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Sad Puppies Review Books: CORDUROY

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

corduroyCORDUROY

Reviewed by John Z. Upjohn, USMC (Aspired)

The SJW clique that runs the publishing world loves to twist things around. When people clamor for them to make books with honest covers, books with covers you can judge them by, they twist things around. They knew we wanted them to change the  inside of the book to match what the covers promised us.

Instead we get books with covers like this one, which shows the male hero half-undressed in a cheesecake pin-up pose, about to bend over while his suspender slips off his shoulder.

I have to hand it to the SJWs: it’s exactly what the cover promises, an emasculation manual for young males and nothing more. It’s barely one step above a forced feminization fantasy story. The Feminazis say they want equality but they are not content to let men be men and women be women. Gender abolition is the real goal of all feminism, and that means male extinction. This so-called storybook is a thinly veiled feminist fable designed to indoctrinate men with passively accepting our fate.

The so-called hero of this book just sits on a shelf all day next to girly stuffed animals and dolls, just waiting for someone to come along and claim him. It’s only after a girl comes along and says she wants him that suddenly his life has meaning and he’s up and walking around, doing stuff to try to please her. What kind of lesson is that for our young men to be learning, I ask you?

If I tried to write a book where this was the other way around, nobody would touch it. The PC Patrol would see to that. Just imagine it: say you have written a story where a girl is locked up in a tower or something never questioning anything about it until a man comes along and rescues her. You’d be eaten alive for proposing it! No one would dare touch it or you. Your career would be completely ruined. You would never be published again, never invited to or even allowed inside a convention, and never be nominated for an award.

This has happened to literally every other author who’s been labeled a misogynist by the SJW bullies, and it would happen to you if you tried to write a story like that.

As you might guess from how he meekly accepts his fate, the hero is a delta male at BEST. When he is rejected by the little girl’s mother for not having a button on his suspenders, he sets off at night to find it. Why should he have to improve himself to please her, though? It’s not like the girl was anything great, even if her mother thinks her precious little angel is too good to pay department store prices for broken toys. Feminism has women convinced that they should be allowed to let themselves go but still get whatever man they want. The sexual economy has been completely thrown out of balance by feminism and that is why the birth rates are declining.

So while the miserable little cuck is stumbling around the department store, he keeps deciding that whatever happens to him is exactly what he wanted. He stumbles onto the escalator. “Oh, I guess I wanted this?” he says to himself, until he believes it. He winds up in the furniture department. I remind you, he was looking for a button that fell off his suspenders. That’s not going to be in the furniture department. But he takes a look around and decides, “Oh, this is where I ended up so I guess it’s where I wanted to be?”

The lesson here is passive surrender. If you wind up married to some skank who doesn’t lift a finger because feminism taught her that she deserves to be up on a pedestal popping out squalling babies while you work to support her, it must be what you wanted or else it wouldn’t have happened.

I take it back. This bear isn’t even a delta male. He’s a full-on gamma. His sad little quest ends in a pathetic anticlimax as the night security guard—a proper man—literally puts him back in his place, where he stays until the girl comes for him.

And then the little girl does come back and buys him, and sews a button on him anyway. The Feminazis talk about agency, but where’s his agency in all of this? He never found his button. He never got a chance to be a man. Instead he needed the girl to “fix” him, playing mind games on him all the while.

“I like you just the way you are,” the temptress coos, “but I’m sure you’d be more comfortable if you let me, oh, I don’t know… change everything about you.”

And of course he succumbs. Even after seeing the palatial inside of the department store, he looks around her tiny matchbox of an apartment bedroom and decides he’s happy to be there. He was better off where he was. If he would have stopped looking for his button to please a girl when he decided he wanted to stay in the furniture department, he could be living there like a king to this very day. Women trick men into thinking that we need them to hide the truth that it is they who are dependent on us. Take the red pill and wake up.

What the Corduroy should have done is refused to change anything. Play it cool. Let the girl know that he doesn’t need her, and then she would have been the one changing for him. This works on every woman. Don’t believe me? Try it. It doesn’t matter if you try it on a hundred different women or even a thousand different women, eventually one of them will probably go home with you. Then you’ll be a believer.

There is one other issue with this book that I know the SJWs will never forgive me for bringing up, and that’s race. I was taught that all men are equal and I don’t even notice the color of a person’s skin. When I look at a person I only see the content of their character. If I cross the street or put my hand on my wallet when I see someone, it’s because I don’t like the content of their character and no one can prove otherwise. Accusing me of racism without proof means that you are the racist.

So what I want to know is why the little girl and her mother in this book can’t just be white like everyone else. There’s no reason for it. The story never even mentions it. They just show up, without a word of warning or explanation, like this is a normal thing that happens. I was trying to read a book about a walking, self-aware stuffed animal and suddenly there’s all this extra side stuff it wants me to swallow without explanation. We’re just supposed to accept it without question, I guess.

It’s even more jarring because I was reading the bear as white and I can’t think of any reason why that would be if he’s not deliberately written that way. It’s not that I have anything against children of one race playing with stuffed animals of another. I just can’t imagine why it’s here if not to push an agenda that doesn’t belong in a children’s book.

Understand that my problem is not the race of the characters. I personally didn’t even notice their race. My problem is that it doesn’t make any sense. The SJWs made the decision to insert race into this book, probably because they knew it would be divisive. It’s straight out of the Saul Alinksy-type playbook that they all follow.

I’m sure when this book was published back in 1968, right when we had just decided to give everyone civil rights, this kind of PC pandering was a no-brainer for the marketing types. Well, I’m not about to give a book points just because it checks off the right boxes in a demographic checklist. I judge books on quality and merit, not the skin color of the characters. I don’t even notice such things.

Two stars.

A Critique of Impure Reason

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

UPDATE AND RETRACTION: An earlier version of this post incorrectly included the allegations that Vox Day is an author, editor, and publisher. Upon reading the objections of an individual using the handle “TangoMan” and having given the matter careful consideration, I have realized that this was uncalled for. I do hereby retract the allegations that I so thoughtlessly repeated. Others may call Mr. Day by whatever names they please, but I will do my best to eschew such terms.

UPDATE #2: Per another correction from TangoMan, I would like to amend this post to note that Vox Day is an ineffective editor. Let this stand as a reminder that even in the most heated debate, there are some things that both sides can agree on. I applaud TangoMan for holding me to the fire on this point.

I apologize for the second correction, and I will try to be more clear about this in the future: let no one insinuate that Vox Day is any kind of an author or publisher, but he is one heck of an ineffective editor, and I’m sure TangoMan and I would both vigorously debate anyone who says otherwise.

TangoMan, I have your back on this.

 

Rabid Puppy ringleader Vox Day likes to try to distinguish what he calls his “dialectical” mode of discourse from mere rhetoric. He claims that his use of syllogism elevates his arguments above rhetoric and into the realm of pure reason, though in fact the opposite is the case: syllogisms, employed in the way that he uses them (when he bothers to construct one rather than just dropping the word “syllogism” into a post to demonstrate that he knows it) is a perfect tailor-made tool for the delivery of rhetoric.

Now, syllogisms are a form of deductive reasoning. In their simplest Aristotlean format, they consist of a general premise, a specific case, and a conclusion. Formally, the first two are known as the major premise and minor premise, but I prefer to use more descriptive terms.

Both the general premise and the specific case in a syllogism are assumptions; they are held to be true. The syllogism does nothing to prove either one of them, offers no evidence in support of them. Thus, syllogisms are most likely to produce true results when dealing with broad, sweeping axioms of life. The classic example is: “All men are mortal (general premise), and Socrates is a man (specific case), so Socrates is mortal (conclusion).”

A syllogism, in short, is a tool for extrapolating from known facts. It’s the kind of deduction that each one of us makes constantly without realizing we’re doing it. No one needs to say that Socrate is mortal; it is enough to understand that Socrates is a man and that valar morghulis, as they say dans la belle Essos. Breaking it down into a formal syllogism is more helpful for understanding how we make deductions than it is for understanding how Socrates came to die.

The syllogism does not care about the truth or falsehood of its premises. It works on the assumption that they are true. The reasoning portion of it is usually quite elementary.

Let me show you an example:

Start with the premise “SJWs always lie.”

Add the specific case “Alexandra Erin is an SJW.”

Pause to allow for various “reasoned, dialectically-minded” Rabid Puppies to quote that out of context as proof that I admitted I’m a lying SJW.

Resume and draw the conclusion, “Alexandra Erin always lies.”

Pause again, same reason.

Resume again.

Now, I’ll admit that the above is an airtight Aristotlean syllogism. Given the stated premises, that is the correct deduction to make. It is as simple and clear and inescapable as 3 + 1 = 4.

But is it true?

Is it reasoned?

No. An equation only gives you what you put into it. If you need to know how many quarters Tommy and Timmy have between them and you pull numbers out of the air, you will get the right answer only by coincidence. 3 + 1 = 4 is mathematically correct, but if Tommy has 2 quarters and Timmy has 7, then the number 4 means nothing to you in this situation.

If you start a syllogism with rhetorical premises, you reach a rhetorical conclusion. Vox freely admits that his oft-repeated line of “SJWs always lie.” is only rhetorically true (which you might recognize is just a fancy way of acknowledging it isn’t true). It’s a statement of rhetoric. The act of labeling someone a “Social Justice Warrior” is also similarly an act of rhetoric. You’re slapping a brand on someone and hoping it affects the way people see them.

If you take two pieces of rhetoric and put them through the form of a syllogism, you arrive at a conclusion that is also nothing more than rhetoric.

Or to put it more succinctly: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

But to someone who is both invested in believing you and invested in believing themselves to be intelligent, reasoned, and calculating, it is elegant and attractive garbage. You’re describing what you’re doing with big, lofty words like “dialectic” and “syllogism” and “Aristotlean”, after all. You can show people the inescapable mathematical logic of if A and B, then AB, knowing that no one in your audience will bother to ask how you arrived at A and B. They’re taken as given. The form of the syllogism not only does not require you to question A or B, it doesn’t work if you do. As soon as you delve into examining the premises, you’re no longer engaging in syllogism.

The fact is that Vox stoops to engage in the actual construction of syllogism fairly rarely, compared to how often he simply bloviates on in a purely rhetorical fashion while peppering his speech with whatever words best flatter his and his loyal readers’ intellects. But even when he does, he’s not engaging in actual dialectic but mere rhetorical sophistry. He starts with unvarnished garbage as a premise, and so he arrives at a similarly tarnished conclusion.

 

In short, it’s mere intellectual wankery. Every time he says the word “syllogism”, what you should be hearing is “silly jism”.

Sad Puppies Review Books: MADELINE

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

madelineMADELINE

Reviewed by John Z. Upjohn, USMC (Aspired)

Let me cut right to the chase: Madeline is some straight-up misandrist Feminazi SJW bullshit.

It starts off right away talking about twelve little girls in two straight lines. Seriously? Twelve characters introduced in a single page and we’re supposed to believe they all just happen to be girls? Not one of them is a boy? Last time I checked half the human race was male. So what are the odds that twelve people in a row—or two rows—will be female?

Listen, I’ve studied statistics. The odds that one character will be a female are 50%, no matter what any SJW wants to tell you. Science doesn’t come any harder than numbers. That’s why SJWs hate dealing with them. Numbers are not susceptible to feelings. You cannot “transgenderqueer” a number away just because you don’t like it.

50% is not very high, but high enough that if there’s occasionally a female character somewhere we can allow that it’s still a bit realistic. Take Black Widow in the Avengers movies. There are six main characters, so if you want to say that okay, well, there’s a 50% chance that one of them will be a female, so we can go ahead and make one of them a female to placate the SJWs, that’s fine. Not that they’ll actually be placated. To hear them go on, it seems they won’t be satisfied until half the characters on the screen are females!

So if the author wanted to make one of those twelve characters a girl, so be it. But two in a row? The odds drop to 25%. Three? 12.5%. Four? 6.25%. Five? 3.125%. Six? 1.5625%. By the time we get to the second line of girls, the odds of what we’re seeing have dropped to less than one percent.

You know what the odds of all twelve being girls are? Less than one in four thousand. That’s how unlikely this little fantasy scenario the author has concocted is.

I don’t know if the SJWs really don’t understand math or just think that we don’t, but this cannot be a coincidence. The author deliberately chose to make this whole boarding school female on purpose and no one said a word. No one stood up to say it was wrong. The editor didn’t stop it. The publisher didn’t stop it. The corrupt journos who reviewed the book didn’t say boo against it. Meanwhile no one has ever published a book set at an all-boy’s school. The powers that be would never allow it. They’d call it “sexism” and “patriarchy”.

Also, SJWs are such hypocrites. If anybody outside of their little protected circle tried to write this book they would be eaten alive for saying the lines are straight and not “LGBTQ” or whatever the PC term is these days.

I’ll be honest, I had a hard time engaging with this book after the opening lines. My suspension of disbelief was shattered. There was no one for me to identify with. It was like the author had written across every page “JOHN Z. UPJOHN, THIS BOOK IS NOT FOR YOU. PEOPLE LIKE YOU DON’T GET BOOKS. PEOPLE LIKE YOU ARE THE BAD GUY, IF YOU EXIST AT ALL.”

I read books to enjoy good stories, not to be hit over the head with messages even if it is a message I agree with. I should pay my own money and spend my time reading a book that spreads a message that is against me? No, thank you!

In the interest of a fair review, I made myself flip through the rest anyway. What I picked up is that the character of Madeline is everything that Feminazis say they want in a “strong female character”, as we are told from the beginning that she’s not afraid of anything, including mice and a tiger in the zoo.

Are we supposed to impressed? Mice aren’t scary and the tiger is clearly in a cage. Does anyone think this precious little snowflake would have lasted five seconds against that tiger in a real fight? Hell no! She wouldn’t have. Not even five seconds and that’s the truth this book takes such pains to conceal from you.

SJWs want us to believe that women are just as strong as any man but then they stage this kind of ridiculous pantomime where we’re supposed to be impressed that they aren’t frightened of zoo animals. But it is the SJWs who are sexist against women by suggesting women should be afraid of caged animals and tiny rodents.

Anyway, it seems like Madeline isn’t such a “strong female character” when her appendix gets inflamed! She cries like a little girl, and guess what? That’s right, a MAN comes to her rescue. The doctor makes the diagnosis but the book still carries on like men don’t matter as he doesn’t appear once she’s at the hospital, even though two different nurses do (again, that’s only a 25% chance).

So who took out her appendix? No one important enough to mention, I guess! In the hands of a competent author, the doctor would have been the hero of this book. But I guess that would be ~*misogyny*~ and the SJWs at the American Library Association would never have made this a Caldecott Honor Book.

Caldecott Honor, what a joke! As long as the SJW clique is in charge there will be no honor in the Caldecotts.

Then ten days pass and suddenly out of nowhere Madeline has all these toys and candy. Some of it came from “Papa”. Between that and the swanky private school I think we can say that Madeline is another privileged trust fund baby typical of the SJW set. Her hair’s probably dyed, too. They all dye their hair these ridiculous sherbet colors for no reason, with no regard for how much less attractive it is to me.

She probably set up up a Patreon account for the rest of the swag we see, crying about how victimized she was by the tiger and the evil doctor man who dared to touch her. She clearly loves the attention, as the first thing she does when her friends visit is to show off her belly scar like a total tramp.

I only respect scars forged in battle. Surgical scars are like the caged tigers of battle wounds.

And what do you suppose happens in the end? Why, suddenly all her friends claim to have appendicitis, too! Why wouldn’t they when they saw all the sweet hand-outs Madeline got just for fluttering her eyelashes and shedding a lot of crocodile tears and showing off her belly?

If you ask me, the whole thing calls into question whether Madeline really needed or even had an appendectomy to begin with, or if she was just angling for some of those sweet victim bucks from the word go. Once someone starts accepting toys and candy and flowers for being sick, they have a fiduciary duty to disclose certain details to make sure things are on the level. That’s why real charities have oversight and accountability.

If I had contributed to Madeline’s hospital room, I would want to see the chart. I would be curious why we never saw her with a doctor after she arrived. I would demand an accounting of exactly what happened during the ten days that passed between when she was dropped off and when her friends visited.

This book teaches women to see themselves as victims. Even if Madeline’s so-called bravery at the beginning of the book is a hollow lie, it’s only when she starts bawling that she has anything to show for it. Nobody brings her a dollhouse for pooh-poohing a tiger. Nobody gives her candy for taking risks.

No, she plays the victim card and is rewarded and her friends all learn the lesson: here is the easy money. Be careful your kids don’t learn the same lesson. This book is basically an Alinsky-style rulebook for the rainbow-haired she-twinks of Twitter and Tumblr.

Two stars.

 

Editor’s Note: Madeline does not, to my knowledge, have a Patreon account, but I do: https://www.patreon.com/alexandraerin

If you’d like to support my fiction, poetry, and—yes—humor writings, please do so. As these reviews have attracted more attention, I’ve had to upgrade my webhosting.

Thank you for reading!

<3 AE

No one is required to buy your PR

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

Everybody has stories they tell themselves about the world, and everybody has stories they tell the world about themselves.

There’s this thing I keep seeing coming up in discussions about the Sad Puppies and Gamergate, where a defender of one group or the other will respond to people talking about the actions of the group with, “So you think you know what they’re about better than they do?”

They’ll link to a post where someone has laid out the glorious purpose of their group as being about things no one could argue with (“ETHICS!” say the Gators, “DEMOCRACY!” say the Puppies), and try to insist that we engage with that and only that, taking into account nothing but the story they tell about themselves.

I could point out the hypocrisy involved as neither Gators nor Puppies are fond of taking their perceived enemies at their word, but the fact is that no matter who you are or on what perceived side of any conflict—as the subject heading of this post declares—no one is required to buy your PR.

People will judge your actions. People will judge the things you say when you’re not taking the time to lay out your case the way you want it to be seen, the way you want to see it. People will judge you by who you stand with, and no, this isn’t guilt by association. If your house is infested with fleas and bedbugs, people don’t have to stoop to the level of accusing you of being vermin yourself to have a good reason to decline an invitation.

Vox Day’s PR says that he believes every human being is equally entitled to life and dignity. That’s the story he tells the world about himself. When we look at how he speaks of and to his fellow human beings, though, we are not required to take that story into account over our own judgment and the evidence of our senses.

Gamergate’s PR says that they are anti-censorship and pro-freedom of speech. When they label opinions that they disagree with as lies and try to run anybody who spreads such opinions out of the marketplace of ideas, though, we are not required to take their stated stance into account.

The Sad Puppies’ PR says that they are for a democratic and transparent Hugo selection process and that they just want more people involved to break the power of any cliques.

When they demonize Mary Robinette Kowal for funding 100 new voting memberships to be assigned randomly to any takers, we are not required to believe their PR.

When they select their slates in secret, using unspecified criteria and offering no explanation for where some of the final selections came from or why certain suggestions were rejected in favor of these undemocratic selections, we’re not required to believe their PR.

When we can look at their blogs and the comments by their supporters and see the way they talk about past winners and nominees, we don’t have to believe the story they tell us that they are here because other people have been snobbishly acting to stop the “wrong” authors from winning.

I’m not against the Sad Puppies because I think it would be the end of the world if Larry Correia or Brad Torgersen or one of their hand-picked favorites won an award.

I’m against the Sad Puppies because—no matter what stories they tell the world about themselves—they have demonstrated that they consider the marginal success or recognition of work they disapprove of as sufficient provocation to turn over the apple cart.

You can link me to any number of posts where they explain what they think they’re doing, in the terms they want us to view it. But if the story they tell is out of whack with what else I can see, it’s not likely to make me think more highly of them.

 

Sad Puppies Review Books: GREEN EGGS AND HAM

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

green eggs and hamGreen Eggs and Ham

Reviewed by John Z. Upjohn, USMC (Aspired)

I just noticed that my editor is titling these pieces “Sad Puppies Review Books” and while she says that the title has stuck I wish to make it clear it was not my idea and I do not approve of it. SJWs try to make it out that we are sad because they believe everything is about emotions and not reason. That makes me so angry I can’t even think straight.

We of the Sad Puppies campaign are not actually sad and we are not actually puppies. The puppies are a metaphor, and while I do not approve of metaphors in general the puppies are a good metaphor because we can say the puppies are sad whenever things we don’t like are allowed to happen, and no one can say that we are sad ourselves.

We aren’t sad. The puppies are. We’re not crying. The SJWs are crying. Got it?

Symbolism is an SJW weapon and they don’t like it when we use their own tactics against them. The salt in their tears nourishes me when they cry out, “John, that’s not how symbolism works.” I had a bullying SJW bitch of an English teacher who said the same thing. Cry harder, Mrs. Vandroogenbroeck. You can’t hold me after class anymore.

If I was a puppy and not a man, I might be crying after I read Green Eggs and Ham. This book is pretty much an illustrated Saul Alinksy-style Rules For Radicals manual for the kindergarten SJW set. The hero of the book is an unnamed, but proud revolutionary figure in full-on revolt against a tyrannical bullying Big Brother type who calls himself Sam-I-Am.

Sam-I-Am is a finger-wagging scold who thinks he knows better than everyone else when it comes to what’s good eating. Just as the SJWs try to convince us that stories that are not good stories are good stories by lying and saying they are good stories, Sam-I-Am tries to convince the hero that bad food is good to eat.

Well if you know anything about the gynocentric lesbian supremacist branch of Satanism that calls itself “Wiccanism”, think SAMHAIN and you will know who this man really is: Satan, the father of lies and son of Saul Alinksy.

And talking about the granddaddy of lies, this book has some whoppers in it. Just like how 1984 shows the power of The (Communist, AKA Social Justice) Party to compel Winston Smith to say that there are five lights when there are only four, this book hinges on the Satanic Sam-I-Am trying to force the narrator to accept that green eggs and ham are a natural and nutritious food. He accomplishes this by gradually wearing down the man’s resistance by exposing him to stressful shocking and even unnatural situations involving foxes and goats. This is a classic SJW tactic for shifting our culture to the left so slow you almost don’t notice it. But we notice it. We notice it.

Sadly much like 1984 this book ends with the protagonist giving in before the onslaught. He does love Big Brother. He does like green eggs and ham. He will eat them with the fox. In a perverse mockery of holy communion, he will eat them with the goat (like Pan or Baphomet, or other guises worn by Satan). This is preparing our children to have not just their food supplies controlled but also their minds and very souls.

A child indoctrinated by this book is not only trained to give in to the illegitimate application of government authority but is also primed to use these techniques to convince others. Unless your children are strong-willed and well-trained to recognize these tricks and traps I recommend keeping this book the hell away from them.

If you have raised your children right as I have done with mine then your best bet is to take a hands-on approach. I read this book to my children, taking care to explain the subtle SJW traps that were on every page. I am pleased to report that they showed no interest in it afterwards.

I think it will be a long time before any of them bring home a book by this joker, who has written numerous SJW propaganda hatchet jobs. The very title of Hop on Pop is a matriarchal assault on male authority. The Sneetches and Other Stories is a fable about the extinction of the white race due to targeted immigration and interbreeding. His books are about the political obsolescence of the straight white male and he is so shameless he doesn’t even bother to hide it.

If what was being done to us was being done to any other race they would call it genocide but if I say “keep the white race pure!” suddenly I am the one who is a racist? The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior would have wanted people who believe the races should be separate judged by the contents of our characters, not the colors of our skins, but SJWs preach that because I am a proud white man I must be the enemy. That is the lesson that this “Dr.” Seuss would teach my children, if I let him. So I do not let him teach them it!

If my sarcasm quotes were not apparent enough, let me speak plainly (unlike those two-faced SJWs, who always lie): I don’t believe the author is any kind of doctor. I don’t even believe his name really is “Seuss”. In fact, I think I know exactly it was who pinned this little propaganda tract.

Nice try, Alinsky. Better luck next time!

Two stars.

Sad Puppies Review Books: THE LITTLE PRINCE

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

little princeThe Little Prince

Reviewed by John Z. Upjohn, USMC (Aspired)

What is this fallen world even coming to. First we had science fiction books with stuff that no one cares about in them alongside the spaceships but now the clique of SJW bullies has decreed we must put up with science fiction books that don’t even have the spaceships in them.

The hell with that! I say we break the clique and make it so that anyone can read any book they want, and then books like this won’t exist anymore.

Reading this book it is obvious that the author was relying more on demographic appeal than quality storytelling, a fact that is only confirmed when you realize that The Little Prince was written by a Frenchman. It is well-known that the French have been Stalinists ever since they were conquered by Hitler. Did you know that Hitler was a leftist? They teach kids in school that Fascism is the opposite of Stalinism but Hitler and Stalin agreed to carve up the world between them and they would have got away with it if it wasn’t for God’s America.

The one good moment in the story is when the Prince realizes that a self-entitled bitch of a rose is taking advantage of him and decides to go his own way. If more men went their own way then we would break the stranglehold that Feminazis have on the sex supply and you can bet there would be more equality around here.

Everything is out of balance because of feminism. You have women who are 6s, 5s, and even 4s who believe they deserve a man who is a 9 or 10 and they won’t “settle” for you even if you’re a 7. They’ll never get the man they think they deserve but because women don’t need sex the way men do they can turn lesbian and hold off forever.

Beta men should be the ones who are complaining because they’re the ones who suffer the most. Deltas and gammas never had a chance of being laid, but all the women that would have gone with betas are holding off for the “Prince” that feminism promised them. Do the betas complain? No. They roll over and take it. They were half-emasculated to begin with and modern feminism has finished the job.

The Prince goes on a tour of many small planets which are all thinly veiled SJW hatchet jobs. Saul Alinsky must have laughed his ass off when this manuscript crossed his desk for approval. Businessmen are stupid now? Have fun buying books without capitalism, pinko perverts! In a better book like one by Ayn Rand the first man who thought to own the stars would have been a hero. He would have been the hero of the book. The Man Who Owned All The Stars is a book I would like to read, but that is not this book. That he is a figure of fun here proves that this book is nothing but base propaganda.

The story just goes downhill from there. Even though the bitch rose admitted she was wrong, the pathetic gamma Prince still misses her. He was better off without her. You know what the thing that makes him long for her is? When he finds out that on earth roses are a dime a dozen and you can just pick them right out of the ground.

Listen, I’m not sure if the Prince wanting to fuck a rose is supposed to be bestiality or symbolism. I don’t approve of either one of those things, but either way it’s just plain illogical. If roses do it for him, why would he be upset to find out that he can have all the roses he wants? This is some namby-pamby SJW bullshit. He had the power. He had all of the power! The book acts like he didn’t because that’s the lesson it wants to teach young men: that they never have the power. They want men to believe that even with dozens of girls around them they aren’t entitled to sex.

In the end the Prince kills himself by allowing himself to be bitten by a snake. If I understand the symbolism (and I think I do, though I still don’t approve) this is meant to be a homosexual act which naturally results in death, as the only natural end result of such an act. Sex creates life, therefore homosex leads to death. Even the liberals can’t pretend otherwise. All they can do is try to spin it into a good thing, conditioning our youth to accept homosexuality and its consequences as good and right. This is why they champion a culture of death with euthanasia and abortion and gay marriage and this book. Christians, keep this book out of your children’s hands.

The snake being full of poison could also be taken as a metaphor for toxic masculinity, which is the coded Feminazi rallying cry for male genocide. This is why I don’t trust metaphors. A massive glistening rocket ship with thousands of tons of thrust behind it is just one thing. If you start saying that things can be other things, there’s no limit on how many other things they can be. When anything means everything, then everything means nothing.

This is the liberal endgame. Don’t let them re-define words. If you let them they’ll have you believing that up is down and left is right and people can be anything they want.

Two stars.

The Essential Truth of Vox Day

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

A while back, I challenged any Puppy on Twitter to show that they really valued truth and honesty and factual reality as so many claim by acknowledging that the idea—widely promoted by Vox Day, including with a made-up quote—that David Gerrold had threatened the career of Brad Torgersen was not supported by facts. I asked them to either cite Gerrold doing so or label Day’s pronouncement a lie.

No one did. When pressed, one person said he couldn’t call it a lie because he felt that what Day had said was “essentially true”. He couldn’t cite facts or quotes, but it was “essentially true”. Its essence was true, or at least, it rang true to him.

Now, in fact-based reality, David Gerrold did not threaten Brad Torgersen. He did not imply that Puppies wouldn’t be welcome at Worldcon or the Hugos ceremony in particular, or that they would be treated discourteously as winners or losers. In fact, when it came to the ceremony, he laid down the law in the opposite direction: all are welcome, all are welcome. Connie Willis turned down a presenter gig specifically because she didn’t feel like she could abide that directive.

But if he didn’t do those things, the feeling among the Puppies is, he ought to have. It fits their worldview, their narrative, so much better if he did, so it doesn’t take much prompting from even a middlingly talented wordsmith to get them to believe that he did.

“If it’s not true, it ought to be!” could be given as a summation of it.

I’ve been calling Day out obliquely (as in, I’m not challenging him directly so much as pointing out what he’s doing) on Twitter for a while, whenever he engages in these lies. I don’t know if I’ve actually made anyone think by doing so, but I believe he’s afraid that might be happening. I mean, I don’t flatter myself to believe his blog post entitled Bi-Discoursality is entirely a response to me. Rather, I believe I’m a part of the general situation he is attempting to defend himself from.

Day’s supporters like to trot out “You don’t understand Vox, he’s a troll. He’s trolling. It doesn’t count.” when someone pins them down with something he said that is 1) too egregious, 2) too much of a lie, or 3) too egregious a lie for them to defend. This response ignores the fact that we do understand him, we know he’s a troll, and that’s irrelevant to the point at hand.

Well, Day is attempting to codify “Was trolling, didn’t count!” into a defensive shell against people calling out his lies. See, they’re not lies, they’re rhetoric, which is the only language those silly emotional irrational SJWs understand, you see? He has to use rhetoric to deal with, even though as a creature of pure logic and reason it’s such a foreign language to him that if he wasn’t also a certified supergenius he would never have been able to internalize its principles in order to communicate with us!

He would much rather use the reasoned method of dialectic to communicate with everyone, except he has to reserve that for those minds that are susceptible to reason and influence, you see, and…

Wait.

Wait.

Wait a minute.

Vox… Mr. Day… when you said “SJWs always lie.”, the example of a rhetorical statement that you put forth in that post, were you addressing us, those you call “SJWS”… or were you addressing your followers?

When you made your famous essentially true statements about David Gerrold, were you trying to convince those wily SJWs they were allied with a skunk, or were you trying to whip up your own base?

And regardless of your intention when you engage in these, ah, rhetorical flourishes… take a look around. How many of supposedly overly emotional, irrational SJWs that you claim to be trying to persuade with them wind up being persuaded? And how many of your own followers wind up repeating the lines and running with them like they’re God’s own truth?

God’s own essential truth, that is. The facts may not bear it out, but emotionally, the target of the rhetoric knows it to be true.

The post I’m referencing is itself a piece of rhetoric. It lays out no actual logical premise, no evidence, and no conclusion. It’s just a pre-emptive defense against anyone questioning his lies, wrapped up in hollow flattery towards his audience: you are so reasoned, so rational… and because I’m writing this dialectically, anyone as smart as you will understand that it is true! It’s a hedge against the day when the intellectual debt incurred by one of his lies overcomes the emotional investment his chosen audience has in agreeing with him.

He winds up the post by predicting that those who only speak rhetoric will see his post as nothing more than a man attempting to sound smart and then attack it. I suppose that, grade school gamer that he is, this is what he regards as a particular cunning trap and he takes this post as a sign that it worked. Or that’s what he would say, anyway.

In reality, it’s just another hedge. It gives his followers an out for ignoring any criticism. Don’t listen to the child who says the emperor is naked. The wise can totally see the clothes!

Sad Puppies Review Books: THE MONSTER AT THE END OF THIS BOOK

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

monster

The Monster at the End of this Book

Reviewed by John Z. Upjohn, USMC (Aspired)

I remember when the cover of a book used to mean something. When you could look at the cover of a book and know exactly what you were getting. If you saw a gleaming chrome spaceship over the shoulder of an intrepid, chiseled explorer holding a ray gun, you didn’t even have to buy the book and read it because you knew exactly what the story would be just by looking at it. But you bought it anyway! And you read it, and liked it! Because that book was an objectively good book, and you knew it by looking at it.

People used to know how to tell stories back then. They knew which plot was the good plot, and they used that plot. They knew what dialogue was supposed to sound like. Sometimes I buy a book today and the dialogue is different than in other books. People, if I wanted different dialogue, I’d read something else. Stop signs. Trees, maybe. I don’t know. Not books! Books are supposed to be one way, not another way.

The cover of The Monster at the End of This Book is full of false promises and overblown hype, just like a woman. I remember when if a book told you that there was a monster in it, you knew what you were getting. There would be a hero who didn’t make any namby-pamby wishy-washy apologies for being a hero. There would be a princess or dame or broad of some description and she would be beautiful and love the hero after saying many times that she doesn’t, because he loved her and love conquers any objection.

There wouldn’t be any of this pandering PC crap that people spout just to get cred with the in-crowd. I know we all hate that, right? Pandering, right? It’s awful, right, when people pander? When they just say what they know is safe and popular, just repeat what their audience wants to hear? Well, I for one have the guts to stand up in front of an audience of people who hate that, and say that I hate it, too, and I don’t care who in my intended audience knows it!

The cover of this book promises a monster, which implies there’s going to be a battle. But there’s no battle. There is barely even a monster! Just some blue gamma male wimp who begs and pleads with you to stop reading the book on every page.

Looking at the obviously inflated Amazon reviews I can only conclude that a number of weak-willed liberal readers gave in to this blue cuck’s loathsome SJW bullying tactics and stopped reading before the disappointing reveal. Of course this doesn’t stop them from lavishing it with glowing reviews. These people care only about politics and demographics, not merit or value.

Well, I read it all the way to the end. The last thing you want to do is tell this red-blooded American he mustn’t do something or shouldn’t read something because I believe in the first amendment and I will read whatever the hell I want.

So I can tell you that according to the last page, the blue wimp is the monster. Allegedly. Typical self-flagellating gamma male posturing. Don’t you know that ALL men are monsters according to the Feminazis? Agreeing with this sexist sentiment is the only way a pathetic gamma male like this “Grover” character (named after Demo(n)cRAT president Grover Cleveland, I suppose) has of getting laid. I got news for you, Quisling: your complicity will not save you. The foundation of all modern feminism is in gender abolition radical feminism.

I did some digging and it turns out this book was produced by an entity called the “Children’s Television Workshop” and now known as the “Sesame Street Workshop”. Well, if you consider that children are tiny people, you might get a better name for it: People’s Television Workshop. This indoctrination factory produces books and television shows and movies and games for your children using your tax dollars. They air their main shows on PBS (or as I like to call it, “Public BS”), in case you needed any proof of the socialist agenda that underpins this thing. They’re targeting your children The whole thing is straight out of a Saul Alinksy Rules For Radicals-style playbook.

Also, apparently this Grover character is a Muppet. A family entertainer like Jim Henson must be turning over in his grave to know that his creations have been turned to a leftist political purpose.

Misandry and the promotion of a culture of fear and illiteracy are what you get if you buy this book. Since I already have a copy, I’ve decided to give it to my kids just so they know what they’re up against. I am pleased to report that they have read it through a dozen times and show no signs of stopping now. They laugh when the blue gamma cuck tells them to stop reading. They laugh right in his stupid, weak face. You hear that, Saul Alinksy? Your little gambit failed! What was supposed to be an indoctrination manual for the left turned out to be a training ground for those who love freedom! We the living read what we want, and we don’t stop just because some emasculated Feminazi puppet-man tells us to.

Two stars.

Puppy’s Progress

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

The Puppies keep describing the enemy they imagine they’re fighting in Orwellian terms. Well, if you want to see an example of groupthink setting out to punish badthink in action, head on over to Vox Day’s blog. Actually, that statement could probably stand on its own at any random instance in time, but I’m thinking in particular of this post, where Day wants to contrast three reviews he says are by “Social Justice Warriors” with one that isn’t: http://voxday.blogspot.com/2015/05/smells-like-success.html

He starts the post by saying that the first review “precisely underlines the central point made by the Sad Puppies campaign and single-handedly serves to justify it”.

Now, I’m not sure which central point it so perfectly illustrates, as the central point of the Sad Puppies changes from day to day. Is it supposed to prove that there’s a clique that judges books by demography rather than merit?  Is that which central point Day is saying it supports? If so, I’d like to know how, as the critique is specific and refers to the text and not the author. Is it supposed to be a counterpoint to Brad Torgersen’s famous lament that he can no longer judge a book by its cover? If so, I would think the third review would serve better, as it points out that the ending of the story is explicitly spoiled by the title, Turncoat.

No, taking the three “SJW” reviews in total, I believe the specific one of the Sad Puppies’ nebulous and ever-shifting “points” which Day believes is being proven is just the general idea that some people who are reviewing books (and nominating them for awards and such) are choosing to lie about what’s good and bad on the basis of how they feel about the author or other externalities.

This is not actually something that I’ve seen articulated by any central personality of Sad Puppies, but by those lurking in the comments and on Twitter. It’s more Gamergate thinking than Sad Puppy thinking, at least in its explicit form.

The shortest review and Day’s response to it really hammer it home.

The review reads:

“I hated Turncoat – compared to how Iain Banks, Neal Asher, Peter Hamilton write sentient battleships and describe space warfare it was unbearable, then there were lines like ‘the men who…’ versus ‘the people who’ really jarred against me – it felt like a story written about AIs written by somebody who has ignored any progress in fiction, computing and so forth in 20 years. The opening battle scene at the start of The Reality Dysfunction is better than Turncoat in every way, and that was written in 1996.”

And Day’s response reads:

“I found that to be rather amusing, considering how spectacularly boring Iain Banks’s space battles are. But considering that Daveon hates Sad Puppies and hates Rabid Puppies, how surprising is it that he – mirabile dictu – just happens to hate ‘Turncoat’ as well?”

The first line is great: “I found it amusing that you profess to like A Thing, when I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that A Thing is unlikeable!” Yes, Day has caught another lying liar in another filthy lie! SJWs are so dedicated to the cause they will lie and say that boring things are interesting!

Or, y’know, different people find different things interesting.

See, the actual central point of the Sad Puppies that Day proves with these four reviews—all of which seem perfectly fair to me, as they all are rooted in the specifics of the text and all seem to honestly reflect how the reviewer received it—is the new central point that Brad Torgersen pivoted to last week when he said there’s no such thing as an objective standard and that the Sad Puppies are about packing the Hugos with people whose tastes reflect his own.

Because that’s what these reviews demonstrate: differing tastes. And given that there are three of them where the story is not to the reviewer’s taste and one where it isn’t, maybe Day is right and this does prove the need for a Sad Puppies campaign, from the point of view of the Puppies.

I know that’s not what Day means, of course. His own commentary on the post reflects his inability to grasp the concept of differing tastes, differing yet honest opinions. Understanding those things would require Day to possess some shred of empathy or a working theory of mind, neither of which he shows any evidence of. I suspect that like many people who rely on being able to brag about what society has told them is an objective measurement of their superior mental ability, Day has never bothered much with actual mental development. Why not? The test says he’s already at the top. There’s nowhere to go except for down.

This puts me in mind of a blog post by Christian blogger slacktivist, which started off as part of a scene-by-scene sporking of the first Left Behind movie and digressed into a meditation on Kirk Cameron’s progress as an actor, contrasting Cameron as an actor who believed that he was at the top of his form as a child on a sitcom and had no more room for improvement with fellow sitcom actor, Leonardo DiCaprio, who has never stopped trying to improve himself.

And this brings me to one of the more curious things found at Day’s post, in the comments. One of the reviewers is quoted as saying that Turncoat reads like it was written by an AI that ignored the past decades’ worth of progress in writing. One of the commenters responds to this in part with, “Progress in fiction, HA!” He would like us to read a book published 24 years ago and concerned only with the shape of plots, which he considers to be not just the last word but the only word in what makes writing good.

Progress? Ha! This is what the Puppies represent: people who believe there can be no advancement in the state of the art of storytelling, because to them there is neither state nor art. No room for improvement, and nothing to be improved.

I know Vox Day has something of a fanboy’s interest in the history of Rome. If he ever gets past the “playing with tin soldiers” phase of things and looks into it a little more deeply, he might notice that there was a trend during the late decline of the empire of poets and authors who trafficked in little more than polite and politic rearrangements of what had come before. No new ideas, no new forms, no new shapes. Aldous Huxley might have been thinking of a grammaticus of this age when he had a teacher in Brave New World ask pupils if they thought they knew better than the World Consensus Textbook: “Do you think you know better than Virgil? Do you think you can do better than Catullus?”

Despite Torgersen’s latter-day admission that it’s actually a matter of taste, this state of art in decline is broadly what the Puppies (and their incestuously close ideological cousins the Gators) are fighting for: stability to the point of stagnation, based around a global consensus of what a story is allowed to be.

Oh, sure, the zealous believers in free speech found in both camps will wring their hands and say, “No, no, no! We want people to be able to both make and enjoy whatever art they want! It’s just the dishonesty of it all that we’re fighting against!”

But when you define “dishonesty” as anyone who evinces an opinion that deviates from the accepted consensus… well… you wind up with things like this, where three reviews that independently arrive at similar conclusions, each making explicit reference to the text, are used as evidence that the reviewers are lying, which is used to justify a “revolutionary” campaign to root out such liars.

As I said, this is the triumph of “groupthink” over “badthink”.

Well, “triumph” might be too strong a word. It remains to be seen if the group is big enough to actually enforce and maintain their consensus reality, outside the carefully insulated protective aegis of their own spaces. Day likes to boast about his millions of monthly page views, yet when he was handing out numbered badges to his “minions” he ran out of takers in the low three hundreds. I suspect he has yet to learn the difference between browsing at someone and browsing with them. I’m also suddenly curious how many hits the Time Cube guy was getting at the height of its notoriety.

Oh, brave new world that has such people in it!

Progress? Ha!

WHAT?! YOUR SAD PUPPIES ARE EVOLVING!

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

So, the past week saw both camps of Puppies, Sad and Rabid, evolving their narratives in significant ways.

Vox Day, over on his blog, made a post declaring that burning the Hugos to the ground is “now a sub-optimal strategy” for the Sad Puppies, which is a weird thing to say given that this was never stated as the Sad Puppies’ goal, but was associated with his own campaign, the Rabid Puppies.

But let that go.

What does our master gamesman see as the optimal strategy now? Ah, he sees it as a big win if no slate fails to have any impact beyond the nomination process because there are too many people involved in voting now…

It’s weird, I’d swear I’ve heard that before. Oh, right. In their more moderate moments, that what the Sad Puppies have claimed to be fighting for all along.

He’s declaring it a firm victory because he either believes or is depending on the cattle that stampede behind him believing that there is a powerful clique that the Puppies are a countering force to, so if no one controls the final voting this doesn’t mean the Puppies win, it means their invisible enemies lost.

But of course, part of his meta-strategy is to declare everything a victory for him. He keeps referring to this as a “Xanatos Gambit,” which is a term for when someone engineers a situation so that all possible outcomes ultimately benefit them. It’s named for a fictional mastermind, though, not someone who simply doesn’t care what actually happens as long as his followers still think he’s cool, so I’m not entirely certain it’s the most accurate application of the term.

But let that go

This is a significant shift from Day for two reasons.

The first is that it signals what he thinks is most likely to happen. He rode high on the sweeping fantasy vision of himself as a Roman general leading a slavering horde of berserkers across the frozen river to assault the well-fortified position of his enemies (note to self: suggest history lessons for Vox), but he has just enough self-awareness to know that his strategy of lying and repeating the lie could come back and bite him if he tried to claim a sweeping victory where none existed, so he’s starting the spin now.

The second is that—as mentioned before—the endgame he now endorses is something the Sad Puppies have claimed to have wanted as their ultimate endgame.

I will not speculate as to the extent to which Day worked with the Sad Puppies. It is apparent from the timeline that he either did not read all the works he nominated or he had an advance look at their slate, since he nominated the same works within a day. It seems likely that there was similar cooperation in coordinating the official campaign artwork.

But let that go.

As the strangely moderated Vox Day’s stance melds seamlessly with the more moderate version of the Sad Puppies’ stance, it’s no longer necessary to try to tease out how their origins may have intertwined, as they’ve ended up in exactly the same place. If Day has enough awareness to even be conscious of the fact that he’s now thrown in completely with the Sad Puppies, I have to think he imagines this some sort of complex flanking operation he’s just completed, or maybe a pincer maneuver where two columns come together to the surprise of… well, absolutely no one, in reality.

And then the two columns get lost in the mcHe’s declaring it a firm victory because he either believes or is depending on the cattle that stampede behind him believing that there is a powerful clique that the Puppies are a countering force to, so if no one controls the final voting this doesn’t mean the Puppies win, it means their invisible enemies lost in the crowd? The wargame metaphor breaks down pretty quickly, to be honest.

But let that go.

On the other side of the increasingly illusory divide, we have Brad Torgersen. In what looks like a Facebook conversation, he appears to have dropped the central contention of the Puppy campaign. That is, he’s no longer maintaining that there was an organized effort by “SJWs” to nominate works and authors for “PC cred” reasons or to reward members of a clique and that the Sad Puppies were conceived to make sure that the nominees and winners really deserved them.

Nope. Now it’s just a matter of taste. You can read the comments in full at http://www.deathisbadblog.com/brad-torgersen-goes-full-post-modern/, where I read them, but I’ll excerpt the most significant lines here:

“Gents, thing is, there is *no* objective standard. None. Pretense to the contrary, [it] is just that: pretense. […] Year after year, a great swath of SF/F’s audience watches as the Hugos parade off to works which leave that swath cold. […] Again, no objective standard. Just taste. If people with taste similar to yours can vote in sufficient numbers, then your taste prevails. If those with a different taste can vote in sufficient numbers, your taste does not prevail.”

I kind of doubt at this point that Torgersen is either honest enough nor self-aware enough to be consciously admitting that the Puppies were founded on a pretense, that the lines that have been used to rally up a small army of small-minded followers were essentially lies, but there you have it. Just as I’ve been saying all along, just as many others have been saying: different people like different things for different reasons.

No need to imagine a clique or conspiracy or cabal or collusion or whatever scary c-word you want to slap on it this time. It’s just differing tastes.

The post I’m linking to is already almost a week old, so I’d expect if this admission were to herald a serious change in the Puppy discourse we’d have seen it already. But why should they start being self-consistent and internally coherent now? The Puppies are an apolitical group, except when they’re not. The Puppies don’t care about diversity, except when they’re its true champions. What exactly they did and why they did it changes from day to day, and I’m not even just talking about if you ask different members of the effort.

That is because at the end of the day, what we’re dealing with is people rationalizing away an irrational response to their feelings at not having their tastes represented as best/most mainstream. When defending its own naked, ugly self-interest, the human brain can and will pivot smoothly from one position to another and just not acknowledge the contradiction between the two but not acknowledge that any movement occurred at all.

They love to throw around the word “Orwellian”, but the way the Puppies constantly shift and evolve their narrative would leave the Ministry of Truth dizzy. If today the Puppies are about subjective taste, then the Puppies have always been about subjective taste.

But let that go.