The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Hugo Packet: The Novels and Related Works

Posted on | June 13, 2015 | 13 Comments

— by Wombat-socho

It’s been a while since I did a book post, since most of the time when I was on the road I was either driving, recovering from driving, or hanging out with friends and relatives, but I hope this makes up for it.

As most of you are aware, the Kulturkampf between the Social Justice Wankers who want to use the arts to preach and dictate and the rest of us who just want some decent entertainment has spread to SF fandom, much to the distress of the SJWs, who had been having it their own way with the Hugos up until this year, when it became public knowledge that anyone with $40 could register for the convention and actually vote. Thousands of people did this (further enraging the SJWs) and it looks like Sasquan will have the biggest membership of any World SF Convention (Worldcon for short) in quite some time, if not ever. In fact, if you haven’t registered yet, you can still get a supporting membership for $40 through August 2, which entitles you to not only vote for the Hugos, but to get free e-copies of many of the nominated works, which is arguably worth more than the $40 you’re shelling out all by itself.

So, having duly registered and obtained my packet, and read most of what’s in it, here’s how I’m going to be filling out my ballot. This is, of course, subject to change once I read the stuff I haven’t gotten to yet.

Best Novel
This is the biggie, the one that draws most of the attention. Before I got the packet, I was strongly inclined toward putting Jim Butcher’s Skin Game at the top of my ballot for two good reasons: up to that point, it was the only one of the nominees I’d read, and I thought Jim Butcher deserved some long-overdue recognition for the “Dresden Files” books, which arguably put urban fantasy on the map as a subgenre.
Unfortunately, now that I’ve read Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem, I can’t honestly do that any more. Liu’s book is an awesome combination of alien contact, secret societies, an immersive computer game, the Cultural Revolution and its effects, and a hard-drinking chain-smoking policeman who doesn’t care who he pisses off because his people instincts are damn near infallible. A great book, and getting it for free from Sasquan beats forking out $13 to Tor. Also very good, but not quite good enough to beat out Butcher’s novel, is Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor. The tale of a half-goblin prince who suddenly ascends to the throne after the Emperor and other senior heirs are killed in an airship “accident”, this makes for very hard reading in the early chapters, since our hero knows nothing of the Imperial court, has no friends or relatives he can trust…Maggie Hogarth is absolutely right. And yet, you keep going, maybe because you can’t believe the author will put the screws to such a well-meaning protagonist, maybe because you want to see the trainwreck – but to give any clue beyond that would spoil the book for you, and I’m not going to do that.

So when the dust settles, my ballot is going to look like this:

  1.  The Three-Body Problem
  2.  Skin Game
  3.  The Goblin Emperor
  4. (not yet read) The Dark Between The Stars
  5.  No Award
  6.  Ancillary Sword (No copy, no vote. Screw you, Orbit.)

Related Works
This category too had a virtual lock going in: Mad Mike Williamson’s Wisdom From My Internet, since 1) it was chock-full of politically incorrect humor, 2) the SJW’s deserved a swat on the nose for handing a certain mediocre author and former SFWA president a Hugo for a similar collection, yclept Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded, and 3) they deserved a further swat for completely ignoring Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century: Volume 2: The Man Who Learned Better 1948-1988the second volume of William Patterson’s Heinlein bio in favor of some ahistorical trash by Kameron Hurley.
Once again, I find myself forced to change my mind as a result of reading the packet. John C. Wright’s Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth is a collection of brilliant essays on SF and fantasy that in many ways parallels what Stacy has been doing in his Sex Trouble posts, but with particular attention to our corner of literature and media. “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Tolkien” is particularly funny, but all of his criticisms are on point.
Lou Antonelli’s Letters from Gardner was not in the packet, and I haven’t read Tedd Roberts’ essay yet, so the tentative rankings look like this:

  1.  Transhuman and Subhuman
  2.  Wisdom From My Internet
  3.  “The Hot Equations”
  4.  (not yet read) “Why Science Is Never Settled”
  5.  No Award
  6.  Letters From Gardner

I’ll try and throw up some more posts in the coming week regarding the other categories.

Category: Books, Culture

FMJRA 2.0: Heat In The Street

Posted on | June 13, 2015 | 9 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Hannan On The Fraternal Nature Of Commies And Nazis
Muslim Anonymous

Her Majesty’s Frontside #LibHorseNames
Batshit Crazy News

Feminist Tumblr: Human Train Wreck Offers Online ‘Support’ to ‘Survivors’
Living In Anglo-America
Da Tech Guy

FMJRA 2.0: D-Day On The Purple Heart Trail
The Pirate’s Cove
BlurBrain
Batshit Crazy News

‘Just an Incredible Amount of Misogyny’
Constantinople Not Istanbul
Living In Anglo-America

‘We Need to Get Him Off the Internet’
Living In Anglo-America
Inoperable Terran
Batshit Crazy News

Rule 5 Sunday: Welcome To Las Vegas
Batshit Crazy News
Proof Positive
A View from the Beach

Who Is ‘Tiggy Upland’?
Batshit Crazy News
Regular Right Guy

Heh. Heh. Heh.
A View from the Beach

Rapists Everywhere (1-in-5)
Constantinople Not Istanbul
Batshit Crazy News
Regular Right Guy
Living In Anglo-America

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge
Batshit Crazy News
Jim-O-Rama
Regular Right Guy

Top linker this week:

  1.  Batshit Crazy News (7)

Thanks to everyone for the linkagery!


Heat In The Street

Category: FMJRA Award

Who Is ‘Tiggy Upland’?

Posted on | June 12, 2015 | 103 Comments

During my explorations of Feminist Tumblr, I stumbled across an online “advice” site called Tiggy Upland. The word “advice” must be put in quotation marks because it’s actually an advocacy site, promoting bisexuality and polyamory (i.e., what used to be called “swinging”). The name “Tiggy Upland” is obviously a pseudonym. At first I suspected the person behind it must actually be male, because there was such a weird “Dear Penthouse Forum” vibe of kinky fantasy to it.

A simple and obvious question: How does a person hiding behind a pseudonym become an online advice columnist? That is to say, where does the adviser get that first advice-seeker? Ah! The self-created “Tiggy Upland” must have invented this seeker and also invented the seeker’s dilemma, you see. Does the phrase roman à clef mean anything to you? Don’t you suspect this first post included some element of autobiography? Whatever your mere suspicions or speculations may be, however, any intelligent person must conclude that there is a self-interested authorial purpose behind the creation of “Tiggy Upland.”

Anyone can see — it’s right there in plain sight, clearly written — that “Tiggy Upland” wants people to believe it is perfectly normal for a man in a heterosexual relationship to masturbate with gay porn and also to want his girlfriend to penetrate him with a strap-on dildo.

Furthermore, pay attention to the backdating of posts, so that “May 3, 2011” was actually posted Jan. 3, 2012. Why would “Tiggy” do this? January 2012 was quite a busy month for “Tiggy” in terms of creating backdated Q-and-A posts, and the similarity of themes is notable. Were any of those questions authentic? Why was “Tiggy” doing this?

Check the “late bloomer” tag, and you find “November 1, 2011” (posted Jan. 10, 2012), “November 15, 2011” (posted Jan. 12, 2012) and “January 10, 2012” (also posted Jan. 12, 2012). So in the span of three days, “Tiggy” posted three Q-and-As with people who were interested in pursuing bisexuality. Some of these questions seemed authentic. But look very closely at this backdated post in which “Tiggy” answers two questions from bisexual women, the second of whom says she “grew up in North Carolina and didn’t really even know what it meant to be LGBT until I moved to Boston four years ago.” The answer to that question included this unusually detailed information:

Since you’re in Boston, I highly recommend that you attend the peer-led group, “Straight Marriage, Still Questioning” on the second Monday of each month. For more information, contact kate.e.flynn [at] gmail [dot] com. . . . They’re in the same position you are and will welcome you into their mutually-supportive space with open arms.

Is that just random and coincidental? Is “Tiggy” simply such a conscientious adviser that, upon getting a question from a woman in Boston, “Tiggy” did some research about support groups in the area and (what luck!) found this monthly meeting advised by Kate E. Flynn?

No, of course not. Here’s your answer: “Ask Tiggy” is a regular column in the quarterly newsletter of the Boston Bisexual Women’s Network. It would seem that the column first appeared in the Summer 2011 issue. Yet if this is a women’s group, and the advice columnist is supposed to be giving advice to bisexual women, why is the “Tiggy Upland” site fielding questions from so many bisexual men?

In the fine print of the Boston Bisexual Women’s Network newsletter, they declare their purpose to provide “a safe environment” for support of “women of all sexual self-identities, gender identities,” promoting “full acceptance” of bisexuality “within the larger LGBT community,” including “transgender people.” Carefully examine Page 16 of the Spring 2015 issue of their newsletter and see if you can’t guess who might have managed to smuggle a penis into their November 2014 brunch.

“Tiggy Upland” made her public debut in October 2011, performing at the Bilicious Boston show, produced “in association with the Bisexual Resource Center.” Oh, what’s the Bisexual Resource Center?

It’s a Boston-based tax-exempt 501(c)3, the administrative director of which was, from 2004-2014, Ellyn Ruthstrom, whose resumé is quite interesting: After getting her master’s degree in Women’s Studies from Ohio State University, Ms. Ruthstrom worked five years (1995-2000) at Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass., then spent six years (2001-2007) as editor of Teen Voices, “the only national magazine and website written by, for, and about teen girls,” where she “trained a team of college-aged editorial assistants and mentors,” etc., etc. If the dates on Ms. Ruthstrom’s LinkedIn profile are correct, therefore, during the years 2004-2007, she was simultaneously president of the Bisexual Resource Center and the editor of Teen Voices.

(Hey, Teen Voices, let’s talk about your vaginas!)

While Ms. Ruthstrom is too old to be “Tiggy Upland,” she certainly must know who “Tiggy Upland” is, which leads us to the question, “Why the strange masquerade? Why the pseudonym?” Because I stumbled onto this entirely by accident, the why part of this question is as mysterious as the who, and Ms. Ruthstrom’s career is an intriguing tangent. The director of the Bisexual Resource Center is the former editor of Teen Voices, “an intensive journalism, mentoring, and leadership program for teen girls in Boston”? Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

What happened to Teen Voices? Their former website is defunct, but the non-profit tracker GuideStar showed their blog address on WordPress, which hasn’t been updated since August 2012. However, the site had an embedded Twitter feed for @TeenNews — “the girl news site of Women’s eNews that delivers news about teens to a global audience and incorporates teens into the production of news.” In 2013, it seems, the former Boston-based Teen News was absorbed by New York-based Women’s ENews, about which we learn:

Women’s eNews became independent on January 1, 2002. Women’s eNews grew out of a 1996 roundtable discussion conceived and funded by the Barbara Lee Family Foundation and hosted by the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund. After additional research on the need for a media outlet to distribute news of concern to women and the opportunity to provide women’s voices to commercial media, NOW Legal Defense underwrote in 1999 the creation of Women’s eNews as an Internet-based news service for all women, with a special emphasis on being a resource for commercial media. . . .

This 501(c)3 outfit gets money from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Family Fund, United Nations Foundation, the Open Society Institute, and the Starry Night Fund of Tides Foundation. The editor of Teen News is now Katina Paron, who is director of the NYC High School Journalism Collaborative at Baruch College. From Ms. Paron’s online profile at the Youth Media Learning Network, we learn that her “youth media career began as an editor, mentor and Board of Directors member with the Boston-based Teen Voices magazine.” Thus we return full circle to the publication where Ellyn Ruthstrom was editor for six years, prior to Ms. Ruthstrom’s subsequent position at the Bisexual Resource Center.

Random coincidence. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

All these coincidences were discovered because I encountered the “Tiggy Upland” Tumblr and wondered, “Who is Tiggy Upland?”

Still don’t have the answer to that question, but I imagine it would be a very interesting answer. Only haters ask questions, y’know.

UPDATE: @TiggyUpland on Twitter was kind enough to share this photo of herself speaking at the 2012 Boston Dyke March:

Just so you know, OK?

UPDATE II: What kind of event was this?

Each year, the Dyke March is held in Boston the day before the Pride Parade as a grassroots efforts to remind the public and the government that “they are a movement, not a market.”

You stay classy, Boston Dyke March ladies!

UPDATE III: There modern double standard involves the way in which feminists constantly derogate masculinity and heterosexuality, whereas no one may express even the mildest criticism of women or homosexuals. It is therefore quite a risky enterprise to suggest that most “bisexuals” are either mainly gay, mainly straight, permanently confused, or just hopelessly perverse.

What are we to say, then, of Tiggy Upland’s approving attitude toward the man in a heterosexual relationship who wanted “his girlfriend to penetrate him with a strap-on dildo”?

We can consult the testimony of a woman who wrote to gay advice columnist Dan Savage (second letter), complaining that she was dating “a wonderful guy” who requested this particular practice. “Honestly, it turned me on as much as it did him,” she said. Then the guy said he wanted to try, uh, “the real thing.” She was also OK with that, “having a threesome with a trusted bi guy friend . . . and we all had fun.” Ah, but then she reaches the plot complication: “We never have vaginal intercourse anymore unless I ask. How soon will it be before I am left out entirely? Have I just been the testing ground for a shy gay boy who is now coming to fully realize that he would rather be with men than women?”

Ma’am, you are an enabler to a narcissist. You are a supporting character in a drama in which he plays the starring role. Yet you willingly cast yourself in this role, otherwise why would you think someone like this is “a wonderful guy”? And, as you say, you enjoyed playing your part up until you realized that this would eventually lead to you being excluded from the final scene. What was it that originally made you think he was “wonderful”? Doesn’t it say something about you — your disastrously bad judgment, or perhaps your own subconscious personality problems — that you would have been attracted to this guy, and willingly gone along with his deviant schemes?

Until people are willing to accept responsibility for their own problems, they will never be able to solve those problems, and feminism is all about absolving women of responsibility.

My advice to anyone who wants a normal life is to stop hanging around weirdos. However much weirdness you might have ever indulged in the past, it’s not actually the past until you walk away from it, renounce it, start socializing with respectable decent people, and try to become someone decent and respectable yourself.

 

Category: Sex Trouble

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

Posted on | June 12, 2015 | 17 Comments

by Smitty

Redlight Mind

“And I followed her to the station with her suitcase in my hand. Well, it’s hard to tell, it’s hard to tell. . .when all your love’s in vain. All my love’s in vain.
When the train rolled up to the station. . .I looked her in the eye. Well, I was lonesome, I felt so lonesome. . .and I could not help but cry.
When the train, it left the station with two lights on behind
. . .well, the blue light was my blues. . .and the red light was my mind. All my love’s in vain.”

via Darleen

Bonus:

[I’ve always loved the delicate minimalism of this tune. Keb Mo’s recording of the Robert Johnson masterpiece is true to the emotion, and a clean recording. I certainly won’t be trumping the emotion on display anytime soon.]

Category: Friday Fiction

Rapists Everywhere (1-in-5)

Posted on | June 9, 2015 | 122 Comments

St. Mary’s College of California is a private school where annual tuition is $41,380, according to U.S. News & World Report.

Of the 3,055 students who attend Saint Mary’s, 41% are male and 59% are female. As an exercise in understanding the “campus rape epidemic” that feminists assure us is a nationwide scourge, let’s apply the notorious 1-in-5 statistic to Saint Mary’s.

By my calculation (59% of 3,055) there are 1,802 females enrolled at Saint Mary’s. The 1-in-5 number means that 20% of these (360) will have been raped by a fellow student before they graduate. This in turn would mean that, if we suppose that about a quarter of the female students graduate each year, then there are approximately 450 females in the senior class, of whom 90 are rape victims.

Could this be true? Well, in September 2011, police investigated two separate rapes reported by Saint Mary’s students in the span of two weeks. The college’s Student Coalition Against Rape (“a peer education and outreach team that is dedicated to ending gender based violence”) clearly have their work cut out for them, battling the pro-rape coalition on campus. Women students at Saint Mary’s who are victimized by male student predators can call a 24-hour Campus Assault Resources and Empowerment (CARE) telephone hotline.

About 10 victims a month or two a week during a nine-month school year because, of course: 1-in-5.

It seems shocking that parents would spend more than $40,000 a year to send their daughters to a place where rape is so common. However, I guess the parents who spend more than $40,000 a year to send their sons to Saint Mary’s must figure that’s just one of the benefits provided by this Catholic private school.

SAINT MARY’S COLLEGE
Raping Your Daughters Since 1863

 

Category: Crime, Education, Sex Trouble

Heh. Heh. Heh.

Posted on | June 9, 2015 | 28 Comments

One of my favorite lines in Ghostbusters:

Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn’t have to produce anything! You’ve never been out of college! You don’t know what it’s like out there! I’ve worked in the private sector. They expect results.

The insulation of the academic cocoon has been thinning for some years now, and what Professor Glenn Reynolds calls The Higher Education Bubble may not yet be bursting, but it seems to have stopped expanding. A left-wing journalist at CounterPunch laments the darkening prospects for the radical intelligentsia:

There are still plenty of left-leaning professors in U.S. colleges and universities. But as an employment sector, higher education has changed. There are now powerful conservatizing trends afoot that will likely lead to the extinction of professors as a left force in U.S. society within a few decades.
One major change is that the expanding academic job market that Jacoby observed is now shrinking. When the market for professors was growing, as it was in the 1960s and 1970s, radicals could get jobs in universities, earn tenure, and do critical intellectual work, even if it was often muted by a desire for conventional academic rewards. Today, tenure-track jobs are fewer and farther between. In response to reduced budgets and out of a desire for a more “flexible” — that is, cheap, pliable, and disposable — labor force, university administrators have cut tenure-track lines, preferring to hire faculty on a temporary, part-time, non-tenure-track basis.
This tightening of the academic job market has intensified competition for the tenure-track jobs that remain. Under these conditions, it is prudent — as each new cohort of graduate students discovers—to focus one’s efforts on publishing in academic journals and avoid rocking any boats, in print or in the classroom. Graduate students are advised that Facebook pages and Tweets should be crafted with the concerns of prospective employers in mind. Anticipation of a competitive job market thus begins to conservatize students early in their graduate careers. . . .
Although all faculty are supposed to enjoy academic freedom, contingent faculty whose writing or teaching causes trouble are easily dismissed. A contract is simply not renewed, or a department chair says, “Sorry, we have no sections for you to teach,” and that’s the end of the matter. . . . Then there is the practical matter of how much research and writing one can do while trying to piece together a living by teaching four or more courses per semester, often at exploitively low wages.

Welcome to the real world, you degenerate Bolshevik subversives!

 

Category: Education, Intellectuals

Rebutting The Anonymous Lickspittle

Posted on | June 8, 2015 | 25 Comments

by Smitty

Let’s be clear, you silly twerp,
That your sins are yours alone.
Accidents of genes and birth,

Should by no means give you groan.
Talent’s not a source of hurt,
Unless buried, bringing wrath.

As the parable makes known,
The Lord’s given simple math.
Doubling, we must be alert

For how we may add real worth,
To that He deigned us to loan,
Lest He tend toward the curt,

Past our time upon the Earth,
Whether mansioned or in yurt.
Ending abed? Via drone?

The point is to keep it pert:
Reject the rational dearth,
The Commies have always shown,

Or sound some man-gina derp,
As your article did moan,
Making manhood sound a curse.

–CLS 08Jun2015

via Instapundit and Conor of the Lone N

Category: Culture

Rule 5 Sunday: Welcome To Las Vegas

Posted on | June 7, 2015 | 24 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Well, after a week of late-night driving, a busted water pump, and way too many hamburgers, I have arrived in my new home of Las Vegas, where I’m holed up at the Plaza Hotel & Casino until I can sign a lease on something more permanent. Once that happens and all my stuff gets unloaded, it’ll be back to the usual routine of daily Live at Five posts, weekly book posts, and occasionally other stuff in addition to the weekend linkagery. Speaking of which, to introduce this week’s assortment of attractive young ladies, here’s one of the dealer/dancers from the Golden Nugget across the street.

One of the reasons Fremont Street is worth visiting:
a different kind of bar girl.

As usual, many of the following links are to pictures normally considered NSFW. Do we really have to remind you to exercise discretion when you click?

This week Goodstuff leads off with Emily Ratajkowski – for SCIENCE! Ninety Miles from Tyranny follows with Hot Pick of the Late Night, Morning Mistress, and Girls with Guns; we also heard from Animal Magnetism, who had the first annual Rule 5 Commencement Speech and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL’s herd this week included the obligatory Bruce Jenner meme, Faces of Evil, Wildling, Nancy Sinatra, and Pitch Perfect 2.

Wine Women and Politics returned with Babe of the Day, Asstastic, Friday Corsets, Thursday Hot Babe Gallery, and a pair of nice ones.

A View from the Beach has Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, I’m so Disappointed with Kate Upton, Can Dirty Cars Save the Bay?, About That Picture…, Is Alzheimer’s A Side Effect of Human Intelligence? (cave girls), Live by the Sword, Die by the Sword, It’s An Ill Wind, “Buy Me a Boat”, TV Star Threatens Peeping Toms, Cops Called…, “Easy Like Sunday Morning” and Clinton.com – A “Model” Charity.

At Soylent Siberia, it’s the usual coffee creamer, Monday Motivationer, Salty Dawg, Tuesday Titillation Metal Fatigue, Humpday Hawtness Kelly Monaco, Stocking Stuffer, Falconsword Fursday Furlette, Corset Friday Late Edition, T-GIF Friday Classic Luxury Ride, Evening Awesome With Fur Finery, Weekender Think Pink, and Bath Night Bounce.

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Michele Rodriguez, his Vintage Babe is Claire Kelly, and Sex in Advertising is covered by Heidi Klum. Also, The Women of PETA XLIII! At Dustbury, it’s Telma Hopkins and Amal Clooney.

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Deadline to submit links to the Rule 5 Wombat mailbox is midnight on Saturday, June 12.

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Category: Rule 5
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