they could just give their environmental regulators the authority to enforce their existing environmental laws.
In the film Under the Dome, Chinese journalist Chai Jing astonishes a Chinese audience with a film clip from California where Cal DoT stops a truck and actually checks that it has all the mandatory safety and emissions equipment. That never happens in China. China has tough emissions standards on paper, but the law is written so that the regulators don't have any enforcement powers. So Chinese manufacturers simply slap stickers on vehicles claiming they have all the mandatory emissions equipment without installing any of it. Technically this is a crime, but the law's written so there's literally nothing anyone can do about it.
And if you don't think environmental regulations make a difference, this is what New York looked like in 1970. Note that that isn't a sepia tinted black and white photo, it's true color. Granted it shows an exceptionally bad day, but before the Clean Air Act got strengthened in the mid 70s bad smog was pretty common. If you look at pictures of American cities from the 70s you'd think that photo technology of the day put a blue or yellow haze on stuff in the distance (like this). It wasn't the film, cities actually looked that way a lot of the time.
Predicting bad pollution days isn't "fighting" pollution, it's living with it. If you want to fight pollution you've got to stop people from polluting. You've got to catch them at it, fine them, and in some cases throw them in jail. Pollution like they have in China is nothing short of manslaughter on a national scale. 1.6 million people die every year from it.
Some people are great at teaching, others are not.
I believe this is a self-perpetuating myth. What the data shows is that new teachers in America improve rapidly over the course of about three years, after which they are about as good as they'll ever be. So it's certainly not the case that some people are just naturally teachers; great teachers have to learn the craft through practice, and that learning comes after they finish their official training.
But maybe what we're seeing is that it takes teachers three years to reach their inborn teaching potential, after which they no longer are able to learn anything more that might help them. My question is, how do we know that? How do we know that American teachers are actually completely incapable of becoming better teachers after three years of in-classroom experience?
We don't know. The remarkable thing is that until very, very recently, very few American school systems have actually attempted to systematically improve the performance of their teachers through observation of what they're doing in the classroom. They may have "professional development" where they get more of the same kind of theoretical training they got in education school, but they usually don't follow up to see how the teacher actually puts that to use, or even to identify bad habits the teacher may have developed over the years, or good habits he hasn't. In my kids' school system kids are sent home early on "professional development days" so that working with actual students won't get in the way of a teacher's skill development. It's like trying to make someone a better baseball hitter by banning bats and balls from training and simply talking to players about the theory of biomechanics.
Imagine you own a factory and your assembly line is turning out too many defective widgets. How would you address that problem? Would you send your engineers to a seminar every year on manufacturing theory and ask them to make design changes when they came back from that seminar? Or would you go over the assembly line with a fine tooth comb? While the seminar idea has it's merits, it's too slow and it'd take sheer luck for the seminar to hit on the particular problem that's affecting the line.
In America we have a simple model for improving the teaching at a bad school: fire the bad teachers and hire better ones. But imagine, just for a moment, it is possible to use empirical methodologies to improve the performance of any teacher. Imagine for a moment some bad teachers could be transformed into mediocre ones; some mediocre teachers into good ones; and some good teachers into great ones. In a world where that was possible there'd still be a place for the hire and fire strategy, but relying on that strategy exclusively leads to two unfortunate and unnecessary results: (1) Poor districts have to make do mostly with inadequate teaching and (2) teaching in rich districts tends to be adequate, but great teaching remains uncommon.
To answer your question, smaller habitat, no experiment at maintaining atmospheric composition, outside excursions in "space suits" etc. Its not very much like Biosphere II.
As for why not under the sea or Antarctica I can give at least three reasons. (1) cost of building, transporting and maintaining the habitat; (2) all the support and research personnel live in Hawaii, above water; (3) the research objectives don't require putting the experiment in a dangerous or inaccessible place.
Now someday when we have an actual habitat design along with all the actual support systems we plan to send to Mars, a trial on top of a super high mountain would make sense as a kind of Mars analog. But we don't have such stuff to test so we don't need the Mars analog with all the expense and complication.
Not everyone in Saudi Arabia are bedouin; in particular the ruling House of Saud is descended from town dwelling Arabs.
I'll go out on a limb and guess that not everyone in Saudi Arabia is worthless. Even people involved in managing their oil. And as for the elite they don't seem to be worse than anyone else who's inherited oil-based wealth; they've managed that for the long term benefit of themselves and their families. If they're ostentatious with their wealth, well they have a lot of it and it hasn't bankrupted them yet.
So there's no rational reason to want to destroy Saudi Arabia. But there's every reason not to want to be so dependent upon them.
I think it depends. If the show's well put together, smartly written and performed by actors people enjoy watching, it could be successful. If it depends entirely upon recycling material from the movies, it'll definitely fail.
Well, this is a bit like parents who take their kids to get vaccinated and a few hours later that kid exhibits the first signs of autism. It's an immensely compelling coincidence. You'd have to (a) know that autism symptoms often have a rapid onset and (b) realize that when they do they can follow any commonplace childhood event. Even if you did it'd still be hard to shake the suspicion if it happened to your kid.
Somebody points a IR remote at your friend; he gets up and has a brief moment of orthostatic hypotension -- also known as a "dizzy spell" brought on by a sudden drop in blood pressure -- just at the moment the guy pushes the button. Orthostatic hypotension can happen to anyone, but if your friend isn't otherwise prone to it that can be a very compelling coincidence; and many of the symptoms of hypotension can be reproduced by psychological stress.
If something like that happens to you people will say, "oh, it's all in your head," but the thing is that all suffering is inside peoples' heads. One of the worst kinds of pain you can have is passing a kidney stone, but if you happen to be in a coma at the time you won't feel a thing. Distress produced within the brain is indistinguishable to the subject from distress produced outside the brain. Having an external explanation for that distress can make someone feel like they have some control over what is a disturbing experience, and shooting holes in that explanation isn't going to help unless you can offer them a better handle on it.
Sometimes I think we'd be better off if we just brought back shamans and witch doctors.
I don't think you could make the reflective surface perfect enough to make the drone positively laser-proof, but I think a reflective coating would certainly reduce the laser's effective range. Analogously you can't nuke-proof an aircraft, but in the Cold War they were often painted "anti-flash white" to help them survive a bit closer to a detonation.
Well, as far as Atkins is concerned, diet research is really, really hard and expensive to do right. I know because when I was an MIT student one of my jobs was office boy in the Food and Nutrition group, and I saw how hard it was. In one of the studies, research subjects were given a duffle bag from which all the input to their digest systems came, and into which all the output from the same went, for six bloody months.
Of course not every study needs to be that rigorous, but diet is one of those areas where the public needs lots of informed opinion but the funding for research is grossly inadequate to meet that need.
By the way, the current state of research seems to be that carbohydrate restricted diets work well in the short term but have only modest success in the long term.
... you don't make any important decisions based on a single paper. That's true for hard sciences as well as social sciences.
Science by its very nature deals in contradictory evidence. I'd argue that openness to contradictory evidence is the distinguishing characteristic of science. A and not A cannot be true at the same time, but their can be, and normally is, evidence for both positions. So that means science often generates contradictory papers.
What you need to do is read the literature in a field widely so you can see the pattern of evidence, not just a single point. Or, if you aren't willing to invest the time for that you can find what's called a review paper in a high-impact factor journal. A review paper is supposed to be a fair summary of recent evidence on a question by someone working in the field. For bonus points read follow-up letters to that paper. Review papers are not infallible, but they're a heck of a lot more comprehensive than any other source of information.
Well, a lot depends on how your actions fit into your long term vision, if anything. "We'll just rebuild this neighborhood and everything will be hunky-dory" is obviously not a long term plan.
The reason the Netherlands flood control makes sense is that the value of 25% of their country's land area far outweighs the cost of reclaiming it, as simple as that. When the net present value of keeping the flood waters off a piece ofland exceeds the net present value of the use you'll get from it, then it's time to abandon piece of land.
Well, if you *insist* on being pedantic, what they mean is "It's not going to stop before it causes a degree havoc most people would find inconceivable."
I think they kind of expect people to understand they're not claiming that the water levels will rise, drowning the Moon, inundating the Sun, and eventually filling up the entire universe.
Sure. Or sooner if you are economically tied to businesses or people near the coast; or businesses or people not near the coast; or businesses or people not near the coast but dependant on others that are. That's the downside of living in a modern economy. I didn't hold any toxic mortgage backed financial instruments, but I sure felt the pain when the capital markets went tits up in 08.
The lack of understanding what a conservative is on slashdot never ceases to amaze me. Its called smaller government and enforce laws that are already on the books instead of creating new ones.
There you go, you explained your own mystification away. You define the conservative program by what conservatives want. Everyone else defines it by what the people conservatives vote for do when they get into office, which is spend money and make government even more intrusive.
Any time the cops stop an autonomous car they have to pay the owner of that car $1000, no matter what the reason for the stop. Compared to the legal costs of what comes after a legitimate stop, that's nothing. But it would dissuade police from developing a pattern of frivolous stops.
Well, I agree government is dangerous -- so is anything that is powerful. Max Weber defined the state as the organization that has a monopoly on violence.
But the blame isn't with the liberals, or the conservative libertarians, neither of whom want this kind of data collection. It's with the conservative authoritarians who want to expand the power of the police.
Well, I think it's more complicated than that. People are not just ignorant of the limitations of knowledge, they're ignorant of the limitations of ignorance.
In fact, I'd say faulty appeals to ignorance are much more common here than faulty appeals to knowledge. People will say "How can we know X when we don't know Y?" when in fact it's quite possible to know X without Y, and in any case we actually know a lot more about Y than the poster thinks.
This is exactly what I was going to say. It's often a mistake to big early with an experiment because you risk finding statistically significant results that are practically significant. People expect BIG effects from a vaccine. When you take a vaccine it's like you're a sample of one: you want a very high chance of it making a practical difference to you. Nobody would take flu shot that reduced their chance of contracting flu by 20%.
But "effective" is only half the story. You have to show "safe" as well, and that's where you need huge trials.
Well, when you're appropriating a common phrase you do have make some effort to make that stand for your product. It's not enough to pick a phrase out of the air and claim it's yours. Nike did this with "Just Do It," and they obviously succeeded because most people who don't live under a rock would be able to identify Nike as the company that uses this trademark.
And if I understand how this works it doesn't mean other people, even corporations with competitive products, can't use that phrase. They just can't use that phrase in a way that is intended to create an association between that phrase and their product. So a different watch maker could say in it's ad, "One more thing you'll like about our Swiss automatic diver is never having to buy a battery again." That is if I understand this right.
Well, as a software designer I learned two lessons about clients that are probably relevant to how politicians deal with constituents:
(1) Clients seldom know what they want precisely enough to do anything about, and when they do have precise ideas they're usually bad.
(2) It's really critical to listen to what clients think they want.
Call it "theater" if you will, but it's really naive to think the petition thing is supposed to be some kind of exercise in direct democracy. It's not. It's an exercise in constituent relations.
I would accept a name of an identifiable person (or well-known pseudonym) that can (a) is actually social justice causes (other than trolling) or has extensive connections with people who do; and (2) has organized/participated in a documentable campaign of intimidation or hate-mongering beyond opportunistic trolling or cyberstalking people they know personally.
What I won't accept is "some troll somewhere said something mean and unwelcoming." It's not that I don't believe that trolling happened or that the person targeted felt bad, it's that I don't believe most trolls are who they say they are or support what they say they support. If you can't stand up to a random troll there's really no hope for you. People who put serious effort and organization into persecution are a different matter. Show me that widespread prevalence of those people and you've convinced me this is a real problem.
That's a starting point; I can even give you an example: Benjanun Sriduangkaew (aka "Requries Hate"). The thing is, like I tell my kids there's at least one example of every kind of person you can imagine out there. It's like Jefrrey Dahmer, who proves there are such things as cannibal necrophiliac serial murderers in the world. And it's obviously a big deal if you run across one personally. But cannibal necrophiliac serial murderers are not a major society problem.
I actually disagree, because "the whole movement" is way too broad.
There's no question that the instigators of the Rabids were GamerGaters; Vox Day makes not bones about it. But the Sads were a different group that has maybe some intersection in views with the Rabids but are by no means close. They thought they could use the Rabids to their advantage, but really the using was going the other way. Vox Day, whom everyone knew was a chaos-mongering crackpot, used Correia and Torgerson to gain legitimacy. It's a case of lying down with a dog and getting up with fleas.
I actually feel sorry for the Sads, who strike me as more naive than Machiavellian. In fact unless I'm mistaken it was the Rabid slate that was successful, not the Sad slate.
Slashdot Mirror
they could just give their environmental regulators the authority to enforce their existing environmental laws.
In the film Under the Dome, Chinese journalist Chai Jing astonishes a Chinese audience with a film clip from California where Cal DoT stops a truck and actually checks that it has all the mandatory safety and emissions equipment. That never happens in China. China has tough emissions standards on paper, but the law is written so that the regulators don't have any enforcement powers. So Chinese manufacturers simply slap stickers on vehicles claiming they have all the mandatory emissions equipment without installing any of it. Technically this is a crime, but the law's written so there's literally nothing anyone can do about it.
And if you don't think environmental regulations make a difference, this is what New York looked like in 1970. Note that that isn't a sepia tinted black and white photo, it's true color. Granted it shows an exceptionally bad day, but before the Clean Air Act got strengthened in the mid 70s bad smog was pretty common. If you look at pictures of American cities from the 70s you'd think that photo technology of the day put a blue or yellow haze on stuff in the distance (like this). It wasn't the film, cities actually looked that way a lot of the time.
Predicting bad pollution days isn't "fighting" pollution, it's living with it. If you want to fight pollution you've got to stop people from polluting. You've got to catch them at it, fine them, and in some cases throw them in jail. Pollution like they have in China is nothing short of manslaughter on a national scale. 1.6 million people die every year from it.
Some people are great at teaching, others are not.
I believe this is a self-perpetuating myth. What the data shows is that new teachers in America improve rapidly over the course of about three years, after which they are about as good as they'll ever be. So it's certainly not the case that some people are just naturally teachers; great teachers have to learn the craft through practice, and that learning comes after they finish their official training.
But maybe what we're seeing is that it takes teachers three years to reach their inborn teaching potential, after which they no longer are able to learn anything more that might help them. My question is, how do we know that? How do we know that American teachers are actually completely incapable of becoming better teachers after three years of in-classroom experience?
We don't know. The remarkable thing is that until very, very recently, very few American school systems have actually attempted to systematically improve the performance of their teachers through observation of what they're doing in the classroom. They may have "professional development" where they get more of the same kind of theoretical training they got in education school, but they usually don't follow up to see how the teacher actually puts that to use, or even to identify bad habits the teacher may have developed over the years, or good habits he hasn't. In my kids' school system kids are sent home early on "professional development days" so that working with actual students won't get in the way of a teacher's skill development. It's like trying to make someone a better baseball hitter by banning bats and balls from training and simply talking to players about the theory of biomechanics.
Imagine you own a factory and your assembly line is turning out too many defective widgets. How would you address that problem? Would you send your engineers to a seminar every year on manufacturing theory and ask them to make design changes when they came back from that seminar? Or would you go over the assembly line with a fine tooth comb? While the seminar idea has it's merits, it's too slow and it'd take sheer luck for the seminar to hit on the particular problem that's affecting the line.
In America we have a simple model for improving the teaching at a bad school: fire the bad teachers and hire better ones. But imagine, just for a moment, it is possible to use empirical methodologies to improve the performance of any teacher. Imagine for a moment some bad teachers could be transformed into mediocre ones; some mediocre teachers into good ones; and some good teachers into great ones. In a world where that was possible there'd still be a place for the hire and fire strategy, but relying on that strategy exclusively leads to two unfortunate and unnecessary results: (1) Poor districts have to make do mostly with inadequate teaching and (2) teaching in rich districts tends to be adequate, but great teaching remains uncommon.
Sound familiar?
To answer your question, smaller habitat, no experiment at maintaining atmospheric composition, outside excursions in "space suits" etc. Its not very much like Biosphere II.
As for why not under the sea or Antarctica I can give at least three reasons. (1) cost of building, transporting and maintaining the habitat; (2) all the support and research personnel live in Hawaii, above water; (3) the research objectives don't require putting the experiment in a dangerous or inaccessible place.
Now someday when we have an actual habitat design along with all the actual support systems we plan to send to Mars, a trial on top of a super high mountain would make sense as a kind of Mars analog. But we don't have such stuff to test so we don't need the Mars analog with all the expense and complication.
Not everyone in Saudi Arabia are bedouin; in particular the ruling House of Saud is descended from town dwelling Arabs.
I'll go out on a limb and guess that not everyone in Saudi Arabia is worthless. Even people involved in managing their oil. And as for the elite they don't seem to be worse than anyone else who's inherited oil-based wealth; they've managed that for the long term benefit of themselves and their families. If they're ostentatious with their wealth, well they have a lot of it and it hasn't bankrupted them yet.
So there's no rational reason to want to destroy Saudi Arabia. But there's every reason not to want to be so dependent upon them.
I think it depends. If the show's well put together, smartly written and performed by actors people enjoy watching, it could be successful. If it depends entirely upon recycling material from the movies, it'll definitely fail.
Well, this is a bit like parents who take their kids to get vaccinated and a few hours later that kid exhibits the first signs of autism. It's an immensely compelling coincidence. You'd have to (a) know that autism symptoms often have a rapid onset and (b) realize that when they do they can follow any commonplace childhood event. Even if you did it'd still be hard to shake the suspicion if it happened to your kid.
Somebody points a IR remote at your friend; he gets up and has a brief moment of orthostatic hypotension -- also known as a "dizzy spell" brought on by a sudden drop in blood pressure -- just at the moment the guy pushes the button. Orthostatic hypotension can happen to anyone, but if your friend isn't otherwise prone to it that can be a very compelling coincidence; and many of the symptoms of hypotension can be reproduced by psychological stress.
If something like that happens to you people will say, "oh, it's all in your head," but the thing is that all suffering is inside peoples' heads. One of the worst kinds of pain you can have is passing a kidney stone, but if you happen to be in a coma at the time you won't feel a thing. Distress produced within the brain is indistinguishable to the subject from distress produced outside the brain. Having an external explanation for that distress can make someone feel like they have some control over what is a disturbing experience, and shooting holes in that explanation isn't going to help unless you can offer them a better handle on it.
Sometimes I think we'd be better off if we just brought back shamans and witch doctors.
I don't think you could make the reflective surface perfect enough to make the drone positively laser-proof, but I think a reflective coating would certainly reduce the laser's effective range. Analogously you can't nuke-proof an aircraft, but in the Cold War they were often painted "anti-flash white" to help them survive a bit closer to a detonation.
Well, as far as Atkins is concerned, diet research is really, really hard and expensive to do right. I know because when I was an MIT student one of my jobs was office boy in the Food and Nutrition group, and I saw how hard it was. In one of the studies, research subjects were given a duffle bag from which all the input to their digest systems came, and into which all the output from the same went, for six bloody months.
Of course not every study needs to be that rigorous, but diet is one of those areas where the public needs lots of informed opinion but the funding for research is grossly inadequate to meet that need.
By the way, the current state of research seems to be that carbohydrate restricted diets work well in the short term but have only modest success in the long term.
... you don't make any important decisions based on a single paper. That's true for hard sciences as well as social sciences.
Science by its very nature deals in contradictory evidence. I'd argue that openness to contradictory evidence is the distinguishing characteristic of science. A and not A cannot be true at the same time, but their can be, and normally is, evidence for both positions. So that means science often generates contradictory papers.
What you need to do is read the literature in a field widely so you can see the pattern of evidence, not just a single point. Or, if you aren't willing to invest the time for that you can find what's called a review paper in a high-impact factor journal. A review paper is supposed to be a fair summary of recent evidence on a question by someone working in the field. For bonus points read follow-up letters to that paper. Review papers are not infallible, but they're a heck of a lot more comprehensive than any other source of information.
Well, a lot depends on how your actions fit into your long term vision, if anything. "We'll just rebuild this neighborhood and everything will be hunky-dory" is obviously not a long term plan.
The reason the Netherlands flood control makes sense is that the value of 25% of their country's land area far outweighs the cost of reclaiming it, as simple as that. When the net present value of keeping the flood waters off a piece ofland exceeds the net present value of the use you'll get from it, then it's time to abandon piece of land.
Well, if you *insist* on being pedantic, what they mean is "It's not going to stop before it causes a degree havoc most people would find inconceivable."
I think they kind of expect people to understand they're not claiming that the water levels will rise, drowning the Moon, inundating the Sun, and eventually filling up the entire universe.
Sure. Or sooner if you are economically tied to businesses or people near the coast; or businesses or people not near the coast; or businesses or people not near the coast but dependant on others that are. That's the downside of living in a modern economy. I didn't hold any toxic mortgage backed financial instruments, but I sure felt the pain when the capital markets went tits up in 08.
The lack of understanding what a conservative is on slashdot never ceases to amaze me. Its called smaller government and enforce laws that are already on the books instead of creating new ones.
There you go, you explained your own mystification away. You define the conservative program by what conservatives want. Everyone else defines it by what the people conservatives vote for do when they get into office, which is spend money and make government even more intrusive.
Any time the cops stop an autonomous car they have to pay the owner of that car $1000, no matter what the reason for the stop. Compared to the legal costs of what comes after a legitimate stop, that's nothing. But it would dissuade police from developing a pattern of frivolous stops.
Well, I agree government is dangerous -- so is anything that is powerful. Max Weber defined the state as the organization that has a monopoly on violence.
But the blame isn't with the liberals, or the conservative libertarians, neither of whom want this kind of data collection. It's with the conservative authoritarians who want to expand the power of the police.
Well, I think it's more complicated than that. People are not just ignorant of the limitations of knowledge, they're ignorant of the limitations of ignorance.
In fact, I'd say faulty appeals to ignorance are much more common here than faulty appeals to knowledge. People will say "How can we know X when we don't know Y?" when in fact it's quite possible to know X without Y, and in any case we actually know a lot more about Y than the poster thinks.
This is exactly what I was going to say. It's often a mistake to big early with an experiment because you risk finding statistically significant results that are practically significant. People expect BIG effects from a vaccine. When you take a vaccine it's like you're a sample of one: you want a very high chance of it making a practical difference to you. Nobody would take flu shot that reduced their chance of contracting flu by 20%.
But "effective" is only half the story. You have to show "safe" as well, and that's where you need huge trials.
Well, when you're appropriating a common phrase you do have make some effort to make that stand for your product. It's not enough to pick a phrase out of the air and claim it's yours. Nike did this with "Just Do It," and they obviously succeeded because most people who don't live under a rock would be able to identify Nike as the company that uses this trademark.
And if I understand how this works it doesn't mean other people, even corporations with competitive products, can't use that phrase. They just can't use that phrase in a way that is intended to create an association between that phrase and their product. So a different watch maker could say in it's ad, "One more thing you'll like about our Swiss automatic diver is never having to buy a battery again." That is if I understand this right.
Given that almost everybody is now calling it theater, would you say it had a positive impact on constituent relations?
I'd be shocked if "almost everybody" had even heard of it, much less absorbed the impression you suggest.
Well, as a software designer I learned two lessons about clients that are probably relevant to how politicians deal with constituents:
(1) Clients seldom know what they want precisely enough to do anything about, and when they do have precise ideas they're usually bad.
(2) It's really critical to listen to what clients think they want.
Call it "theater" if you will, but it's really naive to think the petition thing is supposed to be some kind of exercise in direct democracy. It's not. It's an exercise in constituent relations.
In the end it all falls back to the fact that crimes shouldn't be committed.
Well, there is one more eensy-teensy little thing about the government remaining within the limits set for it by the people.
I would accept a name of an identifiable person (or well-known pseudonym) that can (a) is actually social justice causes (other than trolling) or has extensive connections with people who do; and (2) has organized/participated in a documentable campaign of intimidation or hate-mongering beyond opportunistic trolling or cyberstalking people they know personally.
What I won't accept is "some troll somewhere said something mean and unwelcoming." It's not that I don't believe that trolling happened or that the person targeted felt bad, it's that I don't believe most trolls are who they say they are or support what they say they support. If you can't stand up to a random troll there's really no hope for you. People who put serious effort and organization into persecution are a different matter. Show me that widespread prevalence of those people and you've convinced me this is a real problem.
That's a starting point; I can even give you an example: Benjanun Sriduangkaew (aka "Requries Hate"). The thing is, like I tell my kids there's at least one example of every kind of person you can imagine out there. It's like Jefrrey Dahmer, who proves there are such things as cannibal necrophiliac serial murderers in the world. And it's obviously a big deal if you run across one personally. But cannibal necrophiliac serial murderers are not a major society problem.
there's apparently been blatant brigading going on... and brigading is a real thing.
I can't evaluate this statement or respond to it without specific examples.
I actually disagree, because "the whole movement" is way too broad.
There's no question that the instigators of the Rabids were GamerGaters; Vox Day makes not bones about it. But the Sads were a different group that has maybe some intersection in views with the Rabids but are by no means close. They thought they could use the Rabids to their advantage, but really the using was going the other way. Vox Day, whom everyone knew was a chaos-mongering crackpot, used Correia and Torgerson to gain legitimacy. It's a case of lying down with a dog and getting up with fleas.
I actually feel sorry for the Sads, who strike me as more naive than Machiavellian. In fact unless I'm mistaken it was the Rabid slate that was successful, not the Sad slate.
SJWs say that these books shouldn't exist.
Examples please. And show me how these particular people are managing to steer the course of fandom.