The new Gramscian Soviet Man. [Administrivia. Quotage]

Since the SSM doxxing by Matt Forney I have had moderation on and yes, I do check the files regularly. There are a few trusted people who were whitelisted. But that is going to change, because the spam system is changing.

But Antispam Bee slows the site down and has at times a huge overhead. Akismet and me don’t work well. So I’m moving to WP-Spamshield, which works in part by mining data, and noting that most of us have javascript and cookies on — and bots do not.

Big data is seen as the way forward to move us, in some of Skinnerian or behaviourist manner, into being good. Into doing what the elite want us to do. As if we were a tabula rasa, and rational. But we are not.

Even if we assume that the privacy issues can be resolved, the idea of what Pentland calls a “data-driven society” remains problematic. Social physics is a variation on the theory of behavioralism that found favor in McLuhan’s day, and it suffers from the same limitations that doomed its predecessor. Defining social relations as a pattern of stimulus and response makes the math easier, but it ignores the deep, structural sources of social ills. Pentland may be right that our behavior is determined largely by social norms and the influences of our peers, but what he fails to see is that those norms and influences are themselves shaped by history, politics, and economics, not to mention power and prejudice. People don’t have complete freedom in choosing their peer groups. Their choices are constrained by where they live, where they come from, how much money they have, and what they look like. A statistical model of society that ignores issues of class, that takes patterns of influence as givens rather than as historical contingencies, will tend to perpetuate existing social structures and dynamics. It will encourage us to optimize the status quo rather than challenge it.

Politics is messy because society is messy, not the other way around. Pentland does a commendable job in describing how better data can enhance social planning. But like other would-be social engineers, he overreaches. Letting his enthusiasm get the better of him, he begins to take the metaphor of “social physics” literally, even as he acknowledges that mathematical models will always be reductive. “Because it does not try to capture internal cognitive processes,” he writes at one point, “social physics is inherently probabilistic, with an irreducible kernel of uncertainty caused by avoiding the generative nature of conscious human thought.” What big data can’t account for is what’s most unpredictable, and most interesting, about us.

If you want an example, consider encouraging house ownership or college graduation. These are easy to measure, but they do not matter as much as the ability to work hard, complete tasks, budget and defer gratification. These behaviours make for a society and a good credit risk. Home ownership is an epiphenoma, and if you add a certain level of intelligence then college graduation is one as well.

Tuesday the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell examined Americans’ faith in the wisdom of investing in real estate — particularly their own houses — and offered a heretical thought: “If nothing else, the recent financial crisis should have taught us that it’s not in the country’s best interest to enable every aspiring homeowner to buy.”

Rampell’s seemingly commonsense statement offers dramatic ramifications for the role of the federal government. If, because of the huge unintended consequences that attend it, it’s not in the country’s best interest to enable every aspiring American to buy a home . . . how many other areas of modern American life feature the government “enabling” people — read, distributing money — to pursue dreams that are not, in fact, in the country’s best interest?

Is it really in the country’s best interest to enable every aspiring college student to attend college? Right now the federal government is in the business of loaning money to young people to attend college, only to watch significant numbers — 600,000 or so last year — fail to pay the money back.

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The Science Fiction scat fight I alluded to this morning was started by Larry Correia, who is Hispanic, and Theodore Beale who (with a few author friends, most notably Sarah Hoyt) put together a list of people who should be nominated for a Hugo. This really annoyed some of the other nominees.

The 2014 Hugo ballot is weirdly bifurcated. The “bottom half,” of the ballot, comprising the publishing, fan, and Campbell categories, seems made up, for the most part, of online fandom’s dream nominees. The best fan writer category is not only dominated by women but made up solely of online writers. Blogs and online magazines dominate the fanzine and semiprozine categories. There are more women in the professional and fan artist categories than I think have ever been nominated. I’m particularly pleased to see several nominees that I championed on the ballot, some of which–like Mandie Manzano and Sarah Webb in best fan artist, or XKCD’s “Time” in best graphic story–make me think (rightly or wrongly) that my endorsement played a real role in getting them a nomination.

But then you come to the fiction categories. Though best short story is solid, the other three categories are not simply dispiriting or embarrassing, but downright infuriating. Let me be clear: Vox Day is a despicable person whose repeated racist, sexist, and homophobic behavior towards specific members of the genre community as well as the community as a whole should make all decent human beings recoil from his presence. That I received my first Hugo nomination on the same ballot that bears his name leaves a vile taste in my mouth. That the rest of the fiction ballot feels, as several people have noted, as if it’s recapitulating the culture wars only makes this nomination worse, and confirms me in my feeling that the only people who benefit from award campaigns are those with large and devoted fanbases–whether those fanbases are motivated by love of a particular writer, or the desire to stick it to the lefties (or, as is most likely, both). One can only sigh at Larry Correia’s Warbound, Book III of the Grimnoir Chronicles (serious, sigh) making it onto the best novel ballot, or Toni Weisskopf’s best editor, long form nomination.

Abigail Nussbaum is a fool.

Firstly, plenty of good fiction has been written by people who the great and good consider despicable. There is a long tradition of this: from Chaucer, who had to recant after he wrote the Canterbury Tales, to Joyce, who had Ulysses banned. (I have some sympathies with the censors — reading Ulysses is difficult, but Finnegan’s Wake is deliberately and flagrantly unreadable).

Secondly, the Hugos are a popularity contest, and (although she may have difficulty accepting this, and it may make her nauseous) the only writers on the left who are readable are those who are really, really good. I mean Ken McLeod and Charles Stross levels of goodness. There is no second level — the prose degenerates to unreadable vampiric swill or erotica with rivets. Larry is a good journeyman writer — I think he is now writing at the level Scalzi gets to in his good books. So is Vox (Mr Beale), for they still have things like plot and character, and to my mind Sarah Hoyt is better than both. But the big hitters on the conservative side are Dave Webber and John Ringo.

Thirdly, she considers Toni Weisskopf does not deserve a nomination. Well, it is a popularity contest — but Toni has continued to build the Baen list of authors, who are now interesting.

And Vox speaks some truth to the petunias on his comments about the Hugos.

1. SF fandom has no grasp of how small it is. The repeated accusations of cheating by purchasing multiple memberships and ballot-stuffing demonstrate that the accusers haven’t even bothered to look at the Feedburner icon or click on the Sitemeter icon here. Last year it took only 38 votes to make it onto the Best Novelette ballot; the top vote-getting nominee had all of 89 votes. Meanwhile, the vast quantity of upset and offended goodthinkers visiting here via do-not-link to gawk at the evidence of my being “the antithesis of all that is good and decent” led to a gargantuan 6.9 percent increase in traffic here, which is to say, 758 additional Sitemeter visits out of nearly 12,000.
2. It’s a lot harder to win a Hugo than to get nominated. To win, one needs about 400 votes under normal circumstances. But since the votes are ranked in order of preference and there is an active campaign to vote No Award above “Opera Vita Aeterna”, I’d need more than that. Translation: thanks very much for all the expressions of support, but don’t buy a membership to vote for me unless you’re also planning to get involved on the nomination end next year. If you want to express your support, I’d much rather you spend that money on Castalia House books by John, Tom, and Rolf. For $40 you can buy most of our English catalog… some of it directly from the store we are opening later today.
3. Win or lose the awards, Sad Puppies has served its purpose. The purpose of Sad Puppies, as Larry repeatedly explained, was three-fold. First, to test if the award process was fraudulent or not. To the credit of the LonCon people, we have learned it was not. Second, to prove that the awards are a mere popularity contest, contra the insistence of those who have repeatedly asserted they are evidence of literary quality and the intrinsic superiority of the nominated works. We have shown that it is. And third, to prove that the SF/F Right is more popular in the genre than the gatekeepers have insisted. We have demonstrated that to be the case.
4. People hate me a lot more than they hate Larry Correia. This is very troubling to the International Lord of Hate. I suspected as much, but I thought the ratio would be more like 65/35 than 90/10. That being said, I have little doubt that Larry will manage to level out that ratio somewhat by this time next year.
5. SF progressives believe they are qualified to police race and ethnicity. Many of them can’t seem to wrap their heads around the fact that I am a Person of Color by every definition. It’s amusing that they think my labeling a lying African-American woman a “half-savage” proves my racism, but them calling a pair of Hispanic men all sorts of names, including “savage” and “uncivilized”, somehow proves they are not racist.
6. If they are unhappy now, they are really going to be unhappy in the future. I paid no attention to the nominations last year. The Dread Ilk barely paid any attention to the nominations this year. As we’ve previously seen to be the case, the progressives really don’t understand that their frantic attempts to belittle and disqualify us only makes us stronger, harder, and more numerous.
7. Many Hugo voters have declared they will not read the novelette and it is already apparent that some of those who read “Opera Vita Aeterna” will not do so honestly. For example, one “reviewer” wrote: “I skip a little tedious adolescent Theology talk in Act Two, Plus a Silly Epilogue that I think VD thinks is Dramatic…. His point (I think) is that God Is Real. And So R Demons. The plot is pointless. The writing is dull and bad.” But anyone who has read the story knows that the plot is far from pointless. And anyone who is sufficiently educated will recognize that the theology is not “adolescent”, it is paraphrased Thomas Aquinas from the Summa Theologica.
8. I appreciate the nomination. It’s nice to receive the recognition and it is certainly useful in much the same way as my Mensa membership. But, having recently edited two books by a much superior writer who should, by any reasonable standard, already have several Hugo wins under his belt, it’s hard to view the process as anything but seriously flawed

Sarah Hoyt is my other favourite atheist, (Charles Stross is the English Socialist strain, while she is much more of the libertarian ilk). And she comments wisely on this. What matters is how well you write, not which PC boxes you tick.

So I’m not going to write about the Hugos. I’m just going to say that when there is a storm all over FB about how the awards need to be awarded to more “women” and “people of color” you’ve lost the plot.

Leave alone for a moment the disgusting, viscerally repulsive racism of assuming that the inside of a person’s head always matches their skin color/gender. And let alone the fact that all this smacks of “special award, for extra-deserving minority.” (As a minority – double, if you count women as a minority – I’d like them to take their award and stick it up where the sun don’t shine. I’ll win on my own terms, in competition with everyone of whatever color or gender, or not at all. Not that anyone is offering me an award, of course, since I’m a gender and ethnicity “traitor” (How can you betray something you never swore allegiance to, anyway?))

We’ll leave that alone, mostly because I found myself typing obscenities on the subject on a friend’s FB page last night, and no one wants to see that (right?)

Let’s just consider, for a moment, that their motives are pure. That they think that not having women or people of color among the nominees is the result of racism and sexism (which would mean they don’t expect anyone to judge on the merits of the STORY, but never mind.)

That just shows how the award has fallen. Because if it were given to the most popular work among the fans, no one would care (or often know) what color/gender the writer is.

I think it would be better to take the monies it would take to get a membership and to vote at Worldcon and use them to help an author whose anxiety disorders are not crippling him. Or buy a book from someone you like.

Let the rabbits fight. There is no such thing as a Soviet man, Gramscian or not, Anti racist or not.

It’s far better to live well.