Author: VD

Reminder: don’t talk to the media

Jon Del Arroz didn’t listen.

I didn’t listen to @voxday. I gave an interview to unfriendly media. They trashed the shit out of me. Listen to Vox. I knew better. Fortunately, it’s a site that has less traffic than my blog, and so I won’t give them the satisfaction of linking and giving them clicks. Most won’t ever see it.

The fact that there are exceptions does not mean the rule does not exist. The default position must always be “don’t talk to the media”. You may think you’re prepared to take the heat, you may think you will somehow outwit them, but I can assure you, you are not and you will not.

See, here’s the thing. I’m already on the ADL’s list of 36 Hitlers. I’ve already been trashed around the world, everywhere from Le Monde and Entertainment Weekly to the Guardian and the New Zealand Herald. After 16 years of sporadic efforts, the media has exhausted all the tricks in its usual repertoire without being able to discredit or disqualify me. My friends and family openly joke about me being the epicenter of galactic evil, and I’ve made it very clear to all and sundry that I don’t give a damn what they may think of my opinions one way or another.

But you haven’t been through that crucible. You’re not as emotionally antifragile. You’re not as psychologically inured to what people think of you and your opinions. You still have friends and family and acquaintances and co-workers who would be horrified to see you described publicly as a Nazi, a racist, a sexist, a white supremacist, an anti-semite, and so forth. And that is what the media will do to you, no matter who you are, because that is what they do to everyone they don’t like.

So, don’t talk to the media.

The sickness in Hollywood

It goes back further than you might expect. And includes figures you probably did not suspect.

“RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK”
Story Conference Transcript
January 23, 1978 thru January 27, 1978
George Lucas (G), Steven Spielberg (S), Larry Kasdan (L)

G — We have to get them cemented into a very strong relationship. A bond.

L — I like it if they already had a relationship at one point. Because then you don’t have to build it.

G — I was thinking that this old guy could have been his mentor. He could have known this little girl when she was just a kid. Had an affair with her when she was eleven.

L — And he was forty-two.

G — He hasn’t seen her in twelve years. Now she’s twenty-two. It’s a real strange relationship.

S — She had better be older than twenty-two.

G — He’s thirty-five, and he knew her ten years ago when he was twenty-five and she was only twelve.

G — It would be amusing to make her slightly young at the time.

S — And promiscuous. She came onto him.

G — Fifteen is right on the edge. I know it’s an outrageous idea, but it is interesting. Once she’s sixteen or seventeen it’s not interesting anymore. But if she was fifteen and he was twenty-five and they actually had an affair the last time they met. And she was madly in love with him and he…

S — She has pictures of him.

G — There would be a picture on the mantle of her, her father, and him. She was madly in love with him at the time and he left her because obviously it wouldn’t work out. Now she’s twenty-five and she’s been living in Nepal since she was eighteen. It’s not only that they like each other, it’s a very bizarre thing, it puts a whole new perspective on this whole thing. It gives you lots of stuff to play off of between them. Maybe she still likes him. It’s something he’d rather forget about and not have come up again. This gives her a lot of ammunition to fight with.

S — In a way, she could say, “You’ve made me this hard.”

G — This is a resource that you can either mine or not. It’s not as blatant as we’re talking about. You don’t think about it that much. You don’t immediately realize how old she was at the time. It would be subtle. She could talk about it. “I was jail bait the last time we were together.” She can flaunt it at him, but at the same time she never says, “I was fifteen years old.” Even if we don’t mention it, when we go to cast the part we’re going to end up with a woman who’s about twenty-three and a hero who’s about thirty-five.

S — She is the daughter of the professor who our hero was under the tutelege of. She has this little fragment of the map.

G — He doesn’t have to have the fragment in hand. All he has to do is get a copy of it, make a rubbing of it.

L — (this section is not clear, something about the fragments and how he gets them)

Something is broken

Nicholas Nassim Taleb is underwhelmed with the state of the UK intellectual sphere after his encounter with “historian” Mary Beard:

The BBC did some kind of educational cartoon on Roman Britain and represented “diversity” in terms of someone looking African in the show as representative of “diversity” at the time. Any dissent from the statistical errors made by the politically correct police is treated as apostasy.

What was meant to be a “typical” of Roman Britain by the BBC: flowing quotas of political correctness backward in time.

  • Representativeness heuristic. The picture was portrayed as representative (playing on the representativeness/avalability heuristic in the minds of children). Some people backtracked later by saying it is was not common but not impossible, which is where I shout “BS!”
  • Anecdotal vs Statistical. The backup is mostly anecdotal from cherry picked stories. We find nothing beyond traces of sub-Saharan genes in areas where Roman legions were located (France, Gaul, and even Spain, where most of it came much later from the Arab trade). Show the picture to a French or Italian person and tell him “this is the typical…” and watch the insults.
  • Fuzzy classification. Even the researchers who deal with physical remains miss the point that people from North Africa looked no different from Spaniards, S. Italians, and Greeks. Punics/Phoenicians we now know looked Canaanite, just like a Southern European. Berbers looked like mountain berbers today. So representing “diversity” should focus on the difference between locals and Romans, not within Romans. It would be like mixing English and Spaniards/S. Italians, which makes sense.

The reclassification “when it fits” is nothing short of fabrication.

Mary Beard, of course, fled from the obvious consequences of her own arguments when I pointed out to her that her advocacy of ethnic diversity, combined with her observation that the Roman mass rape of the Sabine Women was “a way of creating a mixed society”, amounted to an implied endorsement of the mass rapes of Rotherham.

English academics are third-rate intellects, which, sadly enough, puts them a leg up on most of their American counterparts. That being said, I still have a lot of respect for Ms Beard, whose take on history is certainly original, if nothing else.

I know I’m definitely looking forward to her first book on Carthaginian history, which promises to be truly ground-breaking in light of her discovery of considerably more ethnic diversity there than had been hitherto suspected.

Steve on Star Trek

This was simply too beatifully contemptuous not to highlight.

Star Trek is just the UFP’s version of Pravda, making their lycra-clad goons and minions out to be heroes and geniuses. But they weren’t, were they?


Picard: pompous slaphead who repeatedly got clowned on his own ship by Q, allowed himself to be captured at least twice – one of those times saw him giving vital intelligence to the Borg and lead directly to the deaths of millions of Federation citizens and servicemen.


Riker: this guy was offered his own command, but turned it down. That’s a huge red flag right there, but it gets worse. He stuffed himself with space doughnuts until potatohead O’Brien had to grease the Jeffries tubes, and let his dopey girlfriend cuck him with Worf. Whenever you saw Riker interact with fellow crewmen it was just awkward and unpleasant, he’s a weird, insecure, unlikeable fatbeard who keeps annoying the crew with his shitty saxophone like he’s Bill Clinton or something. Even his own dad hated him.

Worf: the special-needs Klingon, too stupid to live. A badass in his own mind who kept losing fist fights and could be easily tricked by small children or Data’s cat. No wonder the other Klingons wouldn’t let poor Worfy join in any Klingon games.

Dr Crusher: if she was such a good doctor, why was her husband dead? Check and mate. Spawned Wil Wheaton and had space sex with a space ghost that had previously serviced her grandmother. I’m not sure which is more shameful.

Data: autistic RealDoll who should’ve been recycled as something marginally more useful, such as a vending machine selling jumbo-sized adult diapers to David Gerrold.

Geordi LaForge: handicapped sex-pest who cyberstalked the woman who designed the Enterprise and only avoided an HR investigation because he’s black.

This was, mind you, the finest crew in Starfleet, which leads me to deduce the other ships were full of window-licking retards like Janeway.

In the meantime, much respect to ST:D, which is the first science fiction television show to make ALL of the characters GLBT. This is real progress I’m sure we can all support.

2017 Dragon Award Finalists

Congratulations to the Castalia House authors who were just named 2017 Dragon Award Finalists. By category:

Best Fantasy Novel

A Sea of Skulls by Vox Day


Best Young Adult / Middle Grade Novel

Swan Knight’s Son by John C. Wright


Best Military Science Fiction or Fantasy Novel


Starship Liberator by B.V. Larson and David VanDyke

Best Alternate History Novel


No Gods, Only Daimons by Kai Wai Cheah

To celebrate this announcement, both A Sea of Skulls and No Gods, Only Daimons have been made available to Kindle Unlimited subscribers. Swan Knight’s Son is already available on KU. Congratulations are also due to Castalia House friends Larry Correia, Brien Niemeier, L. Jagi Lamplighter, Jon del Arroz, Declan Finn, Lou Antonelli, and Richard Fox, all of whom were nominated in various categories. And thanks to everyone who made this happen by supporting us! Here is the complete ballot.

There are clearly no shoe-ins, as it’s clear that a lot more people, and a much broader swath of the science fiction, fantasy, and game markets are getting involved. Both Scalzi and Jemisin scored nominations. I was a little surprised that Total War: Warhammer didn’t make it in the Computer Game category, but I was pleased to see that Gloomhaven did in Board Games.

The main competition for A Sea of Skulls appears to be Monster Hunter Memoirs: Grunge by Larry Correia and John Ringo. Correia and Ringo? Yeah, it’s hard to like my odds there, given that both their fan bases are bigger than mine.

John C. Wright is up against his own wife as well as The Hammer of Thor by Rick Riordan, while B.V. Larson and David VanDyke would appear to be the slight favorites in their category, despite facing Iron Dragoons by Richard Fox, Star Realms: Rescue Run by Jon Del Arroz and Caine’s Mutiny by Charles E. Gannon. And Kai Wai Cheah has the daunting task of going up against both Fallout: The Hot War by Harry Turtledove and The Last Days of New Paris by China Mieville.

So, it would appear unlikely that Castalia House will take home two Dragons for a second straight year, but one never knows. Regardless, be sure to vote if you receive a ballot, and note that you can still sign up to vote on the Finalists before Tuesday, August 29th.

Anything but God

Star Trek can tolerate anything, except the concept of a deity:

Star Trek: Discovery‘s producers apparently feel that the word “God” has no place on the bridge of a Federation starship. Series star Jason Isaacs was admonished for ad-libbing a line indirectly invoking a deity, which the show’s producers viewed as fundamentally against Gene Roddenberry’s utopian vision of the future.

Discovery, the long gestating Star Trek prequel TV show, is finally debuting in September, and details are beginning to emerge about the series’ story and characters. Set ten years before the events of the original Star Trek TV show, the series will follow Commander Michael Burnham (The Walking Dead‘s Sonequa Martin-Green), who is now known to be Spock’s half-sister. The show will chronicle an important event in Starfleet’s history that will heavily involve the Klingons.

Discovery has made some unexpected choices so far, regarding which traditional elements of the franchise it’s eager to embrace and which one it feels comfortable discarding. A new story from Entertainment Weekly showcases perhaps the most unexpected choice yet, as Captain Lorca (played by Harry Potter veteran Jason Isaacs) was told he couldn’t ad-lib a line including the word “god”. Here is the anecdote in question, from EW‘s report.

The director halts the action and Lorca, played by British actor Jason Isaacs of Harry Potter fame, steps off the stage. The episode’s writer, Kirsten Beyer, approaches to give a correction on his “for God’s sakes” ad lib.

“Wait, I can’t say ‘God’?” Isaacs asks, amused. “I thought I could say ‘God’ or ‘damn’ but not ‘goddamn.’ ”


Beyer explains that Star Trek is creator Gene Roddenberry’s vision of a science-driven 23rd-century future where religion basically no longer exists.


“How about ‘for f—’s sake’?” he shoots back. “Can I say that?”


“You can say that before you can say ‘God,’ ” she dryly replies.

Star Trek is a show for atheists and pedophiles. Now they’re openly pandering to the former; it won’t be too terribly long before they start pandering to the latter.

What part of “cruelty artist” do they not get?

Do home run hitters ever stand there watching a nice fat pitch heading straight over the plate, and, as they start to swing, find themselves thinking, I cannot believe he thought THAT was a good idea?

Choy Li Fut Lady虎爪‏ @HungSingMA
Why does being a physicist make Brian Cox more intelligent? Btw, Liam Gallagher’s IQ is Higher than Einstein’s was.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday

Because you have to be able to grasp the math involved. Most really smart people (150+) don’t work in intellectually elite professions.

Choy Li Fut Lady虎爪‏ @HungSingMA
So? Doesn’t mean people who are able to grasp the maths don’t do history.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
True. But the highest measured IQ of 148 Cambridge faculty members was 139. Academics, on average, are third-rate intelligences.

Matthew L‏ @Blethigg
When asked what his IQ is: “I have no idea. People who boast about their IQ are losers.”
 – Steven Hawking

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
I bet he doesn’t know his 100-meter time either.

The irony, of course, is that Steven Hawking himself is a wildly overrated academic who could not philosophize his way out of a box. Like most popularizers, he is considerably less intelligent than his fans believe him to be. Hawking wouldn’t fare much better in a debate on religion or philosophy than he would in a footrace.

I discussed the concept of overrated intellectual elites in last night’s Darkstream on Our Third-Rate Intellectual Elites. There is an Easter Egg in there if you listen to the whole thing. I suspect it will amuse most of you.

Meanwhile, the outraged response to this tweet should prove entertaining.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
For her next trick, “historian” @wmarybeard is going to defend Kevin Costner’s American accent in Robin Hood.

The creepy thing is that Mary Beard was attempting to justify BBC diversity propaganda aimed at children while obviously being aware that mass rape is “a way of creating a mixed society”. What are we supposed to conclude from this, that Rotherham is the modern equivalent of the Rape of the Sabine Women and therefore justified in the name of diversity?


The Romans’ sense of their society as a hybrid one, Beard finds, is folded into their founding legends. Virgil’s Aeneid celebrates the Trojan hero who founded the city—a foreigner who, though he kills some of the native inhabitants, also unites the warring tribes. And without downplaying the horrific violence in the tale of Romulus and Remus and the rape of the Sabine women, Beard notes that the mass rape is portrayed not just as evidence of Roman aggression but as a way of creating a mixed society.


UPDATE: Mary Beard is already trying to run away from her own positions. Not that it will do her any good. It just adds two steps to the same conclusion. She’s also cried to The Times already.




UPDATE: Taleb pulls no punches, as usual.


NassimNicholasTaleb‏@nntaleb
More Evidence that Ms Beard is a bullshitter. She tried to degrade me to “pop risk” until I compated the “pop” to HERs. Her report. Bullshitter!

NassimNicholasTaleb‏@nntaleb
If that’s how Mary Beard bullshits about her exchange with me, how can anyone trust her historical reports? No more use for her.

Repealing the Zeroth Amendment

The Trump Administration has taken the unprecedented step of pointing out that a propaganda poem is not actually U.S. Federal law. The media, naturally, is astonished by this extremism.

White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller found himself clashing with CNN correspondent Jim Acosta at Wednesday’s White House press briefing.

“What the president is proposing here does not sound like it’s in keeping with American tradition when it comes to immigration. The Statue of Liberty says, ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses,'” Acosta said, quoting from the poem The New Colossus, which was inscribed on the statue after its erection.

“It doesn’t say anything about speaking English or be a computer programmer,” Acosta continued. “Aren’t you trying to change what it means to be an immigrant coming into this country if you are telling them you have  to speak English? Can’t people learn to speak English when they get here?”

Miller pointed out that English is already a requirement of naturalization.

“The notion that speaking English wouldn’t be a part of an immigration system would actually be very ahistorical,” he said.

Miller further rejected Acosta’s reference to the Statue of Liberty, noting that the poem Acosta had cited was added later.

A French statue with a Jewish poem subsequently attached is neither U.S. law nor American tradition. This is the new law.

THE THIRD COLOSSUS

The Lady of Liberty is not a French whore,
We have endured enough; we don’t want any more.
Don’t give us your tired, your poor huddled masses,
Your refugee refuse of conflict and lack.
They may be the finest of your foreign classes,
But nevertheless, they have to go back!

Excerpt: YOUNG MAN’S WAR

From Rod Walker’s new bestselling novel, YOUNG MAN’S WAR:

Dad had come into the living room. He was a big man, and he looked like the sort of cop who would kick down doors and come in with his carbine blazing. He kept his head shaved, even though it kind of made him look like a Nazi, but I think the comparison pleased him. Right now, he had a massive scowl on his face, and I cringed a little. If that whining sound ticked him off and he thought it was coming from the game console…

“Yeah, Dad?” I said.

“Mute that,” he said. “I need to listen.”

I nodded and hit the mute button on the remote. The game’s chipper music went quiet, and I could hear that whining sound. It was now louder than the noise coming from the console’s fans.

“It must be the air conditioner,” pronounced Maggie. She tended to be a bit of a know-it-all. “That sounds like an air conditioner motor.”

“Maybe one of the neighbors is fixing something,” I said. “Or their car won’t start.”

“No, it must be the air conditioning,” said Maggie. “A broken car doesn’t make that noise.”

I looked up at Dad to see what he thought, and I blinked in surprise. There was something on his face that I had never seen before.

Dad looked…

He was frightened.

“Dad?” I said.

He didn’t say anything. I don’t think I can describe how shocking this was. Dad never showed fear about anything, ever. Chicago at that time wasn’t exactly a safe place, and people had tried to break into our house a couple of times. Dad had beaten the would-be burglars within an inch of their lives, his scowl never wavering. For him to show fear was as shocking as if the sun had gone dark in the middle of the day or had risen in the west.

“Dad?” said Maggie, concern in her voice.

“Oh, no,” he said in a quiet voice. “No, no, no. Not now. Not now.” He looked at Maggie and me. “I had really hoped you two would be spared this.”

“What’s wrong?” said Maggie.

Dad seemed to pull himself together, his face drawing into its usual hard mask. “Get your grab bags and go. We leave in five minutes.”

I pushed to my feet, puzzled, but I knew better than to disobey. “What’s going on?”

“And get your guns,” said Dad. I blinked at that. As you might guess, Dad was a gun nut, but he was equally fanatical about gun safety, and he had drilled into us that we were never to pick up a gun in a crisis unless we needed to use it, and never to point the weapon at anything unless we intended to kill it. “Guns, grab bags, kitchen in the five minutes. Go!”

He all but shouted the last word, which kicked us into motion. Dad didn’t shout. We scrambled up the stairs, and Maggie vanished into her bedroom, and I went into mine. My grab bag was the closet. Dad was ever careful, and the grab bag had been loaded with clothes, food, tools, weapons, supplies—everything you needed to survive in a disaster or a crisis. Part of our chores included packing and repacking the grab bags, making sure that everything worked and that nothing had expired.

I pried up one of the floorboards in my room and took my gun from its hiding place.

I say “my” gun, but it was technically Dad’s, and I was forbidden from touching it save at his express word or during a life-threatening emergency. It was a Glock 17 pistol, and while I would never win any shooting competitions, I was a decent shot with the thing. I checked that it was unloaded, and then pulled out the clips from the hiding place and tucked them into my grab bag.

Handling the heavy handgun seemed to send a shock through my brain. Before, the pure habit of obedience had taken over, but now I was beginning to wonder. Why were we doing this? All we had heard was an odd whining noise. Maybe it really was just the air conditioner acting up. The central air unit for our house was older than I was.

Then again, I had never seen Dad that freaked out by something. Angry, yes. He got angry and cold a lot. But frightened?

I shrugged, checked the grab bag one last time, and headed for the stairs. Maybe Dad was freaking out over nothing. If so, it was no big deal. Better to go along with what he had in mind that risk a punishment.

Maggie had beaten me downstairs, but she was always better organized than I was. Her eyes were wide in her face, though she seemed otherwise calm. I guess Dad’s alarm must have gotten to her. The whining noise had gotten louder, so loud that it was starting to get annoying.

“I guess,” said Maggie,” that’s not really the air conditioner.”

“No,” I said. I started to point out that I had told her so, but I stopped. The noise had gotten louder, and it also sounded…strange. I had thought it sounded like a broken machine, but now it didn’t sound like anything I had ever heard before, and it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

“It sounds like something screaming,” said Maggie.

“Yeah,” I said.

Then I saw the light.

It was nine o’clock at night, and the lights were off in the kitchen, the kitchen door closed. But around the edges of the door I saw a flickering, colorless light, almost like the fluorescent lights in a hospital emergency room. The light kept flickering, and I realized that it was flickering in time to the undulations of the whining noise.

“Roland,” said Maggie. “I think that’s coming from the alley.”

I started to answer, and Dad came hurrying down the stairs. He was dressed in something that looked like riot gear—body armor and cargo pants and a harness for weapons. He was carrying a lot of weapons, two pistols, several grenades, a pair of heavy tactical knives, and he was holding an AR-15 with a lot of custom modifications.

“Dad,” said Maggie. “If you go outside like that, you’re going to get arrested.”

“I’m not,” said Dad. “The force is about to have bigger problems. In a couple of hours there might not even be a police force. Are you both ready?”