Author: VD

RIP Andy Robertson

I received this news today concerning the great champion of William Hope Hodgson’s masterpiece, Andy Robertson:

It is with deep regret and much sadness that I must inform you that although we expected Andy to return home from hospital today, he suffered a heart attack and stroke last night and suffered extensive bleeding on the brain.  We are told that he would have felt nothing.  He remains on life support but has been declared brain-dead.

I did not know Andy well, but I very much enjoyed working with him over the last month as we prepared AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND for publication. He was delighted when he discovered John C. Wright had dedicated the book to him, and I’m pleased that he was able to see the book meet with both commercial and critical success. He had mentioned to me that his Parkinson’s Disease was acting up and warned me that he might need to go to the hospital soon to deal with it, but was eagerly anticipating future fictional expeditions into the Night Lands.

He was amusing, high-spirited, and iconoclastic. In the very first email he sent to me, he wrote: “What are these links in the sidebar?  Alpha Game?   iSteve?(crikeyblimey, you are openly linking to the king of the HBDbloggers!!??!!)  my, you are a naughty, naughty lot. I think we will get on just fine. Please now to direct humble self to links where I may read all about your fall into badthink and your justified banishment from the society of all decent folk.”  


We did, indeed, get on just fine.

The Night Land was very close to his heart, and although I believe he already has a good team in place who will be able to carry on without him, in the event that assistance is needed to maintain its continuation, Castalia House will be pleased to provide it in Andy Robertson’s memory.

UPDATE:

It is with great sadness that I must inform you that Andy Robertson has died after a stroke.  

The political spectrum

As viewed from the Left:

It was somewhat eye-opening to see the Mozilla defenders arguing that the hounding of Brandon Eich was justified by the fact that he was not only opposed to homogamy, but actually donated to the twin devils Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul.

So much for the melting pot

Social science is supporting the obvious history-based logic and blowing apart the concept of multicultural utopia:

The U.S. Census Bureau projects that racial minority groups will make up a majority of the U.S. national population in 2042, effectively creating a so-called majority-minority nation. In four experiments, we explored how salience of such racial demographic shifts affects White Americans’ political-party leanings and expressed political ideology. Study 1 revealed that making California’s majority-minority shift salient led politically unaffiliated White Americans to lean more toward the Republican Party and express greater political conservatism. Studies 2, 3a, and 3b revealed that making the changing national racial demographics salient led White Americans (regardless of political affiliation) to endorse conservative policy positions more strongly. Moreover, the results implicate group-status threat as the mechanism underlying these effects. Taken together, this work suggests that the increasing diversity of the nation may engender a widening partisan divide.

Translation: the Republican Party should totally ignore its various outreach efforts and focus on becoming the Traditional White Party. And as we’ve seen in every liberal state to date, liberal whites have no desire to live in the political utopias their ideologies create and experience the logical consequences of their actions.

Which is precisely why they should not be permitted to vote when they relocate, otherwise they will promptly Californicate the places giving them refuge. Alternatively, they could be simply barred entry.

You may recall that I pointed out the inevitable move of European-Americans to the right years ago. It’s one thing to admire barbarian culture from afar, it’s another thing to see your hometown transformed into Mogadishu on the Mississippi.

Broken and lesser beings

You may think that we exaggerate the craven wretchedness of our enemies. You may think that my boundless contempt for the r/selected, Larry’s muscular backhands for his craven adversaries, and John C. Wright’s withering scorn for the wormtongues is fueled by either a) a sense of offense at being opposed or b) an oversensitivity to criticism.

It is not. It is fueled by our clear-eyed view of what these creatures are. It is our awareness that they are, like the soul-destroyed abhumans roaming the Night Lands, broken and lesser beings who seek to pull others down into the mire that torments them.

By way of evidence, consider their own words about themselves. Here, for example, is Damien Walter:

I was 30 and, by any measure, deeply unhappy. I’d been pushing down a lot of horrible emotions from a damaging childhood, grief from many losses, and had trapped myself in a life I didn’t fit in to from a desperate need to fit somewhere, anywhere. I had no kind of spiritual practice at all. I was a standard issue atheist, and any encounter I had with religion was edged with inherited and unexamined scorn. Consequentially, I really had no tools to process the pain I was feeling. Today, my argument with the radical atheist rhetoric of people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett – both of whom I had read heavily at university – is that it leaves the bulk of its believers utterly amputated from their own emotional reality. It certainly had me. I was miserable, and in trying to escape from the causes of the misery I’d driven myself, repeatedly, to the borders of emotional collapse where I had, at long last, collapsed.

This is why they preach equality. This is why they preach tolerance. This is why they seek to disqualify and destroy those who stand above them, immune to the manifold terrors that haunt their empty chests. They are damaged people, broken individuals, fallen souls.

They live lives of lies and self-deceit. They lie about others; they lie about themselves:

I am by nature a non-political person. I tend to see both sides of most arguments, and there are merits and faults with any position in any political debate. Extremism is always wrong. Beyond that, who is right is mostly a matter of your tribal, partisan allegiances.

No doubt that is why he didn’t link to Larry’s piece he was criticizing and why David Barnett intentionally and admittedly evaded The Guardian guidelines in his hit piece aimed at me, lest I defend my position in a convincing manner.

But no matter what lies Damien and his broken kind tell, they will find no comfort whatsoever in confronting the likes of Mr. Corriea and Mr. Wright. They will find no peace through confronting me. They will find nothing but emotional collapse in this lifetime and damnation in the next as a result of their rejection of the Way, the Truth, and the Life that we do our feeble best to serve.

At least Damien has taken one step forward in abandoning the intellectually bankrupt world of the radical atheist. He knows there is something else out there. But he is still caught in the soul-sucking mire, he is still lost in lies and desperately lashing out at the likes of Larry and me in a vain attempt to find fulfillment in the approval of those he foolishly seeks to emulate.

But he will not, because there is no fulfillment to be found there. There is none to be found in telling lies, in making-believe, because even if he manages to convince others of his falsehoods, he will never be able to convince himself that they are true.

What Damien does not realize is that our strength, our being whole, does not come from within, but from without. The Earth-Current flows through us; we are empowered by the Master of the Master-Word. It is not enough for a man to reject the nonsensical teachings of the self-proclaimed wise, it is necessary to repent and to humble himself before God, after which he can stand again, washed in the sacred blood of His Son, unafraid, unbowed, and unbroken.

Beyond good and bad

The Bloggerblaster reviews AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND:

Moments ago I finished Awake in the Night Land by John C. Wright.

As I sit to give you my thoughts on it…  the first thing that comes to
mind is a question.   How does one review… or critique…  something
like this?  I am unfit.

One does not critique the great works of literature.  One appreciates
them.  You define good and bad by them.  Good and bad do not apply to
them….

I would offer some advice to the reader.  Read with patience.  Each
story builds upon the last.  You will have questions and frustrations as
you go.  Keep going. The struggle of the climb improves the view from
the top. 

One theme that keeps reoccurring in reviews is how the book forces them think about it afterwards. To me, that is one of the hallmarks of greatness in literature; one of Maupassant’s haunting stories, his best, in my opinion, once left me staring at the ceiling for nearly an hour.

It may strike you that this isn’t how we usually talk about one of my books, or one of Tom’s books, or one of Larry’s books. It’s not how we talk about the books we publish. It’s not how we talk about the award-winning stuff, be the awards merited or unmerited. This is one of those rare occasions when one discovers, much to one’s surprise, that one has stumbled upon genuine and timeless greatness concerning the observation of the human condition.

The book’s one four-star reviewer declared he only gives out five stars to Shakespeare… then thought about it and gave the book five stars anyway. If you’ve read my book reviews, you know I tend to grade on the severe side, I rarely give out anything above an 8/10, and yet, I don’t hesitate to tell you that this book rates 10/10. If you believe me, then read it. And if you don’t believe me, then read it and afterwards tell us precisely where and how you believe it somehow falls short.

An appeal to reinstall Firefox

I was asked to reconsider my position on uninstalling Mozilla products and refusing to use them in the future:

You are probably here because you have been advised to consider reinstalling Firefox. You may, in fact, have uninstalled Firefox as a result of a recent campaign protesting either Brendan Eich’s being appointed CEO of Mozilla, or his supposedly being fired or forced by Mozilla to resign from that position as a result of a donation he made in favor of proposition 8. Brendan Eich did, in fact, resign; however, he did was not fired or forced to resign by Mozilla. Mozilla does not discriminate based on an individual’s personal political or religious beliefs. If you have been told otherwise, I encourage you to evaluate the evidence for yourself. First of all, I would like to point you to Mozilla’s official FAQ on Brendan’s resignation. I realize that some people will insist that this is just a cover story and that he was really forced to resign, in spite of whatever Mozilla may say to the contrary. So I would like to share some additional corroborating evidence. There are many inside sources who corroborate this, but the one I find particularly credible and compelling is Gervase Markham. He is in a unique position as an outspoken Christian and supporter of traditional marriage who works at Mozilla. Gerv has stated that he has it from sources he trusts that Brendan did step down of his own accord and was not forced out. You can read his full statement on his blog. Finally, I want to remind you of what Mozilla, and Firefox, truly stands for.

If you are still not convinced, I’d like you to consider one more thing. Consider for a moment, the possibility that Brendan really did step down of his own accord and is not interested in coming back. What more can Mozilla possibly do that would persuade you? Is there any further evidence that would change your mind? It makes sense to treat them with a good faith presumption of truthfulness unless and until there is evidence to the contrary. Why? Because if your mind can not be changed by anything, then they may as well ignore you anyway. There are always people who cannot be swayed by reason or any amount of evidence. Since their minds can’t be changed anyway, we all might as well ignore them and focus on those who can be persuaded by reason. If you are not open to any reasonable evidence, then you make yourself irrelevant to the debate. Don’t be do that. Evaluate the evidence fairly, and when in doubt, treat others with a good faith presumption of truthfulness. Then if evidence persuades you to change your position, it will mean something.

I read this. I read Markham’s piece. I have evaluated the evidence and I am fully informed concerning the relevant facts. And my answer is a staunch and resounding no. I reject Mozilla. I reject what it now stands for.

I am aware Eich stepped down of his own accord. I am aware he was not fired, that his resignation was not demanded by the Mozilla Board, and that fewer than 10 Mozilla employees publicly demanded his resignation.

I am also aware that Mozilla’s executive chairwoman Mitchell Baker issued this official statement on April 3rd: “Mozilla prides itself on being held to a different standard and, this past week, we didn’t live up to it. We know why people are hurt and angry, and they are right: it’s because we haven’t stayed true to ourselves. We didn’t act like you’d expect Mozilla to act. We didn’t move fast
enough to engage with people once the controversy started. We’re sorry.
We must do better.”

For what is she apologizing, precisely? To whom is she apologizing?

I am aware that Mozilla claims to “support equality for all.” This is a blatant lie on multiple levels. Mozilla might as reasonably proclaim that it supports unicorns for all or a chicken in every pot. Mozilla clearly does not support the Constitutional right of free association or the right of free speech on the part of those harboring views it considers incompatible with its mission statement.

I am aware that “Mozilla Supports LGBT Equality”. I don’t and I will not support any organization that claims to do so.

I am aware that Mozilla has ignored tens of thousands of negative comments from current and former Firefox users and has refused to provide any statement in response to them. I am also aware that it responded quickly and publicly to a much smaller amount of criticism that threatened much less damage to the corporation.

A supporter of the move to ostracize and oust Brandon Eich declared: “I do think that any individual is free to choose to resign their own job
or otherwise not conduct business with someone whom they know has taken
an action that they consider unjust.” I agree. That is precisely why I no longer want anything to do with Mozilla and I continue to recommend that everyone #uninstallfirefox.

Prior to the #uninstallfirefox campaign began, Mozilla Firefox represented 34 percent of the total pageviews here. That percentage is currently down to 20 percent, so based on last year’s traffic, Mozilla can expect to lose at least 1,835,637 pageviews from the readers here on this site alone, in addition to the pageviews those readers generate on all other sites and whatever pageviews my household machines generate on an annual basis.

The destruction of Damien Walter

First the massive tetsubo that is Larry Correia responds to the scurrilous libels of SF wannabe Damien Walter in The Guardian:

[M]y name showed up as the poster child for hate mongery and villainy in the Guardian (a liberal tabloid that passes for a major newspaper in Britain). I’ve been in a lot of American news things but this was a first for me, so on Friday afternoon I had to discuss with my fans on Facebook what I should put on my new business cards. We finally decided on Larry F. Correia, International Lord of Hate. Almost went with The Hatemaster because of the 70’s super villain vibe, but that looks too much like The Hamster when you’re reading fast.

So here is the article written by Damian Walter. It turns out that Tom Kratman knew him back when Asimov’s had a forum, and remembered him as a shrill little libprog, and that if Damian was at the Guardian a village somewhere in England was missing their idiot.

Somebody else told me that Damian is an “aspiring” author, and that he’d recently been given a grant by the British government to write a novel. I have no idea if this is true, and don’t care enough to look it up, but man, if it is… your government actually pays people to write novels? BWA HA HA HAW! Holy shit. As an actual novelist, that’s funny. And I thought my government was stupid.

Unlike Damian, I’m not a huge pussy, so I will include the link to the thing that I’m about to insult.

There is more. There is considerably more. Go, thou, and read. And laugh. Then, when Mr. Correia was done abusing the corpse of Mr. Walter’s aspiring career, the elegant rapier that is John C. Wright filleted the bloody chunks:

I was reading Larry Correia’s blog, Monster Hunter Nation. In today’s episode, he has been subject to a ritual shaming by the Guardian so-called newspaper of some country our ancestors left long ago when we got sick of their dandified addiction to petty tyranny, and came here to be free men.

The mewling cravens and castrati were left behind. By some odd miracle, no doubt involving arts forbidden by the Catholic Church, they reproduced and swelled in numbers, and, after Churchill was voted out of office, they outbred the remaining homo sapiens, and overspread the sceptred isle, so green and fair, once called Our Lady’s Dowry.

Not to worry! All that made England decent, fine and free survives in America.

How badly have the dross devolved? A simian named Mr. Damian Walter takes up his pen in his quadrumanous left foot to savage the indomitable Mr. Correia. I read this sentence:

Somebody else told me that Damian is an “aspiring” author, and that he’d recently been given a grant by the British government to write a novel.

A grant?

A grant?!

A GRANT?!!

Can you imagine the sheer effrontery it requires for someone who grovels for pity-pennies to address a real man, a man who works for a living, and upbraid him in his chosen field of endeavor?

Mr. Correia quit his day job, friends. He supports himself entirely by his pen, which by any account, is a frail narrow pillar for all by the most accomplished wordsmiths.

The simian creature does not write in his non-work hours, as do I, he is a beggar. An aspiring beggar. Nay, let me insult no beggar. The creature is not an honest beggar. Honest beggars asks and accept only alms freely given.

There is, of course, more. There is considerably more. Read, and then spare a moment of pity for the wretched creature so publicly humiliated. The painful thing for the libelous Mr. Walter is not that he has managed to draw the scorn of two of the best and most successful writers in the SF/F genre, but that the expression of that scorn makes for considerably better reading than anything he is ever likely to write, with or without the funding of the British government.

A rare alignment

Will wonders never cease? I actually concur with Paul Krugman for once:

Four years ago Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, abruptly canceled America’s biggest and arguably most important infrastructure project, a desperately needed new rail tunnel under the Hudson River. Count me among those who blame his presidential ambitions, and believe that he was trying to curry favor with the government- and public-transit-hating Republican base.

Even as one tunnel was being canceled, however, another was nearing completion, as Spread Networks finished boring its way through the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania. Spread’s tunnel was not, however, intended to carry passengers, or even freight; it was for a fiber-optic cable that would shave three milliseconds — three-thousandths of a second — off communication time between the futures markets of Chicago and the stock markets of New York. And the fact that this tunnel was built while the rail tunnel wasn’t tells you a lot about what’s wrong with America today.

Who cares about three milliseconds? The answer is, high-frequency traders, who make money by buying or selling stock a tiny fraction of a second faster than other players. Not surprisingly, Michael Lewis starts his best-selling new book “Flash Boys,” a polemic against high-frequency trading, with the story of the Spread Networks tunnel. But the real moral of the tunnel tale is independent of Mr. Lewis’s polemic.

Think about it. You may or may not buy Mr. Lewis’s depiction of the high-frequency types as villains and those trying to thwart them as heroes. (If you ask me, there are no good guys in this story.) But either way, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to save three milliseconds looks like a huge waste. And that’s part of a much broader picture, in which society is devoting an ever-growing share of its resources to financial wheeling and dealing, while getting little or nothing in return.

The financial sector is nothing but a gigantic, money-sucking tick on the US economy. None – I repeat – NONE of the claimed benefits it supposedly provides as “the lubricating oil of capitalism” are worth even one-tenth the present cost of the financial sector. There will be no recovery, there CAN be no recovery under the twin burdens of the federal and the financial sectors, which presently account for 48 percent of the outstanding debt in the American economy.

The willfully thick Blue wall

One thing that has always annoyed me about the Hollywood portrayal of police departments, and is something that I mock in passing in the QUANTUM MORTIS series, is the way in which we are supposed to believe that police departments seriously frown upon individual police violating procedures and skirting the law. Is there a single Hollywood cop who hasn’t had to turn in his badge and his gun at one point or another? Or hasn’t been suspended from his job?

The reality is that police are statistically more likely to have sex with a prostitute on duty than to arrest one, are more likely to murder someone and get away with it than be caught and charged with the crime, and are only at the risk of losing their jobs if they violate the code of silence and upset the local police union.

Los Angeles police officers tampered with voice recording equipment in dozens of patrol cars in an effort to avoid being monitored while on duty, according to records and interviews.

An inspection by Los Angeles Police Department investigators found about half of the estimated 80 cars in one South L.A. patrol division were missing antennas, which help capture what officers say in the field. The antennas in at least 10 more cars in nearby divisions had also been removed.

LAPD Chief Charlie Beck and other top officials learned of the problem last summer but chose not to investigate which officers were responsible. Rather, the officials issued warnings against continued meddling and put checks in place to account for antennas at the start and end of each patrol shift.

The police chief simply “chose not to investigate” a series of obvious crimes committed by numerous police officers. It’s totally predictable, so why do we so seldom see that in the movies?

On the cover

Jartstar shares his thoughts about how he went about creating the cover for AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND:

Awake in the Night Land is one of the finest stories I have ever read, and when I was given the opportunity to design a cover for it I was elated. After presenting a series of thumbnails to Mr. Wright with series of different styles and ideas, he chose a straight forward image with the focal point being The Last Redoubt.

The challenge was representing a towering, ancient, rusting structure surrounded by a dead and sunless sky encircled by ruins and a wasteland. If the lighting was accurate to the real world and the story it would consist of a silhouetted triangular shape with a dim red glowing horizon and a few bright spots of magma here and there. This would make for a thoroughly uninteresting image which certainly would not work for a book cover. Using some artistic license I brightened up the concept and made a dramatic, disconcerting red sky with the light of the Redoubt fighting against the creeping black around it. 

I certainly hope my version of the Redoubt has done justice to it as described in the story, but more importantly, it should reflect the power of Wright’s superb work. This question of my success can only be answered by the wayfarers who are willing to enter into the dark of the Night Lands and find their way out again.

On John C. Wright’s Journal, Pinlighter asked about the shape of the pyramid:

It’s certainly an effective cover, – I’ll go beyond that, a beautiful
cover – but the Redoubt is clearly described in THE NIGHT LAND as being a
Pyramid without terraces or steps like that, but looking more like the
traditional (Egyptian) pyramid, smoothly tapering to a point. I am
curious as to your motives for not showing it like that. 

VD replies: The change to a more Mayan-style pyramid was my call. As you can see in the thumbs, the original plan was to go by the book. But the simple geometric shape just looked too plain and boring, especially for a central element that was featured so prominently on the cover. So, chalk it down to artistic liberty, in much the same way that the Watcher’s heads are fully exposed rather than on their sides with their faces half-buried as in the text. It’s certainly desirable to get the details right, but not at the expense of making a cover visually tedious. I think Jartstar did a very good job of conveying the ominous spirit of the Night Lands while also expressing its core message of human hope in a visually arresting image; to see it in more detail, just click on the cover.