-Vox Day

Rule One: SJWs Always Lie.

Rule Two: SJWs Always Double Down.

Rule Three: SJWs Always Project.

If you’re reading my blog – and my books – you probably have an interest in science-fiction and fantasy. If you have such an interest, you will probably have heard of Vox Day. Given the noise-to-signal ratio of the recent Hugo Awards debate, where Vox was demonised as [insert your favourite hater here], some of you will have a strong urge to just put the book down and back quietly away from it …

If you do, you will have proved one of Vox Day’s central points.

A standard tactic – and not just one restricted to SJWs – is to mock the messenger, particularly if the message stands up to rational analysis. Therefore, a person who questions the accepted narrative of [insert social justice issue here] is branded as a racist, sexist, homophobe, etc … with the intention of convincing the undecided or the weak-willed to ignore him. After all, who wants to listen to a racist, sexist, homophobe, etc?

In the current climate this book may have a fair claim to being one of the most important books you will read. It is no surprise, therefore, that most of the one-star reviews on Amazon are insults directed at Vox Day personally, rather than the book itself. The unspoken intention is to mock the messenger, thus discrediting the message.

Read this book. You may hate it, but at least you will have the pleasure of knowing you made up your own mind.

One of the most heartbreaking stories to come out of the Soviet Union came from a man who’d been sentenced to the gulag (prison camp for dissidents); he asked himself, afterwards, why he hadn’t fought or run when the police came for him. He just sat in his house and awaited his fate. The answer, of course, is quite simple. The USSR was a prison camp above ground (and a mass grave below); the inmates – sorry, the population – were conditioned not to resist authority, even when authority was brutal, capricious, untrustworthy and quite thoroughly hypocritical.

Many people will say ‘it can’t happen here.’ But it can and it does.

Our society is under attack by Social Justice Warriors (or, as I prefer to think of them, Social Justice Bullies). They have, as Day points out, become the new thought police. Tell an off-colour joke? Lose your job, reputation and perhaps even your life. Disagree with the prevailing orthodoxy? Get harried into silence and then buried below a wave of focused scorn and contempt. Question the claims to victimhood of the aristocracy of victimhood? Get called a racist, sexist, homophobe, etc.

But what is a Social Justice Warrior anyway?

Put simple, a SJW fights for ‘social justice.’ That doesn’t sound too bad until you understand what it means. Social Justice ignores the individual in favour of the group. By this logic, all Black Americans are one, even though it doesn’t require much intelligence to realise that that cannot possibly be true. You’d be lumping Will Smith, President Obama, Ben Carson, Al Sharpon and Freddie Grey together, even though one is a great actor, two are politicians, one’s an unashamed race-baiter and one was a thug who was shot while committing a robbery.

To make this worse, each group is rated on a scale of victimhood. If there is a clash between two groups, SJWs automatically swarm behind the lower-ranked (or should it be higher ranked) group involved, even though the facts may lean the other way. Therefore, as far as the SJWs are concerned, a white man is always in the wrong when involved in a clash with a black man. In fact, although the average SJW will rant and rave about the evils of racism, many of them tend to be strongly racist towards white males (even when they are white males themselves). The self-loathing many of them feel is directed outwards against their own society.

It doesn’t take much effort to dig up the negative results of SJW policies. Policing in America has been badly hampered by the quest for social justice. Policemen involved in racially-charged incidents were tried and convicted in the court of public opinion a long time before the case ever saw the inside of a court of law. Their wives and families were also targeted. (This too is a common attack vector for the SJWs.) Accordingly, police are less willing to serve their communities for fear of seeing their lives ripped apart by SJWs. People are afraid to speak their minds – to point out that the SJW has no clothes – for fear of being charged with having said something, anything, that someone might have found offensive.

The SJWs are driven by emotion – and they tend to use emotion to keep their attacks moving forward. Emotion powers the Social Justice narrative. Once someone is emotionally involved, it becomes difficult for their preconceptions to be undermined – even if they’re based on a lie. This is at least partly why SJWs are so keen to use ‘racist’ as an insult – it’s a keyword that most people are conditioned to find horrible, urging them to lean away from the target. This only gets worse when the target isn’t someone known to the listener (thus avoiding the problem of positive emotions counteracting the negative ones.)

This book will tell you much of what you need to know about SJWs and the threat they represent to society.

It starts with an introduction to SJW-attack on both a micro and macro scale. The micro-scale attack may be something as simple as an accusation of a ‘micro-aggression’ at your place of work; a macro-scale attack may be something as savage and unjustified as the campaigns directed against Tim Hunt or Brendan Eich. (To some extent, George Zimmerman and Darrin Wilson are also victims.) These attacks will feature charges that are rarely worthy of being put before a court of law, but are maddeningly difficult to refute before the next charge is hurled into the fray. ‘Investigators’ will dig through electronic records to find something – anything – which may substantiate the charges, paint whatever they find in the blackest possible light and scream about it as loudly as possible.

These attacks are not primarily – if at all – about punishment. Instead, they are intended – deliberately – to create horrific examples. In Brendan Eich’s case, for example, the attack was intended to deter others from opposing gay marriage by crushing his career, reputation and future. No one can safely consider themselves immune from the SJWs.

The attacks, Day notes, tend to follow a set pattern; the target is isolated, the target is hammered, the target is pressured to resign and eventually buried by bad press. The resignation is particularly important as it is a de facto admission of responsibility (as noted later in the book, actually firing someone requires due process). To this, the natural human response is to beg for mercy, which is a terrible mistake. SJWs are bullies, plain and simple, and bullies are always attracted to weakness.

Day goes on to discuss GamerGate and its role in pushing back against the SJWs. To cut a long story short, a game designer was caught having several affairs with industry reporters, who gave her game (I’ve never played it, but Day makes it sound about as much fun as going to the dentist for a filling) star ratings. This blew the lid off intense frustration within the gaming community about new games that were designed more to please SJWs than gamers; they went on the attack, developed a mass movement and only fought back harder when the media establishment painted them as villains. (You may not believe the SJWs represent more than a swarm, but it’s hard to look at the history of GamerGate without understanding that gamers believe themselves to be targets – and that they might well be right.)

The SJWs went mad – as they did, later, with the Hugo Awards and the Sad/Rabid Puppy campaigns. It is hard to exaggerate the sheer scale of poison hurled at both the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies. (To give one example; a man in a mixed-race marriage was accused of being a racist who was using his black wife as a shield; clearly, despite marrying her and raising a child, he was a racist. There is no logic in this, merely an attempt to use shouts of RACIST, RACIST to shut down debate.) Their operating principle was simple enough; their lies could get around the world before the truth had even been uploaded to the interest. And the core issue – the non-issue of diversity in SF – was buried.

Finally, the latter third of the book discusses what to do if SJWs attack and how to keep pushing back against them. This is easily the most important section and contains a great deal of advice which is applicable in many other situations. These can be summed up as ‘Don’t Panic, Don’t Respond, Don’t Apologise, Don’t Resign and Get Everything In Writing.’ It’s probably best to regard most SJW attacks as being on the same level as a child throwing a public temper tantrum; it’s loud, its unpleasant and the natural response is to do whatever it takes to calm the child down, but it will soon pass – and the child can do little to harm you. This is not always true of the SJWs, of course, yet keeping calm can allow you to migrate most attacks. Day concludes that most targeted individuals would probably have kept their jobs if they’d followed his advice.

There are two weaknesses that are probably both worth mentioning. In the course of illustrating his first principle – SJWs Always Lie – Day focuses on John Scalzi’s attempt to inflate the viewing figures for his website. On one hand, of course, this is such a minor matter that it illustrates the central tenet quite nicely; on the other, given that Day and Scalzi have a history, it looks as though Day is pursuing a personal grudge.

The second weakness is that the book doesn’t go too deeply into the nature of the beast. Who are the SJWs? They are not, in a conventional sense, a conspiracy; they will challenge their detractors to prove a Vast SJW Conspiracy in the certain knowledge that one cannot be proven. They are, however, a cluster of people who share a set of attitudes, combined with the technology to engage in easy activism. As such, they are both a very minor threat and a serious problem.

This may seem absurd, but the SJWs are – in many ways – the proof of Men In Black’s assertion that ‘a person is smart, but people are dumb.’ SJWs become attached to a narrative – a through line that purports to explain an event – and then refuse to accept any evidence that contradicts the narrative. Their agreements are not based on a reasoned consideration of the evidence, but raw emotion; there is no point in trying to reason with SJWs because they are not governed by logic and reason. Their attacks are so vicious purely because they want to keep the narrative going, rather than allow it to be questioned and picked apart.

You may not like the author, but you should read this book.

At the very least, you should know what you’re rejecting.