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!
I suspect the Wannabe Tribe.
I’m sorry, I still get a huge kick out of “Vox Day”. He’s so *clearly* a total clown whose only value is demonstrating the beating, misogynistic heart of the his “movement.” He is to civil rights what Fozzie Bear is to jokes–and my deepest, deepest apologies to the good Mr. Bear.
On the neanderthal thing, I ran across a small group of far-rightniks online a couple of years ago who claimed they could tell how much neanderthal that people today have in them by looking at photos of them. They all were sure they were part-neanderthal themselves and therefore superior.
Just to stick my $0.02 in about England (as it wouldn’t be for several hundred years) and the civilising effect of Graeco-Roman influence, it’s possible worth noting that The British Isles (“BI”) had trading ties with the communities around the Mediterranean from at least 6,000BC.
In archaeology we often talk of “sea as land”. In other words a coastal community in the BI probably had closer ties with a coastal community in Europe than it did with another BI community overland. Cornish tin and flint turns up all over Europe and beyond and half the inhabitants of neolithic Salisbury Plain were from abroad, as far away as the Alps.
There was a lot of migration and trade.
The Roman ‘invasion’ of 43AD was as much by invitation as conquest (essentially there was internecine intrigue amongst certain BI tribes and even within the tribes). The Romans had plenty of BI allies when they landed.
Even my heroine Boudicca was from a family of happy collaborators with the Romans. It was a row about a will and the calling in of certain debts that caused all the problems.
To suggest the ‘civilisation’ didn’t arrive in Britain until the Romans is to misunderstand history.
Just to confuse matters further; mythologically Britain and Cornwall are supposedly founded by Trojan refugees just like Rome anyway.
Snort. It doesn’t matter how much indigenous and/or Mexican heritage he claims. Or, for that matter, how much English and/or German. He’s still a shitgolem (a word I totally love and hereby vow to use often).
I poked at the blog post and found that he accused John Scalzi of “[describing] himself as a rapist” over that scathing letter in which John Scalzi used *actual* satire to ironically play the role of a rapist who was deeply grateful to conservative politicians for their attacks on abortion giving him more power over the women he victimised.
Because people like Vox Day legit have no understanding of satire or irony and can’t tell the difference between something actually being satire and “satire” just being a word you use after the fact when you’re called on your shit.
Great minds, howlcat. Great minds. 🙂
I’ll bet any amount of money (up to $5) that “fully civilized” means “granting all native male property-holders certain basic human rights, such as sovereignty over their own property and the right to trial by a jury of other native male property-holders”. He gives it away when he says “more than 1000 years after first contact”. He’s got to be talking about the Magna Carta, which is still enormously popular in certain modern political circles. (The general idea of the Magna Carta, I mean, not the actual text.)
A contrarian might say, “How is that ‘fully’ civilized? Haven’t there been other advances in human rights since the Magna Carta”? To which Vox would doubtlessly reply that there’s such a thing as being too civilized.
@Jenora:
That’s almost as good (or bad) as a Fred Clark discussion about why being motivated to do good from fear of a wrathful God wasn’t really all that wonderul, which spawned the term “enormous, mendacious, disembodied anus”… and the observation that that can be sung to the tune of The Beach Boys’ “Kokomo.”
Just TRY to unhear that now.
Usually when racists throw out the “Africans don’t know how to civilization” claim, they’re not talking about Egypt, but about sub-Saharan African cultures.
So I want to throw out there that there were at least three highly-organized kingdoms in sub-Saharan Africa prior to sustained European domination. The Songhai Empire, for example, flourished while Europe was slogging through the Middle Ages. Anyone who claims that sub-Saharan Africans can’t do civilization because reasons is either lying or ignorant, and I won’t lay any bets on which label best applies to Vox.
I do believe I read somewhere that ancient Egyptian statues and monuments were “restored” in different ways and marred by having their noses removed so that they bore no resemblance to African people.
In case anyone’s curious (I kind of was) this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdIy8PeZoRs is what Psykosonik (including Beale – I checked that this track was from the right album) sounds like.
Lol – haven’t found this much in Canada (at least in my neck of the woods) but have seen it a ton online. Busband’s maternal grandmother is Cree, and he doesn’t ever bring it up, or describe himself as a POC, or even think about it really. It’s not a big deal to his mother either, bc it just is.
Anyone ever read one of Shitgolem’s books? I am tempted, but only if there are pirated copies out there somewhere.
Well, it wasn’t blacks who decentralized the auto industry, moved the manufacturing plants elsewhere, lost out to the Germans and Japanese in innovation, and fled Detroit for the suburbs.
Christ on a Segway, Vox Day is ignorant.
@tigtog:
I’ve been curious about Spacebunny too, ever since Scalzi’s “Schrodinger’s Spacebunny” post. Apparently she does exist; Heather Mulheron Beale is his second wife. (What was that about the stability of marriage, again?). But there are some odd things about her. Her Facebook profile is bland, sweet, and self-deprecating, completely unlike her bitchy, obnoxious persona on Twitter, which makes me wonder whether “Space Bunny” is a Vox sock. Also, as Scalzi pointed out, for someone supposedly so hot and camera-friendly, why is there only that one stock photo of her? (Her Facebook account also has exactly one photo of her, in black and white, patting a dog from a distance; and while she does look attractive, she notes that the b&w and camera angle do a great job of disguising her age).
Normally I wouldn’t care enough to investigate a stranger’s FB page, but every time someone disagrees with Vox Day, he trots out the tiresome “but my wife’s HOT!!!” card, as if that’s supposed to end the discussion right there. (His fans also subscribe rabidly to the “Banging A Hot Chick Makes You Right” fallacy). You’d think he’d be flourishing photos of her left and right to prove his point and rub it in the faces of his critics, but nope. Just the one stock photo.
My theory is she’s middle-aged, pleasant-looking but not stunning, and has been forbidden/discouraged from posting her image online lest she undermine the fantasy that Beale has worked so hard to create in his readers.
@David Futrelle: “On the neanderthal thing, I ran across a small group of far-rightniks online a couple of years ago who claimed they could tell how much neanderthal that people today have in them by looking at photos of them. They all were sure they were part-neanderthal themselves and therefore superior.”
Honestly, if anthropologists ever determined that Neandertals or other early hominids who mated with humans outside Africa were in the habit of eating their own shit, these chucklefucks would be happily scarfing down the contents of their toilets like it was filet mignon. HEY IT’S PART OF OUR SUPERIOR NON-AFRICAN GENETIC HERITAGE DUDES, IF IT’S NON-AFRICAN THEN IT **HAS** TO BE SUPERIOR.
I was wondering what the Puppies were going on about when they insisted their ballot was ethnically diverse because it includes Vox Day. I figured it was the old “one drop of blood from an Indian Princess” thing, which in reality almost always means “black ancestors the family didn’t want to cop to.”
I’m trying very hard to get added to the Puppy ballots next year. I promise to hate anyone they want me to hate; who cares what I actually write?
“I’m sure that the RSHD’s share of the millions his Dad squirreled away from the IRS in Europe”
Ohhh, so VD cannot possibly be a racist because he’s actually a Trustafarian?
It’s ethnically diverse because Portuguese are totally Hispanic, right?
Unfortunately, I have no problem understanding how Beale came to think there was no civilization in Africa as it was a view I once had myself before learning the truth; it’s not talked about in the mainstream. We don’t see many historical dramas set in the old African empires, no documentaries on them, no fantasies outside of a mostly self-published group based on those civilizations. The mainstream is content to pretend there were no African civilizations, and so many people grow up thinking all ancient Africans were the crude simpletons from old jungle exploration films.
I tried to get pirated files but could only find a single book of his, The War in Heaven, which is out of print and written under Beale’s real name rather than his Vox Day pen name. I did read free samples of his book A Throne of Bones in which Beale sure liked showing off his knowledge of Latin. It had me thinking of Normand Spinrad’s The Iron Dream the way the heroes are all humans or near-humans while the villains were all inhuman beasts that are evil because we are told they are evil. It could be the real villains are human too; this was only a preview, so I really couldn’t say. What is evident though is that Beale wanted his own A Song of Ice and Fire, having said he wanted to make a “Christian” alternative to J. R. R. Martin’s series. I have considered getting Beale’s books to mock them, but I really wonder if it would be worth the time and effort.
@Rabukurafuto
I’m sure if they’re as bad as people say they are, you can find them in the five cent bin in thrift stores. Or used bookstores that have Twilight and 50 Shades of Gray in the window.
I was under the impression that Beale’s works aren’t mainstream enough for wide distribution like that. I doubt I would see his books in a major book chain. I checked the Barnes & Noble website and found the only physical copies of A Throne of Bones are used hardcovers for $50 and over. It looks like the only books of his carried at book stores are the “nonfiction” The Irrational Atheist and The Return of the Great Depression.
Anyone ever read one of Shitgolem’s books? I am tempted, but only if there are pirated copies out there somewhere.
I’ve read the War in Heaven. It’s not even “so bad it’s good,” it’s just boring and preachy.
@Rabukurafuto
When did Barnes & Noble turn into a thrift store or used book store? 😛
The Barnes & Noble site has always offered where to order used books. So does Amazon (which has a more extensive set of used bookstore offers), and again the only offers begin at $50. It looks like this book was never a paperback.
Hatereading is rarely worth it. Done right, though, it can be wonderful.
I remember reading Mark Reads Twilight after chroniclurker (who lurks quite well) introduced me to his blog, and some of those entries got hilarious.
Most hatereading just gives people annoyed faces, though.