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Elizabeth Sandifer

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

21 Comments

  1. nydwracu
    May 1, 2016 @ 6:54 pm

    “This basic inclination towards crass sadism isn’t unusual for Vox Day, who, were he to be described in his own style, would probably best be introduced as “a bald and pudgy middle-aged Internet troll with daddy issues.” And so it’s easy to miss how strange it is. Let’s clarify: this isn’t a post on Vox Day’s blog, the traffic of which appears to consist largely of people who disagree with him but want to know what he’s up to. This is a $12 paperback; the people he’s trolling by and large aren’t even reading. The sadism serves no actual purpose. It’s unlikely to ever reach its nominal targets. It exists seemingly for no purpose other than that the targets of it seemingly cannot be written about in any other terms. This begs the question: what could possibly require this level of vitriol?”

    We’ve been over this, dude. What was it you said about your book? It keeps people interested. Something like that.

    Reply

    • .
      May 1, 2016 @ 7:30 pm

      Doing something for the audience engagement doesn’t obscure what it is the audience is engaged by though. There’s still a gap between being engaged by weird literary diss tracks, and… well, what’s the word for people whose interest is maintained by sadism?

      Reply

      • Carl Churchill
        May 1, 2016 @ 8:54 pm

        I believe you’d call that the SJ audience.

        Reply

        • .
          May 1, 2016 @ 9:00 pm

          I, uh, get that you think that’s a zinger but it’s kinda a nuanced point to begin with so it doesn’t really work with that kind of bounce-back retort.

          I mean, even if you hate social justice types with a firey passion, what points do you score by figuratively aligning them as Vox Day-reading sadists?

          I’d go for something less neat but more formally correct, like “better to be an alt-right sadist than a piss-left masochist”. You could also tie masochism to pop-right slur-of-the-moment ‘cuck’ if you feel like it!

          Reply

    • Elizabeth Sandifer
      May 3, 2016 @ 3:56 am

      I’m not convinced by the equivalence. What Vox is doing is high context – the sadistic barbs assume a reader who knows enough about the situation to appreciate the selective ways he’s framing it. Which is at marked contrast to the “intro to SJWs and their evil” angle that the book purports to take.

      It can partially be explained if you hypothesize that Vox is actually just preaching to the choir of his own die-hard fans, but even that’s tough, because often the cruelty requires an audience who knows the facts that Vox is deliberately distorting.

      Which can’t be entirely ruled out as a hypothesis, but yikes.

      Reply

  2. John Reen Davis
    May 1, 2016 @ 8:04 pm

    IMO Vox has as many “Mommy” issues as Daddy issues. His tax-dodging father is in prison because his mother informed on him and testified as a prosecution witness. Since then she has divorced his father and taken over the tech company he founded. She now hyphenates her last name. Even though she’s still tea party GOP, Rebecca Summers-Beale is the kind of competent, educated, independent and successful woman Pox loathes and fears. A quote from her Zoominfo profile: “Rebecca Summers-Beale is the majority owner of Comtrol Corporation and serves as its chairman of the board as well as executive marketing director. Ms. Summers-Beale first learned the important roles that honor and integrity play in organizations from her father, a Marine Corps lieutenant colonel, who served in the United States military for 30 years. These serve as guiding principles for the leadership she provides Comtrol today. Ms. Summers-Beale’s career includes human resources and administration positions with Harvard University, Honeywell EDP, Control Systems and Artist Graphics. She studied early childhood development at the University of Maryland and human resources at Northeastern University.”

    Oddly enough, for someone who believes criminal behavior is an inherited trait, almost all of Beale-zebub’s close relatives are convicted felons.

    Reply

    • Elizabeth Sandifer
      May 1, 2016 @ 8:09 pm

      Huh.

      Reply

    • David Gerard
      May 1, 2016 @ 8:18 pm

      His tax-dodging father is in prison because his mother informed on him and testified as a prosecution witness.

      That came later. Really, Robert Beale‘s problem came when he decided to represent himself in court against the IRS. Normal sensible people with business acumen would hire, ooh, a lawyer or something; it’s reasonably clear that the elder Mr Beale had disastrously lost touch with reality by then and there was no way this was ever going to end well.

      Reply

      • John Reen Davis
        May 1, 2016 @ 8:57 pm

        I agree Robt. Beale is his own worst enemy. He would have possibly been arrested if his wife hadn’t called the cops after overhearing his half of a phone conversation but that is the way it happened. His decision to represent himself came later. The shit really hit the fan, of course, when RB (under orders from Jesus) to subpoena the (female) judge from his tax case to appear before a “citizens Court” he organized over the prison telephone. I only mention the judge’s gender as it is another possible reason Pox has a chip on his shoulder about powerful women.

        Reply

        • John Reen Davis
          May 1, 2016 @ 9:40 pm

          Apologies. Having fact checked myself, here are the actual facts. Robert Beale was dodging the Feds in the Bahamas, when his wife found out he’d been making calls to family members and gave the authorities his cell number which led to his arrest. This all obviously still came before his attempt at self-representation.

          Here’s my source: http://www.startribune.com/dec-30-2007-ex-ceo-regrets-mission-to-take-on-irs/12916286/

          Reply

          • David Gerard
            May 1, 2016 @ 9:44 pm

            Yeah, I wrote that RW article a while ago, I wasn’t clear on the timeline. Feel free to hit “edit” if the references made it clear and I just failed to notice.

  3. Rachael M.
    May 2, 2016 @ 8:19 am

    Get a life.

    Reply

  4. tehy
    May 2, 2016 @ 3:59 pm

    did you actually write an article this shitty just to tempt people archive-reading it to comment?

    ‘ He lies when he uses the same disaffected tone of factual declaration for “a hypertext tool that allows people without any knowledge of programming to create interactive fiction games similar to Zork and other text adventures circa 1977” and “a fat and unattractive woman with blue hair and numerous piercings,” as though these are both straightforward truths in the same way.’

    So…is calling anyone ‘fat’ automatically dishonest? You might think so but no one else does; unless you can show me lots of people who will look at her photo and not call her fat and ugly, you really need to re-think your mindset.

    ‘He lies when he shifts the definition of game throughout; one moment she is a faux “game designer,” the next the not-games she not-designs are defined straightforwardly in terms of an iconic piece of gaming history.’

    The difference being that the iconic piece of gaming history used the same tools and structure she used but with incredibly intelligence, creativity, etc., and also created a much larger game with many more choices to be made. It’s like if I said ‘he was a terrible smith, and he crafted from impure metals a really big sword, kind of like the Buster Sword’, would you expect the quality to be the same, or just the look and style?

    ‘It is, however, worth noting that 307 of those 308 reviews on MetaCritic came in August of 2014 or later. In other words, the proof that the game is bad – a premise upon which all of the subsequent venom that he is about to justify depends – is a consequence of the very venom it justifies.’

    you do realise that people can independently play a game and realise it is bad and tell other people without needing a metacritic score right

    are you implying that gamers had no idea this game sucked until metacritic came in and told them

    ‘There are no obvious grammatical antecedents to “also” and “similarly,” nor is any evidence proffered of the non-existence of these death threats. No matter; he transitions, in the next paragraph, to how “things heated up rapidly in the second half of August 2014” that take place in Ars Technica, Gamasutra, The Guardian, The Financial Post, Jezebel, and other sites. This marks another spectacular dishonesty; the New York Times and Playboy pieces post-date August 2014, rather than being causes of these events. And it is at this point in the discussion that “#GamerGate” gets introduced. Vox Day is 100% for it.’

    proof FOR these death threats is startlingly limited as well. By the way, you realise the original sentence doesn’t mention the new york times or playboy, right? Or are you so spectacularly stupid…no, my mistake, of course you are.

    Reply

    • Patman
      May 2, 2016 @ 4:34 pm

      ” You might think so but no one else does; unless you can show me lots of people who will look at her photo and not call her fat and ugly, you really need to re-think your mindset.”

      Uh…what? Aside from your context-free quotation of that line…seriously? (Plus, how can he ‘prove’ that ‘lots’ of people DON’T make such crass, creepy, icky judgments? What kind of crazy are you spouting here, exactly?)

      Reply

      • Tehy
        May 2, 2016 @ 9:59 pm

        Uh…what? Aside from your context-free quotation of that line…seriously?

        Oh yes, forgive me for a context-free quotation…of an article you just read. If you think there wasn’t enough context (which there was), scroll up and find it.

        (Plus, how can he ‘prove’ that ‘lots’ of people DON’T make such crass, creepy, icky judgments? What kind of crazy are you spouting here, exactly?)

        I’m just laying bare the precise kind of crazy this author is spouting.

        Phil Sandifer is saying that including ‘fat and ugly’ along with pure factual statements is dishonest, meaning that the statement ‘zoe quinn is fat and ugly’ is in some way invalid. Given that ‘fat’ and ‘ugly’ are value judgments, there are two ways to resolve their validity or lack thereof. Firstly, you can call any usage of these words ‘dishonest’, which, fine, but that’s not really realistic and not how societies tend to deal with it. The second way is to decide that if a large majority of people agree, it can be treated as true. Therefore, either Phil Sandifer believes calling someone ugly is a lie or he believes many people disagree. Crazy? Yes, that’s why I objected, and I’m glad to hear you agree.

        Reply

      • Dan
        May 3, 2016 @ 2:00 am

        Patman, it’s clear that the commenter could have his requirement fulfilled that Phil find “a lot of people who wouldn’t” refer to her in this way. Mainly because they aren’t so obnoxious, incidentally because it happens to be untrue.

        Funny if there’s an article in a big newspaper about the origins of Gamergate you get all these people commenting about how they “don’t really care anymore” about Zoe Quinn, and yet you still get vile comments like these weighed in.

        Be careful what you associate with.

        Reply

        • tehy
          May 3, 2016 @ 3:25 am

          So are you saying it’s untrue that Zoe Quinn is fat or ugly?

          OK, google image search, so far all ugly. Can’t tell the weight but fat is much less relative of a term so I don’t think I need to. Can you find me large groups of people who don’t know this person who wouldn’t call them fat or ugly?

          What’s amazing about the whole Zoe Quinn saga is how often you idiots drag her back in, then say ‘you must be obsessed with her!’. No, I’d be happy to leave her ass behind, but the writer of this article has to try and find some type of ‘dishonesty’ and all he can come up with ‘but zoe quinn isn’t fat or ugly!’ so here we go… though I’m curious why declaring someone to be fat or ugly is so vile? Do you judge based on appearances, then?

          Reply

          • Elizabeth Sandifer
            May 3, 2016 @ 3:45 am

            Fuck off, Tehy.

          • JC
            May 5, 2016 @ 1:16 pm

            If she is so singularly unattractive, how is she supposed to have slept he way to the top (er, some minor notoreity)?

            Or as Phil is implying, is it that Day decided to gratuitously demean and insult her, for kicks but also because his faithful enjoy it?

    • .
      May 3, 2016 @ 12:00 am

      oh hey, you deliberately misinterpreted the part about truths in exactly the way it’s written to head off

      also what the hell is that analogy about the ‘buster sword’? dude read a goddamn book or something, you have cultural scurvy. your fingernails gonna drop out or something

      Reply

      • tehy
        May 3, 2016 @ 3:22 am

        instead of popping out a pseudo-intelligent one liner, feel free to explain what you didn’t understand about my argument.

        …wait, so you start by ridiculing my hobby. Ok, fair, so you’re going to tell me to go outside? No…instead you tell me to…read a book? OK, I could’ve used the example of ‘just because you write a book of dead people, doesn’t mean it is the Malazan Book of the Fallen’, or ‘just because you create a magic sword of crystal doesn’t mean it’s Callandor’ or I could go on.

        Reply

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