#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
If you’re a Brainstorm member and want to attend, email me with DEVGAME in the subject. If you’re not and would like to attend, please sign up here. The course starts next Saturday and will continue for 10 weeks.
There will be the opportunity to work on actual game projects, such as Elveteka, the game from which the screenshot above is taken, which is nearing completion and was developed by a team of DevGame 1.0 attendees.
Author Earnings isn’t the only outlet to notice the ongoing decline of the Big Five publishers:
Unit sales of e-books published by traditional publishers fell 13% in 2015 compared to 2014, said Kempton Mooney of Nielsen during a Thursday panel aimed at examining different publishing markets.
Units fell to 204 million from 234 million in 2014. The high point of e-book sales was 2013 when units totaled 242 million units. While e-book sales fell in the year, print units rose 2.8%, to 653 million. As a result, e-books’s market share of units dipped to 24% in 2015, down from 27% in 2014. Mooney observed that some of the gain in print sales was due to the extraordinary popularity of adult coloring books last year. The e-book sales figures came from about 400 traditional publishers, Mooney said.
In another look at e-book sales, Mooney reported that the Big 5 publishers’ share of e-book sales fell to 34% in 2015, down from 38% in 2014. In 2012, the Big 5 held a 46% of e-book unit sales. The loss of share of the Big 5 was made up by self-publishers and small publishers. Self-publishers’ share of the e-book market rose to 12% last year from 8% in 2014, while small presses accounted for 30% of e-book unit sales in 2015, up from 26% in 2014.
Sticking to the children’s category, Mooney pointed to a recent survey that found 51% of children under age 9 are non-white. He said publishers that aren’t publishing books that can appeal to children from diverse backgrounds are losing “huge chunks of sales.”
I devoutly hope the Big Five follow Mooney’s advice and devote increasing resources to pursuing readers from diverse backgrounds. One thing that we have learned from our various translations is that “diverse” readers simply don’t read as much, so the more they pursue the rainbow unicorn market, the easier it will be for independent publishers to continue to outcompete them for genuine markets that actually exist.
SJW convergence is no foundation for effective business strategy.
It’s both amusing and a little annoying to see various AltRight figures freaking out about Heat Street running articles by me. Apparently the fear is that because it is a Dow Jones-owned outlet, it will somehow magically “coopt” the AltRight and make it disappear. Can you even imagine how terrible it would be if the New York Times gave me an op/ed column or if CNN gave Mike Cernovich a TV show?
This cooption concept is a fascinatingly stupid theory, in light of how the editor of Heat Street, Louise Mensch, has openly attacked the AltRight and is a card-carrying member of #NeverTrump. Heat Street is simply one of many media outlets, it isn’t the Tea Party 2.0. Unlike Dana Loesch, Dick Armey, and other conservatives who leaped to march in front of the Tea Party parade and were accepted as its public faces, literally no one, including Louise herself, is putting her or her site forward as an opinion leader of the Alt Right.
Here is the core problem with this cowardly paranoia: either the AltRight ideas can survive exposure to the mainstream or they cannot. There is only one way to find out, and that is to expose them to the mainstream. Therefore, those of us who are seen as “Alt Right figureheads” or influences of some kind should welcome every single outlet willing to consider them, whether it is friendly or hostile.
This really isn’t that difficult.
It is ironic that the Alt Right scolds worry rightly about SJW entryism while simultaneously refusing to dirty their delicate white hands by ever preaching to anyone who is not part of the choir, much less engaging in any entryism of their own. Apparently they prefer a purely defensive approach, which as every student of strategy or military history knows, virtually guarantees failure. This is also remarkably stupid, given that the Alt Right has seen how the determination of conservatives to remain solely on the defensive is one of the primary reasons for the catastrophic failure of conservatism.
It is a matter of public record that my articles and my interviews have appeared in everything from Pravda to the Guardian, from WorldNetDaily to the Wall Street Journal. Jews and SJWs condemn me for giving credibility to The Daily Shoah and Counter Currents. Alt Righters and white nationalists condemn me for giving credibility to Heat Street. Meanwhile, I have been reliably informed for 15 years now that I have no credibility of my own.
In case my position is not clear, let me state it outright: I reject the concept of credibility by association.
I am not a moderate, I am outlet-agnostic. No one owns me and no one dictates what I can and what I cannot say. And the Alt Right would do very well to learn from #GamerGate and stop trying to play tone-police or outlet-police.
Ideas stand alone, not on the basis of author, outlet, or association.
UPDATE: Some of these guys clearly don’t know me very well. I’m entirely happy to, as they suggest, GTFO of whatever they think their little movement happens to be. I’m not a joiner anyhow. Attempt to police me and I won’t hesitate to mute and ignore you.
And if you tell me I should not be contributing anywhere, then you will not be commenting here. Live by your professed principles, gentlemen. We wouldn’t want you being coopted by me, after all, and I can’t risk being coopted by you.
Louise Mensch and I discuss everything from conservative feminism to universal suffrage and Native American intelligence at Heat Street:
Louise: We’re now debating feminism. Vox, you go first. Hit me with your best shot, as Pat Benatar once said.
Vox: Okay. Louise, I know that you identify yourself as a feminist, and you also identify yourself as a conservative. Given the connection between feminism and progressive politics, I am curious to know how you rectify those two positions, those two identities.
Louise: I don’t see that there is any reconciling to be done. I can’t stand the social justice warrior thing of identify as. I am a feminist. I am a conservative. I said in our last debate to you that conservatism was about equal opportunity, and to me feminism is therefore a subset of conservatism. If conservatism is principally about equal opportunity, personal liberty, free trade, etc, feminism is a subset of that – because feminism argues that men and women should have equal opportunities.
Which is not to say the same opportunities, but equal opportunities. I recognize the biological differences between the sexes. To me there is no distinction between conservatism and feminism, except that feminism is a smaller version of conservatism, it’s a subset of it.
Vox: I agree that the logic holds. That’s within the logical structure your proposing that that is consistent, but the problem I have with that is that surely an aspect of conservatism is to conserve something. It seems readily apparent to me that feminism is intrinsically incapable of conserving anything from Western civilization, to even a functional, civilized society.
There is more, considerably more, there. Read the whole thing. Then discuss it here, keeping in mind that it is a transcript of a free-flowing conversation and I frequently have absolutely no idea what she’s going to throw at me next.
It’s actually a rather interesting challenge, especially in light of the fact that I know people are going to have hissy fits over anything that is worded in an infelicitious manner.
I’m pleased to announce that on Friday, June 17th at 7 PM Eastern, Brainstorm and the Tom Woods Show will be co-hosting an all-Austrian free trade debate between the well-known Austrian School economist Robert Murphy and Austrian School heretic Vox Day. The debate will be moderated by the noted Austrian School economist Thomas Woods.
It’s too soon to open registrations, but as always, Brainstorm members will have first crack at seats to the event. A transcript will be made available to Brainstorm members and the audio will be available via the Tom Woods Show.
Pitying poor refugees and granting them sanctuary in large numbers is always a mistake. Wikipedia on the Gothic War of 376-382.
In the summer of 376, a massive number of Goths arrived on the Danube River, the border of the Roman Empire, requesting asylum from the Huns. They came in two distinct groups: the Thervings led by Fritigern and Alavivus, and the Greuthungi led by Alatheus and Saphrax. Eunapius states their number as 200,000 including civilians, but Peter Heather estimates that the Thervings may have had only 10,000 warriors and 50,000 people in total, with the Greuthungi about the same size. The Cambridge Ancient History places modern estimates at around 90,000 people total.
The Goths sent ambassadors to the Eastern Roman Emperor Valens requesting permission to settle their people inside the Empire….
Many Goths inside Roman territory joined Fritigern, as did assorted slaves, miners, and prisoners. Roman garrisons in fortified towns held out, but those outside of them were easy prey. The Goths created a vast wagon train to hold all the loot and supplies pillaged from the Roman countryside, and they had much rage against the Roman population for what they had endured. Those who had started as starving refugees had transformed into a powerful army.
34 years later, Rome was sacked by Alaric. The same thing is going to happen to various cities in the USA and Europe if the “poor refugees” are not expelled from the West within the next 15-20 years.
But if your society collapses amidst ethnic violence, at least you can console yourselves with the knowledge that no one called you racist.
Even people who claim to seek equality don’t believe in it:
Last week, Harvard announced that they were cracking down on “privilege” within their student community by banning members of single-gender organizations from holding school leadership positions.
But when Harvard announced its new policy, it stressed that the sanctions applied to both male and female single-gender organizations equally, since both male and female single-gender organizations thrived on their “privilege.”
Harvard’s resident feminists claim that all-female organizations, while just as gender-biased, are beneficial to the school’s community, whereas all-male organizations are merely breeding grounds for the present and future perpetrators of sexual crime.
On Monday, they demonstrated, accusing Harvard of, among other things, perpetuating the marginalization of female voices. “My women’s organization has been more than a social organization,” one student told the Boston Globe. “It has been a mental health respite, a place to discuss sexual assaults . . . where I became a feminist, and where I refound my voice.”
The students claimed that female-only clubs were more important than male-only clubs because women experience systematic oppression, and they repeated claims that such clubs were necessary because women “earn less” than male counterparts and because women are “targeted and shamed” for their sexuality.
Stop falling for appeals to equality. You might as reasonably be persuaded by appeals to unicorns, lumberjacks, or the Labor Theory of Value. Even those who make appeals to equality observably don’t believe in it.
Fred Reed observes that what passes for the United States of America today is not the country he knew:
Mail arrives in my inbox all the time, telling me that by going to Mexico I have sold out, fled, abandoned the United States. I’m a coward and a traitor, just like Lord Haw Haw, and Kim Philby, and probably hate America more than Barack Obama does.
It is is irrational. They think that just because I went to Mexico, I left the US. They don’t understand. I didn’t leave the United States. It left me. It was a bait-and-switch operation. I signed on to one country, and they slipped another in under me….
Now, I used to be fond of the United States. Granted, I wasn’t much
of a patriot. The word nowadays seems to mean one who doesn’t so much
love his country as to dislike other people’s. I figured live and let
live. A lot of other countries struck me as fine places. But America was
my favorite. It just suited me. I liked the people in their wild
variety and the countryside and the music and the brash independence. It
wasn’t perfect. Still, given the sorry baseline for comportment in
human agglomerations, it was about as good as you could get.I’m still fond of the United States. I just can’t find it.
Change the people, change the nation. That’s the real proposition. The irony, of course, is that the addition of all those people “yearning to breathe free” have turned the USA into a place that is considerably less free than many other countries. The extent to which this has taken place, and the way it was accomplished, is documented in some detail here.
The United States of America is now a triple misnomer. It is not united, the Several States are no longer sovereign states, and genuine Americans are now a minority. It should be no surprise that the country – it cannot be reasonably described as a nation – is no longer recognizable to an oldtimer like Fred.
I seldom get harassed in this way, probably because my story is pretty straightforward. I warned nearly everyone around me for nearly a decade about what was happening to no avail, and was frequently told that if I didn’t like it, I should just leave. So I did.
And nothing I have seen in the 20 years since has made me regret that decision.
It’s a rather remarkable admission, considering the average left-liberal’s ability to deny the difference between black and white, between male and female, and between American and non-American:
WE progressives believe in diversity, and we want women, blacks, Latinos, gays and Muslims at the table — er, so long as they aren’t conservatives.
Universities are the bedrock of progressive values, but the one kind of diversity that universities disregard is ideological and religious. We’re fine with people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us.
O.K., that’s a little harsh. But consider George Yancey, a sociologist who is black and evangelical.
“Outside of academia I faced more problems as a black,” he told me. “But inside academia I face more problems as a Christian, and it is not even close.”
I’ve been thinking about this because on Facebook recently I wondered aloud whether universities stigmatize conservatives and undermine intellectual diversity. The scornful reaction from my fellow liberals proved the point.
“Much of the ‘conservative’ worldview consists of ideas that are known empirically to be false,” said Carmi.
“The truth has a liberal slant,” wrote Michelle.
“Why stop there?” asked Steven. “How about we make faculties more diverse by hiring idiots?”
To me, the conversation illuminated primarily liberal arrogance — the implication that conservatives don’t have anything significant to add to the discussion. My Facebook followers have incredible compassion for war victims in South Sudan, for kids who have been trafficked, even for abused chickens, but no obvious empathy for conservative scholars facing discrimination.
The truth is that they don’t believe in what they claim to believe. They think they want La Raza, Muslims, and American Indians at the table, but they’d be scared out of their gourds if they actually believed that they weren’t going to do the driving.
I am increasingly certain that the white liberal-left simply has no idea whatsoever what is in store for it or what the consequences of its actions are going to be. This should not be a surprise, as they show very short time preferences in every other aspect of their thinking. They simply can’t think outside of their childish “America is white and strong and always will be, so Mommy and Daddy will save us if our stupidity gets us into trouble” mode.
Anyhow, it’s just as well they underestimate and fail to understand us. It will make it that much easier to move them out of the way when the real world finally comes home to roost.
That’s the nasty thing about cultural war. As with a civil war, sooner or later, whether one will or no, one is eventually forced to choose sides.
It’s dreadful when two people you admire start beating each other up. Sort of like childhood all over again!
But that’s primary season for you. Particularly this year, it has former allies at each others’ throats. It almost makes you miss the days when SJWs weren’t irrelevant! Almost.
The latest salvo in these internecine conflicts comes from Cathy Young, one of a growing number of libertarians and conservatives who are turning their guns on their own side. She’s gone after none other than Ann Coulter, my only rival for the throne as sassy blonde queen of conservative media.
This is a difficult column to write, as I know both women and enjoy them both in different ways. Both have grappled fearlessly with the worst elements of the left over the years. And now I have to take sides!
Still, it’s Cathy who was the aggressor in this instance, attacking Coulter with the disturbingly leftist tactic of guilt-by-association and unsubstantiated name-calling.
Because Coulter has written for VDARE, a website frequented by the alt-right, Cathy alleges that she must therefore endorse the worst of its authors’ opinions. A tired line of reasoning, one used by those who prefer to debate with shame and taboos instead of arguments.
I’m less interested in a lengthy rebuttal of Cathy’s allegations — so silly and overwrought that I won’t even say what they are! — as I am in understanding why she, and so many others in conservative and libertarian circles, have adopted the language and tactics of the left during this campaign season.
First, there are the obvious points. They’re in a panic because of the unstoppable rise of Donald Trump, who represents a serious risk to the influence of the DC think-tank set.
Then there’s the alternative right, who many mistakenly believe are as bad, if not worse, than the identitarians of the left.
Cathy Young probably shares both of these inclinations — she wrote a lengthy rebuttal last month after my colleague I decided to co-author an explainer on the alt-right that didn’t descend into meaningless virtue signalling.
But I think the problem runs deeper with Young. She’s often very sensible. But, ironically, that moderate impulse makes her susceptible to fallacies — in particular, her implicit assumption that the “extreme” of the regressive left’s opponents must be as bad as the extreme of the regressive left itself.
Coulter isn’t the first of Cathy’s targets, you see. There’s also Mike Cernovich, excommunicated in her Real Clear Politics column for “vile tweets,” and later blocked for using the word “cuck.” Then there’s Vox Day, an icon of the anti-SJW resistance, lambasted by Young as a racist and misogynist — a charge his wife no doubt stridently objects to.
None of these people is remotely so dreadful as the worst actors in the third-wave feminist movement or Black Lives Matter.
Anyone who has met Day or Cernovich in person — I have met both — knows that they harbour no animosity toward other races or genders. The same is true of almost everyone I’ve met in the much-lambasted alternative right.
Sure, they may be merrily outrageous in their blogs and on social media, but a few hours of conversation with them reveals none of the wild zealotry you see in the eyes of campus feminist or black activists. Yet, because Day and Cernovich also dabble in identity politics, Cathy treats them the same — if not worse.
The truth is, Cathy has never bothered to really get to know her targets, instead preferring to shame them with regressive-left buzzwords. I’m afraid that she isn’t really opposed to the left’s social ostracization machine: she just wants to choose where it’s aimed.It’s a shame, because Cathy has frequently been a target of that machine herself. In the early 2010s, she was one of the few writers who dared to question the “rape culture” panic that was underway on American campuses.
Despite being vindicated in the wake of the UVA rape hoax and the collapse of the Columbia “mattress girl” case, she was repeatedly branded a “rape apologist” by her detractors on the left.
At the height of the new wave of sexual assault panic, the Federalist Society even dropped Cathy from their list of campus speakers, with a former president of the society citing pressure from feminist activists as the likely reason.
So it’s disappointing to see someone who has so often been a target of the irrational taboos that govern modern debate be so quick to use the same weapons in a vain attempt to appear balanced.
Because that, I suspect, is Cathy’s real motive — to be seen to be taking a stance that’s equidistant between the identitarians of the regressive left and the identitarians of the alternative right.
It’s a worthy goal, and Cathy is far from malicious. But there’s a problem. For her stance to be valid, you must first accept that both sides are equally powerful, equally dangerous and equally zealous. They’re simply not.
The rise of cultural libertarianism, the alt-right and Generation Trump is turning conservatives on each other like perhaps no other time in recent memory. At least there’s one glimmer of hope: history suggests that after their initial squabbles, American conservatives and libertarians tend to get over themselves and come together eventually.
It’s a uniquely American phenomenon, that, and one that terrifies the progressive left, which is more prone to permanent rifts. Let’s just hope the #NeverTrump types come to their senses soon…
I’m not friends with Cathy Young, nor do I admire her, nor do I find her to be even remotely honest. So, it would be very easy for me to side with Ann Coulter, the most courageous female commentator on the Right, even if I did not agree with her with regards to Trump and the dire danger posed to America by immigration.
People sometimes ask me why I stand by Roosh, or why I stand by Milo. If you read that column, it should be easy enough to understand. We’re standing in this cultural war together, and we know better than to fall for the inevitable divide-and-conquer tactics that are thrown at us by moderates of the Right and extremists of the Left alike.
And as for being “an icon of the anti-SJW resistance”, that’s certainly something I am proud to be. Of course, I’m even more proud of the Evil Legion of Evil, the Ilk, the Dread Ilk, and, of course, the VFM.
UPDATE: Fascinating. Breitbart appears to have deleted the piece. So, I’ve linked to the archive and reproduce the entire piece here.
UPDATE 2: Comments on the article are still up at Disqus.
UPDATE 3: It’s back up again.