When Upton Sinclair ran for Congress as a socialist, he got 60,000 votes. When he ran the same platform under the slogan “End Poverty in California”, he got 879,000. His conclusion was that Californians would gladly accept socialism – just so long as it was called something else.

Writer, editor, and game developer Vox Day believes that modern day America has gladly accepted a regime of thought policing under the label of anti-racism, feminism, and equality – broadly grouped together as “social justice”. A reductive social justice concept is that if you are male, white, straight, you are either an oppressor, or benefit from the oppression, of women, ethnic minorities, and queer people. These are pretty firm categories. White people who live in trailer parks are presumably contributing, somehow, to the systematic oppression of Will Smith’s kids.

What’s interesting is that the poor oppressed classes always seem to be able to get their oppressors fired, suspended, or censured, often for fairly disproportionate things. Pax Dickinson tweeted some Family Guy level jokes on his personal Twitter account. Satoshi Kanazawa reported on the results of a science experiment done by someone else. The CEO of Mozille donated $1,000 to an traditional marriage organisation in 2008. Thank God that the hammer of justice fell on such villains. You can talk about glass ceilings and invisible knapsacks, but Vox asks: are you really oppressed if you can so easily destroy the livelihoods and reputations of your oppressors? At this point, social justice seems like a boxer with a 84-21 record, still claiming to be the scrappy underdog.

Vox overstates his case in the title and nearly every page of this book, but then he’s built a reputation as science fiction’s enfant terrible, and his readers probably expect nothing less. Much of the book is interesting and reasonable. There’s some interesting amateur psychoanalysis of SJWs, and some history of how we got where we are. I could have done with less GamerGate, and a less exhaustive account of the SFWA’s internal politics. There’s a lot of things in here that literally nobody will care about in 3 years.

Towards the end, he’s in uncomfortable territory that will make some readers wonder if he’s that big an improvement over the social justice warriors. He comes up with a battle plan for combating SJWs that includes items such as “restricting their speech” and “denying them employment”, based on such dead giveaways as having a COEXIST bumper sticker. I prefer an alternate battle plan that includes items such as “minding my own business” and “leaving people alone”

And he doesn’t address the other problem: the fact that helping the downtrodden is a fundamentally worthy goal, and that many social justice warriors have their hearts in the right place, destructive and dangerous though their movement has become. Social justice is basically an overgrown sense of altruism, like a peacock’s tail growing until it smothers the bird. Vox Day’s approach to the problem is Genghis Khan’s: “Kill them. Kill them all.” I think a lot of these people could be met halfway, and could have their mental energies directed in a positive direction.

Otherwise, this is a decent book’s who’s time has come – social justice certainly isn’t directed in a positive direction right now. I think I first noticed it in 2007 or so – the way everything had become stifled, cringing, and apologetic. I once watched a Stephen Pinker debate about gender differences, and he prefaced his argument with several minutes of grovelling apologies about how oppressed women are and he’s not denying that and [insert more self-flagellation]? Why? What was he scared of? Anthropologist Gregory Cochran described a friend who thought he might do research in an area with politically sensitive implications (the genetics of Ashkenazi Jews), and was told he had balls. Why should a scientist doing science require balls? Nicholas Wade wrote a book about biological differences between races, and had virtually the entire genetics community perform an Amish-style shunning. Why? Even if the book’s wrong…does this normally happen? If Paul Krugman makes a mistake about the Laffer curve, does the entire economic world rise up and spit him out? Why are some topics and some ideas just…off limits?

Vox Day might not be the hero we need, or the one we deserve, but he’s the one we have. I just hope he remembers that Nietzsche line about reflective abysses. Nietzsche wasn’t a SJW, because he didn’t lie.

Do you have a bad habit? One that’s unethical and potentially illegal? Here’s mine.

Christopher Hitchens once told the story of how, when Mother Teresa was being railroaded towards sainthood, he found himself arguing against her canonisation to a priest, a deacon, and a monsignor. He soon learned that Pope John Paul II had abolished the office of advocatus diaboli, ostensibly to fast-track his favourites to the sainthood rolls. Hitchens noted that he was happy to represent the Devil pro bono.

I am happy to be an unpaid (and nonconsensual) copyeditor. When I see other people’s words, I want to change them. And when I quote other people’s, sometimes I give into the impulse. I don’t necessarily mean editing them for clarity and length. I mean editing them so that they are more aesthetically satisfying.

It feels very wrong to do this. Almost like straightening a crooked picture in someone else’s house. And they’re usually words written by much better writers than me. And yet…

“The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas, and throw the bad ones away.” – Linus Torvalds

I like the first part of the quote, but the second part is a benign tumor – not deadly, but unnecessary. It’s obvious, weakens the impact of the insight, and verges on being patronising (I should throw bad ideas away? Thanks for the gamechanger, Linus.) It would be sharper and punchier like this. “The way to have good ideas is to have lots of them.”

Or consider: “Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel. I have always needed Fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio. A new high-end Cadillac will go ten or fifteen miles faster if you give it a full dose of ‘Carmelita’.”

The bolded sentence is great, almost electrifying. The sentences preceding it aren’t as strong. And Hunter S Thompson didn’t need to actually mention songs. That makes him sound like a hacky 70s radio deejay, spinning Golden Oldies and Platters that Matter. I think the part about the gas needle should have ended the passage.

I realise that this quote is part of a book, and has to make sense in a larger context. You can’t just have lots of cool sentences suspended in a vacuum (or can you?). But that’s the whole thing: when I quote, I change. Books are sometimes altered for film to preserve the strengths of the medium, so why shouldn’t passages from books be altered so that they work better as free-standing quotes?

Sometimes quotations are unflattering, or ungainly. Some writers are at their best when they have a whole blank page to work their art, and can’t really be dissected and broken down into little fragments. So maybe changing their words is for the best. Photoshop and makeup, for written prose. Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s mutatis mutandis.

Not the best Japanese gore porn film (who would want to be the best?) but one of the most famous. A man abducts a woman and dismembers her with a camera rolling. It doesn’t sound like much when I describe it, but it won’t seem like much when you watch it, either.

Apparently Charlie Sheen thought it was real (no doubt while tooting more than just his flute) and called the FBI. That seems to be the time-honored route of fame in the gore porn film industry – try to hint that it might be real. Eventually an actual snuff film will make it to market, and we’ll all call it a boring publicity stunt.

Supposed horror legend Hideshi Hino both directs and plays the killer. He’s more often associated with manga, which are a different beast entirely. His manga efforts (Hell Baby, and so forth) resemble a Japanese Goosebumps, complete with fill-in-the-blanks storylines and a cast of characters that you wonder even he doesn’t forget. The gore is offset by a cartoonish, exaggerated art style – you can imagine children reading Hino’s manga, but this, not so much.

Viewers will find two possible routes of enjoyment: first, the gore, and second, analysing the special effects. It’s a low budget film, and a lot of it isn’t very well done. The woman’s flesh has a rubbery quality. The blood seems like copiously squirted cherry juice. Much of the film is shot in extreme close-up, focused on a single body part that’s an obvious prosthetic. The production quality can be described as “muddy, dark, and distressed” – adding a gritty grindhouse quality at the expense of us actually being able tos ee see what’s going on. You’ve heard of Hollywood’s famous L-shaped bedsheets? Where the male lead has his chest exposed and the female lead has her chest covered? Here the woman’s body spends so much time covered up, she’s practically a goddamn Quaker. The movie takes a lot of care to hide bad special effects, but it’s all in vain.

The admin of the legendary shock site rotten.com was once asked how he knows the gruesome pictures on his site are real. He said something to effect of “I just do”, which is pat, but also probably accurate. He also mentioned that they received large volumes of fake pictures, and that they were usually quite easy to spot.

Little tells always gave the fake pictures away – tricky camera angles, harsh lighting, conveniently poor photo quality. It’s pretty obvious: if a murderer really did dismember someone and make a snuff film, he’d capture it in the best quality possible. Remember the Mitch Hedberg gag about Bigfoot being a blurry, pixelated monster roaming the landscape? It’s the same for gore porn. If the real stuff ever appears, we can assume it will be in 1080p. Fuck this dark, murky crap. It’s for wannabe auteurs and professional fakes.

I like extreme art, but for something like this you really need…more. Of what? Almost anything. Some individuality. Some personality. Something that would separate it from a film generated at random by a sophisticated computer. There’s exactly one interesting angle (Hino wears a samurai outfit), and a lot of fake WWE blood. Apparently, some of the other Guinea Pigs are more story focused. I’ll probably never know. The sad truth is that a perfect gore porn film will probably never be made: anyone ready to outlay the necessary money will want it to be marketable enough to sell. Flower of Flesh and Blood is an interesting historical curiosity, but those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it.