by Vox Day
The very month that John Scalzi told Lightspeed that Whatever had two million pageviews per month, it actually had 305,230. Instead of the “45,000 unique visitors daily” he'd claimed, his site had been averaging 1,808 per day. In June 2012, the last complete month before the New York Times interview in which he'd claimed “up to 50,000 visitors per day”, his site had 3,260 visitors and 16,356 pageviews per day. (This works out to 5.02 pageviews per visitor, which you may recall is almost exactly at the upper bound of my original estimate.)
I posted the information I'd uncovered on my blog in a chart dating back to January 2009 that showed Whatever had only averaged 2,740 readers per day, 47,260 fewer than Scalzi had repeatedly claimed. There was nothing left to debate, obfuscate, misdirect, or deny. The evidence was solid, and the case was closed. John Scalzi had lied, repeatedly, about his site traffic. He wasn't the most popular blogger in science fiction, and his blog did not get “an extraordinary amount of traffic for a writer’s website”. He wasn't “comfortable with the business of promotion”, but was comfortable with lying in order to promote himself.
So, with all the facts out and available for everyone to see, did Scalzi come clean and admit that he'd been repeatedly lying about his traffic in an extraordinarily successful attempt to promote himself as the most popular blogger in science fiction?
Of course not. SJWs never admit their lies even when they're caught red-handed. Which leads us, finally, to the Third Law of SJW.
The Third Law
The Third Law of SJW is this: SJWs Always Project.
Understanding how the Third Law applied in this situation will require a bit of context, so I will briefly provide you with a little background information. For reasons that still remain incomprehensible today, during the leadup to the 2012 American elections, John Scalzi thought it would be clever to post a satirical piece on Whatever in which he claimed that he was a rapist. Seriously. I'm not kidding. The piece began in this manner:
“I’m a rapist. I’m one of those men who likes to force myself on women without their consent or desire and then batter them sexually. The details of how I do this are not particularly important at the moment—although I love when you try to make distinctions about “forcible rape” or “legitimate rape” because that gives me all sorts of wiggle room—but I will tell you one of the details about why I do it: I like to control women and, also and independently, I like to remind them how little control they have.” —“A Fan Letter to Certain Conservative Politicians”, Whatever, 25 October 2012
It was a clumsy and remarkably stupid bit of political satire, but I did him the courtesy of taking him at his word and expressed both astonishment and horror at the shocking news that the three-time SFWA President was a self-confessed rapist. I also quoted him, correctly attributed the quote to him, linked to the piece, and dubbed him Rapey McRaperson. McRapey for short. Initially, and for more than a year afterwards, he and other SFWA members attempted to deal with this self-inflicted public relations debacle by pretending that I did not understand satire and acting as if I genuinely believed he was a self-confessed rapist. Now, this is all a bit meta, I know, but bear with me. The story gets downright surreal and there is a dark punchline that no one, least of all me, could have anticipated.
After I successfully exposed Scalzi's fraudulent traffic claims as previously described, he was unable to maintain the pretense of my being satirically challenged any longer and completely changed his tune. He began declaring that I obviously understood his confession was mere satire and therefore I was lying about him. This was a ridiculous accusation, of course, because I have never met the man and I have absolutely no idea what he has, or has not, done in the past. And while it would certainly be stupid to come out and publicly declare oneself a rapist if one is genuinely a rapist, is it not arguably even stupider to publicly declare oneself to be a rapist if one is not?
Regardless, after so much time had passed, McRapey found it impossible to give up and admit that I had done nothing more than meet satire with satire. After a year of claiming I didn't understand satire, doing so would have made him look foolish and drawn attention to the fact that he had been making light of rape, something his fellow SJWs would consider a seriously “problematic”. So, instead of just admitting that he'd written a prodigiously stupid piece, he concocted a charity drive intended to pressure me to stop calling him “McRapey” and even went on Gian Gomeshi's popular CBC radio show to complain about how he had been maliciously quoted. The two of them waxed lyrical about how they were both great champions of women's rights and how wonderful it was that the charity proceeds would go to benefit women who had been sexually assaulted. And at one point during the interview, Scalzi was foolish enough to actually say “John Scalzi is a rapist” live on the radio, which is something one should never, ever do if one finds oneself at odds with a member of a techno band.
(If you don't understand why that is something to avoid at all costs, listen to “Everything Has Fallen Into Place” (Groove Kittens mix) by the Pink Rabbit Posse, featuring Rapey McRaperson. It is in astonishingly poor taste and may well be illegal in several European countries, but I guarantee you'll laugh.)
Of course, at no point did John Scalzi ever admit that he'd been caught repeatedly lying about his traffic or that he'd been lying about my inability to understand satire. Instead, he continued trying to revise the Narrative and to portray me as a liar on the radio, in The Guardian, on Whatever, and on Twitter. Here are a few examples of his revisionist campaign.
I assume that for the foreseeable future, Day will continue to lie about me confessing to be a rapist, for his own purposes. Again, annoying. On the other hand, useful. If Day is perfectly happy to lie so baldly and obviously about this particular thing, perhaps that should be considered the baseline for the truth value of any other assertion that he might choose to make, particularly about people. (27 December 2014)
I have an odious bigot spreading obvious lies about me. (28 December 2014)
You appear to have landed on the site of Vox Day. The short version is he’s an odious little man who is deeply envious of my career, which he feels he should have, and lies about me a lot to make himself feel better. (19 February 2015)
The December 27th statement is particularly informative because it shows how the SJW who has been caught lying will immediately resort to a reverse accusation intended to not only cast doubt on the credibility of the accuser, but to call the reliability of the evidence against the SJW into question as well.
While I have repeatedly criticized and made cruel sport of John Scalzi, I have not lied about him. I have no need to do so, and I have backed up every accusation I have ever made against him with either direct quotes or incontrovertible evidence that anyone can independently verify. And yet, instead of admitting that he has lied about me, about himself, and about his site traffic, John Scalzi's only response to being caught repeatedly lying in public has been to stubbornly claim that he is the one being lied about.
This is the Third Law at work. SJWs always project.
This tendency to project their own thoughts, feelings and tendencies on others can be one of the normal individual's most powerful weapons against the SJW. The accusations made by SJWs when they attack others usually reflect, on some level, something they know to be true about themselves. An SJW with creepy tendencies will tend to accuse others of sexual harassment. One who is unsettled in his sexual orientation will often accuse others of homophobia. Female SJWs who feel inferior will accuse men of sexism. And since they are all habitual liars, SJWs find it almost impossible to believe that anyone is ever telling the truth.
In other words, an SJW's accusations will usually tell you where you should start looking in order to expose the SJW's lies.
And as further ironic evidence of the Third Law at work, consider the remarkable punchline to l'affaire McRapey. In November 2014, less than two years after John Scalzi appeared on his show to complain about his rape satire being taken at face v
alue, Gian Gomeshi surrendered himself to the Toronto police. The former CBC radio host is presently awaiting trial on a total of seven counts of sexual assault, and one count of overcoming resistance by choking, against six different women. He faces a maximum possible sentence of life in prison.
The Three Laws of SJW are these:
1. SJWs always lie.
2. SJWs always double down.
3. SJWs always project.
If there is just one thing you take away from this book, it should be that. And if you don't believe me, perhaps you will believe it straight from the SJW's mouth in a statement made before any of the incidents described above took place.
I lie, and generally do not regret doing so.
—John Scalzi, 12 March 2012
CHAPTER THREE: WHEN SJWs ATTACK
When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed.
—Theodore Dalrymple
As you probably know, every day your job and your career are at risk. As teachers, artists, policemen, scientists, and even Nobel Laureates have learned to their dismay, just a single comment made at the wrong time, in front of the wrong individual, is sufficient to destroy a man's reputation and cost him his job. SJWs have refined speech-policing to an extent seldom imagined outside the world of George Orwell's 1984, and in doing so they have created an Animal Farm-like world where some animals are definitely more equal than others.
From the famous and accomplished to the insignificant and the ordinary, absolutely no one is safe. Consider a few of the following examples:
Dr. James Watson, Nobel Laureate and co-discoverer of DNA, awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, forced to resign as chancellor and board member of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory after 43 years due to comments he made concerning human biodiversity. The president of the Federation of American Scientists said, “He has failed us in the worst possible way. It is a sad and revolting way to end a remarkable career”.
Brendan Eich, CEO of Mozilla, forced to resign due to a single $1,000 political donation made five years prior.
Sir Tim Hunt, Nobel Laureate, awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, forced to resign from the University College London and fired by the European Research Council’s science committee due to a comment about women crying in the laboratory.
Pax Dickenson, Chief Technology Officer of Business Insider, forced to resign due to tweeting several politically incorrect comments.
Curt Schilling, retired Boston Red Sox pitcher and sports commentator was fired by ESPN for a single tweet comparing the estimated percentage of Muslims who are extremists to the historical percentage of Germans who were National Socialists.
North Charleston Police Sgt. Shannon Dildine, fired for wearing Confederate flag boxers.
Florida high school principal Alberto Iber, fired for defending a Texas police officer accused of racism.
Greg Elliott, Canadian graphic artist, fired and charged with criminally harassing two female political activists for refusing to endorse their plan to “sic the Internet” on a young man in Northern Ontario who developed a video game of which they disapproved.
Now, many authors might devote a chapter or two to defining what SJWs are, or attempting to explain why they are what they are, or trying to determine why they behave the way they do. I'm not going to do that because it simply isn't relevant to the point of this book. Knowing everything there is to know about shark DNA or what fish grizzly bears prefer to eat doesn't do you any good when you find yourself nose to nose with a hungry one. In like manner, whatever went into making the SJW with whom you are acquainted probably happened decades before you ever met him and there is absolutely no way you are going to undo the consequences of years of psychological aberrancy by reasoning with them or lending a sympathetic ear.
The SJWs are what they are. They are who they are. It doesn't matter why. All you need to know is that an SJW is an individual who is inclined to thought-police, speech-police, and even race-police everyone around him and will try to marginalize, discredit, and destroy anyone who fails to conform to his thought-policing with sufficient obedience and enthusiasm. All you need to understand about them is enough to be able to recognize one when you see one.
It's not hard. No one but an SJW has ever used more than one of the following words in a sentence: “problematic”, “offensive”, “inclusive”, “triggered” “trigger warning”, “privilege”, “platforming”, “silencing”, “equitable”, “welcoming”, “safe space”, “code of conduct”, “cisgender”, “diversity”, “vibrant”. No one but an SJW makes quasi-religious fetishes of Equality, Diversity, Tolerance, and Progress.
The most important thing is to grasp the fact that you are never safe in the vicinity of SJWs. Attempting to mollify, appease, or otherwise accommodate the SJWs around you will not put you at any less risk but tends to make you more vulnerable to their attacks in the long run. The phrase “give them an inch, and they will take a mile” might well have been coined to describe SJWs.
This is true even if you are sympathetic to some of the ideas that SJWs claim are their goals, such as equality, diversity, respect, feminism, income equality, fat acceptance, gay “marriage”, transgender acceptance, vegetarianism, religious ecumenicism, and atheism. In fact, this is particularly true if you are sympathetic to any of their objectives, as you are more easily pressured and policed.
Normal people assume that SJWs are inclined to take on their ideological opponents, people like me. But the truth is that although they certainly don't like right-wing extremists, for the most part they leave us alone because we are impervious to their influence. Oh, they will certainly complain about us, take advantage of any tactical missteps on our part, and block us on Twitter, but they very seldom make the sort of concerted effort that one saw in the hounding of Brandon Eich or the metaphorical stoning of Dr. James Watson because they know their efforts will largely be futile.
Instead, they prey on the naïve and the unsuspecting. They prey on the moderates, the middle-grounders, and the fence-sitters. They prey on people like you: good, decent individuals who try to treat everyone fairly and who can't even imagine having done anything that anyone could possibly find objectionable.
Why? Because soft targets are always easier to destroy than hard ones. It's much easier to put pressure on someone who works for a university or a large corporation because the attacking SJW knows that he can count on the support of fellow SJWs in the faculty or the Human Resources department. The bigger the organization, the more likely there is a code of conduct containing nebulous terms that the SJW can claim were violated in some way, shape, or form.
And perhaps most importantly, a target who is psychologically unprepared for being attacked is much more likely to throw up his hands and run away. Look at the list of people above. Aside from the police officer, do any of them strike you as even being right of political center, much less a right-wing extremist? In particular, observe that Watson, Eich, and Hunt all resigned. They were not psychologically ready to deal with the social pressure that is the chief weapon in the SJW arsenal and all three of them rapidly crumbled before it.
Sir Tim Hunt, for example, was so ill-prepared to face the criticism directed at him that he resigned on the basis of a single conversation between an administrative employee and his wife. Contrast that with the hell that I put the SJWs of SFWA through, as the process lasted for months and even forced them to file a DMCA takedown notice with my ISP. I made it so painful for them that by the end, they didn't even dare to put my name in the press release about the board vote. And in the two years since, things have only gone from bad to worse for them.
SJWs always prefer easy targets. And u
nsuspecting targets are the easiest of them all.
The conventional SJW attack sequence is an eight-step routine that can be observed in most historical SJW attacks. The whole attack sequence is based upon the foundation of a narrative defined by the SJW and is intended to validate that narrative while publicly demonstrating the SJW's power over his target. As you will be able to see, the SJW attack routine is loosely based on Rule 12 of Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals.
RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)
The eight stages of the SJW attack sequence are as follows:
Locate or Create a Violation of the Narrative.
Point and Shriek.
Isolate and Swarm.
Reject and Transform.
Press for Surrender.
Appeal to Amenable Authority.
Show Trial.
Victory Parade.
STAGE ONE: Locate or Create a Violation of the Narrative
SJWs don't like to be seen as the vicious attack dogs they are because that flies in the face of their determination to present themselves as victims holding the moral high ground. This presents somewhat of a challenge for them, of course, since it is difficult to be proactive about your thought-policing if you need to stand around waiting for someone to victimize you first. SJWs have solved this problem by adopting three standard tactics: self-appointed public defense, virtual victimhood, and creative offense-taking.