Author: VD

Why one writes

There are those who write primarily for money. That is their right, but they are nothing more than word whores and they are not to be imitated, because word whoredom wears at one’s soul and generally does not pay well. John C. Wright explains a much better reason for writing:

If you only write one book in your whole life, and only sell 600 copies or less, nonetheless, I assure you, I solemnly assure you, that this book will be someone’s absolutely favorite book of all time, and it will come to him on some dark day and give him sunlight, and open his eyes and fill his heart and make him see things in life even you never suspected, and will be his most precious tale, and it will live in his heart like the Book of Gold.

Let me give you three examples to support my point: VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS by David Lindsay had perhaps more effect and influence on me in my youth than any other book aside from WORLD OF NULL-A by A.E. van Vogt. To be fair, I misinterpreted both books, and took them to be preaching a resolute form of scientific Stoicism, an absolute devotion to sanity and truth which I doubt either author would recognize. I never wrote Mr. van Vogt a fan letter, despite that my whole life was influenced by him (but I did write a novel to honor him). Had it not been for his books, I never would have studied philosophy in High School, never would have gone to Saint John’s in Annapolis, never would have read the Great Books. I never would have met my wife.

As for Mr. Lindsay, he sold less than 600 copies of his book, and died in poverty, ignored and forgotten, of an abscess in a tooth any competent dentist could have pulled. And this is a book luminaries such as Colin Wilson, C.S. Lewis, and Harold Bloom regard as seminal. Mr. Wilson called it the greatest novel of the Twentieth Century.

The third example is my own. I wrote a short story called AWAKE IN THE NIGHT for the website of Andy Robertson, and was paid enough to buy a new stove. People have written me to say that this tale inspired dreams and nightmares, inspired new resolve, inspired hope, and at least one woman who was in the midst of her most wretched hour of despair, said she found strength just from the one description of a star appearing through the darkest clouds. What these readers see in my work is far beyond what I have the power to put down on the page: the hand of heaven touched that work, and those readers who express awe are seeing not the author’s hand, but the hand of the Creator who is author of us all, who guided the work without my knowledge.

I was luckier than Mr Lindsay in that I have gotten the letters and applause from admirers denied him, but like him,  I have no idea of what future generations, if any, will read and admire my work. I will never know. It is beyond my event horizon. So that is not why writers write.

I write for that one reader I will never see, the one who needs just such a tale as I can pen, in just such a time and place, some rainy afternoon or dark hour, when providence will bring my book into his hands. And he will open it, and it will not be a book, but a casement, from which he will glimpse the needed vision his soul requires of a world larger than our own, or a star in a heaven wider and higher than ours, a star aflame with magic more majestic than any star mortal astronomers can name.

I am a much lesser writer than Mr. Wright. I write primarily for my own amusement and in order to help me order my thoughts, in part because I have never forgotten something a young woman once told me: “Everyone thinks they have great thoughts, but that’s just a feeling. Those thoughts might not even exist, so the value of a thought can only be determined after it is articulated.” And since I spend most of my time alone, the only way for me to articulate my thoughts is to write them down.

For example, I’m sure many people have said at one time or another something like this: “I wonder how dwarves live deep underground in caves?” When I think such a thought, my mind tends to wander towards figuring out how the dwarven economy might work by raising sightless fish and salamanders for meat, and harvesting various fungi and other lifeforms that don’t require light. And then I start doing research, which inevitably forces me to reconsider my initial thoughts.

“Many cave communities will rely on food being brought into the cave
from the surface. This organic debris includes leafs, twigs etc. brought
in by surface streams or falling down vertical shafts;
it also includes organic matter brought in by visitors to the cave,
carcasses of animals that have wandered in, and droppings from animals
such as bats.
The amount of debris that can be brought in is very evident in Porth
yr Ogof
– including large tree trunks. Most creatures will be found near the
surface where food is more plentiful – the deeper you go in a cave the
harder you will have to look.
In the depths of a cave the communities may be concentrated around
food sources generated by cave bacteria on e.g. flowstone.”

This means that any community of intelligent beings dwelling deep underground would have to have a major industry that revolved around bringing organic matter into the caves, which implies a transportation system for that matter and so forth. I imagine most fans of Selenoth can guess where this particular thought ended up going. My muse is not Beauty, but Logic, which has a peculiar beauty all its own.

In any event, I consider it a mistake to write for any reason besides the joy of it. As Mr. Wright observes, there will always be someone who appreciates one’s work, and it doesn’t really matter a great deal if one only has one ideal reader or one million.

And since we’re on the topic of writing, I should probably mention that my first solo books, the Eternal Warriors trilogy, are finally back in electronic print. All three books, The War in Heaven, The World in Shadow, and The Wrath of Angels are now exclusively available from the Castalia House store. We will also have some interesting announcements regarding some other authors who will be available from the store next week.

The Great War 100 years later

esr reviews Collision of Empires, a history of WWI:

Collision of Empires (Prit Buttar; Osprey Publishing) is a clear and accessible history that attempts to address a common lack in accounts of the Great War that began a century ago this year: they tend to be centered on the Western Front and the staggering meat-grinder that static trench warfare became as outmoded tactics collided with the reality of machine guns and indirect-fire artillery.

Concentration on the Western Front is understandable in the U.S. and England; the successor states of the Western Front’s victors have maintained good records, and nationals of the English-speaking countries were directly involved there. But in many ways the Eastern Front story is more interesting, especially in the first year that Buttar chooses to cover – less static, and with a sometimes bewilderingly varied cast. And, arguably, larger consequences. The war in the east eventually destroyed three empires and put Lenin’s Communists in power in Russia.

Prit Buttar does a really admirable job of illuminating the thinking of the German, Austrian, and Russian leadership in the run-up to the war – not just at the diplomatic level but in the ways that their militaries were struggling to come to grips with the implications of new technology. The extensive discussion of internecine disputes over military doctrine in the three officer corps involved is better than anything similar I’ve seen elsewhere.

There is more at his site. However, as a corrective to this obviously
deficient history of the Great War, allow me to recommend the book I just
finished reading, namely, CATASTROPHE 1914 by Max Hastings, which can be
summarized as follows.

  1. The Great War was the inevitable consequence of dastardly German militarism. Since the
    Kaiser didn’t forcibly stop Austria from invading Serbia, the Germans
    are entirely to blame for making British lads volunteer to travel to the continent
    and die in the mud.
  2. Moltke was a psychological train wreck wholly unsuitable for command.
  3. French was a psychological train wreck wholly unsuitable for command.
  4. Churchill was an excitable loon wholly unsuitable for command of any unit larger than a company.
  5. If it were not for the brave and heroic British Expeditionary Force
    defending freedom, justice, and democracy, the Germans would have broken
    through the French lines and conquered the continent.
  6. The French did a little fighting too. So did the Russians. The Serbs
    killed lots of Austrians. None of this had any serious effect on the
    war, which was won by British courage and pluck.
  7. The death of millions was worth it in the end, because Germany is bad and if the Central Powers had won, Europe would not have the European Union today.

Obama betrays the Constitution

What’s remarkable isn’t that Barack Hussein Obama is ignoring the U.S. Constitution and its limits on the powers of his office. What is remarkable is that the New York Times is calling him out on it:

PRESIDENT OBAMA’s declaration of war against the terrorist group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria marks a decisive break in the American constitutional tradition. Nothing attempted by his predecessor, George W. Bush, remotely compares in imperial hubris.

Mr. Bush gained explicit congressional consent for his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In contrast, the Obama administration has not even published a legal opinion attempting to justify the president’s assertion of unilateral war-making authority. This is because no serious opinion can be written….

But
for now the president seems grimly determined to practice what Mr.
Bush’s lawyers only preached. He is acting on the proposition that the
president, in his capacity as commander in chief, has unilateral
authority to declare war. In
taking this step, Mr. Obama is not only betraying the electoral
majorities who twice voted him into office on his promise to end
Bush-era abuses of executive authority. He is also betraying the
Constitution he swore to uphold.

ISIS in Iraq and Syria is not a problem. Immigrants in the USA are a problem. The complete lack of a southern border is a problem. The expanding credit demand gap and the outstanding debt to GDP ratio is a problem. The decline of Christendom is a problem. The rise of the new Caliphate will likely pose a serious problem for future generations, but there will be no future generation capable of fighting it if the West in general and the USA in particular refuses to provide it with a coherent opposition that is not riven by its sympathizers.

We are waiting for Martel.

It is an appallingly bad idea for Obama to attempt to drag a war-weary, divided nation into a war that has nothing to do with the national interest. It is such a bad idea that even the New York Times is capable of recognizing it.

Evidence of global warming

Or rather, the exact opposite. Again.

An early September winter storm in the Black Hills has dumped up to 8 inches of snow in the area, while Rapid City received its earliest snowfall in more than 120 years.

Jon Chamberlain, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Rapid City, said almost 1 inch of snow had fallen in downtown Rapid City by 8:30 a.m. while 2 inches was measured in higher elevations in town.

The snowfall in downtown Rapid City is the earliest in the city since 1888, the NWS said. The previous early snowfall mark was seven-tenths of an inch on Sept. 13, 1970.

Science does not need women

Science doesn’t need anyone except good scientists who actually understand and utilize scientage.

One of the main glories of science is that it is universal, or at least approaches universality as nearly as it is possible for a human activity to do. Within a few years of Commodore Perry’s opening up of Japan to the outside world, Japanese scientists were contributing to the (then) new science of bacteriology on an equal footing with Western scientists. But that is not at all the same as saying that science needed the Japanese. It could have got on very well without them.

It is true, of course, that women are demographically underrepresented in the ranks of scientists, but so are many other groups. (This means, of course, that others are overrepresented.) This may be for more than one reason: lack of aptitude or interest, for example, or deliberate or subtle obstructiveness. But historical attempts to recruit scientists according to some demographic criterion or other have not been met with success, even as far as the advancement of science itself is concerned, and have been made by the very worst dictatorships that in other respects have been abominable. Social engineering and engineering are two very different activities. It would be no consolation to know while on a collapsing bridge and about to plunge into the deep ravine below that it had been built by a truly representative sample of the population, and was therefore a monument to social justice.

If science needed more women, it would have more women. As it happens, science observably has far more women and more men than it needs, which is why more and more people are leaving science because they don’t wish to spend all their time playing the grant game rather than doing actual science. Science got along perfectly well for centuries without much in the way of female involvement, after all.

Every time – EVERY TIME – you hear someone say “X needs more Y”, you can be absolutely certain that they are useless parasites who are only capable of political activism and useless bureaucracy.

Israel is not a Christian nation

Someone clearly needs to explain the difference to Sen. Ted Cruz, who is not someone that any sane conservative should be supporting for president:

Cruz, the keynote speaker at the new “In Defense Of Christians” organization’s dinner in Washington DC, had offered the crowd–a number of whom were Christians from the Middle East, including Palestinian Christians–public support for Israel. After doing so, some members of the crowd booed at Cruz, and they persisted until he left the stage, noting their hatred and saying he can’t stand with them if they don’t stand with Israel.

“Tonight, in Washington, should have been a night of unity as we came together for the inaugural event for a group that calls itself ‘In Defense of Christians.’ Instead, it unfortunately deteriorated into a shameful display of bigotry and hatred,” Cruz said in a statement provided to Breitbart News. “When I spoke in strong support of Israel and the Jewish people, who are being persecuted and murdered by the same vicious terrorists who are also slaughtering Christians, many Christians in the audience applauded.  But, sadly, a vocal and angry minority of attendees at the conference tried to shout down my expression of solidarity with Israel.”

Why on Earth is Cruz babbling about Israel and Jews when the topic is “In Defense of Christians”. It’s no secret that Israel is openly prejudiced against Christians and Christianity, although it does not persecute them. And Jews are not Christians; simply becoming acknowledging Jesus Christ as one’s Lord and Savior is enough to legally render a Jew a non-Jew in the eyes of Israeli law.

From Wikipedia: “The Supreme Court of Israel ruled in 1989 that Messianic Judaism constituted another religion, and that people who had become Messianic Jews were not therefore eligible for Aliyah under the law.”

Now, I support Israel and defend its right to exist. But it was downright weird, and totally inappropriate, for Cruz to attempt to transform an event dedicated to the defense of persecuted Christians into public Holocaustianity.

Video Game Sex War

There’s a headline for you. It’s pretty obvious that the anti-game women are alarmed and in retreat when they are running to the international media for support simply because Zoe Quinn was exposed as a whore taking advantage of corruption in the world of independent game journalism:

Evil women are coming to take away your computer games. At least, that’s the message that a group of angry young men have been articulating on the internet in the past few weeks. According to them, these games – once a haven for socially awkward teenage boys – are being ruined by the monstrous regiment….

This online explosion grew from two separate, though connected, incidents. The
first was the success of a series of videos made by the blogger Anita
Sarkeesian, called Tropes vs Women, which explored the portrayal of women in
video games (generally submissive and for decoration). When she launched a
crowdfund appeal for the project in 2012, she raised $150,000 more than she
asked for, but also unleashed a vicious campaign of sustained harassment.
Hackers tried to gain access to her social media accounts and she was
bombarded with tweets and emails threatening her with rape and death. A few
weeks ago, she had to leave her home because she feared for her safety.

While this was going on, a game developer called Zoe Quinn also became the
target of abuse, when her former boyfriend posted online accusations of
infidelity: he claimed she had cheated on him with a games journalist. A few
impressionable young men decided that this was their opportunity to end
“corruption” in games journalism once and for all. They bombarded Quinn with
abuse and threats, insisting that their anger was about press ethics – she
had traded sexual favours for good reviews – rather than misogyny. It turned
out that the journalist in question had not even reviewed Quinn’s game.

While many of the men involved in these incidents are undoubtedly motivated by
sexism and sadism – there is a nasty trend on the internet to abuse women
per se – they are right about one thing: women are coming to take away their
computer games…. [A]s video games are increasingly subjected to the same cultural criticism
that is routinely applied to books, films and television programmes, their
developers are coming under pressure to change the way they portray women.
This, obviously, angers many of those who define themselves as “gamers” and
who feel threatened by the idea of such interference…. Games are growing up, whether gamers like it or not, and
testosterone-riddled male-power fantasies are bound to fall out of favour as
a result. The nerds are going to have to grow up and learn to live with the
invasion.

In other words, she’s admitting that those awful angry young men are absolutely correct. But speaking as a game designer who knows a fair percentage of the top game developers, these assertions are downright risible. I was at the offices of an extremely successful new game developer not too terribly long ago, and I would estimate around three percent of their employees were women. And in two days of discussions concerning what they were working on and what they were planning to develop in the future, there was absolutely zero mention of what might be of interest to women or female gamers. It’s just not their market, and therefore it is of no interest or concern to them.

My own game now in development, FIRST SWORD, came under some criticism from the likes of Manboobz and other petty SJWs a few months ago because I made it clear there will be no female fantasy gladiators. Historically speaking, female gladiators were the light comic relief between the real action; they were often set against midgets, for example. These complaints had no more effect on my design decisions than complaints about prostitutes had on Rockstar or complaints about scanty armor on female characters have had on every game company everywhere. But it is more than a little ironic to see that there are pinkshirts who will actually complain about the fact that I am refusing to design female slavery, in which women would be literally bought and sold as property, into a game.

The fact that there is now a large Lite Games industry in which women are the vast majority of the consumers doesn’t change what continues to appeal and sell to young men. You don’t need to tell me about the difference. After all, I designed Hot Dish for THQ, one of the more successful “casual games” played predominantly by women before Zynga rode the Facebook platform to going public. Some of the other options I came up with were a Wedding Dress game, a Bridal Party game, and a sorority-based game. I was literally years ahead of today’s pinkshirts.

But these casual girl games have as little to do with the current AAA shooters as the shooters do with the turn-based wargames that preceded them. Girl games are just another gaming genre, that’s all, and they will have as little effect on the design and development of games in other genres as has always been the case in the past. Now certainly, if someone comes up with a good mechanic in one of them that is useful in another genre, it will be copied and used. After all, Candy Crush Saga is simply a dumbed-down version of Steve Fawkner’s Puzzle Quest, thus allowing one to trace its design lineage all the way back to a turn-based wargame, Warlords, a CGW game-of-the-year which has probably been played by fewer women over the last 25 years than read this blog. But Call of Duty hasn’t changed how designers or players approach Advanced Squad Leader, and Depression Quest won’t change how they approach Call of Duty either.

The reason that the game industry is much less susceptible to the sort of pressure that Sarkeesian and Quinn are attempting to appeal is that whereas it is easy to write and publish books, it is much harder to design and develop games. And the sort of men who design and develop games are considerably less inclined to pay any attention to whatever it is that the pinkshirts are demanding today than the sort of men who used to write science fiction.

I find it all rather amusing. If the pinkshirts are already complaining about the lack of women in a fantasy gladiator game still in development, it should be downright hilarious to see their response to RIDING THE RED HORSE when it comes out in November.

But since we’re speaking of inclusiveness, this is as good a place as any to note that the Spanish (La Gravedad Mata) and Portuguese (Gravidade Mortal) versions of QUANTUM MORTIS Gravity Kills are free today on Amazon. As is the immortal John C. Wright’s Awake in the Night.

UPDATE: Lest you doubt it, academic feminists are quite literally attempting to destroy the game industry in much the same way they have destroyed science fiction and fantasy:

Adrienne: Why do we see such tension between academics and game designers?  less of an issue with indies, but there are always some people in industry that have similar questions until industrial logic takes over later and how can we better intervene in industrial logics to disturb that process.  How can academics bridge the gap to the industry audience to help them do different work?  How can we disrupt the capitalist norms that facilitate this?

Deirdra: This is a hard, personal issue.  Getting attacked or having friends getting attacked hurts.  It’s hard not to feel personally attacked and to get to an academic spot where you take the personal out of it.

Andrew: Feels quite viscerally injured when someone like Samantha Allen is lost to the industry because the reaction to her by some gamers was so violent that it didn’t make sense to stay. Academia needs to push for more radical positions within the industry to help make things better.

If they think the reaction was violent already, they haven’t seen anything yet now that we actually know what they are up to. It is time for the game industry to declare war on academia.

Fisking George Will

In case you haven’t noticed, Vladimir Putin is the new Hitler. Because fascist. And threat-crisis. Also, Hitlerian:

Vladimir Putin’s Hitlerian Mind. The Russian president’s fascist revival in Eastern Europe poses a unique threat to the West. Vladimir Putin’s fascist revival is a crisis that tests the West’s capacity to decide. 

When Will speaks of ‘fascism’, he means it in the mythological sense of the word, not the historic. You know; big bad Hitler plotting to conquer Planet Earth and exterminate or enslave all non-Aryans blah….blah…blah.  Notice how Will cleverly embeds the allegations of a “fascist revival” and a “crisis” as a given, and then quickly redirects the subject to how the West should handle it.

Salesmen refer to this cunning rhetorical tactic as ‘assumptive selling’. Sorry George. We will not allow you get away with slipping such poisonous assumptive ‘mickeys’ into our journalistic drinks. Either prove your underlying premise of a “facist revival’ (in the sense you mean it), or cut the crap about some dangerous “crisis” caused by Putin.

At a certain point, one loses one’s innocence about the strangely repetitive coincidences concerning which first Britain, and then the USA, continually find themselves engaged in fighting wars on other people’s territory for reasons that are never, ever their fault.

I thought it was interesting that there was barely even a handwave in the less-than-halfhearted attempt to declare Assad the new Hitler.

Johnny’s teacher can’t read either

The fruits of the ongoing demolition of public education are being harvested around the world:

As a teacher with six years’ experience, you might imagine that I would have been in my element as I chatted about the eight-year-olds in my charge and offered their parents encouragement and advice. Instead I was consumed with embarrassment. And no wonder. The father opposite me — a lawyer — was looking at me as if I was dirt under his shoe.I had been telling him about the new drive to improve literacy standards in our school when he had interrupted me.

‘Can you repeat what you just said?’ he said. ‘I’m not sure I could possibly have heard you correctly.’

I had no idea why he was getting so agitated. To humour him, I repeated slowly: ‘I said that me and the headmistress are doing all we can to improve standards.’

I might as well have told him that we were planning to bring back the birch. Throwing his hands up in the air, he launched into a tirade that left me red hot with shame.

‘Me and the headmistress?’ he ranted. ‘Don’t you know it should be: “The headmistress and I”? How can you call yourself a teacher when your grammar is so poor?’

I wanted the ground to swallow me up. Many years later, I still feel there was no excuse for his rudeness, but I can understand why he was so angry. I’d feel the same if a child of mine was being taught by a teacher like me.

And the shocking truth is that there are thousands of teachers in schools the length and breadth of the country who are just like me. We have degrees in English from respectable universities, yet wouldn’t know a subjective pronoun from an objective one if it hit us in the face.

Public school is dead, it merely hasn’t stopped moving yet. It is an archaic artifact of 18th century industrialization that is technologically outmoded, societally destructive, and observably dysfunctional.

The one-punch standard

The football world has been striking poses left, right, and center, pretending that Ray Rice is the Second Coming of OJ Simpson. The Ravens released him and are giving out free jerseys in exchange for his old ones, the ever-sanctimonious Roger Goodell added an indefinite suspension on top of the previous two-game suspension, and various players and commentators are ritually denouncing him.

And for what? A single punch.

This is absolutely and utterly absurd. There are punches thrown in NFL games and practices every single week. If the NFL were to apply the one-punch standard consistently, half the African players would be out of the league by the end of the season.

This is not to say that Ray Rice is a good guy. If you watch the video closely, it looks like he does something to provoke her in some way at the elevator buttons. It almost looks as if he spits at her, she shoves him, he shoves back, and then she charges him and gets KO’d. We’re clearly not dealing with a pair of innocent angels here.

But here is the salient point. He’s not “beating her up”. He’s not abusing her. He’s not attacking her. In fact, the reason she got knocked out isn’t because he’s a big strong man, but because she was rushing at him. What he threw was clearly a defensive punch, and quite likely an instinctive one. I’ve been knocked out in much the same way while sparring, by walking directly into the sort of jab that one normally wouldn’t even feel. Remember, F=MA, so while Rice has a fair amount of Mass, a significant part of the Acceleration that provided the knockout force came from her rushing towards him.

There is a reason the prosecutor saw fit to allow Rice to avoid trial, most likely because there is considerably more than a reasonable doubt involved. One never knows with the inaptly named U.S. “justice” system, but it is highly unlikely that Rice would have been convicted of the one count of third-degree aggravated assault with which he was charged. To call his one-punch KO an assault, or even abuse, is to insult the men and women who are genuinely assaulted and abused. While ignorant people only look at the effect of Mrs. Rice crumpling to the ground, anyone with fighting experience is looking at how she rushed at him, how he retreated to the side of the elevator, and how he didn’t step into the punch or snap his hips. The police appear to have taken notice of these things as well.

“After reviewing surveillance footage it appeared both parties were
involved in a physical altercation,” read the Atlantic City Police
report.”

Lest you forget, intent matters greatly with regards to the law, and there is absolutely no indication that Ray Rice entered that elevator with any intent to harm his fiance or that he had any intent to do more than keep her off him when she rushed him. In fact, the only party that is seriously harming his fiance, now his wife, is the NFL, as Roger Goodell is depriving her husband of his ability to support her. That will certainly have more long-term negative effects on her than thirty seconds of unconsciousness did.

I see this as nothing more than pink shoes in October. It’s just another aspect of Commissioner Goodell’s clumsy and misguided attempt to market the league to women. Ask yourself this: how many of you, male or female, would still have your job if you were held to the one-punch standard being applied to Ray Rice?