Author: VD

Book review: The Missionaries

A review of THE MISSIONARIES by Owen Stanley:

Owen Stanley’s The Missionaries is a welcome addition to the genre of ‘savagely funny novel’, the zenith of which is bracketed by Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis (1954) and Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man (1975). Amis and Bradbury targeted academic lunacy, and Stanley does likewise, except that unlike the 50s and 70s, the scholar-prat has reached well beyond, like a noxious virus, the confines of the ivory tower. If you ever wondered where people with postgraduate degrees in the social sciences go, besides reabsorption into the belly of the beast that gave birth to them, then wonder no more; they end up like Dr. Sydney Prout, head of the United Nations mission to fictitious Elephant Island (located somewhere in Melanesia).

What a marvelous creation he is. And pitch perfect. An army of Sydney Prouts tramp this earth like wildebeest on the plains of Africa, kicking up dust and not much else. Educated beyond their capacity, unemployable in shrinking departments of anthropology, political science, and gay fetish studies, they drift about in non-government organisations (some of which have bigger budgets than governments of mid-sized countries) seeking to fix the world by remaking it in their own image. The main aspiration of this new breed of development aid warrior (a close cousin to the social justice warrior) is an executive role at an international NGO with a salary that would make a marketing manager blush followed, in the fullness of time, with a sinecure at the World Bank or one of the UN agencies. Here, buried away in the hallways of justice and business class cabins, our overeducated betters can interfere in people’s lives at leisure on tax free salaries and under the imprimatur of a ‘multilateral agency’.

It is a testament to Mr. Stanley’s ability to craft a character of such verisimilitude that I found myself on more than one occasion putting the book down and shuddering in recognition, enveloped by a sense of horror at the meetings, conferences, projects and other assorted events involving idiots like Dr. Prout that he must have endured. A book like this does not arise from thin air; the author, I assure you, has been through the gates of hell and back to craft such a tale. Your average development aid warrior is a pestilential blight, and any man who has lived among them deserves all the accolades and wealth we are in a position to bestow upon him.

Read the whole thing there. He’s not exaggerating. In my opinion, THE MISSIONARIES is the best novel that Castalia House has published yet, which is saying something considering that we have also published AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND and CTRL-ALT-REVOLT!. It is a borderline classic.

Unimpressed

Dear humans,

That’s a cute little light show you’ve got there. Check this out.

Love,
Nature

Meanwhile, on the place where brain cells go to die, another futile sally into the Vast Chasm of Clueless Midwittery.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
SJWs go to one extreme, sacrificing the organization’s interests to their ideals. Too many on the Right go to the other extreme. Mistake.

Rudolf Mikler‏ @shoaahh
Horseshoe theory amrite lolololol  look at me so edgy.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
No. Horseshoe means the two extremes come together. In this case, the two extremes behave in an opposite manner.

The will to survive

The God-Emperor challenges the West:

President Donald Trump today met the Polish President in Warsaw and warned that the future of the West is in doubt. Trump will question if the West has the ‘will to survive’ in a landmark speech in Warsaw later on Thursday. ‘The Polish experience reminds us – the defense of the West ultimately rests not only on means but also on the will of its people to prevail,’ Trump will say.

He also had a few words to say about CNN’s evil attempt to blackmail a meme magician:

‘I think what CNN did is unfortunate for them,’ Trump said at the press conference. ‘As you know they have some pretty serious problems. They have been fake news for a long time. They have been covering me in a very, very dishonest way.’

Trump then turned to Duda and asked, ‘Do you have that also, Mr President?’, to which Duda shrugged.

‘What CNN did – and what others did, NBC is equally as bad despite the fact that I made them a fortune with The Apprentice but they forgot that,’ Trump said. ‘What I will say is that CNN has really taken it too seriously and I think they’ve hurt themselves very badly, very, very badly. And what we want to see in the United States is honest, beautiful, free, but honest press. We want to see fair press. I think it’s a very important thing. We don’t want fake news. By the way, not everybody is fake news. But we don’t want fake news. Bad thing. It’s very bad for our country.’

Very unfortunate for them. We don’t want fake news. The speech is pretty good. I’ll add the transcript here when it is available.

This is why you don’t hire SJWs

Is anyone – anyone – even remotely surprised that things went badly awry for the company that hired the tranny SJW who was pushing Codes of Conduct on Open Source projects last year?

At first I had my doubts. I was well aware of GitHub’s very problematic past, from its promotion of meritocracy in place of a management system to the horrible treatment and abuse of its female employees and other people from diverse backgrounds. I myself had experienced harassment on GitHub. As an example, a couple of years ago someone created a dozen repositories with racist names and added me to the repos, so my GitHub profile had racial slurs on it until their support team got around to shutting them down a few days after I reported the incident. I didn’t get the sense that the company really cared about harassment.

My contact at GitHub insisted that the company was transforming itself. She pointed to a Business Insider article that described the culture changes that they were going through, and touted the hiring of Nicole Sanchez to an executive position leading a new Social Impact team. I was encouraged to talk to some other prominent activists that had recently been hired. Slowly, I opened my mind to the possibility. Given my work in trying to make open source more inclusive and welcoming, what could give me more influence in creating better communities than working at the very center of the open source universe?

With these thoughts in mind, I agreed to interview with the team. The code challenge was comparable to other places where I’d interviewed, as was the pairing exercise. I was impressed by the social justice tone of some of the questions that I was asked in the non-technical interviews, and by the fact that the majority of people that I met with were women. A week later, I had a very generous offer in hand, which I happily accepted. My team was 5 women and one man: two of us trans, three women of color. We had our own backlog separate from the rest of the engineering group, our own product manager, and strong UX and QC resources. I felt that my new job was off to a promising start.

However, it soon became apparent that this promising start would not last for long. For my first few pull requests, I was getting feedback from literally dozens of engineers (all of whom were male) on other teams, nitpicking the code I had written. One PR actually had over 200 comments from 24 different individuals. It got to the point where the VP of engineering had to intervene to get people to back off. I thought that maybe because I was a well-known Rubyist, other engineers were particularly interested in seeing the kind of code I was writing. So I asked Aaron Patterson, another famous Rubyist who had started at GitHub at the same time as I did, if he was experiencing a lot of scrutiny too. He said he was not.

Shortly after this happened to me, the code review feature was prioritized. This functionality was rolled out internally pretty quickly. From that point on I didn’t get dogpiled anymore, since I could request reviews from specific engineers familiar with the area of the codebase that I was working in and avoid the kind of drive-by code reviews that plagued my initial PRs.

A couple of months later, I finished up a feature that I was very excited about: repository invitations. With repository invitations, no one could add someone else to a repository without their consent. Being invited to contribute to a repository resulted in an email notification, from which the recipient could accept or decline to join and even report and block the inviter.

Feature releases such as these are frequently promoted on the GitHub blog, and the product manager on my team encouraged me to write a post announcing what I had shipped. Since it was so important to me personally, I wrote an impassioned piece talking about how this feature closed a security gap that had directly affected and provided an abuse vector against me. The post also served as an announcement to the world of the new team and the kinds of problems that we were charged with solving.

The post was submitted for editorial review. It was decided that the tone of what I had written was too personal and didn’t reflect the voice of the company. The reviewer insisted that any mention of the abuse vector that this feature was closing be removed….

In speaking up like this, I felt like I was simply doing my job. I was trying to make a positive impact by speaking up for the minority of users who are regularly targeted for abuse. I wasn’t just trying to represent the values of the Community & Safety team, I was trying the represent the values of marginalized communities. I tried my best to make a positive impact. I kept the needs and best interests of the most vulnerable people on our platform at the front of my mind at all times, and prioritized my work according to what would make the biggest difference to this population of users.

SJWs always – always – put themselves and their social justice before the interests of the project, the company, and the community. Like insects, they are always looking for a chance to further infest their surroundings.

Finally in January I got the chance to work on the one feature that I wanted GitHub to have most of all: a tool to make adding a code of conduct to a project easy… The code of conduct adoption feature was launched in May 2017, and was widely praised. It would be my last feature for GitHub.

I’ll bet it was not widely praised within the company, but rather, by SJWs outside both the company and the tech industry. It is never, ever, a good idea to hire SJWs. Even the lesser ones are a serious problem; that’s how Coraline was hired in the first place. Notice that as I warned in SJWAL, the lesser SJW had installed itself in HR and created a locus for infestation called the Social Impact team.

But don’t worry, it has a happy ending. Of sorts.

My overall review was a “Does Not Meet Expectations.” I was shocked and upset. A bad review out of the blue was not something that I had experienced before. I thought I had good rapport with my manager, and that if there was a problem that we would have been addressing it at our weekly meetings. In my mind this was a serious management failure, but there was apparently nothing I could do about it.

The same day that I had this review, I got some devastating personal news. I have bipolar depression and was already in a bad place mentally, so I found myself feeling crushed and hopeless. In an attempt to deal with things I ended up taking a dangerously high dose of my anti-anxiety medication. When I reached out to my therapist for help, she recommended that I go to the emergency room. This was the start of an eight day ordeal involving involuntary commitment to a mental health facility.

June print and audio

We’re pleased to announce three Castalia House books that are now available in print and audio editions:

In PUSH THE ZONE: The Good Guide to Growing Tropical Plants Beyond the Tropics, David the Good shares his successes and failures in expanding plant ranges, and equips you with the knowledge you need to add a growing zone or two to your own backyard. Based on original research done in North Florida, PUSH THE ZONE is useful for northern gardeners as well. Discover microclimates in your yard, use the thermal mass of walls to grow impossible plants and uncover growing secrets that will change your entire view of what can grow where!”

The paperback is 188 pages and $14.99. And if you’re a subscriber to David’s SURVIVAL GARDENING NEWSLETTER, be sure to check your email for an offer from him later today.

While we don’t publish the ebooks, we are publishing the print and audio editions of Peter Grant’s Maxwell Saga. STOKE THE FLAMES HIGHER is now available in audiobook; print is coming soon.

Bob Allen narrates the fifth book in the Maxwell Saga, which is 11 hours and 5 minutes long.

Two planets, torn apart by the same fanatics – and Lancastrian forces are caught in the middle! Major Brooks Shelby must keep the peace, on a world where radical terrorists want submission or death. Lieutenant-commander Steve Maxwell must trace the source of their fighters and funding, deal with diplomats, and fend off a nosy journalist.


The marines are up against smuggled explosives and suicidal martyrs, while a suborned bureaucracy stymies the investigation. Brooks and Steve must find a way to stop their enemies at all costs, before the fanatics unleash their own version of Armageddon!


And last, but far from least, is Jeffro Johnson’s APPENDIX N, now available in hardcover. It is 355 pages and $24.99.

APPENDIX N: The Literary History of Dungeons & Dragons is a detailed and comprehensive investigation of the various works of science fiction and fantasy that game designer Gary Gygax declared to be the primary influences on his seminal role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons. It is a deep intellectual dive into the literature of SF/F’s past that will fascinate any serious role-playing gamer or fan of classic science fiction and fantasy.


Author Jeffro Johnson, an expert role-playing gamer, accomplished Dungeon Master and three-time Hugo Award Finalist, critically reviews all 43 works and authors listed by Gygax in the famous appendix. In doing so, he draws a series of intelligent conclusions about the literary gap between past and present that are surprisingly relevant to current events, not only in the fantastic world of role-playing, but the real world in which the players live.

CNN: silenced

Ivan Throne has been tracking all of the CNN social media accounts.

Ivan Throne‏ @DarkTriadMan
#CNNBlackmail is still #1 on Twitter and @CNN has silenced every single one of their correspondents on Twitter.


TexitMachine‏ @BrowningMachine
Note @KFILE’s last tweet was 2hrs ago. Right about when @CNN’s in-house lawyer came in after 4th and went “HOLY SHIT WHAT HAVE YOU DONE??”

Sounds as if someone is trying to come up with an organization-wide strategy. Want to bet they don’t get it right?

Especially in light of new information that indicates CNN ID’d the wrong guy, and the original creator of the meme is a Mexican man.

Everyone hates liberals

The Left and the Right finally agree on something:

‘‘Liberal’’ has long been a dirty word to the American political right. It may be shortened, in the parlance of the Limbaugh Belt, to ‘‘libs,’’ or expanded to the offensive portmanteau ‘‘libtards.’’ But its target is always clear. For the people who use these epithets, liberals are, basically, everyone who leans to the left: big-spending Democrats with their unisex bathrooms and elaborate coffee. This is still how polls classify people, placing them on a neat spectrum from ‘‘extremely conservative’’ to ‘‘extremely liberal.’’

Over the last few years, though — and especially 2016 — there has been a surge of the opposite phenomenon: Now the political left is expressing its hatred of liberals, too. For the committed leftist, the ‘‘liberal’’ is a weak-minded, market-friendly centrist, wonky and technocratic and condescending to the working class. The liberal is pious about diversity but ready to abandon any belief at the slightest drop in poll numbers — a person who is, as the folk singer Phil Ochs once said, ‘‘10 degrees to the left of center in good times, 10 degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally.’’ The anonymous Twitter account ‘‘liberalism.txt’’ is a relentless stream of images and retweets that supposedly illustrate this liberal vacuousness: say, the chief executive of Patagonia’s being hailed as a leader of ‘‘corporate resistance to Trump,’’ or Chelsea Clinton’s accusing Steve Bannon of ‘‘fat shaming’’ Sean Spicer.

This shift in terminology can be confusing, both politically and generationally — as when baby boomers describe fervent supporters of Bernie Sanders as ‘‘very liberal,’’ unaware that young Sanders­istas might find this vomit-inducing. It can also create common ground. Last year, the young (and left-leaning) writer Emmett Rensin published a widely read piece on Vox deriding liberals for their ‘‘smug style’’; soon enough, one longtime adept of the right, National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru, was expressing his partial approval, writing in Bloomberg View that what contemporary liberalism lacked most was humility. Here was a perspective common to both sides of the old spectrum: that liberals suffered from a serene, self-ratifying belief in their own reasonableness, and that it would spell their inevitable defeat.

When it comes to diagnosing liberalism, both left and right focus on this same set of debilitating traits: arrogance, hypocrisy, pusillanimity, the insulated superiority of what, in 1969, a New York mayoral candidate called the ‘‘limousine liberal.’’ In other words, the features they use to distinguish liberals aren’t policies so much as attitudes. The profane hosts of the popular podcast ‘‘Chapo Trap House,’’ prime originators of the left’s liberal-bashing, spend a good deal of airtime making fun of liberal cultural life, with one common target being fervor for the musical ‘‘Hamilton.’’ ‘‘Nothing has represented them more: a hagiographical musical where they can pretend to be intersectional and pretend to be multicultural,’’ said Felix Biederman, a co-host, on the second episode of the show. ‘‘They have no policy. They’re all cultural signifiers.’’

And now we know what to call moderates…. However, after much reflection, I think I may have finally landed upon a useful rhetorical term: spectator. Mull it over and try it out the next time you happen to have a moderate cluck-clucking and waving his finger at you.

Coercion? What coercion?

And yet, something isn’t quite adding up. One story, two versions. Kaczynski is trying to claim that since he only emailed with HAS, but did not speak to him on the phone until after the apology was delivered via email, he could not have coerced HAS. And remember, this is the same guy who set the global media on Justine Sacco when he was at Buzzfeed. This is straight-up Internet karma.

It looks as if GamerGate II may have just begun, with the announcement of Operation Autism Storm.

CNN is the new Gawker

This public threat issued by CNN to an anonymous meme maker marks an interesting development in so-called “professional journalism”. Since when is it the job of the news media to report, or not report, the news depending upon whether someone behaves how they want? And since when is it acceptable to blackmail a minor?

The apology came after CNN’s KFile identified the man behind “HanA**holeSolo.” Using identifying information that “HanA**holeSolo” posted on Reddit, KFile was able to determine key biographical details, to find the man’s name using a Facebook search and ultimately corroborate details he had made available on Reddit.

On Monday, KFile attempted to contact the man by email and phone but he did not respond. On Tuesday, “HanA**holeSolo” posted his apology on the subreddit /The_Donald and deleted all of his other posts.

“The meme was created purely as satire, it was not meant to be a call to violence against CNN or any other news affiliation,” he wrote. “I had no idea anyone would take it and put sound to it and then have it put up on the President’s Twitter feed. It was a prank, nothing more. What the President’s feed showed was not the original post that was posted here, but loaded up somewhere else and sound added to it then sent out on Twitter. I thought it was the original post that was made and that is why I took credit for it. I have the highest respect for the journalist community and they put their lives on the line every day with the jobs that they do in reporting the news.”

The apology has since been taken down by the moderators of /The_Donald subreddit.

After posting his apology, “HanA**holeSolo” called CNN’s KFile and confirmed his identity. In the interview, “HanA**holeSolo” sounded nervous about his identity being revealed and asked to not be named out of fear for his personal safety and for the public embarrassment it would bring to him and his family.

CNN is not publishing “HanA**holeSolo’s” name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again. In addition, he said his statement could serve as an example to others not to do the same.

CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.

If I was a CNN employee with any big secret to protect, I’d consider resigning today. I somehow doubt the channers are simply going to take this sort of thing lying down. #CNNBlackmail is already trending globally and the firing of the four members of the KFILE team has already been publicly demanded. As Mike Cernovich says, CNN is the new Gawker. And #CNNBlackmail is the new #GamerGate.

Based on what one of the KFILE employees, Andrew Kaczynski said, it appears that this CNN meme may be the real reason HanAssholeSolo was targeted.

andrew kaczynski  ?‏Verified account @KFILE  6h6 hours ago
This was someone who shared an image of CNN reporters’ face with Stars of David next them.

Oh, well, in that case, it’s totally justifiable to threaten someone with public exposure, right? And this tweet cracked me up.

CNN producer: “I’ve had the worst week!”
Van Jones: “Dude, Please!”
@KFILE : “LEEROOOOY JENKINSSSSSS!”

The memes must flow.

Better than Reagan

Speaking of John C. Wright, the science fiction and fantasy grandmaster reminds us that while the God-Emperor is overturning the media’s collective apple cart with his tweets, he is also getting a great deal done:

President Trump fulfilled another campaign promise and recinded the absurdly unconstitutional Johnson Amendment, which is a Dem administration IRS regulation threatening preachers, priests and pastors with loss of their tax free status for their churches should they ever speak on political matters from the pulpit.

I had never heard any so called conservative politicians even speaking on the topic of the Johnson Amendment erenow. It has been in place for decades, an insolent, open, filthy, glaring, and obvious desecration of the central Constitutional liberty embodied in the First Amendment.

Donald Trump is already showing strong signs of being the best and most conservative President the United States has had since Calvin Coolidge. Believe it or not, he’s much, much better than Ronald Reagan ever was. I was there. I loved Reagan. And the God-Emperor is, to this point, doing much better than Reagan.

Still. Not. Tired.


On tonight’s Darkstream, I explained how Trump has gotten off to a much better start than Reagan did in 1981, and also mentioned some ideas about the possible purpose behind the God-Emperor’s meeting with Vladimir Putin this week.