Vindication

It seems like a long, long time ago that Worldcon banned Jon del Arroz for "racist and bullying behavior," an intentionally vague catch-all term for everything outside the Death Cult's influence. Despite living in a cynical age, many people are credulous when it comes to this kind of thing. All it takes is an accusation and the court of public opinion will skip the trial and go straight to the sentencing. Cultural incentives favor consent by silence. To object has the feel of declaring war, for control based on falsehood faces an existential threat from the truth.

The very public and humiliating announcement was no straightforward case of disassociation. (People are free to choose who they want to be around. That's a fundamental human right.) It was a de facto fatwa placed on Jon's livelihood. Nowadays you don't have to behead someone to be rid of them. You just have to coordinate a consensus among the commissars that any who choose to transact with a "racist and bullying" person is guilty by association. Effectively starving that person to death.

It goes without saying the charges were without merit. Rather than sit down and mutter to himself in the shadows to which he'd been banished, Jon fought back and defended his good name. It took over 3 years of wrangling in the California court system, but he finally got a retraction and an apology.

Worldcon also ponied up $4,000 in damages, a paltry sum compared to the lost book sales that come from wrecking an up-and-coming writer's career.

We call this vindication. If I were Gina Carano, I'd have my lawyers draft suit against Lucasfilm immediately. Their charge against her, "social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities," is similarly bogus.

The Wild West has the reputation, among modernity's supposed moral betters, of being violent and uncivilized. What will future generations say about the slanderous social media culture of 2021? At least in the Wild West men had recourse via fists or guns when others defamed their character. This encouraged grudging respect among rivals. Nowadays there are hardly any consequences. Slander and libel are notoriously difficult to prove in American civil courts. Not coincidentally, they are the Death Cult's go-to weapons in crushing their enemies.

Thanks to Jon, maybe they'll think twice before pulling that trigger.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like science fiction, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

UPDATE: Jon takes a well-deserved victory lap:

The competition for authority

When you hear cancel culture apologists say "It's just a song" or "It's just a statue," understand that works both ways. If it's just a song, why the uproar in the first place?

The cancel mob chooses its targets to make the public's compromise, and eventual capitulation, as painless as possible. They want the authority to issue decrees, authority which can only be granted by public consent. The idea is to convince people they're consenting to something small, when in fact they're consenting to being controlled. Have you noticed the ubiquitous statement about "more work to be done" is attached to every announced compromise? It's another way of saying the mob's next maneuvers are to be determined.

The object of the mob's wrath is irrelevant, so a debate on the merits of whether something is "bad" also is irrelevant. When someone makes a factual claim in the form of an accusation, just say "I don't believe you." It disarms them of their claim to authority.

In the long run, I expect the University of Texas to capitulate to activists calling the alma mater racist. The only reason they haven't yet is many rich alumni have put their foot down and said the alma mater is not racist. The presence of a competing truth claim, backed by money, has left UT in limbo. The administrators are waiting for either side to relinquish their claim. This is narrative warfare's version of cold war. Who can bear the social costs of their claim longer will win. If, or when, UT gives up its alma mater, it will admit that it is a racist institution that requires works of redemption to be saved. The activists will dictate what those works look like.

Universities are notoriously weak. Against individuals the mob is hit and miss. Comic book artist Jeffrey Scott Campbell clapped back against people who criticized his drawings on ideological grounds. The hysteria he generated by disagreeing with the grounds for criticism was something to behold. Denied authority over Campbell's artistic style, Kevin Norman posted a lengthy thread justifying himself.

As silly as cutting off people over so small a thing looks, I believe no one is above this sentiment. There's nothing in our nature that compels us to share space with people we disagree with. I don't mean minor disagreements; I mean the kind of disagreement where one person calls the other a bigot. No friendship or union can withstand that level of enmity. When that happens, it's practical to retreat to opposite corners. Free men must be allowed to associate with whom they want.

Where options proliferate in a large, competitive space, the sorting is easy. Campbell draws his comic books and readers buy them or they don't. If someone doesn't like him, there are other artists to patronize. Where options are limited in a small, noncompetitive space, pray for God's mercy and His glory to be revealed to all.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like sci-fi, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

Authors, moral purity, and freedom of association

I never met someone who read a Philip Roth novel, let alone liked one. But I've never been to cocktail party on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, either. Roth wrote neurotic, self-absorbed books steeped in the post-war era's listlessness and secular disfunction. As with many books that fly high on the back of the temporal zeitgeist, his aged terribly.

Vanity Fair reports on a rape scandal embroiling Roth's biographer, his publisher, and The New York Times. Anyone with passing knowledge of the way the Times functions as cheerleader for academia and the literati shouldn't be surprised.

Last week The New York Times advanced upon allegations of sexual harassment and assault in The Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate and the Los Angeles Times against Philip Roth biographer Blake Bailey with an account from Valentina Rice, a 47-year-old publishing executive who alleges Bailey raped her in 2015 while they were both staying at the home of Times book critic Dwight Garner. The story raised eyebrows, and not just because W.W. Norton, Bailey’s publisher, had halted the shipping of the long-awaited book in response to the allegations leveled against the author by Rice and several former students (Bailey denies any wrongdoing).

It was particularly striking that one of the alleged sexual assaults took place at the home of one of the most prominent book critics in America, one employed by the very paper disclosing the previously unreported accusation. All of which came after weeks of its copious—and often, though not always, glowing—coverage leading up to Bailey’s release. The Times’ level of promotion wasn’t unusual for a book positioned as a serious literary biography—and especially one about the late Roth, who represents a kind of fantasy of what it meant to belong to a certain generation of American male novelists—but the paper’s own scoop inevitably raised questions of who knew what and when.

If this excerpt of Portnoy's Complaint's Wikipedia entry is anything to go by, I firmly reject what it means to belong to Roth's generation of American male novelists:

Roth had begun work on Portnoy's Complaint in 1967, before publication of his novel When She Was Good that year. The piece had its genesis in a satirical monologue Roth had written to accompany a slide show proposed for inclusion in the risqué revue Oh! Calcutta! that would focus on the sexual organs of the rich and famous.

While the slide show would never come to fruition, Roth found part of the accompanying monologue about masturbation salvageable. Roth re-fashioned the material for the novel and sold a chapter of the book, entitled "Whacking Off", to Partisan Review. Progress on the novel was slow because Roth was suffering from writer's block relating to his ex-wife, Margaret Martinson, and the unpleasant notion that any royalties generated by the novel would have to be split equally with her. In May 1968, Martinson was killed in a car crash in Central Park. Roth's writer's block lifted and, following Martinson's funeral, he traveled to the Yaddo literary retreat to complete the manuscript.

This is what passes for erudite entertainment to the gatekeepers of popular entertainment, at least at the time. Protective of its legacy, the NYT spares no expense boosting Roth and acolytes like Bailey with gusto.

One of the hundreds of people who bought the book before the ban hammer dropped took to Twitter to ask whether it was permissible to read it.

Start with asking why you're reading the book in the first place. If it's because you want to ingratiate yourself to a certain crowd, spare yourself. That world is leaving Roth behind.

As for the issue of whether you should engage in commerce with someone who did something bad, this is one of the great quandaries of our time, isn't it? If you're looking for a writer who passes a moral purity test, stop looking. He doesn't exist. To read anything, you must reconcile yourself to reading the works of sinners, including yours truly. On this, as usual Paul had a wise take:

I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people—not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world. But now I am writing to you that you must not associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or slanderer, a drunkard or swindler. Do not even eat with such people.

The key difference being a brother in Christ has heard the gospel and assented to its teachings. He knows better yet continues to live in sin, wilfully opposing the truth. I would say if Bailey shows wilful opposition to what he knows is right, as opposed to the occasional moral failings of a man whose flesh predisposes him to sin, it's permissible to refuse to read him on those grounds.

On the other hand, we saw "she who must not be named" almost lose her book deal because of her studied observation of the immutability of sex. Her defense of her stance was definitely wilful. People with a different epistemological view of reality were justified in refusing to engage in commerce with her.

That doesn't mean I think they're right or that I don't want their minds to change. All it means is they appropriately applied their conscience in accordance with what they believe, as I also reserve the right to do.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like sci-fi that is most assuredly not like Philip Roth, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

Your hill to defend

After I went running last night, you know what I did while waiting for my pulse to come down and the sweat on my forehead to dry? I sat in my office chair and watched an hour of Looney Tunes' Pepe le Pew. Next week I'll get around to watching Gone with the Wind. The only reason I borrowed these DVDs from the library is I expect I won't be able to watch them in the future. Our commissars drove the amorous French skunk who made children laugh from polite society last month for violating their current year sensibilities. HBO Max—"the world's worst streaming service" according to Christopher Nolan—temporarily removed Gone with the Wind before restoring it with humiliating commentary videos to put the movie "in context." If Gone with the Wind is indeed guilty of what it stands accused of, there's only one acceptable outcome to the commissars: digital death.

I don't want to get into why I despise the cleansing of legacy IPs from cultural memory, or the many ways it exemplifies a decadent society. The point is our house is on fire, and there's a limited amount of time to save our things before it collapses. Pepe le Pew went from the subject of a throwaway line in a C-list New York Times column to cut from the Space Jam sequel in 5 days. While many of us were hearing about the latest outrage and having a good laugh, corporate board members at Warner Bros. were holding crisis meetings. As usual, they listened to the loudest voices and those most privileged by supposed grievances. At least in Nineteen Eighty-Four Two Minutes Hate ended after 2 minutes. Now the object of cathartic scorn disappears forever, or else limps along on used DVDs that you can't resell on eBay without being added to the no-fly list.

So, 5 days is the new benchmark for a legacy IP to be revived from relative obscurity only to be figuratively burned at the stake. Away from the culture war front, the conflagration is slower moving. Sony's online Playstation 3 and PSP stores are going away this summer, which means a lot of people are going to be buying external hard drives to keep their games.

The situation reminds me of early electric cars being designed to tap backup gas tanks in case the engine battery ran out of juice. If gas is a more reliable backup, why bother with an electric battery in the first place? The same could be said of Cloud storage versus owning physical media. Why bother with the Cloud when you can upload a game from a CD-ROM onto your computer plus any computer you own in the future?

The answer is convenience, but not on the customer's part. I'm a supply-sider, which means I believe the market is pushed not by what people want, but by what producers offer consumers. It's more convenient for producers to maintain a direct pipeline into your home, to feed you games, music, TV, and movies on-demand. That pipeline is a single point of failure. In the back of our minds we may have understood the inherent flaw of the system, but only recently have we come to grips with what it really means: the erasure of cultural memory.

JD Cowan, take it away:

As download speeds got faster and hard drives got bigger, so did the possibilities grow. Physical sales of media dropped year after year, eventually ending up with music more or less stranded on digital download services with no other option for purchase. Unless you were quirky enough to get a vinyl release, finding CDs had gone out of style with the death of rock music. And this is before getting to the downgrade that is streaming.

Everything changed in a small handful of years, but nobody realized how much it had until much later. Some of us still don't see it, and won't until they wake up without access to a digital library that had been turned off by the license holder. We've walked into a situation that many think is a dream but is actually a nightmare scenario.

You don't actually own anything anymore. Most won't even notice or care until they get their rude awakening. We will keep paying corporations to make things more convenient, and yet far inferior, to what came before.

They can't take from you what you physically own. It's convenient to retcon the digital space; it's harder to burn books for real.

Maintain a personal library. Include things you enjoy as well as timeless classics. Make a habit of raiding yard sales and resale shops. (Amazon is part of the problem, but it's also part of the solution. I get a lot of physical media there that I can't find locally.) Be discerning, lest you fill your garage to the ceiling with stuff you'll never look at. Don't forget to save something for your kids. This is your hill to defend.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like sci-fi, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

Panopticon

The best system of control is self-administered. The most oppressive system of control is administered by the public, deputized by earthly powers. The former spurs on a passion for righteousness, the latter a passion for conformity.

A hallmark of the present age is that you can be photographed at any time in public. No matter how cordial your interactions with strangers, no matter how ethical you are, you will make an embarrassing mistake. It's inevitable.

The decontextualized images of your mistake get beamed across the planet to millions of people, who get a dopamine kick out of mocking and scorning you. An Internet sleuth doxxes you, and you're stripped of personhood and cast out of polite society. That one mistake now defines you. You are now a cautionary tale to the rest of the world: Don't let your guard down for one minute, or your life may be turned upside-down.

Does that sound like a free society or a prison?

The panopticon is a type of institutional building and a system of control designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept of the design is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single security guard, without the inmates being able to tell whether they are being watched.

Although it is physically impossible for the single guard to observe all the inmates' cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched means that they are motivated to act as though they are being watched at all times. Thus, the inmates are effectively compelled to regulate their own behaviour.

I can't think of a better way to divide people than weaponizing technology to enforce conformity. A society cannot withstand attack when its members are atomized thus by fear and suspicion. They will be like sheep to the slaughter.

If the Second Amendment can be restricted by the state, a strong argument can be made for restricting available technology until the people demonstrate the discipline to peacefully wield it.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like hard sci-fi, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

An unlikely hero

In mad times, unlikely heroes emerge.

In a joint statement, Fisher, Davies and Jónsdóttir said that following Rowling’s recent intervention on transgender rights, they had asked the agency “to reaffirm their commitment to transgender rights and equality”. However, following private talks, they said: “We felt that they were unable to commit to any action that we thought was appropriate and meaningful.”

As a result, the writers felt unable to continue to be represented by the agency, adding: “Freedom of speech can only be upheld if the structural inequalities that hinder equal opportunities for underrepresented groups are challenged and changed.”

In its response, the Blair Partnership said it took pride in the diversity of views represented by their authors but it could not compromise on the “fundamental freedom” of allowing authors the right to express their thoughts and beliefs.

A spokeswoman said it would always champion diverse voices and believe in freedom of speech for all but it was not willing to have staff “re-educated” to meet the demands of a small group of clients.

So the four writers, one of whom remained anonymous, don't see the contradiction between compelling speech in support of a cause and freedom of speech? This pretzel logic is what comes of worldly ideologies that assert themselves as absolutes. They ultimately trump others' rights, including the right to speak against it, which is what Rowling did, effectively.

I must register my astonishment that a literary agency would characterize the writers' demands as Communist re-education. That kind of rhetoric is typically reserved for use by Right-wingers against mandated political correctness.

At any rate, good on Rowling and the Blair Partnership for standing up for what they believe in and protecting their employees. Some may bemoan the spat going public, the parting of ways, and the ripping up of contracts, but it's the optimal outcome in a liberal society, which is what this is supposed to be. This way, no one's conscience is violated and everyone walks away of his own free will.

Rowling may have "F-U" money a hundred times over, but we shouldn't discount a celebrity's attachment to adoration. That adoration, more or less constant for over 20 years, has turned to bullying since she spoke out. She's responded with bravery and class.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like hard sci-fi, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

Insurgents at Hachette

JK Rowling as is close to a sure thing in publishing as it gets. The revenue her books generate for tradpub feeds hundreds of people across the entertainment industry. But that hasn't stopped woke insurgents at Hachette, feeling their oats after getting Woody Allen's autobiography cancelled, to turn their sights on her.

Yesterday morning at publishing house Hachette, several of those involved in Miss Rowling’s new children’s book, The Ickabog, are said to have staged their own rebellion during a heated meeting. One source said: ‘Staff in the children’s department at Hachette announced they were no longer prepared to work on the book.

‘They said they were opposed to her comments and wanted to show support for the trans lobby. These staff are all very “woke”, mainly in their twenties and early thirties, and apparently it is an issue they feel very strongly about.’

It also really burns your stomach lining when someone you thought for sure was on your side turns out to not be.

Say what you want about Rowling ret-conning Albus Dumbledore into some sort of gay icon. Her comments on the transgender movement's bending of reality to conform to its vision were the sanest thing I've heard her say in years.

Hachette issued a statement that, while hypocritical, is nonetheless refreshing in today's political climate:

Freedom of speech is the cornerstone of publishing. We fundamentally believe that everyone has the right to express their own thoughts and beliefs. That’s why we never comment on our authors’ personal views and we respect our employees’ right to hold a different view.

At least someone's saying it.

Who knows what motivated Hachette to stand up for Rowling. My guess is she's simply too important to their bottom line to let go. It's a wonder that Rowling, an institution in her own right, would put up with this nonsense. She doesn't need Hachette to sell millions of books. Her name finishes the sale.

For the insurgents at Hachette, this is an opportunity for reflection. How many, when put to it, would pass an ideological purity test? How many have never compromised with society? How many have never uttered a word of doubt about a beloved cause? Knowing how few in number such people are, they cannot maintain the fiction of their ascendancy.

Military historian Victor Davis Hanson writes:

Inevitably cultural revolutions die out when they turn cannibalistic. Once the Red Guard started killing party hacks too close to Mao, it began to wane.

Once cultural revolutions turn anarchic and eat their own, they lose support. When quiet sympathizers conclude that they too may targeted, to survive they turn on their former icons.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like hard sci-fi, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.