Author: VD

The End of Anti-Racist Liberalism

In which ESR, a smart, well-educated anti-racist liberal, reluctantly accepts that the racists who fought against the imposition of civil rights in the United States were right all along:

“The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned;”

The part of me that was once an idealistic anti-racist liberal marching for civil rights died its final death last night as I watched the video of Irina Zarutska on the Charlotte light rail, being fatally stabbed in the throat from behind by a black savage I refuse to name.

What has finally broken me is, incidents like that aren’t even a surprise anymore. The frequency of brutal, senseless murders by “African-Americans”, both individually and in predatory mobs, has risen exactly as rapidly as social and coercive controls on their behavior have weakened.

Meanwhile, for anybody who’s wondering, American whites still have about the same crime rate as Switzerland. When enforcement of norms disintegrates, only intelligent people with low time preference still act civilized.

As I’ve watched us sliding down the civilizational failure gradient, the question I’ve been increasingly unable to dismiss is this: was the whole ugly apparatus of racial repression – segregation, sundown towns, lynchings -really just senseless hatred? Or was it a rational containment strategy evolved under pressure from living alongside a large, visually distinct population of low-IQ savages?

I think I know the answer now. And I hate knowing it. I preferred my innocence.

It doesn’t do any good to protest that this particular savage was “mentally ill”, whatever you think that means. The mobs that routinely form to beat up and kill whites unwary enough to wander onto their turf aren’t psychotic, unless all Blacks are psychotic.

Yes, yes, I know. If you were to select a population of whites for the same distribution of IQ and time preference as American Blacks, and then coddle them, scholarship out their brightest kids for four generations, and tell them all of their failures are society’s fault, you’d get the same level of pathology and violence in about the time it took you to say “dyscultural and dysgenic”.

That doesn’t matter. We’re not dealing with that hypothetical. We’re dealing with reality. The reality is that we have a predation problem that will only be solved when our actual population of low IQ savages is contained again. Creatures like Irina’s murderer, cognitively unable to participate in civilization, must be subject to either segregation or repression so brutal that they live in fear of it.

I don’t really want to live in the kind of society that can do either these things. But Irina Zarutska’s murder is the seal on my realization that there are no longer soft options, only hard choices.

I’d prefer the one where armed citizens routinely shoot down creatures like that at the time of the attempted crime, or immediately after it. All the alternatives seem far worse.

My only observation would be that the problem isn’t four generations in the making, it’s one that would require about 1,000 years of relentless eugenics to solve given the time to civilization required for the erstwhile savages of Northern Europe.

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Focus on the Homeland

A long overdue shift from maintaining the failing Pax Americana to defending the US homeland would be a very welcome change.

Pentagon officials are proposing the department prioritize protecting the homeland and Western Hemisphere, a striking reversal from the military’s yearslong mandate to focus on the threat from China. A draft of the newest National Defense Strategy, which landed on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s desk last week, places domestic and regional missions above countering adversaries such as Beijing and Moscow, according to three people briefed on early versions of the report.

The move would mark a major shift from recent Democrat and Republican administrations, including President Donald Trump’s first term in office, when he referred to Beijing as America’s greatest rival. And it would likely inflame China hawks in both parties who view the country’s leadership as a danger to U.S. security.

“This is going to be a major shift for the U.S. and its allies on multiple continents,” said one of the people briefed on the draft document. “The old, trusted U.S. promises are being questioned.”

Why the American people should give one quantum of a damn about “old, trusted US promises” given to foreigners when none of the promises given to them have been kept is an obvious question. But Simplicius and others doubt that this “major shift” is real anyhow.

Recall the US even under Trump has dragged its feet for years on initiatives to pull troops from Iraq, Europe, etc. An excuse is always somehow resurrected at the last moment which buys the MIC time and keeps US occupation forces perpetually in places where their presence stirs conflict, exacerbates tensions, and unnecessarily provokes so-called “adversaries” like Russia, China, or Iran. US troops in Syria, for instance—which Trump has likewise failed to pull—have done nothing but facilitate conflict, act as JTACs for Israeli strike corridors, etc.; the claim of being some sort of ‘peacekeepers’ is a sham.

If the troops are brought back from Europe and the Middle East, the borders are manned, and the mass repatriations begin, then perhaps we can take some of these pronouncements seriously. But until then, it’s all just irrelevant noise.

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Baseless Con

Castalia doesn’t support any con that treats people this way, particularly not one of our authors:

For the last five years, Libertarian author Robert Kroese has been running an alternative convention to the mainstream industry-run cons such as WorldCon, with the intention of making it an alternative. Unfortunately, the convention has turned into much the same liberal gatekeeping as those conventions, as the convention banned me after Kroese could not handle my calling modern woke D&D “Satanic” (rightfully in my opinion), and proceeded to cancel me over my journalism calling out problems in the gaming industry.

There’s much more to the reason robkroese went full-cancel that has to do with his personal ego with the convention rather than anything I’ve done, which is why his continued actions have been beyond absurd, and it’s been a debate of whether Fandom Pulse should address this matter at all.

I’m chosing to for two reasons: 1. Fandom Pulse provides the best comprehensive coverage of conventions with bad behaviors, and this is no different despite my being the focus of the story, 2. because at the convention, Kroese is taking the stage dedicating an entire panel to personally attacking me, which I’ve never heard of a convention doing in the history of cons, making this an incredibly exceptional situation. Despite saying there’s no panel, what is giving a 20-minute talk from a stage of a convention if not a panel?

Below is the history of what transpired and why this is simply a mockery of the name “BasedCon.”

The cucks and cons who act as if they’re any sort of alternative to the SJWs in genre fiction, while attempting to police ideas, politics, and tone in exactly the same manner as those to whom they purport to be an alternative, are as useless and ultimately ephemeral as the Bush Republicans.

They’re just another form of gatekeeper, and they are always opposed to anything that isn’t more of the status quo, only with a conservative varnish. But they’ll cancel people over insufficient enthusiasm for the Gazacaust as readily as the SJWs will cancel someone for insufficient enthusiasm for transgender children.

Anyhow, this is why we don’t support BasedCon, although since we’re not into the business of socially policing anyone, we don’t have any problem with those who choose to attend it, or WorldCon, or ComicCon, or any of the various other events that we ignore as we continue to build infrastructure that will not only last generations, but hopefully, centuries.

Before the end of October, we’ll have the ability to produce mainstream-sized print runs, but in leather. It’s taken a very long time for all of the pieces to come together, but we’re finally getting to where we knew we needed to be. And there will very likely be some developments well beyond what anyone is imagining is possible in the next few years, as our strategic plan for the next stage will take most people by surprise.

Which is why I’m making it clear now that we will work with anyone who simply wishes to do business in a professional manner, regardless of whatever their past antics may have been. We are focused on producing the best and most beautiful books in the world, and while there is certain content we will not publish, we don’t concern ourselves with policing the opinions of our current or prospective partners.

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Japanese PM Resigns

Okay, I jumped the gun on this one by a few weeks, but the inevitable has now occurred:

Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba resigned on Sunday, ushering in a potentially lengthy period of policy uncertainty at a shaky moment for the world’s fourth-largest economy. Having just ironed out final details of a trade deal with the United States to lower President Donald Trump’s punishing tariffs, Ishiba, 68, told a press conference he must take responsibility for a series of bruising election losses.

Since coming to power less than a year ago, the unlikely premier has overseen his ruling coalition lose its majorities in elections for both houses of parliament amid voter anger over rising living costs. He instructed his Liberal Democratic Party – which has ruled Japan for almost all of the post-war period – to hold an emergency leadership race, adding he would continue his duties until his successor was elected.

“With Japan having signed the trade agreement and the president having signed the executive order, we have passed a key hurdle,” Ishiba said, his voice seeming to catch with emotion. “I would like to pass the baton to the next generation.”

Ishiba has faced calls to resign since the latest of those losses in an election for the upper house in July.

Ishiba has also been pushing Clown World immigration policies on Japan, which has been a factor in the rise of the new anti-immigration Japanese party that helped keep the LDP out of the majority.

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Most Authors Will Get Nothing

A lot of authors are very excited about the announcement of the Anthropic settlement that promises to pay out about $3,000 per work to the authors whose work was pirated.

There’s just one problem: the settlement excludes 92.8 percent of the pirated works, including pretty much all foreign authors, foreign publishers – including Castalia House – and self-published authors. Even worse, there is absolutely no path to legal redress for them in the US courts.

AI Central explains why.

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Mailvox: Tactical Dominance isn’t Victory

An American military analyst shared his professional opinion about the challenge facing the Israeli military, as the Netanyahu regime appears to be writing checks the IDF knows it can’t cash:

Israel’s professional military is what has generated its tactical dominance — operationally and strategically, its position is deteriorating faster than almost anyone predicted, evidently excluding me, and the General who was in charge of training the IDF’s generals.

The IDF’s general officer corps is currently openly fretting about a potential war with both Egypt and Turkiye — they didn’t consider either scenario even a remote possibility 2 years ago, with the only people who frequently pointed out the possibility of war with Egypt being old Shin Bet Egypt hands that’ve scrupulously documented the Egyptian military’s build-up.

To be clear, the IDF’s generals concluded that they’d functionally lost the Gaza war like 4 months after it started. They’re not stupid. A major contributing factor to this strategic miscarriage is the IDF’s conscription policy, which has cultivated a general sentiment of martial invincibility that really is not grounded in material reality. That’s enabled the Israeli government’s designated wingnuts to push through flamboyantly strategically self-defeating regional policies because their support base has a “we can take them” attitude rooted in their temporary service, despite Israel not having fought anyone even approaching peer status in 50 years.

I shouldn’t even have to expound upon the IDF’s conscripts’ bad battlefield performance, and their high casualty rates when they actually see combat. The professional Israeli Army has borne the brunt of the actual fighting, and even they’ve been experiencing manpower shortages for over a year now — largely from casualties absorbed.

Now, I don’t put much stock in American military analysts anymore, much less European military analysts, since most of them have been so observably wrong with regards to both the Ukrainian and the Taiwan situation. But, in the case, the analyst correctly predicted the same thing that students of Martin van Creveld also knew, which is that a Gaza operation would most likely cause the serious deterioration of both the IDF’s military capabilities as well as its strategic position in the region.

Goliath can’t find David for an extended period of time without degrading its morale, its morals, and its military capabilities. It’s the same reason police make terrible combat soldiers. Becoming accustomed to outnumbering and outgunning the opponent by a significant margin is not conducive to developing the skills, mindset, and practices required to defeat a genuine peer; there is a reason why the oddsmakers favor college football teams who test themselves with formidable opponents early in the season over those who schedule cupcakes.

Imagine if Notre Dame played nothing but high school teams all season, then went up against Ohio State. That’s pretty much what the IDF has done for the last 50 years. Although its special operations have been wildly successful with the support of the USA in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, none of these geostrategic accomplishments – and the unseating of the Assad regime in Syria was particularly impressive – actually have anything to do with genuine military combat. And I see no signs that the IDF has begun to start even trying to apply the lessons of the new generation of infantry warfare developed in Nagorno-Karabakh and Ukraine.

This may explain why the Netanyahu regime recently backed down from its intentions to announce the annexation of the West Bank. The ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from Greater Israel is obviously its goal, but saner heads in Israel understand that openly pursuing that objective will likely trigger a war it is unlikely to win.

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Never Seen That Before

The Golden Gophers were up 59-0 over some team called Northwestern State which looked more like Northwestern College in Roseville. After the stadium ran out of fireworks, and it became clear that even the substitutes were too much for the NSU players, the referee announced that the game had been called by mutual consent midway through the fourth quarter with the score at 66-0.

I’m not saying it was the wrong decision. In fact, given the circumstances, it was probably the right thing to do. I just want to know why they didn’t call the game early back in the days when the Gophers were losing 73-0 to Nebraska.

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Fear of a Dark Lord

People occasionally ask me why I am often referred to as a “dark lord” and why my various minions, ilk, followers, and fans address me as “SDL”. This is just one of the many reasons why:

I’ve discovered that any reference to you or the SSH shuts down, and makes inoperable, Proton’s AI, Lumo.

When even artificial intelligences fear to speak your name, or dare to even attempt to write in your style, well, you just might be a dark lord.

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Conservatives Reject the Proposition Nation

It’s more than a little late, but conservatives are finally beginning to shake off the absurd idea that America is not an actual nation of people, but an idea:

It the recent NatCon conference in Washington, D.C., Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri delivered a powerful speech about American identity, arguing that our nation isn’t merely an abstract proposition about human equality and rights, but a distinct people with a shared past and a common future.

“For decades, the mainstream consensus on the Left and the Right alike seemed to be that America itself was just an ‘idea’ — a vehicle for global liberalism,” Schmitt said. “We were told that the entire meaning of America boiled down to a few lines in a poem on the Statue of Liberty and five words about equality in the Declaration of Independence. Any other aspect of American identity was deemed to be illegitimate and immoral, poisoned by the evils of our ancestors. The true meaning of America, they said, was liberalism, multiculturalism, and endless immigration.”

Not so, argued Schmitt. America’s principles, he said, are not abstractions. “They are living, breathing things — rooted in a people and embodied in a way of life. It’s only in that context that they become real.”

This is absolutely correct. Those who would reduce America to an abstract proposition either misunderstand or misrepresent our history and heritage. As I argued at NatCon last year, nearly everyone who argues that America is a proposition is wrong about what the proposition is and what it means. “All men are created equal” is a specifically Christian claim, not a universal call to multiculturalism and mass immigration. It emerged as a political ideal from Christian Europe, and arrived in America by way of settlers and pioneers who came here specifically to establish a nation where they could practice their Christian faith as they saw fit.

In other words, America isn’t a grab-bag of Enlightenment tropes about free speech and equality, but the product of Christian Europe. The ideals that animated our founders are universal in the same way that the Christian faith is universal: God created all men equal, they all bear the imago Dei, the image of God, and are all His children. But the only people who ever took that self-evident truth and used it as a foundation on which to forge a new nation were the English colonists in America.

The fundamental falsity of the proposition nation can perhaps be most obviously seen in the way that “a nation of immigrants” has subsequently been applied everywhere from England and Sweden to, most recently, Japan, of all places. It’s a psychological operation, not a philosophical truth.

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Switzerland Isn’t Neutral

The Swiss media is quite rightly beginning to worry about the inevitable implications of the Swiss government’s decision to abandon neutrality now that the rest of the world has taken note of the way in which the Swiss government is waging economic and proxy war on Russia at the behest of the European Union.

Is Switzerland still neutral? People ask Google this question, or a similar one, some 14,000 times a month – outside Switzerland and in English.

In a trial search, an English-language article from Turkish state media shows up quite high on the list. “Why Switzerland is breaking away from 500-year-old neutrality,” says the headline. Although the text itself is more nuanced, the headline sets the wrong tone and skews the readers’ interpretation. And as journalists know, far more people read the headline than the actual article.

There are various reasons why people abroad may be asking Google about Swiss neutrality. One is that foreign players – in particular Russian propaganda channels – are spreading misinformation on the issue.

It is important that people who take the trouble to research Swiss neutrality have access to reliable and accurate information. Anyone who claims that Switzerland is no longer neutral is assuming that Switzerland has picked a side. And anyone who has taken sides can be viewed with hostility.

It is therefore in Switzerland’s interest to ensure that its neutrality, which has been the guiding principle of its foreign policy since 1815, is correctly communicated to the international public. If a person hears over and over again that Switzerland is no longer neutral, they can easily come to perceive this as the dominant view. This is the case even if the statement is made multiple times by the same source but reaches them through different channels. Frequently repeated untruths have a proven effect.

And frequently repeated truths have an even greater effect, because the most powerful rhetoric points toward the truth.

Switzerland obviously isn’t neutral. It has engaged in many hostile actions toward Russia over the last three years. In fact, it has engaged in so many of them that it has been formally declared an “unfriendly nation” by Russia as a result of those actions.

The Russian Federation has decided to add Switzerland to its list of “unfriendly nations”, after the country imposed sanctions on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine. The move follows a letter from the Russian Foreign Minister, who asked the Swiss government, “Which side are you on?”

In the press conference announcing the sanctions, Swiss President Ignazio Cassis dismissed Russian accusations of a violation of neutrality by saying, “Playing into the hands of an aggressor is not neutral.” Speaking to Blick about the allegation made by Vladimir Putin that western sanctions amounted to a declaration of war on Russia, the president said, “Switzerland is not at war with Russia.”

“Switzerland remains a neutral country,” said law professor Oliver Diggelmann, from the University of Zurich. He noted that a commitment to neutrality did not mean a commitment to inaction and that “the Swiss government recognised that not fully sanctioning such a blatant violation economically would make (Switzerland) an indirect accomplice of the aggressor.”

These word games don’t fool anyone. Cassis’s response is both irrelevant and disingenuous, and is the sort of sophistic rhetoric that doesn’t even merit being taken seriously, let alone at face value.

Doing nothing is not “playing into the hands of an aggressor”. It is, quite literally, NOT doing that. It is, quite literally, doing nothing. If we combine both statements by Cassis and Diggelman, it’s easy to see how inverted the “economic sanctions are neutral” logic is.

  • Neutrality does not mean doing nothing.
  • Doing nothing would make Switzerland an indirect accomplice of Russia
  • Enacting economic sanctions is necessary to avoid becoming an indirect accomplice of Russia
  • Enacting economic sanctions makes Switzerland a direct accomplice of Ukraine, the EU, and the USA
  • Therefore, neutrality requires Switzerland to become a direct accomplice of Ukraine, the EU, and the USA
  • In other words, neutrality requires Switzerland to take sides against Russia.

This isn’t merely incorrect logic, it is inverted sophistry that relies upon an implicit redefinition of the term “neutrality” from “not taking sides” to “not taking the side of the aggressor”. Which means that the “interventionist neutrality” approach literally requires the abandonment of genuine neutrality and the replacement of the word with something that means its exact opposite.

The claim that Switzerland has taken a side is observably true. The claim that Switzerland is still neutral is observably false.

We’ve seen this sort of inversion before. We’ve seen it many, many times. As with the EU’s “democracy” that fights the will of the people and the UK’s “liberalism” that imprisons people for having opinions, this new Swiss “neutrality” is the exact opposite of what everyone historically understood the word to mean. The worldwide observations of the recent Swiss abandonment of neutrality aren’t false, they are 100 percent correct.

The more important point is to recognize that no one from Beijing to Washington cares even a little bit about how Swiss policy or Swiss law formally defines neutrality. All the legalistic word games are irrelevant. Unlike the tango, it doesn’t take two to war. If Russia says you’re at war with them, then guess what? You’re at war with Russia. And as has been made very clear by the SCO summit, if you’re at war with Russia, then you’re at war with China too. Good luck with that.

The small nations of Europe are still stuck in the post-WWII mindset of an invincible USA, but the post-WWII era is over. The USA can’t defeat either Russia nor China anymore, and it would now lose both a land war in Europe and a sea war in the Pacific. At this point, the US military might not even be able to prevent a joint invasion if the Sino-Russian alliance elected to launch a 10-year all-out war of invasion and occupation, although fortunately neither China nor Russia has any interest in doing that.

So while taking sides is foolish, taking the side that is guaranteed to lose, taking the side that has the military-industrial deck stacked even more heavily against it than the one that was stacked against the Axis powers in WWII, is downright insane.

It’s not too late for the Swiss. No one in China or Russia is under any illusion about the Swiss people wanting to go to war with them. They know perfectly well who is responsible for the economic war on them. But that means it’s time to start fixing the diplomatic damage of the last three years, not to double down and make it worse while trying to deny it. It needs to be fixed before it’s too late and no one cares anymore what is said or done.

The Swiss government’s opinion on neutrality is perfect clear. It is absolutely against it.

Bern, 26.6.2024 – The popular initiative ‘Safeguarding Swiss neutrality’ (Neutrality Initiative) seeks to enshrine neutrality and its practical application in Switzerland’s Federal Constitution. At its meeting of 26 June 2024, the Swiss Federal Council decided to recommend that the people and the cantons reject the Neutrality Initiative.

30.5.2025 – The Foreign Affairs Committee of the Council of States soundly rejected the neutrality initiative, reported SRF. The Council of States’ Security Policy Committee also resoundingly rejected the popular initiative in mid-February.

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