Racist, woman-hating fantasy author Theodore Beale (aka Vox Day) is upset that people are calling him racist. I mean, it’s not like he called all black people “savages,” he objects; he merely called one black woman — speculative fiction author NK Jemisin — a “half-savage” in a portion of a blog post that, he complains, has been taken out of context. Indeed, he sniffs,
the fact that the same ungrammatical excerpt chopped out of the middle of a sentence keeps being trotted out again and again should alert the dialectical mind to the probability that there simply isn’t very much, if any, there there.
Ah, context! A lot of shitheads who say terrible things complain, when others point out these terrible things, that their words have been taken out of context. So I thought I’d do Vox a little favor here and provide the context to his infamous quote so we can all see how much there is there.
You may notice that the context here does not actually make Vox look any less racist.
I’ve taken the liberty of bolding the especially egregious bits, though to be honest there isn’t much here that isn’t egregious:
Jemisin has it wrong; it is not that I, and others, do not view her as human, (although genetic science presently suggests that we are not equally homo sapiens sapiens), it is that we simply do not view her as being fully civilized for the obvious historical reason that she is not.
She is lying about the laws in Texas and Florida too. The laws are not there to let whites ” just shoot people like me, without consequence, as long as they feel threatened by my presence”, those self-defense laws have been put in place to let whites defend their lives and their property from people, like her, who are half-savages engaged in attacking them.
Jemisin’s disregard for the truth is no different than the average Chicago gangbanger’s disregard for the traditional Western code of civilized conduct. She could, if she wished, claim that privileged white males are responsible for the decline of Detroit, for the declining sales of science fiction, even for the economic and cultural decline of the United States, but that would not make it true. It would not even make it credible. Anyone who is paying sufficient attention will understand who is genuinely responsible for these problems.
Unlike the white males she excoriates, there is no evidence to be found anywhere on the planet that a society of NK Jemisins is capable of building an advanced civilization, or even successfully maintaining one without significant external support from those white males. If one considers that it took my English and German ancestors more than one thousand years to become fully civilized after their first contact with advanced Greco-Roman civilization, it should be patently obvious that it is illogical to imagine, let alone insist, that Africans have somehow managed to do the same in less than half the time at a greater geographic distance. These things take time.
Being an educated, but ignorant half-savage, with little more understanding of what it took to build a new literature by “a bunch of beardy old middle-class middle-American guys” than an illiterate Igbotu tribesman has of how to build a jet engine, Jemisin clearly does not understand that her dishonest call for “reconciliation” and even more diversity within SF/F is tantamount to a call for its decline into irrelevance.
In case you want a bit more context, elsewhere in the same post he 1) mocked a man for taking his wife’s name, 2) suggested that one of his female critics was totally not as hot as his wife, the mysterious “Spacebunny,” and 3) reminded anyone who had forgotten that he had “three Billboard-charting club hits,” a fact that evidently makes him irresistible to women.
You see, Vox was briefly a member of a largely forgotten techno group called Psykosonik more than two decades ago. Well, “largely forgotten” by everyone but Vox, that is.
CONTEXT!
In other words, Vox doesn’t just believe black people aren’t fully human, he believes black people are neither fully human nor capable of civilization?
Is there a word for that kind of lack of self-awareness?
Every time you post Vox Day stuff I feel a twinge of guilt for that Psykosonik album I bought in 1993
@yama: I can only think of a phrase that might fit ‘ “insipid assholery”.
I bet the Germans have a word for it.
Germans have great words for stuff like that.
It’s not self-awareness. It’s just that he says “out of context” and his MRA fundamentalist followers go “Yeah, those feminists are out to tar us” and don’t investigate further. He’s a stupid, horrible, racist, sexist piece of a human garbage, and dishonesty isn’t a hard moral hurdle for him to cross.
He also believes that only “Greco-Roman” civilization is worth anything apparently – and even without regarding the various other instances of advanced civilizations around the globe (e.g. in China, in India, in the Americas, and even – heaven forbid! – in Africa), he completely ignores (or is ignorant to) the fact that Greco-Roman civilization itself was influenced by other sources.
And then there’s… oh, all of the rest of his ignorant bile. Ugh.
I found a video of him at the last SFWA reception:
(I feel that I need to clarify that I am not referring to Africa or the Americas as countries; on the contrary, I’m referring to China and India as large geographical areas, since there were several civilizations that developed there.)
“There simply isn’t very much there there” is indeed a worthy successor to that timeless classic, “The gaping mouth gaping loosely open.”
If Vox Day was a rapper, he’d rhyme “Bitch” with “Bitch” five times in a row.
(I’m too tired to tackle the sort of racism that’d make several high-ranking members of the Nazi Party blush, so I’ll just stick to mocking his manatee-level writing for now.)
Well, only two sentences here, but what a fuckload of stoopid to unpack. He ASSumes, first off, that the “Greco-Roman” people were the only civilized game in town. Actually, given their history of looting, sacking and enslavement, they’re the true barbarians. They’re ten orders of magnitude less civilized than any of the peoples they “conquered”. All of whom were not, as he thinks, grunting cultureless savages wandering in the wilderness eating bugs and turds, but actual people with civilizations and cultures of their own. And wealth, too — why else does he think the Roman Empire so lived to plunder?
Jesus H. Christ, what an idiot he is.
What? When he says “genetic science” does he mean “phrenology”? Because that whole sentence is pure nonsense, otherwise. In fact, recent research indicates that people or African decent might even be more homo sapien than those of European or Asian decent, as European and Asian people tend to have a few neanderthal genes hanging out on their DNA, while African people do not.
Dear Vox,
Genetic research shows that folks who remained longer in Africa probably intermixed with preexisting hominid lineages less than those who left relatively early, like those of us with european or eastern lineages.
So, it’s probably true that Ms. NK is more of a Homo sapiens from a purely genetics standpoint than you or I. I’d be careful about pulling the “I’m the truest human” card, there… bub.
(Truth burns sometimes.)
(although genetic science presently suggests that we are not equally homo sapiens sapiens)
—
Wait… what??????
Ninja’d by magnesium.
Only, add in some Denisovan to that Neanderthal, too!
Well, there’s a number of them, but they tend to correspond to English: Doofheit, for stupidity. Doofmann, a stupid guy. My personal choice for him would be Scheißkopf — literally, shithead.
I think he means that variant of phrenology that the Nazis used.
Someone should inform him it was discredited long ago. Someone should also inform him that “Aryan” doesn’t mean “blond, blue-eyed, northwestern European”, it means “Indo-Persian”. As in Afghans, some Pakistanis, and the Iranians.
In Vox’s defense (wat?! *horror*) “there is no there there” is a mangled reference to a Gertrude Stein quote.
@yamamanama, I think the term you’re looking for is “ignoramus to the nth degree”
“although genetic science presently suggests that we are not equally homo sapiens sapiens”
I would really love to know what genetic science he’s talking about here, and what part of his ass he pulled it out of.
What the hell was Egypt if not a tremendously successful advanced (for its time) civilization that lasted for thousands of years, you great stupid git???
*Sigh*
I can only retell my favourite story about the time Tony Lambrianou, an enforcer for notorious gangsters the Kray Twins was being interviewed:
“Now, there was the time you nailed a man to the floor”
“That incident has been taken totally out of context”
Vox Day uses a high-falutin’ pseudoacademic version of the n-word to describe the deteriorating state of US pop culture. No, really. https://archive.today/gDF8V
Something tells me that the Billboard “club hit” charts have an awfully low threshold for entry.
Either that, or he barely clocked in at 100th place for all of two seconds.
Just a bunch of cat-worshipping Africans. No biggie.
He also seems to have a fondness for the word “mudshark,” for which I had to look up the definition. See http://www.donotlink.com/ekev and http://www.donotlink.com/ekex