Tag: current events

Christine Blasey Ford raped me

As you may have heard, the congressional hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh have been thrown into chaos late in the eleventh hour by shocking allegations of sexual misconduct. The accuser is a certain professor Christine Blasey Ford from Palo Alto, California. According to her, when Kavanaugh was around seventeen (I say “around,” because she doesn’t actually remember the year), he forced himself on her and tried to rape her.

She doesn’t remember where it happened. She doesn’t remember what time of year it happened. She didn’t tell anyone about it, until after she was married and seeing a therapist, and the story she told her therapist is materially different than the story she’s telling now. Also, all of the people she claims were witnesses to this act have vehemently denied, as has the accused.

But that’s not why I’m writing this blog post. I’m writing it because I have a confession to make. I haven’t come out with this story yet, because frankly, I’ve been afraid. But now is the time to come out and say it.

Christine Blasey Ford raped me.

From 2003 to 2005, I served in the California San Jose Mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I spent time in Sunnyvale and Cupertino, just a few miles from Palo Alto, that added up to almost a full year. While knocking doors one day, we came across Mrs. Ford and one of her friends. She was just visiting from Palo Alto, but they agreed to take the missionary lessons together. We came back three or four times, and struck up something of a friendship. Then, I was transferred to my next area.

I can’t remember the name of the friend, or where the friend lived. It was somewhere in the area of Sunnyvale or Cupertino. I also don’t remember which year this happened, or what time of year. In the Bay Area, all the seasons kind of blend together.

It was definitely Christine Blasey Ford, though. I remember her quite well.

Fast forward to April 2006. I had just finished my first semester at BYU, and had arranged to take a road trip to the Bay Area with one of my freshman dorm-mates, in order to visit my mission. When we arrived in Concord, I rented a white Ford Taurus from a local Enterpise and drove down the 680 to good old San Jose.

There were so many people from my mission that I wanted to meet, and Mrs. Ford was one of them. I still had her number, so I gave her a call, and we arranged to meet at the In’N’Out in Mountain View, along El Camino Real.

At first, I was happy to see her. She’d listened so intently to the missionary lessons, and I wanted to know what had happened to her after I’d been transferred. I knew that she’d lost contact with the missionaries, but I felt certain that once we were back in touch, her interest in the gospel would quickly be renewed.

While we were eating our burgers, I left to use the bathroom. She must have slipped something in my drink, because my memory gets a little fuzzy after that.

When I came back to myself, I was sitting in the passenger side of my rental. The car was parked in the back of an empty parking lot somewhere in Sunnyvale (I forget exactly where). To my horror, I discovered that my pants were down by my ankles. My crotch was wet and sore.

On the dashboard, I found a note. It said: “Thanks for the blowjob, Elder! <3 <3 Christie.”

I was mortified. I was ashamed. I didn’t know what to do. I was no longer a missionary, so I didn’t have any of that support structure to fall back on. And because I was traveling alone, there was no one I could really tell.

I never saw or heard from Mrs. Ford again.

For the last twelve years, I’ve lived in shameful silence. It just didn’t seem that anything good would come from going public with this. But now, it’s a burden that I can carry no longer. I deserve to be heard. My story needs to be told.

But wait, you say. What’s your evidence that any of this actually happened? How do we know that any of this is true?

I admit, I have no witnesses or evidence to corroborate my story. If pressed to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, I probably couldn’t do so.

But before you rightfully dismiss everything that I’ve just written about Christine Blasey Ford, consider the following:

First, my story has more specific, verifiable details than Mrs. Ford’s accusations of sexual misconduct against Justice Kavanaugh.

Second, I’m a fiction writer. I tell lies for a living.

Draw your own conclusions, America.

Thoughts on #AmazonClosed and disappearing KU reads

There are a lot of scandals happening in the indie publishing world right now. The latest one has to do with Amazon deleting KU reads from March: some authors have seen their page reads retroactively revised down as much as ninety percent.

The speculation is that this is connected with Amazon deactivating several customer accounts, allegedly on the basis of those customers accepting free or gifted items in exchange for reviews. It’s also supposedly connected with Amazon’s recent legal arbitration against book stuffing in KU, which scammers use to inflate their page reads. Until now, Amazon has done precious little to push back against endemic scamming in KU.

The best potential explanation for this that I’ve read comes from TexasGirl and PhoenixS over on KBoards. TexasGirl writes:

I think it goes like this:

— An author hires a bot reader to inflate their page reads.
— The bot account opens the book and page reads through it.
— The bot then spiders the sales page for other books like it, to strengthen the association with other books Amazon has placed either as 1: normal also-bots 2: sponsored products
— The bot opens the also bot or sponsored books and reads them too.

This creates synergy between the paid bot book and collaterally botted book. This means the other bot accounts will do the pathway as well, creating more page reads via bots by the bad accounts. It ALSO muddies the waters as to which books hired the bots and which were just secondary opens.

PhoenixS adds:

A good portion of those “bots” may well be incentivized readers. Once a real reader account has been identified as a recipient of incentives either for leaving reviews or for borrowing or for reading — or skimming through — a book, then all their reviews and borrows/reads become suspect. So anything they might borrow, even for their own, real personal pleasure (often within the same subgenre they’re getting incentivized for) would be dinged.

In other words, KU authors who use AMS ads are inadvertently shooting themselves in the foot, as the bots and click-farms use the sponsored links to find legitimate books to borrow (in order to mask their illicit activity). Also, when Amazon deactivated a bunch of customer accounts, they also removed a bunch of legitimate page reads, putting the screws on some of their KU authors.

I have many thoughts on this subject. Personally, I haven’t been affected at all, as none of my books are in Kindle Unlimited. I do feel for the authors who have been hit, though. It takes about two months for book royalties to show up in your bank account, so when you think you have $$$ coming only to have it arbitrarily disappear, it can create some heartburn-inducing cashflow problems. No one likes to be jerked around like that.

In my view, though, this is all just one car of a much larger train wreck.

The big tech companies that comprise the FAANGs all seem to suffer from the same hubris: that the fundamental laws of nature, economics, and human behavior can all be overcome by a sufficiently advanced algorithm. Combined with this is the equally arrogant hubris that they, by virtue of their power and success, have a responsibility to reshape the world in a progressive way, even if that’s not what their users want.

We can see the second part of this hubris in Zuckerberg’s recent testimony to congress. His admission that Facebook bears responsibility for the content on its platform has got to be giving his lawyers multiple aneurysms right now.

The first part is evident in the way Amazon structured Kindle Unlimited. The whole program is rife with perverse incentives, from the zero-sum payment structure of the KDP global fund to KENPC and the All-Star bonuses. Book stuffing, click-farming, and other KU scams are both predictable and forseeable. Instead of restructuring the program, though, or hiring a team to clean it up, Amazon has either denied that any problem exists, or created algorithms to play whack-a-mole with the scammers, often striking legitimate authors in the process.

The dirty little secret is that KU wasn’t created to benefit authors or readers, however, but to benefit Amazon by preventing a rival ebook subscription service from eating into their market share. Hence the exclusivity requirement for KU authors. By tying up the majority of the indie publishing community with exclusivity, Amazon denies the competition the content it needs to get off the ground. Never mind that KU isn’t that great for readers and is downright horrible for authors.

But why all the drama right now? Because this train wreck is headed for a massive cliff: an antitrust suit against Amazon. Between President Trump’s tweets about Jeff Bezos and the “Amazon Washington Post,” and the mainstream media’s neverending crusade against the president, the political winds are shifting in ways that must appear very foreboding in Seattle.

Amazon is cleaning house, and a lot of dolphins are getting netted as a result. One bad apple spoils the whole barrel, and the scammers have been squatting in Amazon’s house for years. But the real train wreck is just getting started, and when it goes over the cliff with the rest of this mixed metaphor, that’s when the fireworks will begin.

As an indie author, now is a good time to be as flexible as possible.

Further thoughts on the Florida school shooting

  • The Broward County sheriff needs to resign or be fired immediately, and should also stand trial for criminal negligence. There’s something rotten in the state of Florida, and it all points back to this man.
  • CNN has completely lost all credibility. As far as I’m concerned, they rank slightly above Alex Jones and slightly below the grocery store tabloids for journalistic integrity.
  • The anti-gun activist shooting victims are political pawns. Nothing more, nothing less. Emotion does not give you credibility, and suffering does not give you authority.
  • By the same, Donald Trump’s emotional reactions on Twitter have been disappointingly puerile.
  • The only person who comes out looking good from all this is Dana Loesch.
  • We obviously have a problem with mass shootings in this country. Instead of focusing on the gun issue to the exclusion of everything else, we should first try to fix all of the other contributing factors, such as mental illness, school security, psychotropic drugs, absent fathers, etc. Let’s focus on the areas where we can agree.
  • The FBI has demonstrated criminal negligence in their failure to investigate the shooter, and what is even more disturbing, I don’t know that it isn’t politically motivated. If it is, it represents an existential threat to our republic.
  • I don’t know that our nation has been this politically divided since the years leading up to the Civil War. The United States is deeply ill, and if we cannot come together—if we cannot find our e pluribus unum—I fear that this great nation will fall.

Undercover Antifa: This story needs to get out!

There’s a lot that I could say, but I think the video speaks for itself:

One question: when Antifa has their Charlottesville moment and somebody dies at their hands, how is the mainstream media going to cover it? What is the narrative going to be?

Good on team Crowder for exposing these domestic terrorists. Make no mistake, that’s exactly what they are.

To escape or to engage

A couple of weeks ago, I finally sat down and wrote a (semi-) formal business plan. It was an enlightening experience. I’ve kept it all organized in many different ways, but writing it all down in one place allows me to step back and take a wider look at what I do.

No business plan is complete without a mission statement. Here is mine:

To write and publish fiction that serves the truth, expands minds and hearts, and empowers my readers to be better men and women for reading my books.

To serve, expand, and empower. All of the books that have profoundly affected my life, from Ender’s Game and Lord of the Rings to The Neverending Story and A Wrinkle in Time, did those things.

“That’s very high and lofty, Joe, but what about just writing damn good stories that entertain people?” I don’t actually see a contradiction there. All of the best stories I’ve read that served, expanded, and empowered me were only able to do so because they entertained me first.

Entertainment is an important part of what I do. So is escapism. I have no idea how J.R.R Tolkien voted in the 1930s and 40s, nor do I care to know. I have a pretty good idea how Orson Scott Card voted in the 90s and 00s, but not from reading Ender’s Game. Sometimes I read authors for their politics (Ringo, Heinlein, Correia), but I didn’t read The Last Centurion to decide how I would vote in the last election; I read it because leading a stranded cavalry division across a post-apocalyptic Middle East sounded like a damn good story.

The surest way to kill a good story is to try to cram a message through it. The best stories never do this. They serve as a mirror that allows the reader to see themselves more clearly, whoever they may be. That’s what makes them timeless.

The world is becoming an increasingly scary and violent place. In the coming months, I expect that things will get a lot worse. This puts me in an interesting position. Should I try to write stories that engage with what’s happening in the world, or stories that provide an escape from it?

Or is there a contradiction between the two?

There’s a lot of outrage on social media from people who are trying to engage with the problems they see in the world. Unfortunately, the louder their outrage becomes, the more they seem to be part of the problem and not a solution to it. That’s part of why I deleted my Twitter account and radically scaled back my Facebook usage.

Does lashing out at injustice really make the world a better place? Adding outrage to outrage, pointing out everything that’s wrong? There’s a time and a place for that, sure. But there’s also a time and a place to disengage.

When times get hard, people need an emotional escape. That’s why they turn to things like sports, or movies, or books. But when this media instead tries to engage by bringing in politics or social justice or whatever, it deprives people of their escape. We see it all the time with the virtue signalling in Hollywood, or the issue dropping in TV and movies, or whatever the hell ESPN has become.

I don’t want to go that route. Not with my books, not with this blog—not with any aspect of my career. It’s tempting, sure, and I’ve flirted with it in the past, but it’s time to pull back. I may be convinced of my own views and opinions, but that’s not why I write. You don’t serve the truth by forcing it on other people. You don’t expand minds and hearts with moral outrage. You don’t empower people to become better by telling them that they’re wrong.

With the way the world is going, I think the best thing I can do is to focus less on trying to engage with it and more on providing an escape from it, through my books. Ultimately, I think that’s a better and more effective way to change the world.

Thoughts on the violence in Charlottesville

No one is right in any of this.

I tend to lean to the “right,” but it’s a completely different “right” than any of the protesters at this event. Constitutional conservatives and classical liberals are both increasingly endangered species in this country, and that’s a problem. Nothing in our Constitution supports Nazism and white nationalism.

Radical Islamic terrorism is evil, and needs to be called by its name. So does White supremacist terrorism and neo-Nazism. So does Black supremacism ala Black Lives Matter. So does neo-fascism and radical anarchism ala Antifa. All of it is evil. All of it needs to be named and recognized as such.

We live in a world where words and hate speech and so-called “micro-aggressions” are called violence, but where real violence is legitimized if it’s in the service of political ends. This needs to stop. The first step to stopping it is to call evil by its name. No one in Charlottesville this weekend was on the side of truth or righteousness. They were both fighting for two sides of the same evil coin.

Sarah Hoyt thinks this is our Fort Sumpter moment. I disagree. It may be our Harper’s Ferry moment, but I thought that the Oregon standoff was one of those, and apparently it wasn’t. Perhaps it’s just another wake up call, like the Washington DC baseball shooter who miraculously failed to kill any of his targets.

Regardless of what kind of moment Charlottesville was for this country, we need to wake up and take a step back from the brink.

I’m actually quite optimistic about this. None of those bozos represent the vast majority of us. We’re better than that. We’re the country that saved the world twice, from Nazism and from Communism. Yes, we don’t have a perfect track record, but Churchill was right: you can always count on the Americans to do the right thing, after we’ve tried everything else.

There’s a lot of scary stuff happening in the world right now, but I’m actually not too alarmed. We’ve been through worse. We’ll pull through this, “we” being those who are prepared. If ye are prepared, ye shall not fear.

Take care of yourself, dear reader. And thanks, as always, for reading.

An open letter to Google

To whom it may concern,

My name is Joseph Vasicek, and I have been a regular user of your company’s products since 2006 when I set up my first Gmail account. Until the events of the past week, I was also a satisfied user.

The recent firing of James Damore over the controversial internal memo titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber” has profoundly shattered my trust in your company. I have read the memo and find it eminently moderate and well-reasoned. It is not an “anti-diversity screed,” as many in the traditional news media are calling it, and their characterization of the memo–as well as your own characterization, given by your vice president of diversity, Danielle Brown–is manifestly false to anyone who has actually read it.

Your handling of the controversy has been nothing short of Orwellian. I find this especially disturbing for the fact that your company controls almost every gateway to the internet that I use on a daily basis.

My phone is an Android device that is deeply integrated with your products. My personal and business email accounts are with your Gmail service. I use your search engine on a daily, almost hourly basis, and routinely default to the first three sites listed in the search results. Whenever I’m lost or traveling to an unfamiliar place, I use your maps and navigation service to guide me. Until this memo controversy, Chrome was my default browser. While I lived in Utah Valley, I even used your fiber network too connect to the internet.

It is abundantly clear to me now that I have been far too complacent in allowing myself to become wholly dependant on your company for almost every facet of my online connection to the world.

I cannot, at this time, fully divest myself from Google in the way that I have already divested myself from Facebook and Twitter. However, I can make gradual changes to lessen my dependence on your company’s products in the coming months and years. This principle will guide my future purchasing decisions, as well as the online products I use and the personal data I share.

In the world of tech, if you use a product or service without paying for it, then you are the product, wittingly or otherwise. This was not a problem for me when I still trusted your company. But you have profoundly violated that trust.

I won’t say that it is impossible for you to win back that trust. It would take an extraordinary act, but you are an extraordinary company. At the least, it would require an acknowledgement of the legitimacy of my concerns, and a reversal of the fascistic Orwellian turn that your company has taken. It would require, for example, changing the search results page for “Abraham Lincoln” to reflect that he was our first Republican president, not just a member of the National Union Party (which was simply the Republican Party, rebranded for the 1864 elections when Lincoln was the sitting president. He was elected in 1860 as a Republican, and calling him anything else is deliberately misleading.)

Without an extraordinary effort to win back the trust of the millions of Americans like me whose trust you have betrayed, in the coming months and years, you will see much less of me as I reduce my dependence on your products.

Sincerely,

Joe Vasicek

Thoughts on the #Alexandria shooting

This attack was a warning.

It could have been much worse. There could be more than a dozen dead congressmen right now. We could be in a national crisis as severe as 9/11, or more.

This was a premeditated and carefully planned act of domestic terrorism. It is clear that the attacker was politically motivated. Millions of Americans share his extreme views. Thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, believe that his actions were justified.

It is only by the grace of God that the attack was thwarted. As Congressman Loudermilk said, “God was there.”

I believe in a God who is intimately concerned with the details of our individual lives. I believe that His hand guides the events that shape us, and that He takes a particular interest in the course of the United States.

He has given us our individual agency, the freedom to choose between good and evil. That is a gift that He will never take away. No matter how violent we are toward one another, no matter how much anger and hatred fills our hearts, He will not violate our agency nor revoke that Liberty wherewith He has made us free, but will leave us to our devices until we return on our knees to Him.

This attack was a warning. We would do well to heed it.

Several months ago, I came to the conclusion that the United States is between three and fifteen years away from an existential crisis as great as the Civil War. Will this crisis turn into a second civil war? I believe there’s a significant chance that it will. Certainly we are on that path right now.

Wake up, America! You talk of wars in far off countries, but you know not the hearts of men in your own land. Even now, the voices of evil speak louder in your ears than that which will shake the Earth. Treasure up wisdom, and remember: if you are prepared, you shall not fear.