Category Archives: true equality

Between This Essay and The Next

A few days ago, I retweeted something I saw on The Ralph Retort‘s feed and briefly wrote about how I stopped being a feminist in reply to that retweet. A brief discussion followed and I decided it would be best to expand on it. I guess it’s one of those ‘triggering’ things for me because whenever I flash back to that time, it always results in the same towering fury I remember having that pushed me to my feet and had me start shouting back. After all, all the hate they were spewing went against everything we ourselves had been taught about being good strong Catholic women. I decided to break it up into two parts because 1) I had to stop being angry because it really wasn’t doing good things to my heart rate and 2) I had to do stuff away from computer, namely lunch for the family. As it was I had to ask my daughter to handle the rest (just make sure it didn’t burn) because I needed to fall over into bed: I was burning up with flu and everything hurt. I’ve been bedridden since.

Ralph asked if he could feature it and I said yes.

While I was asleep it went up on his site.

I woke up today, fever broken, and went to check on the kids. My eldest boy, Vincent, was up already but Big Sis wasn’t so I sicced him onto her to wake her with cuddles, yelling “INVASION OF THE LITTLE BROTHER” at the top of my voice. Cue “KYAAAAA!!! What are you doing?! Oh, hugs.” The ruckus had Aff come out of his room where he was playing L2. I made coffee and sat down to look at stuff online. That’s when I saw that my account had gone up on The Ralph Retort, and saw retweets talking about a young girl/woman. My still fever-fuzzy brain thought “…I hope they don’t think this is current events.” (I’m still fever-fuzzy.)

 

That’s my graduating year ID – lucky it was where I remembered it was. I blacked out my ex’s surname – yes, I was married then to someone else; our marriage was on the rocks and we separated before I graduated and eventually divorced – He was American so he could divorce me; the Philippines does not have divorce for anyone who isn’t Muslim and that is a rant for a different day. I visited Australia in 2004 and Rhys and I have been together since. My ex and I still talk on occasion, and we both agree that we’re in better places than we were before and we wish each other happy.

This happened while I was still in college. I went for six years from 1998 to 2004, not because that’s the required time to put in, but rather because as an ‘irregular student’, I didn’t have the per-assigned hours and classes that regular block students did. I started in the second semester, not the first, of the last co-ed school ‘batch’ before Miriam fully reverted to being an all girl’s college. So I had to try grab the empty slots for my required major and minor classes if they were still available, or if they weren’t, I’d take them next year. This caused some issues as …I think it was calculus?… was dropped while I was attending (Miriam did not offer hard science or engineering majors at the time – that may have changed now) so other than Algebra or Statistics, there was no need for it – and it had been on my curriculum list when I entered. So I had the strangest schedule sometimes. The history classes were supposed to be spread across the first three years; I got them all on my second semester. Unfortunately I had a very boring World History teacher – one of those people who focused more on geography and dates and timelines as opposed to bringing the events to life in the classroom. Philippine history and Asian Civilization was fun, especially Philippine History, because that was taught by someone who became one of my favorite teachers ever. A tale for a different day.

I wrote as much as I could remember – this would have happened sometime between 2000-2002 or 2003, so I’m afraid that I don’t remember things like names any more. I’ve always been bad with them, so I’m sorry, I can’t point you to a particular lecturer, I remember only that the two Indian women were the most outspoken of the four or five guests up on that stage. They’re a lot like the typical militant feminist common today, just without the rainbow hair.

I forgot to include the parts where I argued extensively about how could they simply shove aside half the human population and dismiss them as rapists when surely all of us present knew of good men, were related to them, and had good male friends. How were we supposed to become good parents to sons, if we treated them with suspicion simply because they were born the opposite sex? I suppose most of the details have gotten hazy in the back and forth shouting. But I remember that fury, the feel of my sense of restraint breaking one chain at a time with each outrageous thing that the feminist lecturers were verbally heaping on our heads – and trying to crush our spirits with. In a way, they did us a favor by overplaying their hand; that particular batch of students were never feminists of the type that seem so prevalent today.

I have good memories, for the most part, of my college years in Miriam. I liked most of my professors and had problems only with the Statistics teacher and the hard-line socialist who was very upset that I didn’t paint a shining picture of glorious utopia after finding out I’d lived in East Berlin. In fact, I don’t really have bad memories of Women Studies classes either – and I know now I was very lucky in that respect. It was a lot more classical feminist than the fainting couch paternalism-encouraging Third Wave weaklings. The focus was more of being able to improve conditions for women and push for a more egalitarian outlook on a local scale. In some respects that is correct and indeed a good thing to advocate. In some other respects however, I don’t think it really applies to a lot of the Filipino outlook either honestly, but that’s the topic of my next essay, which I’m still in the process of writing.

 

First though I have to make sure I don’t relapse.

 

Nazi is not a term you throw around lightly

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I haven’t really written about the Sad Puppies 3 campaign on my blog because when it really started to heat up, my two and a half month old son Brandon died of SIDs. After that, I kind of wanted to keep my little space on the Internet off that kind of harassment, like what I saw levelled at Brad Torgersen – for a while. Nevertheless, I openly support Sad Puppies 3, because I honestly saw it as a chance to vote for the Hugos, as a fan of Sci-Fi and Fantasy, to see try vote for books I felt was worthy, honestly.

I can’t any more.

I’m just a small (literally – I’m only 4’8″) indie author and artist. So most people will probably dismiss me as unimportant. Most people don’t know who I am, and that’s okay.

The problem is when you don’t know who you’re talking about, or yelling insults at, you don’t know anything about them, where they’ve been, what they have done.

You don’t know what stories they have.

This will be long, so brace yourself.

A bit of background about myself first, which I don’t really wave around much.
My family’s always been a politically active one. My father, the son of two poor teachers was a police beat, later investigative journalist during the Marcos Era, and he openly didn’t approve of the abuses being conducted at the time by the dictatorship and its cronies. I don’t think most people who read this will really get it unless they’ve lived under similar circumstances, but that pretty much was walking around with a big fat target on your back. Not the bullshit social media kind that is common these days, but the kind that actually gets you hit with bullets. Journalists disappearing wasn’t uncommon, and most of those who did disappear were never seen again. If the family was lucky, they’d find something to bury and mourn – my parents related that a belt buckle in a shallow grave in the jungle was all that was found of one of my father’s journalist friends years after he’d vanished. One of the ones who made it out alive refused to talk about the years he was gone and missing.

For whatever reason, Dad didn’t vanish, nor was he openly assassinated, even with critical columns when he was an editor. He was a bit too visible perhaps – at his funeral, one of his longtime friends described Dad as a noisy bantam rooster, kicking up a fuss when it was warranted. (Another described him as being so restless and excitable that he would often be like a headless chicken rushing about, or so his senior editor would yell.) He taught me that there’s a story to be told if you know how to find it – and he was very good finding stories and bringing them to light. Have an article written by another one of his friends which some examples; which, surprisingly, has comments from myself, AND Uncle Larry Sipin’s daughter. Larry Sipin and my father were best of friends, and when Tito Larry died, he grieved for years. When my father died, his former colleagues in journalism wondered who they would first pester for an interview when they got to Heaven.

Dad was also a union leader, back when such a title actually meant something, looking out for worker’s rights and safety. One day, when I was on my way to college, I put on my school ID – it clipped to my blouse pocket. An old man sitting across from me in the Tamaraw FX taxi (these functioned more like jeepneys, plying set routes) saw my surname and asked if I was related in any way to Antonio Modena. Surprised, I replied that he was my Dad.

The old man then said “Ah, a man of great principles, your father. When he was the leader of our union at the newspaper I worked at, he looked out for us, the workers lower on the ladder – the cafeteria workers, the janitors, the people running the print machines, the security guards. When one of us lost his fingers in a printing machine accident, your father was able to fight for our employer to pay for the medical bills and give the man accident compensation and a pension. His children didn’t have to drop out of school to work.

“He never sold us out, you know. I heard they tried to bribe him, two million pesos and immigration to the US and a job, and he turned them down. A man of great, solid principles, your father. Be proud of him.”

Needless to say, his principles and unwillingness to bow to fear earned him enemies, including one of the relatives of Imelda Marcos. When Dad refused to accept that bribe, he found himself sacked on Christmas Eve that same year. There’s lots more to that story, but at any rate, he was encouraged to take the Foreign Service Officer exam. Out of two or three thousand, only six passed. Dad was number four, I think.

The relative of Imelda, we heard later on, was quite unhappy and tried to get Marcos himself to keep my father out of the foreign service. Supposedly, Marcos told him that because my father had passed the exam, there was nothing he could do.

My father’s first assignment was to East Berlin. A World War II history buff, he was excited because this meant that he could go and live in a place he had only read so much about. I was seven when we got there, and for two years we lived under in a socialist country. Privacy was an illusion, quite honestly; and my parents knew that there would be listening devices, and that our house would be inspected while we were out of the house. It would be little things – cups just out of place, neckties and suits not in the same order that my Dad carefully arranged, our toys moved from their original positions. There had been no housing in the diplomatic quarter, so we lived in an apartment high-rise where the families of the Stazi were granted homes. Dad was happy – we got to live Socialist East Berlin unfiltered and uncurated.

But to get to East Germany, we first flew to Amsterdam. And while we were there, Dad took us kids to the Anne Frank House museum. That started my education in history. Dad felt it very important that we learn about it before we got to Berlin, because once we were there, there would be no mention of it. This was particularly emphasized by the fact that the Second World War was excised entirely from East German education at the time, and they were only taught about ‘The Great War’ – what the rest of the world was calling World War I. Socialist Germany was a big exercise in erasing the past and reconstructing it in a great big lie – and somewhat inconveniently, there were still people who remembered WWII. It was a verboten subject, and the younger generation knew nothing of it. They didn’t believe that someone as evil as Hitler could have ever existed.

Dad, the Aristotlean gadfly that he was, liked to smuggle in copies of Mein Kampf and give it away as gifts, his own little subversive fight for the truth. I know he horrified one of our babysitters with it, who was a college student and an avowed Marxist who enjoyed being able to pit wills and philosophical arguments with ‘someone unfortunate enough not to be educated in Socialist education.’ It was her awakening into questioning what she knew.

One of the people working at the consulate fell in love with an East German woman. The only way they could marry was if she escaped East Berlin, and so he smuggled her out. The details of that I don’t know, but I remember my dad saying she was struck dumb for three days from sheer culture shock after she saw West Berlin for the first time – and realized that everything she’d been raised to believe, and had known as truth was in fact a carefully manufactured and maintained lie that was possible only through total control of information. Everything had to be spoon fed. They had to develop a disdain, to instil contempt, pity and aversion to Capitalism, America and other countries on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

It was actually the control of information that the older people tended to rebel against – the younger generations knew nothing of that, of course, because they did not know about the reality of the past. But the older people hungered for news, information. So we’d often get invited out to houses outside the city, where there were big, sprawling gardens. While my brothers and I played, my parents would be discreetly grilled for information and news about the outside world. They had no interest in leaving the Socialist setup, but would have liked to have the freedom to make up their own minds about the information out there, as well as events. They didn’t like being treated like children who were unable to think for themselves, or thought of as not having that capacity. They also wanted to just be able to travel and see their family on the other side.

The other thing they didn’t like what that good manners, right conduct and personal responsibility for one’s actions was no longer taught, and was considered ‘old fashioned’ and ‘wrong.’ Basic decency was being slowly erased, and the younger generations sind nicht mehr so nett. (no longer as nice.)

These seem like such a small things, I’m sure, to those of you reading this now, but the truth is, lots of little things eventually pile up, and become bigger than expected. We were reassigned to West Germany after only two years, but those two years still have an impact on me.

I was the only Asian student, and an ‘unknown’ Asian at that, in my classes in East Germany – most of my classmates had never heard of the Philippines; for the most part, they had heard of China, a sister nation in Communism. The years that followed in Bonn exposed me to the kind of racism I only had read about, but hadn’t experienced. See, my parents raised me to believe that I am a worthy human being, that my sex and skin color didn’t matter, and that it was my personality, my skills, my mind that mattered, that had merit, in the teachings of Martin Luther King Jr. who is one of the figures of history we look up to. So I was surprised to find myself getting bullied because I was seen as ‘less’ because I came from a ‘dirty Asian country.’

And since I’m my father’s daughter, I got into a lot of fistfights. I got accused of a lot of falsehoods too, including supposedly trying to throw a teacher down a stairwell, with ‘lots of witnesses’ lined up against me. My father asked that the person I supposedly tried to murder be brought into the room. So they did, and the teacher in question was surprised. “She saved my life, because she kept me from falling over the railing when the lunchtime rush caught us both.”

The teachers, trying to save face, tried to tell my father that I was disliked because I was ‘abnormal’, preferring to read (Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern, at the time) over playing during recess. My father jerked his thumb at the other children and said, “No, they are.”

In time though, the fights from my fellow schoolmates dribbled away as they decided I ‘wasn’t as weak and as cowardly as the other Asians’ – just in time for me to get into a fight with several teenagers from the high school who had heard of the uppity Asian girl who didn’t bow to her superiors. The same kids I used to get into a punchup with were right there with me and fighting back, and telling the teen boys that I was ‘stronger’ than the ‘rest of the weaklings.’

I remember trooping back to my house, the whole lot of us cleaning the scrapes and cuts and bandaging them up, and my mother, baby brother and the nanny coming home to see a crowd of Turkish, Iraqi, Iranian, African and German kids with cuts and bruises eating pizza at the dinner table. My mom’s only response was to send the nanny back out for more pizza and coke and for more band-aids. My house became the preferred place to hang out at after that, which my father said was fine because at least if we were there, we weren’t out in the streets getting into fights. I didn’t get into more fights after that, since word seemed to spread.

We moved around a bit after that, staying in the US with relatives for a few months, then going back to the Philippines, where I endured a different kind of discrimination – our household had always been English speaking, and the California sun had lightened my hair to a reddish brown, something I myself didn’t notice but my schoolmates did. Worse, I didn’t know how to speak Filipino, my English had a notable German mode of pronunciation, and the repeated syllables of Filipino, as well as it’s tonal inflections greatly eluded me. I was treated outright as an outsider, because I’d ‘lived abroad’ – seen as one of a different class of privilege and ‘snobbishness’ that I actually didn’t have (despite my father’s job and social standing, we were financially middle class.) The Philippines had changed a lot in the time we’d been gone, and I have to admit that the whole concept of envy of social and financial circumstances had been something I didn’t understand. It made less sense to me than racism, because it was something you could change with your own two hands!

My Dad got an assignment to Paris, France, as the Embassy’s minister counsellor, for six years. Because I was of college age, my mother and I stayed in the Philippines (though I stayed there for a year) and my brothers and father lived in France. When that tour was over, they came back home, and after a couple of years Dad took the panel examinations to qualify to become an Ambassador. He passed (not easy to do), was assigned to the ASEAN division of the Department of Foreign Affairs for a while, then he was up for assignment. He three options, one of which was open an embassy in Ireland (I think?) an assignment… I think the Maldives, and Israel.

I came down from upstairs to get a cup of coffee (that which sets my mind in motion…) and he was sitting at the dinner table, pondering what to take. He asked my opinion.

I said, “Ireland would be interesting. But Dad? You’re the kind of guy who thrives on stress. Israel’s better for you! Besides, that’s the land of the Bible! Think of all the history! And besides, it’s the only place in the Middle East where you won’t go insane from all the human rights violations and discrimination you’d be able to do nothing about.”

He chuckled and said I was right.

Now I mentioned before that my family is very political; and while Dad admired the Jews, he and my mother disagreed on the Israel-Palestine history. He felt that the Palestinians were the victims against a better set up aggressor – essentially buying the long-running media narrative. My mom on the other hand, curious about the Jews, studied the history, and took Israel’s side. It was, my mother and I felt, Dad’s blind spot; but he was also honest enough and objective enough that in the terms of comparison, Israel was the best place in the Middle East to be if you didn’t want to be in trouble for having different beliefs and religions.

Within five months of his arrival in Israel as our Ambassador and representative of the nation, Dad changed his decades-long opinion about the Palestinians, and sided with Israel. During a brief visit back we asked him why. Frankly, we were shocked; the Israel-Palestine situation had been an on and off debate with my parents, and we’d figured Dad was firmly entrenched in his view.

“It was all a lie,” he said. “Everything that I thought had been true of the Palestinians, is a lie. They fire rockets from hospitals and schools and houses, aiming at the Israeli schools, hospitals and houses, not military targets, and then run to the media and complain about how their civilians died in retaliatory fire. It’s stupid that they act like they’re the victims.” What broke the straw on the proverbial camel’s back though, was seeing the thrice a week caravans of food, supplies, necessities for living in food aid going across the border, funded by the Israeli government

He was also furious that any land the Palestinians got, ‘they turned into a wasteland’ – Gaza, Bethlehem… Gaza had been a fertile stretch of orchards and farmland when the Israelis surrendered it. Bethlehem, with it’s deeply religious significance, had been a thriving center for tourism and pilgrimages, but under the Palestinians, ‘it had become a slum.’ He saw the pictures of what these places looked like while under the care of the Jews and Israelis. Under the Palestinians, those places were ruined.

This isn’t to say he became unable to judge between right and wrong – barely a year into his ambassadorial duties, he called my mother, saying that he was likely to endanger his career, and told her why. She supported him and told him to do what he believed was right.

Now, I know in the light of the current controversy, which I will address later, this may sound hypocritical, but it isn’t – only those who are incapable of reading comprehension will take it wrongly.

My Dad, you see, had witnessed and been subject to very rough treatment by the Israeli Immigration Police. I know the general populace will go ‘so what?’ but there’s a culture of proper diplomatic protocol expected from the host country – and the IIP were violating it. Worse than that however, were the reports brought to him in his capacity as Ambassador of how the Filipinos were being segregated and discriminated against– told to sit in the back of the plane, treated more suspiciously at the immigration lines, and generally disrespected.

For the Filipino workers, he heard stories from both groups, and their Israeli landlords, how the IIP would conduct sudden searches – usually at night, startling families who were about to go to bed, often taking showers or were half-undressed, by kicking down doors and breaking through the windows. There were stories of men trying to protect their half-undressed female kin and being beaten, and if they protested the rough treatment, would be struck with the butts of rifles, and if the Jewish landlords protested the rough treatment of their Filipino tenants and the damage to their property, they would get yelled at and intimidated and threatened. “They were looking for illegal workers,” the landlords said. “But that doesn’t excuse their treatment of our tenants, because it assumes by default that the people they’re investigating are guilty.”

This was a gross violation of basic decency and human rights, as well as a big case of unfair discrimination. Further investigation by him – and when I heard about it, by me – that this was a common problem but limited to the IIP. There used to be a website documenting their violations, which I linked to my Dad.

Around this time he was also scheduled for an interview in one of the local magazines, and during the interview, he talked about the actions of the IIP, and called them ‘Nazi-like,’ ‘Gestapo-like,’ explaining why he used that description. He said that the Israeli people were quite hospitable, friendly and welcoming – and that this behaviour was specifically confined to the actions of a particular government body. He cited those offences, and talked about the responses of the landlords.

When the interview was published there was a brief firestorm, because, how DARE someone describe Jews as ‘Nazi-like’?! The furore was actually confined to a single politician in Israel, and one in the Philippines, calling for my father’s resignation in disgrace, that he be declared persona non grata and be immediately deported from Israel.

The people on the other hand… Well, my unofficial help on this side was to keep track of the news. I provided my father links and information, detailing the feedback. What was interesting was, the Israelis themselves said “We call each other Nazis in fits of pique, and he’s not wrong about the rough treatment he’s complaining about.” This response was common in the comments of the online newspapers even in Israel; at home, countering the grandstanding of that one local politician, the journalists were saying that my father should be lauded as a hero for standing up for Filipino well being and treatment, behaving as an Ambassador should. He would call my mother at odd hours, saying he was sleepy but was unable to sleep because he was getting interviewed globally – radio shows, newspaper interviews.

The Knesset called for an investigation. My father said that other representatives from other Embassies delivered complaints of mistreatment and discrimination.

All he wanted was for the Filipino people to be treated like normal human beings, he said, like people. He cited that with the history that Israel has, they shouldn’t forget what it is like, to be treated as less than human, second class. He did not blame the entirety of Israel. He sincerely apologized for his heated remarks in that light, but, he said, he had been so shocked and dismayed by that unfair discrimination that he forgot himself.

Bolstered by his stance, Israeli employers pressured the government to improve the lot of the Filipino workers and caregivers – many of whom work in caring for the aged and infirm.

There was no further ill treatment of overseas workers or discrimination from that point on, as far as I know. That website with the descriptions of the IIP’s wrongdoing went away, and was gone. During checks of passengers on the planes, Filipinos were no longer segregated to the back of the plane, but investigated and checked like everyone else.

My father consistently believed that the Filipino was worth fighting for – not as superiors, but in defence of their equality, that they have the right to work for their successes and dreams without discrimination. This does not mean he was blind – he was just as open about his criticisms of the flaws of Filipinos, just as he was willing to call out a flaw in Israeli performance.

We are human after all, and not perfect. He believes that we are capable of mistakes, and when we do them, apologize and make up for it.

This would not be the only time that my father would do everything he could in defence and protection of the Filipino. During the Israeli-Lebanon war, he coordinated the efforts in evacuating Filipinos from Lebanon – in some cases, helping them escape from their employers.

Soon after that, my father started promoting awareness of how the Philippines had opened it’s doors to the fleeing Jews during World War II. It’s a piece of history, he said, that isn’t commonly known, and is, by large unacknowledged.

Courage and determination to give humanitarian support for the Jews seeking refuge from the Holocaust in Europe in the 1930s.

These are the Filipino values that are sought to be remembered in this project called “Open Doors, ” the first Philippine Monument in Israel symbolizing the people’s hospitality, when the Philippines opened its doors to the Jewish refugees fleeing Europe during the Holocaust.

In 1939, the Philippine Commonwealth Government, as a matter of policy, opened its doors and welcomed Jewish refugees escaping Nazi tyranny in Europe. Ten thousand visas earmarked for travel to the Philippines Islands were made available to thousands of Jews.

President Manuel L. Quezon fully understood the crisis that the Jews were facing at that time. And to reinforce this open door policy, President Quezon built a housing community for Jewish refugees in Marikina in 1939 and allotted a farm and large settlement area in Mindanao for Jewish refugees before the outbreak of World War II.

The Filipinos expressed their indignation to the persecution of the Jews. On 17 November 1938, hundreds of Filipinos held a rally in Manila to express their moral outrage and to denounce the Kristallnacht.

These episodes in the journey of Jews to the Philippines to escape the Holocaust were documented and thoroughly discussed in the book entitled “Escape to Manila” by Frank Ephraim, one of the Jewish refugees and a witness to the humanitarian efforts of President Quezon. “Escape to Manila” will preserve for all generations the memories and experiences of the European Jews who sought refuge in the Philippines and the warm hospitality of the Filipinos during this difficult period in the Jewish history.

Perhaps impressed by my father’s willingness to fight for his fellow countrymen, or by the strength of his character, the Israeli government offered that a monument be raised to commemorate and remember that show of welcome when so many other nations turned the Jews away.

My father never saw the fruits of his efforts; he came home that last Christmas to tell us he had lung cancer. His doctors in Israel were optimistic; saying that if this had been twenty years prior, he should have been saying his farewells. Instead, they felt it was treatable. He collapsed while accompanying my mother on a pilgrimage to a certain church so she could pray – the unusually cold weather had given him pneumonia. While he was in the hospital, they treated his cancer as well, but his body had been so weakened by the pneumonia he didn’t make it through recovery.

I gave birth while he was in the hospital, and Rhys and I would sit and ‘talk’ with him – Dad had a tube inserted into his throat through which he was fed or to help him breathe, and couldn’t reply, but wrote his replies on a pad of paper. Vincent wasn’t allowed into the ICU then, so my father demanded photos, as many as we could take, which he would gaze at longingly. The day Rhys had to return to Australia, he promised my Dad he would take care of us.

A week later, Dad was released from the ICU and put into a normal hospital room. We brought Vincent to see him. Dad looked happy, and nibbled at his grandson’s little toes. Perhaps prickled by my Dad’s mustache, Vincent began to cry, and that seemed to upset Dad, so we said we’d visit him again later.

He passed away the next morning.

http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/anglo-file/local-filipinos-mourn-death-of-ambassador-antonio-modena-1.213810

http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/59977/pinoyabroad/open-doors-first-rp-monument-to-rise-in-israel

http://www.philstar.com/travel-and-tourism/481231/open-doors-monument-filipino-heart

What does this have to do with the Sad Puppies, I’m sure you wonder. I’m fairly sure few would have made it down this far, down this long-winded summary of the last 30-odd years of my family history.

Well see, consider first what the Hugo Awards are, and the claims that are constantly slung against the Sad Puppies, Rabid Puppies and their supporters. I won’t deny that the Sad Puppies campaign is politically touched – Larry Correia set out to prove that if he got conservative authors nominated, the left-leaning establishment would explode in rage and out would come every single tactic in Alinsky’s playbook.

Sad Puppies 1 and 2 proved that he was right. Satisfied by that, Larry was ready to lay down the banner. After all, Sad Puppies 2 had shown that the opposition would go FAR beyond merely calling him names and making up false claims on the Internet about how evil he was. He was libeled on the Guardian by Damien Walter, and people called up Larry’s home, ‘offering help’ to Larry’s wife to ‘escape from her abusive husband’ – the sheer amount of slander that he got, simply for disagreeing and exposing the biases and hate was staggering.

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

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

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

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

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

Larry didn’t win the Hugo, but despite what John Scalzi and the rest of Larry’s detractors claim, that was never his goal. His real goal was to expose what he, and Sarah Hoyt, and several others have been saying all along:

Short Version:

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

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

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

Sad Puppies 3 started with a bid by Brad Torgersen to try get the authors’ works we felt were worthy of nominating into the Hugo nominations, but wouldn’t otherwise get nominated. Larry felt that Brad was being rather idealistic, but hey, Brad felt the Hugos could be brought back to it’s original meaning of being an award that represented ‘the best of SFF’ as opposed to ‘who wrote the ‘most important work’ by purely left-leaning talking points of ‘important’, or by the color of their skin, their politics, who they slept with, if they’d changed gender, or were female. He wanted simply that the works be judged as works of science fiction and fantasy. So he called for suggestions. People replied – not just on his blog, or his friends’ blogs, and facebook posts, but also sent in suggestions via email – either to his friends, to Larry, to Sarah and Mad Genius Club, who forwarded it on, and such.

Brad called for everyone to send in suggestions of what they felt was worthy of an award. That invitation included people who opposed the previous campaigns. The only rule? Was to suggest only works that the persons suggesting it had read. No ‘I’d heard that…’ People sent in their suggestions, and the resulting slate of suggestions to nominate for the Hugo awards was a wide range of people and political leanings, sexual preferences and races – diversity by it’s very definition, as is considered important by those who are our detractors, but in reality, what we cared about were the works those authors produced.

We chose entirely based on merit.

Not on whether the person who wrote it was white, black, yellow or green striped and with red and orange polka dots.

We didn’t choose because of their political leanings.

We didn’t choose because of who they slept with.

We didn’t choose because of their religious beliefs.

We didn’t choose works based on whether or not the writer was transgender.

Brad stressed that nobody had to follow the slate. It was just suggestions – if there was a work that they felt should be nominated over one that was on the list, then by all means, vote for it. All that mattered was that this time, we were participating. And that we should also get the word out to other fans to nominate, and if we missed that, see about spreading the word that anyone who paid the supporting fees could vote this year, and nominate next year.

All he cared about was getting more and more people involved. That we judge works, as opposed to the people.

Leaving aside whether or not you agree with what we Sad Puppies did, let me emphasize that this is an award ultimately determined by who votes for what, as they wish, according to their individual tastes. I’ve been seeing lots of complaints, rage and demands, lots of misrepresentation, and falsely pretending to be impartial. There was a ridiculous complaint that if ‘we puppies had done the thing perfectly, the anti-pups wouldn’t be complaining.’

(That one is extra silly because it soon became clear that nothing we did or said was ever going to be good enough.)

There was also a strange, and frankly unrealistic expectation that we should have predicted that we sweep the nominations (Sorry, but while some of us write fantasy, we’re not wizards.) This one is funny to me because it’s a tacit admission that we supposedly outnumbered their nominations, thus ‘that’s not fair!’

We didn’t make the Sasquan rules. We followed them. And yes, yes, I hear the arguments about the ‘spirit of the awards’ – well, what are Hugos awarded for? The ‘best of SFF.’

Heck, we were unaware that we’d get so many works nominated – and honestly, not all of the ones we picked were. Larry and Brad both got nominated – and then refused their nominations. But the outrage was already showing up before the nominations themselves were announced.

We really didn’t know.

And while we kind of expected that rage would be directed at Brad and Larry for their nominations, honestly we didn’t expect that kind of rage to be directed at say, Jim Butcher, whose politics were completely unknown. Our detractors were demanding to know if ‘they’d allowed’ themselves to be included on our list. I’m sorry that you think that we need your permission to like something that much, but no, we don’t. Others complained about The Three Body Problem not being nominated by us – then demanded to know why we hadn’t read it in time.

And on and on and on. Even we were shocked by the Entertainment Weekly smear piece, but the detractors pooh-poohed it as careless journalism, because they were quite happy that we were being spread far and wide as the usual list of outrage engendering labels.

Misogynist.

Racist.

Homophobic.

Rape apologists.

And so on and so forth. Not a whit of it was true of course. This was, however, a step further than the smears laid on Larry by Damien Walter at the Guardian, because within hours, the libelous Entertainment Weekly piece was requoted across the globe – and even after the threat of litigation caused Entertainment Weekly to retract – bit by bit, starting with the title, then the content, then changed it to the point that it just leaned towards the anti-Puppy side in tone – the other articles have not been changed the last I heard.

There were accusations of us dragging in GamerGate, but this had little to no traction, honestly because Sad Puppies is about books, while GamerGate is about games – different focuses of ethics. Yes, there was some overlapping fandom but it didn’t take – until well known anti-Gamergater Brianna Wu said something. Gamergate wondered then what they were being accused of this time, apparently being the new boogeyman that is ad hoc blamed for everything. The problems we fight against are similar, especially with #NotYourShield.

The controversy has grown to the point that big name authors have weighed in, some in defense of us, some against. Ultimately, most of those have been private opinions, expressed privately on their own blogs.

Then along came Irene Gallo.

When you are promoting the product of your company, you are representing your company. Hitch along with it sneering in the main body of that post? You’re using your company’s name to give your words weight, whether or not that was what you intended. When someone asks you a question, and you respond in such a libellous, career-destroying manner, including authors in your statement – not by name, but by association – that your company publishes, you are indicating that this is the company point of view.

The thing is, honestly, such is what is considered acceptable – and frankly, you’re showing Larry is right again – from the other side, as indicated by the dismay by the anti-Puppies by Tom Doherty’s addressing the outrage from out side. They toss those labels at us because they consider us the enemy and must be destroyed.

Proving Larry right again and again and again.

The thing is, they toss those labels blindly, caring only for the destruction such words a capable of. So all-consuming is their hatred, that they include people like myself as ‘hateful white cis-men’ – I’m Filipino, female, and in an interracial marriage – and label people like Peter Grant to be the very thing that heroes like Peter have fought: White supremacists, Nazis.

Mr. Doherty, I spent eighteen years working with the victims of racial and tribal violence in South Africa, trying to overturn the vicious and racist policies of apartheid. The white government sought to rule by diktat, and the so-called ‘liberation movements’ who opposed it sought to render white rule impossible through terror. Groups such as ours that sought to bring relief and new hope to areas of conflict were targeted by both sides. We paid a heavy price for our beliefs. Twenty-seven of us died during those years, and more have died since. I’ve written here from time to time about some aspects of our experiences. If you’d like to know more, try this article, or this one. As for my attitude towards racism, try this article for a start.

Given that background, you’ll understand that to be told by Ms. Gallo that, as a supporter of the Sad Puppy campaign, I’m “unrepentantly racist”, is utterly unacceptable to me. Furthermore, I’ve fought (and I mean exchanged gunfire with) real neo-Nazis who sought to impose Nazi-like ideals of racial purity on a country at war with itself. Thus, to be told that I’m a member of an “extreme right-wing to neo-nazi group” is equally unacceptable. I could go on cherry-picking individual clauses out of Ms. Gallo’s statements, but why bother? I think you can understand why I exploded with anger when I read it. She has no idea about those realities. I do. I will bear their scars, mental, spiritual and physical, until the day I die.

I strongly, strongly advise you to read his post. The links in that quote that should, no must be read.

This is why I prefaced this post with a history of who I am, and a rather summarized description of my experiences. I have faced real racism, real discrimination. I have stood OPENLY in support of the Jews, of Israel, for which I have been stalked by someone on the side of the Antis FOR NEARLY SEVEN YEARS AND RECEIVED THREATS AGAINST MY CHILDREN FOR.

Peter Grant has fought against it.

Brad Torgersen goes to fight ISIS / DAESH – against REAL terrorists, REAL religiously motivated hatred, REAL rape culture, REAL KILLINGS OF GAYS.

You who sling mud at us, who question our honor our integrity, our hardships and experiences are doing so FOR THE PETTY REASON OF AN AWARD FOR FICTION.

With Irene Gallo’s original response to the protests of her words, and her subsequent non-apology, it is clear she is unrepentant in her contempt, in her hatred.

The difference between her and my father is, she is ‘sorry’ that ‘we were hurt by her calling us Nazis’, not that she is sorry at all ‘for calling us Nazis.’

My father apologized for his words, for calling the then actions of the Israeli Immigration Police as Nazi-like.

Irene Gallo and her like are not building, they are destroying. They are discriminating against merit, and favoring things extant to merits.

I frankly feel bad for Tom Doherty. He has employees who are more interested in their own agendas and their own ideology, than they are interested in keeping the business of the customers who do not share that ideology, or being welcoming towards authors who do not share that ideology. I do not know him, but I’ve heard about him, for the large part, good. I do not remember bad things said about him – and I heard about these good things from Larry Correia, John C. Wright, Sarah A. Hoyt, and others I may have forgotten. It is clear he treasures what he has built up.

An actual apology, instead of a sulky ‘I’m sorry you’re pissed off by what I said,’ would have been good. Perhaps probation. It depends on what punishments are deemed fit by the head company (Macmillan in this case) – as noted by other people already, the human resources departments of other companies would have already fired her for her unprofessional conduct.

Personally, I have no wish that their words ever be silenced. Let them speak, let them scream. Let everyone know what they think. Let them show the world how they react to disagreement.

Judge them by their words, their actions, revealing their character.

The people Tom Doherty has under him stand on the house he has built and throw rocks and jeer at half of their audience, and have openly reviled some of their authors, and openly reviled authors of other houses, regardless of their true beliefs.

But that is not important to them. That is why Brad came up with the term CHORFs – it was to distinguish the easily, perpetually outraged from those who lean simply left or disagree with us, like Eric Flint, who is on record as disagreeing what we Puppies are trying to do / how we did it, but speaks in our defence because such shrieking hatred is flat out unacceptable.

For all the accusations that they are flinging our way for ‘destroying the Hugos’ they really need to look at the behaviour they are displaying.

When it is gone, they will find something else to destroy in their attempts in recreating the Great Leap Forward in whatever genre or part of society they are in.

I would like to thank my mother, Maria Caridad Modena, for proofreading and checking my essay, as she used to do for my father’s articles and editorials.

Thank you to Eric Rasmusen for letting me know of a typo!

I am more than that

I’m going to have to start this with something unfortunately unrelated.

Hi, if you’re here because of a quote taken out of context, you are likely being used by Yama the Space Fish, also known as Yamamanama, aka Andrew P. Marston. Please refer to the Yama Stalker PSA and the list of various pseudonyms. This is a man living in the US who has been stalking me since 2009 and has been attempting to get people to attack me online as well as trying to defame me as ‘anti-woman with internalized misogyny’ or ‘homophobic’ or paint me as a bigot of some stripe or type by taking my words out of context in often what are several threads deep discussions, quoting them in other websites with parts removed (like my mentions of Yama being a stalker of women). His deep hatred and misogyny has been long documented, and he has a years-long vendetta against me that includes his threatening my children for my disagreeing with him in a discussion, a threat he has repeated again and again over the years. Lately he has been trying to drag other people into his vendetta, or trick them into doing the kind of behavior they condemn.

 

Larry Correia fisks and dissects very neatly how racist and exclusionary the call by someone I shall refer to as Princess Teacup Tempest to ‘read only (insert racial/skin color/sexual/sexuality-based minority / non-hetero / male) writers is. It’s worth a read, especially if you are sick and tired about radfems/tumblr feminists. For the record, I’m an equalist and value meritocracy. And before someone decides to dismiss me as white and male, with all due (dis)respect, I’m not either of those.

The funny thing is, the comments themselves observe that the list of such writers would include Larry himself, as well as Sarah A. Hoyt, along with a number of authors mentioned in the comments to be female, or black, or well, not Caucasian, or not Christian, or not heterosexual (C.J. Cherryh is a lesbian? News to me… and I honestly don’t care because booooooks) – heck, I myself, if I wanted to, could tick the non-white box (I’m Filipina), the non-male box (I’m female – in fact I gave birth only last month) and quietly am not Christian (I consider my religious beliefs and practices personal and have nothing to do with my writing). By those criteria, we’d all be on the list of ‘approved authors worthy of approbation’ and Princess Tempest in a Teacup would be recommending our works to everyone!

But I don’t want to tick those boxes. I’m more than ‘just’ female, Asian, non-Christian, heterosexual. Those are only facets of what make me as a whole, and not the entirety of who I am. I am a fan of fun, inspiring, exciting stories, who wants to write stories in the hope that other people enjoy their visits to my imaginary worlds, that my readers want to know ‘what happens next?’, who dreams that young readers pick up my stories and enjoy reading, maybe outgrow me and move on to other stories by other authors, their love of reading growing with them. If anyone could accuse me of a dastardly plot, “I want people to have fun reading” is the extent of it.

When I’m writing fiction, the fact that I’m female has nothing to do with the story – after all, it’s not my vagina typing out the tale, is it? Continue reading

So they went after metal and failed, and now they’re going after Linux?

And Linus Torvalds?

https://twitter.com/hashtag/istandwithLINUS?src=hash

Oh man. I seriously need to buy me that popcorn machine, stat. It is now a necessity.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/01/linus-torvalds-on-why-he-isnt-nice-i-dont-care-about-you/

fml___problem_exists_between_keyboard_and_chair_by_cutelildrow-d89s2yu

First off, you pretentious fucking douchebag SJWs, code, of ANY type will not give two shits of a rat’s ass about your hurt feelings, who you fuck, what you chop off or stick onto you, or what political opinions you hold. You fuck up your code no amount of crying and whining and throwing ickle tanties will make it forgive you and work. I’m no programmer, but just fuck up basic HTML tags and well, we’ve all been there. Type in the wrong command – oh wait maybe most of them don’t even know that. Never mind!

But seriously now, there’s nothing more coldly uncaring of gender, race, social or economic class or any of those silly irrelevant things as programming. Either your code works, or it doesn’t. Either your program works, or it fails miserably and needs debugging – in which case fuck you, find it, fix it. All it cares about is whether or not you have the skill to make it work. It does not care whether the fingers that typed across the keys belong to a white or black or green skinned person, nor does it care whether you have a penis or a vagina, or neither, or both, or like to suck cock or lick twat or dress up in a fursuit. It does not care if you are in a wheelchair or have massive tits and swing both ways.

None of that matters. What DOES matter is the pure, unadulterated unforgiving meritocracy of being able to make the hardware and software interact in the way it needs to, to bring about a result.

Really, it boils down to the simple reality that unmasks SJWs and the left with the cold hard truth: When it comes to true, brutally blind equality, they can’t handle it. They don’t want to deal with meritocracy, or skill, or truly even ground, they want everything handed to them on demand, or tantrums, life destroying and slander shall ensue!

Boo de Q_Q harder.

Linus Torvalds does not care about your fucking little fee fees. All he cares about “is quality and merit comes first and everything else comes second, and he doesn’t care if he offends people in this regard” – and frankly, that’s pretty fucking fair of him. None of this diversity in programming bullshit – I don’t give a crap if the person doing the code or writing the program is a girl or a guy, or likes to fuck a guy or not, or what their political opinion is. I really don’t. All I care about is ‘can this person do the job? Does that shit work? Is that program legit or does it have hidden malware?’

Don’t like that? Then make your own fork or program.. oh wait, no you can’t unless you have the skills, and since there’s more Q_Qing than actual skills to make stuff happen… we’re left with people just throwing massive tanties again.

edited to add this quote:

This is triply true in engineering/development. It’s not like marketing or HR where everyone is special and an all-day meeting constitutes productive work, technical work is very well-defined with quantifiable, testable results where there’s not much room for second place. The winners in this space are those who Get Shit Done, not those who have the most friends or the most politically-correct agenda. And you will not Get Shit Done if you prioritize your team’s DNA over their skillset. Seriously, social skills do not mean a damn thing here–either your robot is the biggest, baddest mofo in the room and it crushes everyone else’s souls with its godlike power, or it’s not and its your souls getting crushed by someone else’s godbot. There’s something to be said for being able to deal with other humans when necessary but it’s a secondary skill, and one not generally used as companies tend to keep engineers as far away from the customers as possible.

Linus is the ultimate non-discriminating manager. He does not care who you are or what you look like as long as you’re good at what you do, and he won’t tolerate excuses. Which is exactly why diversity fanboys hate him so much–they don’t actually want an identity-blind society, they want an identify-focused society which simply flips the discrimination in favor of gender-studies weasels. They have to tear him down because, like Trotsky to Stalin, he vividly shows that what they claim to want is vastly different from what they’re actually implementing.

Yep.

 

 

Because it is worth relinking and rereading.

thatswhatseparatecountriesarefor

 

Jim Butcher has this to say about the Charlie Hebdo atrocity

Freedom v Fear

It needs requoting, but you should also read the original post on his LJ.

“Still mortified about our fallen cartoonist colleagues, but free speech will always win.”

No.

No it won’t.

The history of the human race demonstrates /very/ convincingly that free speech is the /exception/ to the human condition, not the rule. For millennia, those who spoke out were imprisoned or killed. Hell, you could say something that wasn’t even subversive, just inept and stupid, and be destroyed for committing the crime of lese majeste.

Make no mistake. What we have today is a level of freedom and self-determination on a scale unparalleled in the history of our species. We live in what is, in many ways, a golden age. So much so that we give tremendous credit to the adage, “The pen is mightier than the sword.”

But everyone always forgets the first half of that quote:

“Under the rule of men entirely great, the pen is mightier than the sword.”

I’m not sure I know of anyplace that’s ruled by anyone “entirely great.” That adage wasn’t a statement of philosophy, as it was originally used: it was a statement of irony.

Don’t believe me? Look around. Notice that everywhere you go in the world, whoever happens to be ruling seems to have a great many swords.

Still, the idea contained within the quote is a powerful one–that intangible ideas, thoughts, and beliefs can have tremendous power. And that’s why we should be paying close attention.

After all, intangible fear can be mightier than the sword, too. Hell, it has been for quite a while now. Don’t believe me? Try getting on an airplane without taking your shoes off in the security line. While you’re doing that, try cracking a joke about having a knife.

That’s the power of fear, guys.

We. Are. In. Danger.

The threat isn’t aimed at our government or our borders or our resources. It’s targeting something far more precious–our identity. It’s changing us, who we are, how we live, and not for the better.

The Western world has got the biggest and sharpest sword the planet has ever known, yes. But the extremists are armed with a weapon just as powerful: Fear. And these nuts are really good at using it.

There is /one/ way that freedom, freedom to speak, to choose, to grow, to believe, to improve, survives in the face of violent attack.

Free men and women defend it, violently if necessary–or it dies.

It’s that simple. It really is.

If we forget that, if we forget that there are predators in the world who very much want to destroy those freedoms in the name of their god, their philosophy, their politics, if we forget that our freedoms /can/ and /will/ be taken away if we sit staring and do nothing, they are as good as gone.

Freedom doesn’t defend itself.

We have to do it.

That said…

Good question.

That’s a huge contrast to Scalzi apologizing to Muslims for what happened over in France. Hat tip to Vox Day on that one, since I don’t keep track of Scalzi.

Respect for Butcher, Correia, Hoyt, and so many others +++++++ infinity. This is a freedom of speech issue. This is a Western Civilization issue. It needs defending, or we lose everything.

Une nécessité pour un Charles Martel

A collection of the ‘offensive’ comics from a satire paper that targeted everyone equally.

Yet, it’s Muslim jihadists that did violence, killing for their religion. There’s no way around that, no matter how the usual apologists try to whitewash and blame the victim (warning, that link, I’m told, is particularly enraging and I was strongly advised not to read it given my current blood pressure issues by a very good friend.)

Honestly, I’m somewhat surprised it took this long, since the local jihadists are plentiful and active in France, there are plenty of zones urbaines sensibles – pretty much ‘if you are not Muslim, you take your chances in these areas because the rule of law does not apply, Sharia does.‘ There’ve been plenty of other terrorist attacks that were rather ignored by the West, including an attack on a Jewish school in France some time ago, before the attacks on Pakistani schools by the Taliban – where one suicide bomber was thwarted by a brave 14 year old.

I’ll eventually write up a longer post on my thoughts on this, because I’m still in the hospital and the blood pressure meds are wreaking havoc with my ability to think straight, due to migraines and bouts of drowsiness.

Still, I wonder if people in the US will still call for cop deaths in the wake of the French police getting killed – and one of the cops in question was black, female, and the other one was… wait for it … Muslim. Both of them considered ‘legitimate targets’ because of the uniform they wore, and the choices they made. (Also, no screams of POLIIIICE STAAAAATE!!!!! for France increasing security everywhere, in the wake of terror attacks? I remember the complaints of the same thing being done during the Boston Bombing. I’d like to know what’s ‘different’ now.)

Anyway, I’ll link to people who I think are doing a much, much better job of reporting on this and reacting to this.

Of course

http://www.jihadwatch.org/

http://gatesofvienna.net/

www.thereligionofpeace.com/

Atlas Shrugged

American Thinker

Frontpage Mag

The Long War Journal

Noisy Room has more links

Larry Correia has some very choice words on the matter, especially with regard to this being very much a Freedom of Speech issue.

T.L. Knighton also makes the very valid point that if we were, as per that idiotic feminazi’s demands, to ‘criminalize’ (a very strange definition of free speech that boils down to ‘I don’t like what you say and think you should go to jail’), we lose the most basic freedoms that allow idiots like her to spew her stupid all over the Internet.

Kate Paulk is correct in saying that Free Speech is not, in fact ‘free of charge or cost.’ People pay a heavy price to keep the ability to say what you want and to have the freedom to opine, disagree and speak one’s mind, to write the stories we want to write, and so much more that honestly, most people in Western countries just take for granted. Don’t let them take it away! I’ve lived under two different regimes where you couldn’t speak your mind or seek the knowledge you wanted to know about, and it hurt the people who lived in them, in their spirit, and soul.

Lastly, Sarah A. Hoyt expresses the anger I don’t have words for right now. Thank you all, for writing.

 

What the I don’t even you know what fuck you.

TotalBiscuit Receives Death Wish By Anti #GamerGate For Promoting Charity

So there’s a charity event to help disabled gamers. Which, well, is freaking awesome because some of the most awesome, most badass people I’ve ever had the privilege to meet are disabled gamers. Think ‘wheelchair bound mostly unable to move limbs’ disabled. Think people who have been in horrible car accidents. Think kids who were born with unavoidable defects that trap them in less than optimal bodies, but have fully working brains. Think vets and cops who have been injured in the line of duty and for a number of them, this is the only social interaction they can have without being treated like cripples. These people also tend to be the nicest, most cheerful people I’ve ever met, and most of the time you never find out they’re disabled till you ask something like “Why is your vent not push to talk?” “Because I can’t reach it fast enough with the stick in my mouth.”

life in hard mode

So yeah, fucking do not ever deprive these guys of one of the few things that put them on even footing with the rest of the goddamn world, where they can be themselves and not ‘crippled.’

So anyway…

Two Anti-GG people ask for retweets and then flip the fuck out when TotalBiscuit (one of the biggest Gamergate supporters, apparently) actually takes them at face value and does exactly that. Because Ablegamers Charity for disabled gamers is fucking awesome.

He also does it because his company is partnered with the Ablegamers charity. Oops, didn’t know that? Of course not – Anti-GGers are too busy trying to hate the guy for daring to disagree and oppose them. Remember the previous post I mentioned about nerds and not wasting their time with social bullshit? Yeah, there’s a reason for that.

ThosewhocantCriticizethosewhocan

So really, who’s the haters here? Who’s intolerant? Oh and attacking the guy based on his cancer treatment? Really classy and humanistic of you. Not.

Anti-GGers are proving themselves that they are the most hateful shitfaces on the face of the earth quite easily. And the bystanders like myself are just staring then facepalming when we take them entirely on the face of their actions. Holy crap. Epic, epic fail.

Seriously, it’s like this level of epic failure: suicide bombers blow themselves up on TV by mistake.

 

Sometimes you have to call it what it is

Hi. If you came here from Fundies Say the Dumbest Things, you guys are being used as a catspaw by my longtime misogynistic stalker, Yamamanama / Yama The Space Fish, aka Andrew P. Marston of Marshfield Massachusetts. Here is a history of his stalking and harassing me online me for six years, taking advantage of the fact that I am a woman who doesn’t live in the same country as he does – and yes, I am, in fact, a woman; I’m also small, and Asian. He is very fond of taking things I say and do out of context in the worst possible way to try portray me as either 1) Misogynistic 2) Racist 3) Homophobic 4) insert whatever hateful label he wants to try pin on me. Andrew has a tendency to also bring me up at random on websites that I have nothing to do with, in often hateful or defamatory language.

He has outright admitted that he actively does this in attempts to try get people to dogpile on me.

Andrew Marston / Yamamanama has repeatedly tried to use his taking my words completely out of context to justify his harassment and stalking of me; repeatedly making claims that I said something, but never backing up the claims with proof the way I have been able to prove, with screenshots, that Andrew / Yama has the intent to harass and defame me. I have repeatedly spoken against self-defeating attitudes that are aimed at preventing people from taking their own lives into their own hands and taking control of their own choices. This is NOT racism, but Andrew / Yama tries to make it seem like that.

This is a person who has actively threatened my children as well, and has repeated this threat again and again.

Yama repeats that threat again, this time more personally than ever before.

 

So yeah, that’s what’s going on, and I’m sorry you guys are getting dragged into something that has nothing to do with you, and everything to do with someone’s longtime campaign of hate, harassment (both sexual and otherwise) and racism and misogyny. (Also, uhm, I’m quietly pagan, so I’m really unsure if I count into American definitions of ‘fundie’ from what l gather is supposed to reflect on Christian fundamentalism.)

 

ANYWAY. ON TO THE ORIGINAL POST.

 

Feminism Today

 

This was originally meant to be a comment over at According To Hoyt, but I changed my mind and decided this should well be a post instead. I wouldn’t be surprised if people skim until offended, but meh. And because inevitably some idiot out there will paint me as white, racist, misogynist and rape-apologizing or whatever – I’m Asian, female, hate political correctness and opinionated – so if that sort of shit bothers you, hey, feel free to close the tab or browse away. You don’t have to read this.

So, feminists are going after nerds, since they failed to paint all gamers as 1) male 2) rapists 3) racists. For ‘sexual entitlement’. Or something seriously bizarre like that. The article I linked is a rebuttal because it’s actually more readable than the brain-breaking stupid of the thing it’s actually addressing.

First off, fuck you, feminists for trying to paint ‘nerds’ as ‘only male.’ Sayeth THIS female nerd and geek who has always been proud of her nerd and geek status. Also, fuck you again, because guess what? The Internet owes its’ existence to the very nerds you despise and looked down on. Guess who you sound like to nerds like us? The popular Prom Queen bitches who liked to spread rumours about the nerds and anyone who dared NOT to fit in during high school. While the rest of us grew up and became adults, you stupid eternal children pined for the days of being relevant and ‘socially the centre of the universe’ in High School. While the rest of us were fighting off the bullying and the abuse of your sycophants – and yes, I had my share of having to fight people who thought it would be funny to seriously hurt me – you lot pretended to be morally superior to us.

I’d love to know based on what ‘morals’ those are supposed to be. Frankly, the worst bullying I got were from women, because given the rumour-mongering and slander I’d get from an insecure bitch who saw me as some kind of threat to her social position that I never noticed, and the honesty of a punch in the face from a man, I had better chances of fighting back against the latter. Because then it’s self defence and I could gut the son of a bitch.

Also, fuck you for trying to make nerds as a group feel worse. Bitch, we’ve been through hells you can’t even imagine, the kind of oppression that drives people to suicide, we’ve survived, we’ve made it through and you’re TRYING to drag us back to that pointless, empty stupid time of High School just because your own lives are so empty and devoid of meaning, you need to find someone to bully to make yourselves feel better? This is especially true of male nerds, who are freaking socially awkward because the usual social cues make no sense to them – hell, to us. Male nerds as a group tend to step into social landmines for that reason – and they’re aware of that so they also tend to be more careful and sensitive than the ‘average male.’ As a nerd girl who played the Universal Big Sister and Confidant to several male nerds all through my life, how fucking dare you claim that male nerds are sexually entitled?! They’re FAR more likely to treasure and cherish the woman who falls for them, to the point that I’ve seen many a male nerd get taken advantage of by an abusive, user-friendly woman.

On the far end of that, there are the male nerds who simply refuse to have relationships with real women and go with the 2-D Girl option. Seriously, leave them the fuck alone. It’s ‘coz of crazy psychotic bitch queens like you that you drove away those men to eternal fantasies. They’re not going to treat real women worse, they just won’t have relationships with them. You do not get to bitch about them not wanting real women, because to them, real women are not worth the heartache and suffering and endless double standards that the feminists like you have put up as ‘proper treatment of women.’

06d

In the long run, I think that this is ultimately an attempt by feminists to ‘get back’ at the nerds who frankly, see them, and run away screaming because when it boils down to it, these sort of women have nothing to offer for any kind of partnership except a lifetime of pain and heartache. Especially true for the rich, successful, powerful nerds who they looked down on before who now are in positions of economic and social power of the kind they only dreamed of. While these women were wasting their time playing social superiority games, we nerds applied ourselves more usefully.

I gotta say, these ‘feminists’ display some serious amounts of undiluted crazy and lies in order to try make themselves sound more relevant and important. Somehow. Instead, they happily come off as flat out insane. Also, hats now are some kind of code for being … pro-male or something demented like that? In my universe, where we have brush fires and typhoons and 45 degree Celsius weather, hats are worn to give you some shade and protect you from the sun.

And fedoras are awesome, because Indiana Jones. Whatever ‘argument’ about fedoras they’re trying to make is invalid forever.

indiana-jones-and-the-raiders-of-the-lost-ark-original

Oh, and holy crap the hate the feminists have for mothers has to be seen to be believed. Yep, even towards lesbians who choose to become mothers.

By other lesbians.

images

Read the whole thing. If possible.

.… that you’re weakening and permanently altering your body, and shortening your life span, making it more possible to bleed to death, develop high blood pressure, have a stroke or heart attack, or develop diabetes, kidney disease, or cancer.20 (The dangers of pregnancy and childbirth are a well-kept secret.)

Uhm, flat out lie. They tell you what to watch out for every single time you get pregnant and you go have your check-ups. The info is out there, open for perusal. It’s bloody freaking obvious that the person who wrote this never ever got near a family clinic – after all, why should she? (Thank gods she’ll never breed and inflict herself on her children.) The pregnancy booklet I got for free from the clinic has a section on the more common complications and advises that the woman report anything even REMOTELY unusual. There’s a pregnancy complication that commonly presents with a single insane-sounding symptom: itching only at night, ‘especially on the palms of the hands and on the soles of your feet.’ Not fatal for the mother, but holy hell the risk it puts the baby under…

Hell, just the opening paragraphs contradict them, within the first few sentences. To the point that the paragraphs themselves are oxymoronic and null and void as statements. That’s an impressive show of doublespeak there.

They shouldn’t become parents. They howl about gendercide and inequality but ignore the same shit that they decry for women as perfectly acceptable for men.

Feminazis are fucking crazy. And yes, they hate even their own sons. Child abusers!

Feminazis are fucking crazy. And yes, they hate even their own sons. Child abusers!

Refer to the top graphic. They are surprised we take them and their words at face value?! Why?

shakes head If they were really ‘telling the truth, with facts and honesty’ why the nine bleeding hells do they have to lie like the crazy reality-denying -y’know what? Fuck it – bag of cunts-not-brains-are-important – psychos they present themselves as? And no, describing them as they are is not an insult, it’s describing them as they are. These are …people… who hold militant misandrist lesbian feminazi ideals to the point that they denigrate lesbian mothers. To them, sex is the end all and be all and reproducing at all is ‘the ultimate act of selfishness.’ So when I call them ‘cunts’ it’s because that’s their main identifying ‘thing’ – not their personhood, not their intellect or anything else, but the entirety of their identity is based on their genitals and who it’s used with and for.

In fact I am utterly gobsmacked at the sheer amount of hatred that this article alone spews onto other lesbians for making choices that they don’t agree with. What was that about not judging and being accepting of alternate choices, LGBT movement people? Yeah, these people may be ‘outliers’ but geez. You can’t claim to be ‘more accepting’ than I am. I support gays and lesbians having children and support the concept of their marriage, and treat them like people (I just don’t like it when they go after Christian orphanages, schools and institutions, and businesses for disagreeing or disapproving of them, and do not like the current methodologies for their push of non-equal treatment for marriage. I’d be completely fine with non-religious, secular options that do not intrude into the religious areas of life but apparently that’s not good enough, so… See below.)

Equality is equality, people. This means that other people are as free to reject or disagree or disapprove of your choices as you are of them – and yes, if they are meant to accept some of the choices you make, that means that you must also accept some of theirs. That’s two-way street stuff. You can decry it as wrong, disagree all you like, but you can’t shut them down and can’t suppress them or their point of view from the marketplace of ideas. The moment that you do, that means you’re not pushing for equal treatment or equality in any form, you’re pushing for unequal treatment that benefits your/your cause / your POV.

At which point, you lose my support. I’m someone who’s for equal rights, equal treatment, equal responsibility.

I wandered over to The Other McCain’s twitter feed to see if there was anything interesting, and boy did I get it. For a rather demented peek into the range of ‘interesting’ anyway…

 

==========

 

Edited to add this awesome article:

http://chrishernandezauthor.com/2015/01/02/microaggressions-trigger-warnings-and-the-new-meaning-of-trauma/

THIS. SO MUCH.

Good to know that there are men still willing to do what’s right

PS3-Got-PWNED-by-TIME-2

http://fox13now.com/2015/01/02/rape-victims-boyfriend-accused-of-brutally-beating-suspect/

The slight nitpick I have is, since the rapist was caught in the act of raping the woman, wouldn’t that be ‘perp’ or ‘perpetrator’ and not ‘suspect’?

On a completely different, but related tangent…

Warning: facepalm and potentially rage inducing. The epic amounts of stupid may cause locking up of your brain.

Merely existing does not equate to Holocaust

 

http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/20654/

When she showed her class “Capturing the Friedmans,” a documentary about a criminal-sex-abuse investigation, some students complained that she should have given them a “trigger warning” beforehand, and others suggested she shouldn’t have shown the film at all, Suk stated.

Suk added that one of her peers was recently asked by a student “not to use the word ‘violate’ in class—as in ‘Does this conduct violate the law?’—because the word was triggering, and some students have even suggested that rape law should not be taught because of its potential to cause distress.”

“[M]y experience at Harvard over the past couple of years tells me that the environment for teaching rape law and other subjects involving gender and violence is changing,” Suk stated. “Students seem more anxious about classroom discussion, and about approaching the law of sexual violence in particular, than they have ever been in my eight years as a law professor.”

Please tell me that these fragile speshul snowflakes were given failing grades and advised to take up a different career, preferably very far away from law and medicine? What the hell are these ‘students’ doing in college, never mind law school?!

Too Stupid To Insult

Speaking of brainbreaking, I’m not sure if someone should link this to John C. Wright, or any other Christian I know. I mean, I love the way the good Mr. Wright becomes delightfully erudite when it comes to dismantling stupid, but this one is one that had me wanting to head-desk, and I would not to cause the man to sputter in outrage.

Anti-Christian activist: God raped Mary

And no, direct not your ire at the writer of the article, but rather the ‘activist’ with nae functioning brain cells in the space that lies twixt her ears; the skull there merely exists to give shape to the skin and muscles that coat it. There’s nothing inside. On the topic of the author of this article, I cheered when reading

actually believe in said “rape culture,” something that, outside of Islam, does not exist,
Because it is true. (Don’t believe me? Find out what happens to a woman when she is convicted of a crime and sentenced to die. Virgins cannot be executed according to Islamic law, so the police ensure that the woman is not a virgin.)
But I digress.
Summary of the madness is, this psychotic misandrist goes on and on, out of whole cloth, that the Virgin Mary was ‘raped’ by God.
implied-facepalm
I guess the people who like to push this narrative like to ignore that Mary gave her consent and that the angel who came to her pretty much told her that she was chosen before the act of holy conception happened.
26 In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth,
27 to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary.
28 And he came to her and said, “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you!”
29 But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and considered in her mind what sort of greeting this might be.
30 And the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.
31 And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus.
32 He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David,
33 and he will reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there will be no end.”
34 And Mary said to the angel, “How shall this be, since I have no husband?”
35 And the angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God.
36 And behold, your kinswoman Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren.
37 For with God nothing will be impossible.”
38 And Mary said, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” And the angel departed from her.
A casual reading of the text shows that Mary didn’t go into this blindly or without questioning, she actively questions the angel sent to her. In fact, the angel, said to be Gabriel, has to convince her that this is even possible.
Whoops. Guess she wasn’t the blind accepting doormat that people like to paint her as, huh? Hell, being a woman of her time, she knew fully well that conceiving outside of wedlock would result in her likely death. It’s for that reason that I consider her one of the bravest women in history.
Misandrist SJWs will never let reality, facts and truth get in the way of an agenda-driven hate filled rant, right?
*memetastic post because you guys get the fruits of my distractions.

Compare and contrast a woman versus grrrrl

Merely existing does not equate to Holocaust

So I spotted this article about a psychotic hosebeast of epic proportions on Larry Correia’s twitter:

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/12/10/The-Madness-Of-Queen-Shanley

Some of the battles Kane has fought on behalf of the sisterhood include objecting to the use of the device terminology “master” and “slave” (they’re “oppressive”, apparently), flouncing off websites for being called out on parasitic financial practices, telling women that if they have a male co-founder he will probably rape them one day and attacking prominent academics such as Vivek Wadhwa, who works tirelessly on behalf of women and minorities in Silicon Valley.

By any reasonable person’s definition, and even by the standards of Silicon Valley, Kane is an abusive engine of discord, creating precisely the opposite conditions to those needed for happy co-operation between the sexes. So how did she land a feature-length profile in Matter, Silicon Valley’s long-read organ of choice—even though her paranoia and control freakery eventually screwed up what would probably have been a fawning profile and left journalists and readers alike aghast at her childishness and self-destructiveness?

(In case you’re not familiar with the story, follow those two links, which have to be read to be believed. Evidently Matter started calling around, asking people about Kane’s personal and professional life in preparation for their profile of her and her work—doing journalism, in other words—and she threw a hissy fit and started defaming and smearing the journalists in question, who were respectable professionals, beyond reproach in their dealings with her.)

While my gob is totally smacked by the massive screeching witchhunt that this Shanley crazy did over proper fact-checking investigative journalism, Kate Paulk links me this delightful contrast.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/girls-and-software

Seriously, it is a joy to behold for those of us who actually value true equality and meritocracy.

Open source was my refuge because it was a place were nobody cared what my pedigree was or what I looked like—they cared only about what I did. I ingratiated myself to people who could help me learn by doing dull scutwork: triaging issues to keep the issue queues neat and orderly, writing documentation and fixing code comments. I was the helpful kid, so when I needed help, the community was there. I’d never met another programmer in real life at this point, but I knew more about programming than some college students.

It Really Is about Girls (and Boys)

Twelve-year-old girls today don’t generally get to have the experiences that I did. Parents are warned to keep kids off the computer lest they get lured away by child molesters or worse—become fat! That goes doubly for girls, who then grow up to be liberal arts majors. Then, in their late teens or early twenties, someone who feels the gender skew in technology communities is a problem drags them to a LUG meeting or an IRC channel. Shockingly, this doesn’t turn the young women into hackers.

Why does anyone, anywhere, think this will work? Start with a young woman who’s already formed her identity. Dump her in a situation that operates on different social scripts than she’s accustomed to, full of people talking about a subject she doesn’t yet understand. Then tell her the community is hostile toward women and therefore doesn’t have enough of them, all while showing her off like a prize poodle so you can feel good about recruiting a female. This is a recipe for failure.

Honestly, the problem comes from caring too much about the superficial stuff, versus the really meaningful and important things. The constant obsession about sex, sexuality, and who you’re sexually attracted to lends to really boring conversation and people because guess what – people aren’t just their sex drives and their sexual organs to me. Thankfully, the ones who do constantly focus on the superficial unimportant crap – SJWs and their endless focus on gender, race, sexuality – are very loud and obvious and I can steer clear of them. I seriously DO NOT CARE about your ethnicity, dangle-or-boobs, or boinkchoice, I’m more interested in if ‘you are a jerkass’ or ‘can I actually talk to you without you biting my head off in a giant ragefit of a rant simply because we disagree’?

I’m not the only one baffled by this.

http://prosebeforehohos.com/2014/12/10/on-diversity/

Seriously, the people who whine and cry about their hurt feels are not new. I leave you with the wonderful Ray Bradbury’s words on that.

http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/451/451.html

The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist / Unitarian, Irish / Italian / Octogenarian / Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women’s Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquareGospel feel it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.

      Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by the minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from the book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the library closed forever.

      “Shut the door, they’re coming through the window, shut the window, they’re coming through the door,” are the words to an old song. They fit my lifestyle with newly arriving butcher/censors every month. Only six months ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with the censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy-Lynn Del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place.