, racist, ablist, transphobic, homophobic etc... and 2) have been given at least 10 upvotes by other redditors.

people on SRS then repost these comments, with links to them and generally how many upvotes they got, and then the rest of the people on SRS see these, and start mocking them in the thread created in the SRS sub.

They have strict rules about "touching the poop", i.e. going over to the original comment and mocking it there, and very strict rules about upvoting/downvoting these comments - the strct theory SRS runs off of is that it's a "museum of poop, do not touch the exhibits", so all the mockery takes place in the well moderated venue of SRS rather than the rest of reddit.

This sounds pretty innocuous right? Pointing and laughing at fools in a subfora that fools have to do out of their way to find?

Well the mere existence of SRS has prompted at present count 5 dedicated subreddits run by misogynistic, racist, homophobic and frequently pedophilic (not joking about that btw) trolls and try hards who are dedicated to combating the "censorship" and "attacks against the foundations of reddit itself" that SRS supposedly does.

Can't think why I should be reminded of that when reading up on the SFWA, oh right.

For the full documenting of the irony involved in this let me just point out:

Many of the people kvetching and moaning in those threads are the same people who kvetched and moaned about the damage to public discourse caused by "anonymous" critics who "don't have to risk their real identity by connecting it to what they say". These same people are of course deathly afraid of public criticism and are hiding in private fora lest they get teased for their honestly held views.

Jerry Pournelle was one of the 70% of SFWA who, after Lem criticised Philip Jose Farmer's writing and, along with Phillip K Dick, was responsible for Stanislav Lem being kicked out of the scottish football writers association. Phillip K Dick at least had the excuse of being an unmedicated paranoid schizophrenic who thought Lem was stealing monies from him by being involved in the unlicensed production of polish versions of Dick's books, and also Dick apologised for this misconception later on so it's hard to begrudge him too much for that, PJFarmer is a snotty git though and always will be.

Pournelle on the other hand went on record, after Ursula K LaGuin criticised this literally reprisal against Lem for his criticism of western science fiction, wanted Lem out of SFWA because:
Lem was Polish;
Polish people are different (and all devout communists, back in the day);
Therefore Pournelle wanted Lem out of the SFWA.
(Lem being a far better writer of hard science fiction, and fiction in general, probably didn't help)

And of course Pournelle's never apologised for that, and in fact argues to this day that it was really because of a technicality in the SFWA's bylaws that got Lem kicked out... because apologising would require humility or a sense of decency or selfwareness or a functioning brain that isn't filled with the swirling phantasms of demoniacal environmentalists maliciously hugging trees and thereby impeding the development of human spaceflight.

But remember that; Jerry Pournelle is on record as saying that you can get kicked out of the SFWA for technicalities caused by SFWA's leadership having to operate per a Rules-As-Written reading of the SFWA's bylaws, but not for violating those bylaws in the way Beale recently has because...

Of course I'm being facetious there; Anyone who knows Pournelle knows that he doesn't want Beale to be kicked out because Beale violated the SFWA's bylaws in a way that involved Beale's white supremicist views, and kicking him out would obviously have a rather chilling effect upon Pournelle and his own public stating of white supremicist views, and ultimately Pournelle looks after Pournelle, ergo; THIS IS THE CENSORSHIP-SHOAH!

That the people trying to get beale kicked out of SFWA are very carefully linking it to his flagrant abuse of the twitter retweeting service doesn't matter to them because they aren't listening to anyone... not even to themselves!

Take for instance the way that, in amongst all that whining and the beardhurt about how being politely criticised for your actual opinions is a fate worse than the shoah, you ALSO get the defense of con-groping and editor James Frankel's harassment of Elise Mattheson, because sexual harassment of female writers is fine, but CRITICISM!? My word, they're as different in severity as night and day! (which is technically true, but those fools have their polarities mixed up).

And of course there's the ur-irony in amongst all of this: Beale ran for president of SFWA on a plank that included removing the right of female members to vote in SFWA election - so we literally have a guy on one side, who wants non-white members of SFWA to shut up because he believes that they're not as evolved as white people like him are and thus have no right to speak aloud in public, and this guy furthermore campaigned on a literally policy of having taxation of female members of the SFWA while depriving them of representation and a voice in SFWA elections... and the censors are the people who are publically criticial of him? - They're not trying to take away his ability to say things out loud, and even if he was kicked out of the SFWA, he'd have his membership monies refunded for the loss of membership privileges (and membership is a literal privilege, not a right).

But the REAL censors are the people trying to get him kicked out who are being very careful to get him kicked out for the right reasons so as not to create a chilling effect from setting a dodgy precendent.

Like say if an honourary member had been kicked out for being too foreign for Jerry Pournelle's liking.




("clown car of fail" tag stolen shamelessly from Solarbird's post on this subject)
fridgepunk: A sign on garrus' back reading "Shoot a rocket into my ugly stupid face" (Pony Jerusalem)
One of the more interesting facets of the current american election cycle is just how little enthusiasm the vast inhuman republican party machine has for its designated candidate.

It adds a certain ludicrousness to events, especially when that negatively enthused inhuman party machine has to produce pro-romney guff. And remember that there are literally employment contracts that legally require the various human vacuum tubes in the republican political machine to fluff Romney.

Which I assume is why someone writes nonsense like this:

It is a curious scientific fact (explained in evolutionary biology by the Trivers-Willard hypothesis — Willard, notice) that high-status animals tend to have more male offspring than female offspring, which holds true across many species, from red deer to mink to Homo sap. The offspring of rich families are statistically biased in favor of sons — the children of the general population are 51 percent male and 49 percent female, but the children of the Forbes billionaire list are 60 percent male. Have a gander at that Romney family picture: five sons, zero daughters. Romney has 18 grandchildren, and they exceed a 2:1 ratio of grandsons to granddaughters (13:5). When they go to church at their summer-vacation home, the Romney clan makes up a third of the congregation. He is basically a tribal chieftain.


I've skipped over the bits where the writer, in a rather convoluted attempt to deny the existence of granny shaggers, explicitly calls Mitt Romney a bishop. Because wut.

But the evo-psychical bit was what caught my eye. For those who don't know, the Trivers-Willard hypothesis is the one that runs from the observation that red deer does in "good condition" (read: better fed/lower parasite load than their peers, which in some species thereby donates the higher social status of the animal) tend to give birth to disproportionately more male offspring than female – a fact that then leads to a supposition that this is an evolved trait, wherein successful mothers essentially zerg rush their genes across the local population via male offspring, who can obviously get multiple partners pregnant while female mammals experience a reproductive bottle neck due to the biological fact of pregnancy.

The trouble of course in applying all this to humans, especially to a human who believes that all sexual relationships should happen within marriages and also that marriage is naturally and normally only between one man and one woman, is of course the issue of gender.

Note that in my explanation of the Trivers-Willard Hypothesis, I've talked in terms of male and female animals while the vacuum-tube is instead rather coy about specifying the sex of the "high status" animals who give birth preferentially to male children... because obviously it's female animals that actually provide evidence for the Trivers-Willard Hypothesis, in large part because zoologists have a hard time verifying the paternity of animals while the maternity is obvious. But so married to his weird attempt to gve "scientific" support for this notion that Mitt Romney possesses superlatively manly virility, that not only do we get this weird sexless discussion of breeding patterns when the sexes of the breeders in question matters quite a lot, but that this all then leads into an assertion that Mitt Romney, in some Kronar-esque (nsfw) fashion, has given birth to 5 sons.

The slight problem is that, as with any other attempt by republican pundits to find a criteria by which to judge Romney and find him acceptable to vote for (not an easy task when core republican voters are fundamentalist protestants and their candidate is a wooden mormon), you hit the snag that there is always someone nearby who better fits whatever criteria you try to make Mittens Romney fit, with left-conservatism or mormonism it was Huntsman, with business history and sheer unashamed "I am a rich man and that's great"-titude it was Herman Cain, for woman hating funditarianism it was Santorum, for "generic republican candidate"-titude it was Perry, for political experience it was Bachmann, and for reproductive and sheer Boss-dominance it is of course Ann Romney.

Because remember; The logic here is that the number of male children = dominance BECAUSE, evopsych says that dominant females give birth to more male offspring, and remembering from evolutionary biology 101 that male offspring are ultimately nothing but competition for their still fertile fathers, evopsych logic dictates that male doms should produce more female offspring if they had control of sex ratio. However, as the female of the species is the one detirmining the sex of the offspring, and as the social position of the mother is what ultimately detirmines the sex ratio of offspring, the only mechanism by which fathers could affect the sex ratio is to so thoroughly dominate their female mates that they actually cause their mates to experience a loss in social standing that makes them preferentially produce girls.*

Which leads us to my main counter-point to the vacuum tube's piece:

Ann Romney is the Alpha Mammal of the Romney household and Mitt Romney is her omega bitch.

Now there's no actual proof for that point, but it's a scientific fact. This means however that no woman would ever vote for Mitt Romney, for as evopsych emeritas John Norman makes clear; women need to be dominated by males and find submissive/socially inferior males detestable.

Obama by contrast, with his all female progeny, is clearly the alpha male of not just the Obama household, but also the United States of America (and clearly is stealing Michelle's food).

But the evopsych logic doesn't stop there, oh no no, for you see, Ann Romney has had FIVE male offspring, and as five is a larger number than two (at least until Sarah Palin becomes president in 2016), this means that if Ann Romney were to run for president, she is mathematically guarunteed to be so superior to Obama as to have an actual chance at winning if the criteria that determined presidential elections were in fact intrarelationship dominance, unlike her wimpy husband, who I feel I have shown will, scientifically speaking, find himself compelled by his weak biology to phone Obama up come november and submissively urinating on himself over the phone as his way of accepting defeat.

* at this point I need to step out of "character" here and make it clear that while that line of reasoning does seem to provide an evopsych reason for guys being negging jerks to women (even if it actually argues against the whole "women prefer jerks" thing), the problem is that the Trivers-Willard hypothesis runs from the "condition" of the breeders rather than the "status", condition just correlates closely enough with status in some species that you can conflate the two if you particularly want to be sloppy, like I in fact do in this instance. Evopsych logic means that, in reality, if the trivers-willard hypothesis was a major detirminant of human psycho-sexual issues we'd actually see both men and women innately attracted to parasite infested starving waifs with no teeth. SO MY FETISHES ARE EXPLAINED AND EVERYONE ELSE IS THE WEIRDO Y'HEAR *gets back to masturbating to medical reports of people with consumption*
fridgepunk: A sign on garrus' back reading "Shoot a rocket into my ugly stupid face" (Team Hannibal)
VOTE LIBDEM NAOW!

SLOTH: THE DEADLIEST OF SINS

Originating BBC story & Picture

(and yes, I know the composition sucks)

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