by Vox Day
The First Law
The First Law of SJW is this: SJWs Always Lie.
The story that follows is just one example of a journey into the disorienting depths of SJW dishonesty. It's a trivial example of little significance to anyone who was not directly involved, but it is educational and informative in its very triviality because it demonstrates both the absurdities of the Narrative that SJWs attempt to push on everyone as well as the lengths to which they will go to hide the fact that they are lying. Rest assured there is an SJW in your social circle, at your church, or in your office, who is completely capable of behaving in exactly the same way that is described below because the Three Laws of SJW apply to all SJWs. The details are irrelevant, except in that they show the ludicrous extent to which SJWs will go to maintain their sacred Narrative, even when that Narrative is mutating faster than E. coli irradiated at Fukushima Daiichi.
Although I'd been blogging at Vox Popoli since October 2003 and had run across more than a few commenters who shamelessly lied and then retreated or fell silent rather than admit that they had done so when their falsehoods were exposed, I didn't begin to realize the full extent to which dishonesty is a fundamental part of the SJW identity until late 2012. That was when on the 25th of December, John Scalzi, a leading SJW in science fiction and a blogger with whom I'd had alternatively civil and uncivil relations over the previous 7 years, happened to brag that his blog, Whatever, had just hit 8 million WordPress pageviews for the year. That surprised me, because I'd always assumed that Whatever had considerably more readers than 8 million pageviews would suggest. I initially thought that Scalzi must have made a mistake and substituted “pageviews” for “visitors”, as my own pair of blogs, Vox Popoli and Alpha Game, had a combined 5,969,066 Google pageviews in 2011 and were on track to finish with 7,777,620 pageviews in 2012.
It didn't seem possible that I had very nearly the same amount of traffic as the famous blog belonging to the best-selling, award-winning, three-time SFWA President John Scalzi. After all, Whatever had been described for years as the biggest blog in science fiction and Scalzi himself was one of Tor Books's top authors, had won a number of literary awards, and was frequently referred to throughout the media as an enormously popular blogger. In fact, just five months before, the New York Times had profiled him as a master of buzz and promotion.
He is comfortable with the business of promotion: An affable speaker, he is familiar with the patois of fandom and is adept at generating buzz through the nerd mafia of like-minded collaborators. He already reaches up to 50,000 readers a day through his popular blog, “Whatever.” (“Taunting the tauntable since 1998” is the slogan on its home page.)
—“The Extras Get a Life”, by John Schwartz, the New York Times, 6 July 2012
Now, I am an economist by training and a game designer by profession. Spotting mathematical anomalies comes quite naturally to me. It's almost automatic. 50,000 readers a day comes to 18,250,000 readers per year, which even the most innumerate individual will notice is considerably more than 8 million. And while that apparent discrepancy could theoretically have been accounted for by the reporter's use of the term “up to”, the problem was that as a blogger myself, I knew very well that each reader accounts for multiple pageviews. The average number of daily pageviews per reader for a well-engaged blog, in my decade of experience, is usually somewhere between four and five. So 50,000 readers per day would indicate over 90 million annual pageviews!
So why was John Scalzi bragging about hitting only 8 million pageviews five months later?
Of course, the apparent discrepancy didn't necessarily mean that Scalzi had lied to the reporter. It only meant that he was, at the very least, considerably stretching the truth by referring to one very good day that was at least 9 times better than his average daily traffic. (8 million annual pageviews indicated somewhere between 4,383 and 5,479 readers a day, depending upon exactly how many pageviews per day his readers averaged.) But even a single day with 50,000 readers appeared highly unlikely in light of how the 8 million pageviews represented a sixty percent improvement on his traffic from previous years. Consider the following table of the data that Scalzi provided as part of his 8 million post, to which I have added the number of daily readers that would indicate if each reader accounted for 4.5 pageviews per visit.
Whatever site traffic: 2009 to 2012
Year Annual Pageviews Est. Daily Readers
2012 8,000,000 4,870
2011 5,409,015 3,293
2010 5,131,194 3,214
2009 4,488,281 2,733
Note: Whatever actually concluded 2012 with 8,166,822 WordPress pageviews and 4,539 daily readers. It subsequently declined to 7,519,279 pageviews in 2013 and 5,295,655 in 2014.
Having been a blogger for ten years myself, I knew it was very unusual to see even a single day that would double a large blog's average daily traffic, let alone see it jump by a factor of up to 20. Nevertheless, Scalzi continued to not only repeat the claim for the next nine months but even dropped the “up to” qualifier, thereby eliminating any possibility in my mind that he was doing anything but significantly exaggerating his site traffic.
John Scalzi @scalzi 6:20 AM - 4 Dec 2012
Hey, authors of non-traditionally published books! Promote your book to my 50K daily blog readers TODAY
John Scalzi @scalzi 3:33 PM - 10 Aug 2013
I think if people like the content they will keep coming in regardless. I mean, my site gets 50K readers a day
My suspicions thereby aroused, I tested the waters by posting several times on this apparent anomaly. This prompted a series of responses that seemed rather bizarre at the time, but which I have since learned are absolutely typical of the SJW who senses that his lies are on the verge of being exposed. In the next section, several of these standard SJW defensive tactics can be observed in addition to a very clear example of the Second Law of SJW in action.
The Second Law
The Second Law of SJW is this: SJWs Always Double Down.
It is important to keep in mind that the SJW concerned had all of the information that I eventually uncovered from the beginning. Nothing that I subsequently learned about John Scalzi and his site traffic was unknown to him, there were no surprises involved, and the only question was whether or not I would be able to unearth the information that would disprove his public claims and expose him as a fraud and a liar. In such a situation, a normal person who has lied—and who knows that his lies have aroused suspicion and are under investigation—is usually inclined to stop lying. In many cases, he will even come clean to the party who is in the process of exposing him and beg for mercy.
Not the SJW. Instead of coming clean in one way or another, the SJW will instead double down and attempt to shore up his lies by concocting an even larger framework of deceit and misdirection to support them. He will throw the full weight of his status and credibility into the effort, call on the support of his entire social network, and try to turn the risk of potential exposure into a popularity contest between him and the individual threatening to expose him. The goal is to destroy the whistleblower's credibility so that even if the truth comes out, no one will believe it.
In this particular case, John Scalzi's first response was to attempt to distract everyone by disqualifying the individual whose uncomfortable questions were threatening the perception of his massive popularity with the public. He did this by pointing to a single controversial comment I had made on my blog in response to a vicious and unprovoked attack by one of his allies, and using it as an excuse to force the SFWA board to choose between me and two of the most influential people in science fiction.
“My membership is due and I can’t in good conscience renew it until SFWA finds the means or moral backbone or Whatever’s ultimately required to expel someone as hateful and wilfully destructive as Day—not just from the organisation but from the culture present within it.”
—John Scalzi, from Report to the Board of Directors of SFWA
&n
bsp; At the time, John Scalzi was the organization's outgoing three-time president, and Patrick Nielsen Hayden was the Senior Editor and Manager of Science Fiction at Tor Books. Both leading SFWA members, they stopped paying their membership dues that summer and threatened to leave the organization if the Board did not vote to expel me, which it obediently did on August 2013. I was not actually expelled, as Massachusetts state law required a subsequent vote by the entire membership, nor was my expulsion ever publicly announced by the SFWA Board, but apparently the charade of a meaningless vote was sufficient, as both Scalzi and Nielsen Hayden promptly announced they had paid their dues and were once more members in good standing.
John Scalzi @scalzi 9:18 AM – 14 Aug 2013
I just renewed my @sfwa membership!
P Nielsen Hayden @pnh 11:53 AM – 14 Aug 2013
@scalzi So did I! What a coincidence! @sfwa
Having successfully disqualified me in this manner, Scalzi and his allies then proceeded to pretend that my continued attempts to discover the truth about his traffic claims were nothing more than a bitter attempt at revenge for my expulsion from SFWA—never mind that I'd first raised the matter months before the SFWA controversy and I wasn't genuinely expelled from the organization.
His second response was to publicly back off his expanded claims. Four days after I called out the discrepancy between his claimed 50k daily readers and his actual average of around five thousand per day, the “up to” qualifier again began to appear in his statements.
John Scalzi @scalzi 4:45 PM – 16 Aug 2013
It's related to having 50K Twitter followers and up to 50K daily readers of the blog, many of whom like SF/F.
His third response was to attempt to engage in a bit of statistical sleight of hand that did nothing to disprove any of the questions I had raised. Two weeks after the SFWA Board vote, a newspaper published a puff piece on him that led to a number of links from large sites like Daily Kos and produced an incredible spike in his site traffic. He reported that he'd had 60,018 visitors and 100,374 pageviews in a single day, which he promptly screencapped and posted to Twitter.
John Scalzi @scalzi 12:10 AM – 27 Aug 2013
All the dudebros who adamantly maintain I don't get 50K visitors a day are totally right. #HaHaHa
The timing was so perfect in this regard that I actually wondered if he'd somehow managed to plant the story in order to drive his traffic up, but regardless, the fact that he had a single day of 100k-pageview traffic didn't mean that he'd ever previously seen similar traffic. In fact, given the hard limits he'd previously reported, the bigger the spikes were, the lower his average daily traffic would have to be.
Two weeks after that, precisely one month after I'd been “expelled” by the SFWA Board, John Scalzi celebrated having hit 30 million pageviews in six years in an elaborately verbose post designed to further defend his past traffic claims. He even showed a WordPress screenshot to prove that his site had had 30,036,338 pageviews and 349,576 comments over that timeframe.
At some point yesterday the site passed the 30 million all time views, “all time” in this case defined as “visits recorded by the WordPress stats program since early October 2008,” which is when the site switched over to the WordPress VIP hosting service. Note that I would take all stat information with a grain of salt; here is my standard link to explain why. For all that, 30 million views in six years doesn’t suck. This 30 million visit milestone happens whilst some folks out there are asserting foamily that I’m lying about my site’s visitorship; the bone of contention appears to be that I note the site gets up to 50,000 visitors a day, whilst the foamy folks complain that the daily traffic is in fact nowhere near that, so therefore, I am lying…I don’t know about you guys, but I gotta say, if I’m lying about my visitor stats, I’m doing a really terrible job of it. I know. I suck. I must try harder. The good news is, I know of some people who are better at lying about my site stats than I am. Well, maybe “better” isn’t the correct term, actually. —“30 Million Views”, Whatever, 13 September 2013
Of course, all this frantic activity, and obfuscation, and misdirection, and name-calling merely served to convince me that the SJW was protesting far too much. Why had he gone to such efforts to get me expelled? Why was he selectively revealing single-day traffic anomalies and long-term traffic totals while steadfastly refusing to simply make his traffic meters public and thereby put a definitive end to the matter? He obviously had the information on hand, so why not click a single button and release it to the public? What purpose could there be to all the dancing if he wasn't trying to hide something?
Sure, 30 million pageviews sounded superficially impressive, as did the 350,000 comments he cited, but then, both numbers had accumulated over a period of six years. I was in a better position to put these numbers in perspective than most because I happened to have over 475,000 comments on my two presumably less-trafficked blogs in only five years. How was it possible for me to have 36 percent more comments in 17 percent less time despite presumably having considerably less site traffic?
The discrepancies were starting to accumulate, and the increasingly wordy, increasingly elaborate defensiveness on Scalzi's part made me increasingly certain that he was lying. But how to prove it to everyone else?
Then it occurred to me that anyone who was willing to shamelessly exaggerate in an interview with the New York Times was probably not doing so for the first time. In my experience, most people who are self-promoters never stop promoting themselves. They have a tendency to talk themselves up, and they will often exaggerate when they have no need to do so. Given that the New York Times is at the top of the U.S. cultural heap, I figured the chances were very high that Scalzi had similarly inflated his traffic in previous interviews with other reporters. And, sure enough, I found an interview he had given almost exactly three years before to Erin Stocks at a science fiction magazine called Lightspeed.
Anything you ever wanted to know about science fiction writer John Scalzi you can find online at the public and rather opinionated blog that he’s kept since 1998, Whatever.scalzi.com/. His bio page holds all the usual info—education, past jobs, present jobs, books published, awards won—and is wrapped up with the tongue-in-cheek coda: “For more detailed information, including a complete bibliography, visit the Wikipedia entry on me. It’s generally accurate.” But spend a little more time browsing, and you’ll learn that beyond the dry stats and quippy bon mots, there’s more to John Scalzi and his writing than meets the eye. For one thing, his blog gets an extraordinary amount of traffic for a writer’s website–Scalzi himself quotes it at over 45,000 unique visitors daily and more than two million page views monthly.
—“Interview: John Scalzi”, Lightspeed, September 2010 (Issue 4)
Extraordinary indeed. It's fascinating, isn't it? Three years before the New York Times interview that struck me as anomalous, John Scalzi had been publicly claiming to have very nearly the same number of readers, as well as an absolutely impossible number of pageviews. And how could Whatever possibly have had “more than two million page views monthly” in September 2010 when he later reported 5,131,194 pageviews for the whole of the year?
At that point I knew, beyond any shadow of a reasonable doubt, that John Scalzi was lying about his site traffic, and what's more, he had been repeatedly lying about it for years. The problem was that in light of that one-day 60k-reader spike, it was still theoretically possible, just barely, that Whatever had truly accumulated two million of its five million pageviews in 2010 in a single month. While passing off such an anomaly as an average would be deceptive, it would be technically true. Given Scalzi's known predilection for the absurd “up to” terminology, it wasn't unthinkable. It was the very sort of deceitful word game that he seemed to enjoy playing. And while I very much doubted that explanation was the case here, I couldn't entirely rule it out.
But was it possible to eliminate the possibility? Certainly, if only one could acquire the information contained
in Whatever's historical site metrics. Every blog owner makes use of various site meters. There are dozens of different meters; the most popular are WordPress and Google Analytics, but there are a considerable number of lesser variants, each of which purports to measure site traffic more accurately than the next. While honest bloggers make their site metrics open to the public, those who wish to maintain some sort of mystique about their traffic and pretend to be more influential than they are tend to lock them down and prevent anyone else from seeing the level of traffic they are actually receiving. Needless to say, John Scalzi made a habit of keeping all of his site meters hidden since it's impossible to exaggerate one's popularity when anyone can see exactly how many visitors and pageviews one's site has.
After 25 years of developing games and designing technologies, I have a fair number of contacts in the technology world. One of them just happened to be an executive at a company whose site meter Scalzi has utilized for years. Since the technology company actually owns the data, it only took a phone call to obtain the historic traffic records for Whatever and to compare them with the public numbers he had been reporting. Somewhat to my surprise, the records proved that he had accurately reported the annual numbers for 2009 through 2012, and rather less surprisingly, confirmed he had been lying in his public interviews, on Twitter, and on his blog. They demonstrated very clearly that instead of being as massively popular as everyone, including me, had previously believed, he had been exaggerating his site traffic, by a factor between 7x and 30x depending on whether one looked at pageviews or visitors.
