Author: VD

Reviewers wanted

Castalia has been publishing a lot of non-fiction of late. But over the next few months, we’re going to be getting back to our original mission, which is advancing the state of Blue SF, which is to say science fiction that is written in the spirit of the science fiction giants, particularly Robert Heinlein.

So, I’m looking for 10 volunteers who can review for Amazon a forthcoming book by an author we are billing as the New New Heinlein – he does Heinlein better, more respectfully, and in a much more original way than Scalzi ever did – as well as 10 volunteers who can review a novel that is written in the tradition of Louis L’Amour.

That’s right, in addition to the return to Blue SF, we’re bringing back the Western too. So, if you’re ready, able, and willing to read and review one of these books in short order, please email me with either BLUE SF or WESTERN in the title.

UPDATE: We have enough reviewers, thank you!

In addition to TWO new John C. Wright novels we will be publishing this summer and fall, I’m particularly excited to publish a novel that I can only describe as written in the tradition of W. Somerset Maugham’s short stories. It’s intelligent, funny, and remarkably good.

Our range is becoming increasingly eclectic, but as I told David the Good after his second-straight book went #1 in Gardening, (the Kindle and Paperback editions of Grow or Die are currently #3 AND #5 in the category) Castalia House has four major guidelines for the books we publish:

  • Expected #1 category bestseller. If it’s not at least as popular as the most popular books in its category, it’s probably not for us. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad book, but we intend to not only maintain, but improve our level of quality as we grow. As more good authors exit the orbit of the failing major publishers, we expect more of them to come our way.
  • Intelligent. We don’t aim for the lowest common denominator. We’ll leave that to everyone else.
  • Different and original. As Marc Aramini openly informed his SJW critics at Making Light, no one else would have published Between Light and Shadow. No one, because it was a crazy, unprofitable thing to do. Even Gene Wolfe, though flattered, thought the project was completely insane. It is brilliant and unique and completely over the heads of everyone who isn’t a Wolfe fanatic, myself included. And that’s why we published it.
  • No SJWs. We publish science fiction. We publish fantasy. We publish science. We publish philosophy. We publish religion. We publish literary analysis. We publish gardening. We publish economics. We are in the process of publishing both Westerns and literary novels. But we do not publish social justice in any form.

On a tangential note, I should note that later this year, there will be another debate on free trade. We’re still sorting out the timing and the details, but it appears Robert Murphy, Thomas Woods, and myself will be involved.

Second Law

You can almost hear the gritted teeth at NY Mag. But he’s laughing. Oh, yes, indeed, he is so laughing:

Space Raptor Butt Invasion is about a man and a raptor who become romantically involved in space. “Soon enough,” according to its synopsis, “Lance becomes close with this mysterious new astronaut, a velociraptor. Together, they form an unlikely duo, which quickly begins to cross the boundaries of friendship into something much, much more sensual.”

But Tingle, who is pseudonymous and speaks on Twitter in a stilted, broken cadence, is having none of it. He spent much of this week trolling the Puppies and their ridiculous white-supremacist leader Vox Day on Twitter. He also released a new story, Slammed in the Butt by My Hugo Award Nomination.

Best of all, Tingle has appointed Zoe Quinn — the primary target of the Gamergate horde for the last couple of years — to serve as his proxy should he actually win. In other words, every Puppy vote for Chuck Tingle is also a vote to give Quinn more visibility and a platform to explicitly refute their bullshit.

I sometimes wonder what planet these SJWs think they’re orbiting. Literally Who has been featured in fictional form in TV shows, has been the cause of the destruction of both 4chan and Gawker, and has even testified at the United Nations. But giving her more visibility and a platform, well that just proves that, um, Puppies are stupid white supremacist Gamerhaters!

That’s clearly the Narrative. Remember, SJWs must always claim victory. So, if “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” wins the Hugo for Best Short Story, then it’s me and the Rabid Puppies who will look ridiculous. Got it? 

Tingle has also been relentlessly owning Vox on Twitter by calling him “Voxman” and concocting bizarre memes using the movie Grandma’s Boy, which is about a 35-year-old manchild who works as a video game tester. So if Space Raptor Butt Invasion really does win an award, which is still pretty unlikely, it’s not going to look like the victory Vox Day and the Puppies wanted. They’re the ones who are going to look ridiculous, and if it’s a victory for gay space dinosaur erotica as well then that’s OK too.

Owning. Relentlessly. As I’ve said, SJWs simply can’t maintain a coherent narrative. It’s going to be fascinating to hear them explain how the SF-SJWs no-awarded the super-funny, masterfully brilliant Shakespeare of our time. Just like, well, Mr. Sixth of Five himself.

It’s really not fair

But sometimes they throw you a big fat one right over the plate:

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
A white woman who has a child with a black father has a 2 percent chance of the father financially supporting that child.

lionorder ‏@lionorder
That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard all day. There’s proof that black dads are more hands on then others.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
Child abuse doesn’t count, sport.

One has to keep one’s hand in, if one is to remain an Award-Winning Cruelty Artist, after all.

Democrats fear the Trumpening

And well they should:

Republicans are divided, the economy is improving, the demographics are increasingly in Democrats’ favor. The likeliest result of a Trump nomination is a Republican washout up and down the ballot.

I do get all that.

Still, when I hear smart people explaining why Trump cannot win, all I can think is: Aren’t you the ones who told us that he couldn’t top 30 percent, and then 40 percent, and then 50 percent in the Republican primaries? Weren’t you confident that he was finished after he called Mexicans rapists, and insulted prisoners of war, and dished out a menstruation insult?

Did you predict his nomination? If not, we don’t want to hear your certainty about his November defeat.

Nor is it reassuring to read how happy the Clinton camp must be to be facing such a weak opponent. They need to be running scared — smart, but scared — now and for the next six months.

Crooked Hillary Clinton is running scared of Dangerous Donald Trump. And it’s not going to do her any good at all.

Immigration, feminism, and dyscivilization

Stefan Molyneux mentioned some telling statistics concerning the timing of the rapid increase in illegitimate births. This chart shows the percentage of illegitimate births, which have risen by an order of magnitude, from 4 percent in the 1940s and 1950s to 41 percent in 2010.

Notice the giant leap between 1960 and 1970. This cannot be entirely the result of feminism, but is likely a combination of a) the War on Poverty, b) the 1965 Immigration reform act, and c) feminism. The rise in illegitimacy is closely correlated with the changing racial demographics.

 
It is worth noting that the great brown hope of the equalitarians, mixed-race children, tend to be illegitimate and grow up without fathers. That isn’t exactly a sound set of building blocks on which to base a stable society. There hasn’t been a lot of research in this regard, but it is has been reported that 92 percent of biracial children with black fathers are illegitimate; 97 percent when the mothers are white. Even worse, only two percent of black fathers financially support biracial children or their white mothers, whether or not they marry them.
While it is merely anecdotal support for this study, you may recall how I noticed at Paris Disneyland that virtually no mixed-race children had a father with them. I saw many white children with white mothers and fathers, I saw several black children with black mothers and fathers, but with one exception, the mixed-race children were only accompanied by their mothers.

The situation is clearly not sustainable. Society will never be a functional brown equalitarian version of historical white American society. The concept is not even remotely credible given the observable evidence. This multiracial illegitimacy alone is sufficient to indicate why racial segregation is inevitable regardless of how anyone feels about it.

Homogeneous socities arise from heterogeneous societies because the latter are structurally inclined towards collapse. US society simply cannot survive in its current form; the stagnation and decline the USA has experienced to date is only beginning, as the effects of this 50-year destruction of the family are not even close to fully realized yet.

Back to the barricades

#GamerGate’s Operation Icy Blizzard is underway:

Operation Icy Blizzard is an operation with three main objectives. First it is to raise awareness about corruption in gaming journalism. Second it is to promote ethical alternatives to the mainstream gaming press. Third and most importantly, it is intended to spark a conversation and encourage new people to engage with it’s participants and discuss why they are care about ethics in games journalism and offer suggestions for moving forward.

The operation was originally proposed by /u/MikiSayaka33 last month and with her support I will be launching the operation with an initial Thunderclap campaign, which will send out a message that should reach tens or even hundreds of thousands of people. The campaign is worded in such a way as to both provide links to important resources AND serve as a jumping off point for new people and neutrals to join the conversation.

Obviously ethics in games journalism is only one facet of the conversation and this campaign is not intended to limit the scope of GamerGate, but ethics is the main focus of this particular campaign. The operation will go live on Friday, May 27th. I picked a Friday, because studies indicate that Twitter is more active on weekends and this provides people with a great opportunity to have a dialogue over the weekend.

If you want to participate in this operation, there are many ways you can help! The simplest way to help would be to sign up for the Thunderclap campaign and participate in the #IcyBlizzard and #GamerGate hashtags on Twitter (or other social media). If you are a content creator, you can help by making a video, blog post, art or similar content to encourage people to participate in the discussion and participate in the Thunderclap campaign.

I’m in, Oliver is in, and Lo-Ping is in. It’s already at 115 percent of participant goal, but let’s see that grow with your support. The media believes it has successfully spun the Narrative, but as it has learned more than once, the ride does not end and #GamerGate always comes back strong from every interlude.

Note that more than 400 separate incidents of game media corruption have been documented on DeepFreeze. As for moving forward, one of the most important things GG can do is to provide a functional action template and field guide for anti-SJWs in other fields.

America is not an idea

And Americans are not proposition people:

The concept of American Exceptionalism is one that on its face would seem to be a healthy one, which is what makes it so pernicious. In practice, American Exceptionalism is a favourite idea of the Glenn Beck crowd. Often what this belief comes down to is that the rules that apply to every country on the planet don’t apply to America, because there’s a piece of paper with ink on it in Washington that claims so.

America isn’t bound by blood like every other nation on the planet. Ethnicity and race may matter everywhere from England to China, but not in America. America, you see, is an exception to these rules, because America was a country created by ideas put forward by the founders. America is a proposition nation, they will tell you. Ideas built America.

This seems to me to be quite the concept! I wonder what it would look like to see Liberty and Equality running around Boston in 1750. How would the Declaration of Independence have managed to push further and further westward, trekking through miles of dense forest, weathering the rain and the snow and the hail, civilizing what was in in effect barren wilderness? What a sight it would be to see ideas clearing forest, laying down railroads, and building canals! I can’t say I have ever seen anything so incredible, but perhaps I would if I took a trip to the propositional nation to the south of me.

Yet, somehow, I doubt it. What mainstream conservatives have largely forgotten is that ideas can shape societies and peoples, but they don’t create them.

It would have been vastly preferable if the Founding Fathers had stuck to the original term – the Rights of Englishmen – rather than trying to make them sound universal for the purposes of rhetoric.

Just to give one example, those who don’t believe in the existence of a Creator God cannot possibly appeal to unalienable rights that stem from Him.

So angry

It’s amusing how the SJWs keep relying upon their primary tactic, which is to spin the Narrative no matter what relation it might have to the truth.

Michael Morlock ‏@RevWinfield
The latest tantrum by @voxday has just gone to show that Buttpounding enthusiast @ChuckTingle is both a better man and a better writer.

Great. So vote “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” for Best Short Story. Perhaps I will too.

I am intrigued by Kevin Standlee’s proposal, for a three-stage process
(nomination as now, but leading to a list of up to 15 potential stories,
then an up-down vote on whether a story was worthy, by current Worldcon
members only, then the final ballot as now). The better solution would
be for Vox Day to abandon his childish games, but that seems unlikely in
the near future at least.
– Rich Horton, Black Gate

Angry. Crying. Childish. Tantrum. Toddler.

Those who have read SJW Always Lie will, of course, recognize the tactic for what it is: a rhetorical attack. Their objective is no different than the objective of the fourth-grade girl who calls another girl ugly or fat. They’re simply playing Mean Girl Game, in which the rules are the first person to upset the other person and make them run off crying wins.

Now, you might ask yourself, what is the point of that? Even if I did feel devastated by people calling me names on the Internet and ran off crying, what would that change? In reality, nothing. But in their weird little delusion bubbles, they believe that just the right verbal sally will cause neutral parties to publicly acclaim them and enemies to submit. The fact that this has never, ever happened in their adult lives doesn’t prevent them from relying upon the tactic.

Anyhow, if an SJW someone else is slinging rhetoric at you, there is no need whatsoever to address it directly, to deny their ludicrous accusations, or to defend yourself in any way. Because what it means is that whatever you are doing is upsetting them and you should simply keep doing it. You can respond in kind if you feel like it, but there is no need to do so. The more they emote, the more they project, the more they will inform you where their vulnerabilities are.

For example, it should be readily apparent why so many of their preferred insults this year have a noticeable theme to them. They are projecting their emotional response to the accurate charge that as a community, they are harboring, defending, and celebrating pedophiles and child abusers. They very much dislike being referred to as pedofilers and pedophandom, because, as we know, the best and most effective rhetoric is that which has its basis in truth.

Conservatism and progress are dead ends

A commenter at Steve Sailer’s observes as much:

Social conservatism, which is largely concerned with morals legislation, is essentially dead, and has been since the Supreme Court Lawrence decision in 2003 (as Scalia correctly prophesied.) Thus anyone could have predicted the victory of SSM, and the discovery of all manner of rights in terms of sexuality, since, apparently, one’s membership card in LGBTQQIV2A is the only self-identification that means anything (not race, not religion, not language, not culture: just with whom and how you like to have sex: this includes asexuals of course, the “A” above: there’s another one for Allies.) So Ross can just give up on that. The same pertains to third trimester abortions or anything else, because virtually any attempt to police human conduct (except the ingestion of drugs, of course) can and will be carried into an argument about our innate right to do whatever we want.

Hawkish internationalism is also a dead letter, since we just had a decade or more of foolishly prosecuted wars, and one can (some cynically, I suppose) claim that with the most pressing issues for the DOD being the extension of selective service registration to women, and the integration of transgender drill instructors into the the Marine Corps Recruit Depots, it is highly unlikely that there will be any non-foolishly prosecuted wars in the near or far future.

Free market economics is also dead, since the American economy has already been heavily socialized by a variety of government controls, restrictions, and, most importantly, benefits, which the citizenry (at this point) cannot live without.

So Reagan is dead, so is Reaganism. The only question is what can we do to improve the lot of regular Americans, materially, and what can we do to generate some kind of purpose for our people and our nation.

The correct approach is not to attempt to save, or fix, the United States of America. As I noted back in 2004, it’s dead. It is no more a true nation than Yugoslavia, or South Africa, or the Austro-Hungarian Empire were.

The long term American focus should be on successfully doing what the South Africans failed to do, which is peacefully dividing the empire between the various nations. This will no doubt be difficult for many to accept, but it is what is going to happen anyway, and the sooner that “conservatives” understand that this is the only way to preserve the actual nation, as opposed to the mythical “proposition nation” which is now based on nothing more than Magic Dirt Theory, the more likely it is that they will be able to come away with something sustainable.

The very great irony is that the combination of multiculturalism, feminism, and propositionism is collectively less societally viable than North Korea’s insane political economy. North Korea is a totalitarian nightmare, but it has indubitably remained Korean, in fact, more Korean than England is English or Germany is German.

History demonstrates that a nation can survive evil kings and nightmarish ideologies, but may not be able to survive what many, if not most, in the West today consider “progress”. One really should be inspired to completely reassess one’s ideology when it is observably more societally destructive than Juche.

And still they doubt me

I find it fascinating that every single step along the way, SF-SJWs are always convinced that this time, surely this one more time, they will be able to stop me from pursuing my objectives. The Reverend 3.0 considers the growing movement to permaban the Puppies from participation in the Hugo Awards.

In a way, the Puppy Revolt could end up making things easier on the Controllers, because it gives them an excuse to seize control under the cover of protecting everyone from the Puppies. Not that this will stop the slow death of traditional publishing, but whatever.

Now, Vox wants us to believe he can use the proposed PermaBan rule against the Kickers. That remains to be seen, but the man has an excellent track record on these things.

I’m torn on whether or not Vox can pull that off. My gut tells me that this is at least partially a bluff, but I have no evidence and it runs counter to Vox’s pattern of saying what he will do and then doing it. But the gut will say what it says, regardless of reason.

Predictions Time:

-The Powers That Be will move forward with PermaBanning, and will implement it if they think they can get away with it.

-If PermaBanning is implemented, the Hugo base will go along with it.

-If Vox can flip PermaBanning on the PTB, I will give my gut a very stern talking-to.

These people must spend all their time posing, posturing, and bluffing, because every time I do what I tell them I am going to do, they’re astonished. Although it is amusing that they’re already abandoning hope in EPH, which they were certain was the answer last year.

Of course, I told them as much, in fact, I made it clear that I welcome the passage of EPH, as its implementation will mark the start of the second stage of the Pink SF-Blue SF cultural war. But an open ban would take us to the third stage even faster.

That being said, one has to credit Rev 3.0 for being correct in the essentials:

First, we can all appreciate how much of a brilliant predictor I am. Second, we can examine that perennial question: is Vox Day a legitimate threat or a paper tiger? I have said (over and over again) that he is a legitimate threat. The Establishment has said (over and over again) that he is a “toddler.” You be the judge.

Betting against the SJW Narrative is usually the safe bet. And then, of course, there is this:

If the 2016 Hugos are the Year of the Gay Space Raptor (ie, the
biggest talking point and what people remember it for), Vox knows what
he’s doing.