A stand for speech

Free speech must not be silenced. [Link]

Self-censoring out of fear means self-imposition of shari’a (Islamic law).

Self-censoring out of “respect” (actually just a euphemism for fear) means you are submitting to the terrorists’ worldview.

The way to overcome them in this instance is to overwhelm them with disrespect and mockery.

They can silence one magazine, but they can’t silence the entire Internet.

Every blogger, of every political stripe, be it left, right, and everywhere in between, needs to realize that freedom of speech and freedom of the press are the two keystones of your ideology, whatever it may be. You need to make a stand. You need to make these terrorists lose the ideological battle.

And the way to do that is to republish the Mohammed cartoons yourselves. Today. Right now.

Fill the world with images of Mohammed so that the terrorists realize they can never expunge them all.

But where to get the pictures? Easy.

The Mohammed Image Archive, which I have hosted at zombietime since the day of the original “Mohammed cartoon crisis” back in May of 2006, has not only a full collection of the original cartoons, but more importantly the largest collection of Mohammed imagery ever assembled in the history of the world.

High School Never Ends (in Sci-Fi)

One clique is angry that another clique has invaded it's secret clubhouse. The Hugo Awards. [Link]

A few days ago the finalists for the Hugo were announced. The Hugos are the big prestigious award for science fiction and fantasy. One of my books was a finalist for best novel. A bunch of other works that I recommended showed up in other categories. Because I’m an outspoken right winger, hilarity ensued.

Many of you have never heard of me before, but the internet was quick to explain to you what a horrible person I am. There have been allegations of fraud, vote buying, log rolling, and making up fake accounts. The character assassination has started as well, and my detractors posted and tweeted and told anyone who would listen about how I was a racist, a homophobe, a misogynist, a rape apologist, an angry white man, a religious fanatic, and how I wanted to drag homosexuals to death behind my pickup truck.

The libel and slander over the last few days have been so ridiculous that my wife was contacted by people she hasn’t talked to for years, concerned that she was married to such a horrible, awful, hateful, bad person, and that they were worried for her safety.

I wish I was exaggerating. Don’t take my word for it. My readers have been collecting a lot of them in the comments of the previous Hugo post and on my Facebook page. Plug my name into Google for the last few days. Make sure to read the comments to the various articles too. They’re fantastic.

Of course, none of this stuff is true, but it was expected. I knew if I succeeded I would be attacked. To the perpetually outraged the truth doesn’t matter, just feelings and narrative. I’d actually like to thank all of those people making stuff up about me because they are proving the point I was trying to make to begin with.

Allow me to explain why the presence of my slate on the Hugo nominations is so controversial. This is complicated and your time is valuable, so short explanation first, longer explanation if you care after.

Short Version:

1. I said a chunk of the Hugo voters are biased toward the left, and put the author’s politics far ahead of the quality of the work. Those openly on the right are sabotaged. This was denied.
2. So I got some right wingers on the ballot.
3. The biased voters immediately got all outraged and mobilized to do exactly what I said they’d do.
4. Point made.

I’ve said for a long time that the awards are biased against authors because of their personal beliefs. Authors can either cheer lead for left wing causes, or they can keep their mouth shut. Open disagreement is not tolerated and will result in being sabotaged and slandered. Message or identity politics has become far more important than entertainment or quality. I was attacked for saying this. I knew that when an admitted right winger got in they would be maligned and politicked against, not for the quality of their art but rather for their unacceptable beliefs.

If one of us outspoken types got nominated, the inevitable backlash, outrage, and plans for their sabotage would be very visible. So I decided to prove this bias and launched a campaign I called Sad Puppies (because boring message fiction is the leading cause of Puppy Related Sadness).

The Hugos are supposed to be about honoring the best works, and many of the voters still take this responsibility very seriously. I thank them for this. But basically the Hugos are a popularity contest decided by the attendees of WorldCon. I am a popular writer, however my fans aren’t typical WorldCon attendees. Anyone who pays to purchase a WorldCon membership is allowed to vote. Other writers, bloggers, and even publishing houses have encouraged their fans to get involved in the nomination process before. I simply did the same thing. This controversy arises only because my fans are the wrong kind of fans.

For the people saying that I bought votes, or made up fake people, or bought memberships for a couple hundred imaginary relatives, nope. For those saying I committed fraud, put up or shut up. That would be extremely easy to prove if it were the case. I’ve been up front and public the whole time. Sadly, the thing which has so damaged your calm consisted of a few blog posts and I drew a cartoon. And I’m a terrible artist: http://monsterhunternation.com/2014/01/14/sad-puppies-2-the-illustrated-edition/

Eventually one of my friends colored the cartoon in PhotoShop and one of my fans thought it was funny and made a video. Sorry, outrage crowd. No big evil conspiracy. An evil right winger is treading in your sacred halls because of this:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzGKlOkQsxY

I mean, seriously, my spokesman was a manatee. No. I’m not making that up. So Sad Puppies 2: Rainbow Puppy Lighthouse The Huggening got my fans involved. Really, that was what we called it. Because writing is such a serious business.

Even last year’s winner, John Scalzi, has said that I did nothing different than what he and other authors have done before. And Scalzi and I seldom agree on anything. Tor.com wrote a scathing bit condemning my actions (and implied what a horrid writer I am). Of course, the very same website did the exact same thing explaining to Wheel of Time fans how the rules allowed them to nominate all 14 books as a single work and encouraged them to get involved. And a cursory Google search by my fans found dozens of other places where authors, reviewers, and bloggers had pushed their favorite works and tried to get fans involved.

We always hear about how fandom is supposed to be inclusive… Only apparently my fans are the wrong kind of fans. They don’t care about the liberal cause of the day. They don’t care about Social Justice. They like their books entertaining rather than preachy. They probably vote incorrectly. That sort of thing.

The last few days have been kind of awesome. I said that for the Hugo’s the writer’s politics were more important than the quality of their work. I was called a liar. Yet, within a couple of hours of the announcement there were multiple posts from the other side where groups of SJWs were strategizing how to make sure No Award beat me, and how to punish every other artist I recommended as well. Others were complaining that the rules needed to be changed to keep the undesirables out. All of this was while they proudly bragged how they had not read me, nor ever would… because tolerance. Hell if I know.

For those who have heard that I’m a terrible, undeserving writer whose mere presence is a mockery of their sacred system, but haven’t read any of my books, I’m actually pretty decent. Feel free to judge for yourself. For the record, my novel that is nominated, Warbound, is the final book in a trilogy that has sold extremely well, been translated into a bunch of other languages where it has also done well, gotten tons of positive reviews (out of the thousands of reviews for this series from across all the various different places I’m still at 4 ½ stars) won and been nominated for other awards, is one of the bestselling and most praised audiobook series there is, has won two Audies, is currently nominated for a third, and been a finalist for best novel in other countries where I don’t speak the language and can’t campaign, so there is that…

But everybody knows bad people can’t create art, says the side that keeps showering Roman Polanski with awards.

In closing, I would really like everybody who is a voting member of WorldCon to actually read the works in each category and vote based upon which ones they think are best. I fully expect Wheel of Time to win my category of best novel. It is a fourteen book epic written by two authors over twenty six years. Duh.

Personally, my goal has been reached. I got the thought police to show the world their pretty pink panties. :)

Why do some liberals have so much hate for black conservatives?

Because they are only interested in diversity of appearance, not diversity of thought. [Link]

There is a disgraceful double standard amongst liberals, particularly those in academia, in the hatred they direct at black conservatives.

We saw this last April when the conservative neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson was forced to step down as a Commencement Speaker for Johns Hopkins University (where he ably served as the head of pediatric neurosurgery).

Liberals on the Hopkins campus mobilized against Carson because he criticized President Obama’s health care reform law and said that he opposed gay marriage.

I am not a conservative but I have spoken out for years against the staggering amount blind hatred directed at black conservatives by liberals.

Liberals are shockingly quick to demean and dismiss brilliant black people like Rice, Carson, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, U.S. Senator Tim Scott (R-SC), Professor Walter E. Williams and economist Thomas Sowell because they don’t fit into the role they have carved out for a black person in America.

Black Americans must be obedient liberals on all things or risk being called a race traitor or an Uncle Tom.

I’ve experienced some of this vitriol firsthand when I have veered by liberal orthodoxy. I wrote about it in my book “Muzzled – the Assault on Honest Debate.”

This shunning of Rice is especially troubling coming from a great American university. This is the place where debate and dissenting views are to be valued as sacred.

Rutgers’s own university mission statement says that one of its goals is to produce students who perform “public service in support of the needs of the citizens of the state and its local, county, and state governments.”

How is the public served by muzzling one of the most thoughtful, accomplished and respected political voices of her time just because she happens to be a Republican?

Doe the Rutgers University faculty really have so little faith in the students they are about to graduate that they think are incapable of hearing opposing views and making up their own minds?

You could feel the disappointment

When it turned out the Boston bombers were Islamic radicals. [Link]

Liberal hopes were dashed with the revelation that the Boston Marathon bombers were a couple of Chechen Muslim immigrants.  The Left was so sure they had finally bagged the elusive Tea Party murderer!  The bombings occurred in Boston on Tax Day.  Surely, at long last, the opportunity to smear libertarians, small-government conservatives, anti-tax crusaders, and the whole hellish tri-corner hat crowd was at hand!  ”Two plus two equals…?” Michael Moore burbled happily, retreating back into his copious shell of sub-human idiocy when the answer turned out to be “Islam.”

That’s how the junior member of the bombing team, Dzhokar Tsarnaev, explained his “outlook” on an Internet profile.  Family and friends talk of the brothers growing more intensely involved in the stricter aspects of their religion over the past few years.  The older brother, Tamerlan – named after a brutal Islamic conqueror from centuries past – seems to have led the way, with Dzhokar trotting after him like a “puppy.”  Somewhere along the way, they became radicalized – a process that will be of great interest to investigators in the weeks ahead.

Substitute the Tea Party for Islam, and liberals would be hitting the floor in a swoon of ecstasy today, their every fantasy about the adversaries of Big Government joyously fulfilled.  The Internet would groan beneath the weight of their blog posts and op-eds.  And it’s not hard to imagine various officials of the Obama Administration egging them on, linking the bombers to everything from the defeat of gun-control legislation to sequestration.  (Well, they’re already trying to connect the bombing to sequestration – at one point, Nancy Pelosi’s Threepio unit, Steny Hoyer, explicitly blamed the loss of life on those brutal sequester “cuts.”  The difference is that the terrorists themselves would ostensibly have been inspired by sequestration, seeking to finish the work Republicans started by insisting on a 1.8 percent reduction in the growth of government spending instead of more tax hikes.)

Every Republican would become an accessory to the bombings.  They would be expected to offer ritual denunciation of Boston Marathon attacks every day, for months to come.  Then they would be presented with lively figures from the outer edges of non-violent conservatism, and expected to denounce them, too.  Anything less would be tacit acceptance of the “climate of hate” that could lead to more murders.  Voodoo dolls from closer and closer to the mainstream of conservative thought would then be chosen for these denunciation rituals, presenting Republican political leaders with an increasingly difficult choice between meeting the expectations of the liberal media, and alienating their voters.  We saw a dry run of all this when liberals invented their “climate of hate” out of then air to link the Tucson shooter to their political enemies.  Back then, two plus two was supposed to equal Sarah Palin and her bullseye-festooned electoral map.

The embarrassing failure of their “climate of hate” Tucson hysteria didn’t stop the Left from doing exactly the same thing last week, and last week’s narrative implosion won’t stop them from trying it again next time.  Sooner or later, one of these maniacs will turn out to be someone who doesn’t like ObamaCare!  There’s no practical reason for liberals to stop running this game; they pay no real price for getting it wrong.  Dzhokar Tsarnaev celebrated Barack Obama’s re-election online, but he could easily restart the entire liberal Climate of Hate greenhouse-gas system by casually remarking to his interrogators that he’s thought it over, and now really wishes Mitt Romney had won.  Do not for one moment doubt how quickly that would unleash a tidal wave of triumphant “aha, we knew it!” blog posts from the same people who got the “Tax Day bombing” smear wrong.

It's almost like they have an agenda

The media seems to keep expecting every violent lunatic to be a Tea Partier. They keep being proven wrong. [Link]

It started with Bill Sparkman, the part-time Census worker who went missing and then was found dead, setting off an avalanche of mainstream media and left-blogosphere accusations that he was the victim of anti-government “right-wing” hate.  It turned out that Sparkman killed himself, but there were few if any apologies coming.

The Sparkman accusations were based on nothing more than a desire to demonize the newly formed and rapidly growing Tea Party movement as terrorists and un-American.  It was as if theywere hoping for an act of Tea Party violence.

Yet there was a theory behind the madness, the Eliminationist Narrative created by Dave Neiwart of Crooks and Liars about an “eliminationist” radical right seeking to dehumanize and eliminate political opposition.  It was a play on the over-used narrative of Richard Hofstadter’s “paranoid style” in American politics.

The Eliminationist Narrative was aided and abetted by an abuse of the term “right-wing” to include groups who are the opposite of conservatism and the Tea Party movement.

In the case of Sparkman, the accusations were just Another Failed Eliminationist Narrative.  And the Eliminationist Narrative would fail time and time again:

• James Holmes
• Jared Loughner
• The Cabby Stabber
• The “killer” of Bill Sparkman
• Amy Bishop
• The Fort Hood Shooter
• The IRS Plane Crasher
• The Pentagon Shooter

We can now add the Boston Marathon Bombing to the pile.  The wild speculation that there was a Tea Party or “right-wing” connection proved false.

It turns out two Muslim Chechens apparently inspired by jihadist videos and ideology turned on the country which welcomed them with open arms.

Just another Failed Eliminationist Narrative, for which there will be no apologies.

Illegal Aliens still illegal, still alien

No matter what the AP stylebook says. [Link]

So what in the heck are AP writers supposed to say? “Specify wherever possible how someone entered the country illegally and from where. Crossed the border? Overstayed a visa? What nationality?” Um, this seems a bit unwieldy,AP. If I want to say: “we should not count illegal immigrants among the uninsured in this country because their lack of insurance is an immigration issue, not a health care issue,” how am I supposed to rewrite that by referring to how the people entered and from where and whether they overstayed a visa?

Basically, the idea is to make the concept so unwieldy that you banish it from the discourse, using control over language to change the terms of the debate.

Are you here legally? No, you are here illegally.
Are you a citizen? No, you are an alien.

This is all about changing the language so it becomes impossible to discuss issues that are now considered verboten by all 'right thinking people'.