Authorial Affirmative Action: Even the Politically Incorrect Rarely Engage on More than a Single Aspect

One of the things that is rather amazing about authorial affirmative action is how pervasive it is, even among artists who are pretty transgressive against Cathedral hegemony relative to their peers.

For instance, the movie Idiocracy (opening scene http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icmRCixQrx8 )
opens with a demonstration of the massive delta in fertility between the smart and the stupid.

The smart couple, Trevor, IQ 138 and Carol, IQ 141 basically have no descendants.

Do you see the authorial affirmative action, even in this least PC movie made in recent memory?

Here it is:  First of all, women in the 2-3 sigma range are substantially rarer than men.  So it is much more likely that the IQs are reversed, even ignoring hypergamy.  Second, women in the 2-3 sigma IQ range are VERY hypergamous on IQ, because it is almost invariably a huge component of their identity.  We discussed this back a few months ago.  Simply put, a woman in that category will almost never accept a mate who isn't smarter than she is, by an amount sufficient for her ego to accept that fact.  Been there, married that.  So you see a concession to feminism practically right in the opening credits.
Then you see the IQ 84 couple, which are OF COURSE, not black or Hispanic, despite this being fairly probable (50% of the black population is there or below, about 15-16% of the white population is---given the relative ratios of the population in the US, you'd expect randomly selected such couples to be black or Hispanic around half the time).  No, they had to be fat rednecks for authorial affirmative action purposes (although the fat part requires no affirmative action, most people in that IQ range in the US are obese.

You see much the same sort of authorial affirmative action in the 'Unincorporated Man' series-in particular, the 'Unincorporated Woman' being in fact, a woman.  Given her nature and capabilities, the probability that she is a she is damned near zero.  Amusingly, you could rewrite her character to be a man with next to no effort, leading me to conclude that it is blatant authorial AA.  It's also easy to ignore if you want to enjoy the story and its exploration of a lot of ideas. The series to date is well worth the read.  But whenever a good author writes a character of a protected class and you could divest them of that status with a trivial rewrite (it isn't load bearing in the characterization), it's authorial AA at work.

Perhaps it is a reluctance to fight a war on more than one front?  Unfortunately, what you're facing isn't so much multiple possible fronts, against powers that would otherwise not be at war with you simultaneously, but more akin to multiple army groups loosely coordinated all on the same front against you.  You can't assume that the other groups aren't going to counterattack you if you leave them alone while you're dealing with your primary target.  If you're an outlaw conservative or reactionary anyway, best to give not even a pinch of incense to the Cathedral.

Behold the Incredible Magnitude of Authorial Affirmative Action

http://www.thedaily.com/article/2012/10/05/100512-news-female-marines/

The sort of affirmative action we tend to see in our daily lives tends to be around the level of a sigma or so----roughly around the magnitude of the difference between the white and black mean level of intelligence.

But authorial affirmative action is far larger than this---it is easily 3 sigmas, maybe even more.

Consider this:
The marine infantry officer training is very very hard.  Apparently only those who are already exceptional in physical and mental endurance take it, and even among that population, about 1/6 of them fail it.

It has recently been opened to women, and volunteers were solicited for it.  2 women lieutenants in the Marines stepped forward, aspiring to be the first women Marine Infantry officers.

What can we reasonably infer about these 2?
They're probably more exceptional relative to the female population of marines than the average male candidate is relative to the male population of marines.  That's probably a sigma at least right there.  If male marine infantry officer candidates are typically drawn from the 'Second Sigma' of male physical ability, it is likely that these two were from the Third Sigma, maybe even the Fourth, of female physical ability.

They're probably also likely to get the 'benefit of the doubt', at least in any 'coin toss' sorts of deliberations.  What instructor is going to risk his career by being perceived to be 'unfair' to them?

But both of them washed out.

From this, and a lot of other evidence, we can conclude that the difference between the male and female distributions is on the order of 3 sigmas at least.

So, when an author places male characters around the +4 sigmas relative to the male distribution, and then places women who are competitive with them in the same capabilities, that author is engaging in authorial affirmative action of insane proportions.  GI Jane---indeed.  There do in fact exist women who are stronger than an average man, but they are few and far between.  Women stronger than men in the 'Second Sigma' of physical ability are pretty much Olympic quality, and women comparable to men at the NFL level (generally in the 5 sigma ballpark), basically don't exist.

But you'd never know that from watching television or movies.  For God's sake, the MSM arm of the Cathedral has convinced most of the population that a quarter of the population is gay.

Request For Propaganda: Crowd the Confessional

The next request for propaganda I have (RFP for those who love TLAs) is not so much an attempt to create propaganda that reflects reality but more of an attempt to shape or alter said reality.

The objective is to give a long term indirect line of attack to elements of the Catholic hierarchy who have their hearts in the right place but who are fearful of direct confrontation.  It's not my style, or my preference, but perhaps a Pope must go to war with the bishops he has, not those he might wish he had.  Where is the Hammer of the Heretics when you desperately need him?

The weapon brought into play here is the confessional---specifically, the Sacrament of Confession.  It is a powerful weapon and I know very well that Satan fears it.  I also know that it is almost entirely disused---very few Catholics make anything remotely approximating regular confession.  If they did, you would very likely find many of your orthodoxy and orthopraxis problems greatly mitigated, simply because of the dread of having to fess up to them at the next regular confession.

Here is how the weapon is brought into play.  What you need is for authors and other writers to associate confession with high-status characters.  They don't even need to follow them into the confessional---simply stating or showing that they go to get confessed regularly (to trigger the weakness of the neurotypical mind to this kind of histogram distortion propaganda, you just need to show it twice, and they'll fill in the estimate that character X confesses regularly).  Do this a lot in literature, film, and television and you'll create an expectation in the minds of ordinary Catholics that a high-status Catholic just does this.  It's not an attempt to sway the rational mind but the gut level status estimator.

My wife and I read a ton of books every year between us.  Interestingly, the only author we can think of that we read who has used confessions more than once for his characters is S.M Stirling in his Change novels.  Stirling is either agnostic or atheist for God's sake!  If he'll carry the water of life for you it shouldn't be too difficult to get others to do so as well.

There are some advantages for writers in the confessional.  You see, one of the big dogmas of present day writers is 'Show, Don't Tell'.  If you want to show the readers or audience what a character is thinking, or want to digress on some point of that character's background or history, what easier device can you think of than the confessional?  Good Lord, you can launder an authorial information dump quite easily that way.  Just do it twice (because to the gut, there's no such thing as two, only unique or ubiquitous) and use high status characters.  TV occasionally uses the trope of the confessions being sealed and intimately related to some particular crime.  There is a LOT more that can be done with the confession box.  You can also use the assignment of penance as literary glue for why the confessing character has to do something afterwards that they would not otherwise be disposed to do given what you have revealed about their personality thus far.

My gut tells me that boosting participation rates in confession will help you a lot in terms of keeping your priests in line as well.  Getting lots of confessions from more than little old ladies and hardcore traditionalists will impress on them the gravity and sickening pervasiveness of sin.  The wrecks of lives and souls will be seared into their minds and the need to cal out to God for aid and mercy will be almost undeniable. 

Authorial Affirmative Action and Distorting the Histograms of Reality

Back when I was a grade schooler, in a few of our classes, we had a 'propaganda unit', wherein many of the common techniques of propaganda used historically were detailed and analyzed, perhaps with the intent of inoculating students against them.

Unfortunately, the techniques studies were not the ones actually used most frequently by cultural Marxists---they were really more those of 1950s-1960s Mad Men and WWII propaganda posters.  The really dangerous techniques were never described.

It is our intent to coin a phrase to describe a rather ubiquitous pattern.  We will call this technique 'authorial affirmative action', with the objective being distorting the histogram of reality.  How does one use this technique, one might ask?
The beauty of this technique is you never need to say a damned thing.  What you do is place large numbers of non-representative characters---with a frequency vastly in excess of their frequency in reality.  People generalize from fictional examples all the time, and you're directly poisoning their histograms of reality (which is to say, their estimation of how commonly class X does behavior Y).  Black scientists is one of the biggest examples here---what's the fraction of blacks among eminent scientists (the only variety that usually show up in fiction or TV)?---now compare the actual fraction of such in reality.  Women who can fight better than trained male combatants is another---the actual difference between male and female raw physical strength is huge, on the order of 3-4 standard deviations, granted strength is not all there is to conflict, but it's a very large factor.
Such authorial affirmative action is particularly gratuitous when it is clear that the character(s) in question could be rewritten to occupy another gender or race with a very small amount of effort---being almost like a 'product placement'.  Black lesbian naval officers with supreme physical combat capabilities (Island in the Sea of Time)?  I'm looking at you Mr Stirling, largely because I know that you know better.  Do your editors/publishers require such things in general, or are they just still sore at you from your Draka series?

In addition, you make members of favored/protected groups never unsympathetic or low status characters.  For instance, almost all the criminals on Law and Order and similar shows are white males.  Gays or blacks pretty much never get to be the bad guy or betrayers.  Besides corrupting people's priors, there's also the objection that this makes most fiction and dramas terribly predictable and the limited range of characterization must terrifically suck for any talented actors in particularly protected classes.
How long has it been, for instance, since a black man got to be a Bond villain---the 70s?

The bottom line on this is that persuasion isn't really about truth, it is about repetition, status, and affiliation.  Anyone who uses such techniques adversely towards your group is your enemy, and you probably shouldn't support them when you have an option.

More unwitting allies in the great struggle against the Cathedral: Amazon

http://drhelen.blogspot.com/2011/10/amazon-cutting-out-publishers.html

Now Amazon is almost certainly not a diehard reactionary organization.  But it is serving our ends by hastening the demise of the publishing industry's business model.  It is seriously unlikely that it is an accident that nearly all literature published today has what I call 'authorial affirmative action' and 'histogram distortion' (by this I mean significantly skewing the demographics of who does what in fiction or news relative to the actual frequencies in the real world).  They are in fact effectively part of the mainstream media and their destruction through slowly choking their lines of supply only helps us.  All hail the heroes of Reaction!
Only the founder of Craigslist is higher in our constellation of stars.
Our regular readers know, of course, that I favor gaining support from people by appealing to their actual interests rather than attempting to spin a web of cosmic justice and prancing unicorns over my cause.  Many of our most useful allies not only will not like us as persons or as a group, but will actively dislike us.  So be it.  Those reactionaries that are Christians like myself can use this as an opportunity to love some of those that consider us enemies.

Reactionary Propaganda---How The Cultural War is Really Fought

Composing good reactionary propaganda is actually pretty easy if you have control of a section of a cultural organ---e.g., a television show. The key is you DON'T go all 'afterschool special' or 'GI Joe--where now you know and knowing is half the battle' on your audience. You see, that induces your audience to actually think about what you said and to attempt to argue with you in absentia. Instead, you just do this:
Imagine on your TV show, you've got 20 regulars and 80 bit players that occasionally show up. Let's say you've got 20 reactionary characters, 60 middle of the roaders, and 20 leftist types.
What you do is make, say, 18 of the reactionaries sympathetic characters, and most importantly, you frequently let them demonstrate higher value when dealing with the opposite sex. Two of the reactionaries get to be low-status. For the leftists, just reverse the ratios. This way you can always point to counterexamples whenever anyone says anything.
Persuasion isn't about reason normally--I blog to encourage those who either consciously or unconsciously agree with me, I've few illusions I can convince anyone to change their mind except via attrition or divine intervention---it's about status and repetition. Humans are profoundly maladapted to television. Lots of people even seem to mentally process characters on their favorite TV shows as being their own friends. This has the effect of distorting their mental histograms as to what various groups in society are really about. Don't believe me? Ask yourself how often you see unsympathetic or uncool gay characters on TV? Now compute the same ratios for nongay characters. Do you think this is an accident?
If, for instance, a reactionary TV producer wanted to make good propaganda for Christianity in the social sphere, he'd just disproportionately stock his character pool with high status characters with Christian social markers. There's not even any need to have them show 'life lessons' or even pray on screen. In fact doing so makes your propaganda easier to resist. Just bang on the subliminal drum repeatedly---Christians, 90% hot 10% not, pagans 50% hot, 50% not, heathens, 10% hot, 90% not. Screwtape would recognize the strategy but obviously few Americans do.