Author: VD

Fear of a Black Yoga Class

One has to salute the remarkable courage of this brave young woman who was faced by a terrible moral crisis in the very last place she expected it:

A few weeks ago, as I settled into an exceptionally crowded midday
class, a young, fairly heavy black woman put her mat down directly
behind mine. It appeared she had never set foot in a yoga studio—she was
glancing around anxiously, adjusting her clothes, looking wide-eyed and
nervous. Within the first few minutes of gentle warm-up stretches, I
saw the fear in her eyes snowball, turning into panic and then despair.
Before we made it into our first downward dog, she had crouched down on
her elbows and knees, head lowered close to the ground, trapped and
vulnerable. She stayed there, staring, for the rest of the class.

Because I was directly in front of her, I had no choice but to look
straight at her every time my head was upside down (roughly once a
minute). I’ve seen people freeze or give up in yoga classes many times,
and it’s a sad thing, but as a student there’s nothing you can do about
it. At that moment, though, I found it impossible to stop thinking about
this woman. Even when I wasn’t positioned to stare directly at her, I
knew she was still staring directly at me. Over the course of the next
hour, I watched as her despair turned into resentment and then contempt.
I felt it all directed toward me and my body….

I got home from that class and promptly broke down crying. Yoga, a
beloved safe space that has helped me through many dark moments in over
six years of practice, suddenly felt deeply suspect. Knowing fully well
that one hour of perhaps self-importantly believing myself to be the
deserving target of a racially charged anger is nothing, is largely my
own psychological projection, is a drop in the bucket, is the tip of the
iceberg in American race relations, I was shaken by it all the same.

Reading
this, one is left with one immediate and inescapable question: how on
Earth can anyone possibly even attempt to justify female suffrage?
Although one can’t help but be amused by the idea that a single invasion
by one African is sufficient to make this no-doubt “anti-racist” white
woman begin to question the safety and value of six years of yoga
classes.

Now, a few years ago, one might well have
assumed that this simply had to be an SWPL parody. And perhaps it is.
But we now live in a post-parodic society where nothing, no matter how
absurd, can be assumed to be a joke.

Especially such deadly serious matters as interracial inter-subspecies same-sex stare rape.

Mailvox: Castalia House questions

Some of you had questions, so here are the answers:

As opportunities become available will you be posting them here?

Initially, yes. As Castalia House develops its own readership, we will tend to gradually move more CH-related communication there. We will ALWAYS be looking for more translators and it’s hard to imagine a time when we would not be on the lookout for more excellent authors. We intend to be considerably more picky than what one tends to see from the likes of Tor and the other genre publishers. We’re not at all interested in the shotgun approach that many other small publishers take and we fully support those who elect the self-publishing approach.

The inclusion of the “obscure ancient military text” hints that Castalia
House may not limit its focus to the science fiction and epic fantasy
genres. Is this a fair assumption? 

This is correct. In fact, one author has already produced an intriguing proposal that combines those elements. We intend to experiment and try different things that have not necessarily been done before. Some of these experiments will work, some of them won’t, and some of them will be done simply because we think it is worth doing. That being said, SF/F has the best chance of being accepted for publication as it stands closest to the heart of what we are doing.

Can I be Wheeler’s editor?

No. Wheeler is the perfect example of the ideal self-publisher. We will, at some point, be offering various pointers to aid self-publishing on the CH blog. We can’t publish everything. We don’t want to publish everything. But we don’t see any reason why people shouldn’t publish themselves.

Will Castalia House make certain its books qualify the authors for SFWA membership, and possible future expulsion?

It will take at least one year before Castalia House could possibly become a qualifying venue. So, it’s not what we would consider a priority. We do expect to have the necessary 10 authors as well as meeting the minimum print run and revenue requirements.

What is the Italian conceptualization of the differences between
National Socialism and proper Italian Fascism beyond the obvious
racialist accretions?

Non credo questa domanda era proprio per noi. In ogni caso, posso raccomandare il Fascisti di Giordano Bruno Guerri per un esaminazione cosi.

Will there be dead tree versions?

Yes.

Will you be limiting Castalia House or eventually allowing for fiction as neither fantasy or SF? 

Our fictional focus will be on SF/F. But we will certainly consider works outside the genre if they are exceptional.

Any chance there might be music?

Only if it is recorded by a certain award-winning techno band.

What type of submission is required, Just summary, cover letter-summary- and manuscript (Double space or single).

We’re still working this out. On the one hand, it’s faster to be able to simply scan an epub on your reader. On the other, most authors don’t know how to produce epubs. But in general, a one-page synopsis, a one-page author bio, and a single-spaced manuscript all in a single Word-formatted file will suffice. As for the bio, we are less interested in credentials than learning who you are and what you stand for.

Do you have any insights on how you will be able to avoid the fate of other publishers? 

We have zero overhead and zero salaries. We’re already profitable. And we already sell more books than many small publishing houses. Thanks primarily to the support of the readers here, we’re on a path to sell more than 10,000 books this year, not counting free downloads, in-game sales, or other authors. From a time and labor perspective, publishing is absolutely trivial in comparison with game development and we had to do 80 percent of this stuff in order to handle the in-game publishing anyhow. We are a lean, mean, disruptive machine.

I would like to submit a story or two, written with the blood of my enemies. 

Go for it. Just make sure you get them tested before utilizing your “special ink”. (Note to self: THIS is why we utilize slush readers as “the first line of defense”.)

What would be involved in being a slush reader?

Reading submitted manuscripts and rendering your opinion on them in a timely manner. We want to feature very fast turnaround times. If we’re going to say no, we’re going to do it very quickly. And if we’re going to say yes, we want to do that almost as quickly. Also, risking the acquisition of various tropical diseases from manuscripts written in the blood of the author’s enemies.

Why is there no Kickstarter for Castalia House?

We don’t need one. If you would like to support Castalia House, we would encourage you to buy our books or to join our growing list of translators.

What better protagonist than a half-savage shitlord in a douche canoe?

Nothing, obviously. Please to accept a 10-book contract at your earliest convenience.

Can I submit works for consideration that I’ve already self-published online?

Sure.

How much experience with sci-fi or fantasy do you want your slush
readers to have? And do you even WANT a woman’s opinion on these
things?

A reasonable amount would be desirable. If you haven’t read Tolkien, Lewis, Asimov, Heinlein, and Bradbury, at a bare minimum, you probably don’t have a sufficient grasp of the field to read for us. If, on the other hand, you are familiar with Stephenson, Gibson, Shikibu and Hesse, so much the better. We already have female readers. What we do not have, and do not need, are feminist, equalitarian, and left-wing readers.

Can you shed light on why an author should consider Castalia rather than self-publishing?

There are four primary reasons. First, it is a non-trivial pain in the posterior to go through the process of creating and administering a book. I’m not going to exaggerate the difficulty as it is perfectly doable by anyone who is computer literate, but there are certain economies of scale there and we’re already stuck doing it due to our other commitments. Few authors want to spend their time dealing with these things and we offer sufficiently high royalties that most authors will be happy to off-load the administrative work on us.

Second, there is the issue of credibility and exposure. I may be notorious throughout the genre, but even some of my worst enemies have freely admitted that I have pretty good taste in literature. Not even the SFWA members who purged me from its ranks had anything negative to say about my performance on the three Nebula Award juries upon which I sat. If Castalia House publishes a book, there are thousands of people, perhaps tens of thousands, who will recognize that it very likely contains something worth reading. These days, that is considerably more than one can say of Tor or most publishing houses in SF/F.

Third, our growing ranks of translators means that there is a reasonable chance that your novel will be translated into another language, thereby increasing your prospective royalties. The growing gap between traditional translation expenses and average expected ebook revenues means that other publishers are going to have to adopt our translation model or simply give up on translating anything but the biggest selling novels.

And fourth, we have better cover artists than most of the established publishing houses. You will get a good cover. You will have considerable input into that cover. Having been victimized by a major New York publisher that threw out a beautiful Rowena work-in-progress in favor of an ineptly imitated Left Behind  look, I fully understand the significance of cover to the author.

It’s possible you might exclude me. I’m a libertarian and a federalist,
and I expect my work to appeal to traditionalists. However, I’m also an
atheist, and while I respect and write about people of faith, that’s
bound to turn off some blog visitors.

We are perfectly willing to publish atheist authors. We will not publish evangelical atheists or atheists whose work denigrates Christianity, advocates secular humanism, or wallows in nihilism.

Is this a compliment to, or an integral part of, the First Sword concept? Is that a picture of Markku’s house?

It is an integral part of it. That is not a picture of Markku’s dwelling.

Would love to submit something for a cover. Can you give some parameters. 

The minimum resolution is 1667×2500. We are always looking for good artists, so feel free to submit something for review. However, our cover work is all custom and we expect the artist to read the book before producing the cover.

What is Castalia House’s policy towards publishing under pseudonyms?

Fine by us. If you’re an established author concerned about retribution from the Pink SF gatekeepers due to public association with us, we would even encourage it.

Desperation is an ugly color

John Scalzi moves the goalposts in trying to hide the decline:

What’s this? It’s the traffic graph for all the parts of Scalzi.com that are not part of the current iteration of Whatever, i.e., archives and other bits and pieces that continue to be linked into from around the Web and Internet. The part of the site you’re reading now (the current iteration of Whatever), has statistics information provided by WordPress and Google Analytics. Everything else has its stat information recorded by the 1&1 Site Analytics. There’s surprisingly little overlap in recording between the two stats packages. Last year the WordPress stats package recorded 7.57 million visits; the 1&1 stats package recorded 6.13 million. The former set of stats are mirrored inexactly by Google Analytics; the latter, not at all.

I note this because occasionally I see someone who is not me purport to speak with authority about how many visits the site gets. However, as the total universe of visits the site gets is not publicly accessible, if someone who is not me is making that claim, they literally do not know what they are talking about. Not because they are obtuse or dishonest (or at least not just), but simply because they don’t have all the information about the traffic coming into the site — the entire site.

(If I am making the claim, mind you, I generally note all sorts of caveats about the numbers. If several years of looking at stats has shown me anything, it’s that the numbers are fairly fungible, shall we say.)

The moral of the story: Beware people who are not me! At least, as far as the stats to this site are concerned.

Let’s see here. Little Johnny bragged about his 8 MILLION VIEWS in 2012.  He wrote: “Just passed the number. Thanks to Hacker News for the assist; someone
there linked to “A Self-Made Man Looks at How He Made It,” sending a
flood of programmers over to read it. You can follow their own
discussion of the article here. I’ll note again that this is just the
views recorded by WordPress’ software; the actual number of views is
higher. I’ll have a full report early in 2013.  But still: 8 million
views. It doesn’t suck.  Thank you.”

Keep in mind that these were the numbers he previously reported for Whatever:

2009: 4,488, 281
2010: 5,131,194
2011: 5,409,015
2012: 8,000,000

Now notice that he’s openly admitting that he had 7.57 million WordPress visits for Whatever in 2013. Where have we seen that number before? Ah, yes, in the chart I posted on January 1, 2014. And notice, too, that I specifically labeled those 7.57 million views as Whatever visits; in Google Analytics terms they were closer to 7.52 million. In any case, Johnny is trying to obscure the fact that the numbers I reported for Whatever were precisely accurate. Instead of calling my account into question, all he’s managed to do is to confirm my veracity. Not only do I know what I am talking about, (which was never anything but Whatever, the Very Important Blog that was supposed to be ever so vastly popular), but my numbers were dead-on accurate.

Now Johnny is belatedly bringing in non-Whatever traffic after five years of ignoring it to attempt to obscure the fact that my blogs have surpassed his blog, and he’s doing so in a characteristically deceptive manner. There may well be “surprisingly little overlap”, but of course, Johnny doesn’t say if that overlap is 10 percent or 40 percent. As usual, he’s hiding information and frantically spinning the information he can’t hide in order to try to make himself look better. It’s all rather desperate.

And it’s pointless anyhow. Even if there were no overlap at all, even if we accept his moving of the goalposts, and even if we ignore the fact that WordPress visits are slightly exaggerated in comparison with Google Analytics pageviews, at 13.7 million for Maximum McRapey to 13.1 million for VP and AG alone in 2013, the fact is that I’ve already passed him up in 2014.  That’s because in January, he was down 30 percent year-on-year from 2013, while my two blogs were up 24 percent. He’s on an annual rate towards 5.3M Whatever / 9.6M Max Total while I’m on an annual rate towards 16.2M VP+AG combined.

Johnny is in observable decline and he knows it; despite trying one new stunt after another, he still hasn’t written anything as good as his Heinlein rip-off published seven years ago. It won’t be long before the ever-ravenous left-wing forces he fanned for years will begin devouring him in envy now that he’s finally received his unmerited Participation Hugo. I don’t care about such things, but those shambling shoggoths sure as hell do!

In any event, the fact is that there is overlap between the two components of the 13.7 million and Johnny refused to specify how much overlap there is tells you all you need to know about his long-delayed honesty. Either way, his fraud has been exposed, the numbers that I reported are now confirmed to be very accurate, and if you still take the chubby little neurotic seriously, well, you probably aren’t tall enough for this ride.

John Scalzi has never learned that if you simply tell the truth, you never have to worry about anyone finding out that you are a fraud. He could have ended all of this nonsense by simply putting up a public Sitemeter or Google Analytics counter, but then, doing so would have demolished the myth of popularity that he has so carefully constructed over the years.

The new iron dream

It was amusing to learn about a new Kickstarter entitled The Old Iron Dream, which is intended to be “an in-depth piece of long-form journalism, a no-holds-barred, no-punches-pulled look at the sci-fi far-right”. The author mentions dangerous right-wing figures from John Campbell and Robert Heinlein to Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven, as well as Orson Scott Card and me.

They haven’t seen anything yet.

Castalia House is my new publisher and we intend to give Mr. Forbes and his fearful left-wing friends a good deal to worry about over the next few decades. We are working off the new publishing models which will provide authors better royalty rates than they can get anywhere without self-publishing, and we are encouraging the participation of the various readerships involved. We are intentionally keeping prices down with an eye to maximizing the ongoing technological disruption of the existing publishing companies; we do not view every free reader of one of our books as a lost potential customer, but rather, as a reader who has been rescued from the confining intellectual chains of the SF/F gatekeepers.

We are asking everyone who has ever wondered whatever happened to the golden age of SF, who has ever felt ripped off by being subjected to yet another left-wing lecture instead of being entertained, who has ever wondered how on Earth that dreadful PC schlock was ever published in the first place, who has ever bitten his tongue rather than say something that might end his career, to not only support us, but to join us in this neotraditionalist rebellion. Remember, the future belongs to those who show up for it.

We are looking for excellent authors. We are looking for committed translators. We are looking for merciless slush readers. We are looking for talented cover artists. We are looking for people who will spread the word that an alternative to what John C. Wright so aptly described as the relentless heart of darkness exists.

By the end of this month, Castalia House will be announcing the addition of four new books to the existing arsenal of science fiction and epic fantasy, one of which will be mine, one of which will be a novella from an even better-known author, one of which will be an out-of-print novel from the public domain, and one of which will be an obscure ancient military text.

If you have any questions about Castalia House or our future plans for it, please feel free to ask them here.

Answers for MJ 3

It appears MJ is in dire need of some Stoic philosophy:

How exactly do you handle humanity? What I mean is this: when I get up in the morning I either find myself incredibly depressed because humanity is remarkably stupid and beyond hope, or I find myself incredibly hateful because humans are parasitic creatures, stupid, hopeless, hedonistic, narcissistic, and ungrateful among many other things. Or, on even worse days, I wonder if only I am the one being parasitic, stupid, narcissistic, etc. and I am simply projecting these internal characteristics on the world (as much as I don’t care for Freud and psychology in general, I think along these lines). I suppose these emotions stem from a weak faith. I would not be frightened, depressed, or hateful toward humanity if I had hope, faith, and trust in God. I am working on that. I just wondered if you had any other suggestions.

TL;DR: I roll my eyes and move on. This is not exactly an unusual feeling. About 1,900 years ago, a Roman emperor wrote the following:

“Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody,
the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things
happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But
I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the
bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is
akin to me, not only of the same blood or seed, but that it
participates in the same intelligence and the same portion of the
divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on
me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him. For we
are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the
rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another, then, is
contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and
to turn away….


“Thou must now at last perceive of what universe thou art now a part, and of what administrator of the universe thy existence is an efflux, and that a limit of time is fixed for thee, which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind, it will go and thou wilt go, and it will never return. Every moment think steadily as a Roman and a man to do what thou hast in hand with perfect and simple dignity, and feeling of affection, and freedom, and justice, and to give thyself relief from all other thoughts. And thou wilt give thyself relief if thou dost every act of thy life as if it were the last, laying aside all carelessness and passionate aversion from the commands of reason, and all hypocrisy, and self-love, and discontent with the portion which has been given to thee.”

Most people, being idiots, fail to understand the purpose of my regular resort to the acronym MPAI. It is not a reminder to hold others in contempt; it is a flaw in my character that I seldom need any such reminders. Rather, it is a reminder that most people do not think before speaking or acting and that one should therefore not take pointless offense at their thoughtless words and actions. It is a reminder that people are making decisions with differing amounts of information and differing cognitive capacities, and that it is foolish to expect people to respond to the same input factors in the same way that I would.

God is an ever-present reminder that we are not the center of the universe. We are natural and instinctive Ptolemaics; from birth we are inclined to believe that our awareness is the center of all Creation and that without us the universe does not exist. This is why pride is a root of so much evil and why humility is a virtue. Humility is the child’s acceptance of his true place in the grand scheme of things, and it is little wonder that so many minds cling to their foolish pride and flee from that awful reality.

The observable fact is that without God, humanity is without hope. That is why even the finest minds have never been able to do better than the ancient philosophers did in advising calm acceptance of the daily horror show combined with the firm resolution to make the most of what little time one has.

Hall of Fame 2014

Canton makes room for seven more:

Giants defensive end Michael Strahan led a seven-member class into the Pro Football Hall of Fame Saturday. First-ballot eligible Seahawks tackle Walter Jones and Buccaneers linebacker Derrick Brooks joined Strahan among the modern era finalists, along with Cardinals and Rams cornerback Aeneas Williams and Bills wide receiver Andre Reed.

The two seniors committee candidates, Raiders punter Ray Guy and Falcons and Eagles defensive end Claude Humphrey were also elected

I don’t see how Strahan got in before Charles Haley. I don’t think there is a coach alive who would take Strahan over Haley, but Strahan is Big Media while Haley is, to put it mildly, an unusual guy. Ray Guy is more of a symbol than anything, so I don’t really have a problem with that. It’s the Hall of Fame, not the Hall of Statistics, after all, and if you’re going to name a punter from back in the day, he’s the first one you think of.

I’m glad to see Reed get in over Brown. I never thought all that much of Brown while he was playing and certainly never worried about him.  Not an exciting class, but not a problematic one either. Jerome Bettis shouldn’t get in, neither should Marvin Harrison. Both good players, but neither of them were great.

Super Bowl XLVIII

So, I’m told there is a game today. And, let’s face it, this is the matchup most fans of the game wanted to see. If Peyton Manning is going to cement a legacy as a champion, rather than a choker, it’s much more interesting to see him try to do it against the best defense in the NFL.

Historically, the best defense has defeated the best offense. Defense wins championships and all that. So, one has to lean towards the Seahawks on that basis, I think. While DVOA has Denver as the top offense and Seattle as the best defense, it also shows the Seattle offense (7) being better than Denver’s defense (15). Russell Wilson hasn’t looked great in the playoffs, but the San Francisco defense was capable of making anyone look average and the New Orleans defense was much improved over the disaster of the year before.

As I’ve said several times over the course of the playoffs, I haven’t seen a defense intimidate wide receivers like this Seattle defense since the 2000 Ravens. If Manning can get Welker working across the middle early, that will be the sign that Denver can solve the Seattle secondary. If not, well, we may be seeing the same alligator arms we saw in the NFC Championship game.

And if you’re one of those commenters who feels the need to inform us that you’re not interested in the NFL every single freaking time those of us who are interested in the sport are discussing it, just go away already. Neither I nor anyone else cares about what you do or don’t like. Deal with it.

The dark side of income inequality

Republicans, Libertarians, and Any Rand aficionados like to talk about income inequality as if it is an intrinsically socialist concept. And there is some truth to that. Socialists and other distributionists often appeal to income inequality in order to violate private property rights and rob from Peter in order to pay Paula, DaPaul and Pedro. Income equality can be, and has often been used to justify socialism.

However, superior talent, hard work, and luck combined with a capitalist system are not the only source of income inequality. Income inequality also comes from theft, fraud, government corruption and other evils. And that is the very sort of income inequality that is not only indefensible, but is ever bit as problematic economically as it is morally.  Zerohedge explains the dark side of income inequality:

This brings us to the second undesirable and unjustified source of income inequalities, i.e., the creation of money out of thin air, or legal counterfeiting, by central banks. It should be no surprise the growing gap in income inequalities has coincided with the adoption of fiat currencies worldwide. Every dollar the central bank creates benefits the early recipients of the money—the government and the banking sector — at the expense of the late recipients of the money, the wage earners, and the poor. Since the creation of a fiat currency system in 1971, the dollar has lost 82 percent of its value while the banking sector has gone from 4 percent of GDP to well over 10 percent today.

The central bank does not create anything real; neither resources nor goods and services. When it creates money it causes the price of transactions to increase. The original quantity theory of money clearly related money to the price of anything money can buy, including assets. When the central bank creates money, traders, hedge funds and banks — being first in line — benefit from the increased variability and upward trend in asset prices. Also, future contracts and other derivative products on exchange rates or interest rates were unnecessary prior to 1971, since hedging activity was mostly unnecessary. The central bank is responsible for this added risk, variability, and surge in asset prices unjustified by fundamentals.

The banking sector has been able to significantly increase its profits or claims on goods and services. However, more claims held by one sector, which essentially does not create anything of real value, means less claims on real goods and services for everyone else. This is why counterfeiting is illegal. Hence, the central bank has been playing a central role as a “reverse Robin Hood” by increasing the economic pie going to the rich and by slowly sinking the middle class toward poverty.

One need not be a socialist, or oppose capitalism, to oppose the income equality that is the result of theft. With the assistance of the Federal Reserve and Congress, the banks have financially raped the American economy and the American people through fraud and political corruption. A reckoning is overdue. Everything that has been done in the last five years has been done in order to postpone it. And yet, a reckoning is coming nevertheless, because that which cannot continue will not continue. The rich simply cannot consume enough to substitute for more equitable consumption; how many cars can a man drive? In how many homes can a man dwell?

Answers for MJ 2

In which MJ asks about Platonism and Socrates:

I wanted to ask you about your view of Platonism. I have two acquaintances who are fellow classical language majors; they are both atheists (I view them as rather militant at times) and as far as I understand they became Platonists after having taken a Greek philosophy course. I was wondering how compatible atheism and Platonism are.

While I am convinced that the human mind is able to fuse even contradicting philosophies together to its liking, avoiding the inconsistency in the process, I am not so sure that they form a coherent pair. In particular, Platonism opens up the necessity of a non-material world of the Forms. While a non-material level of existence does not immediately imply the existence of god, I conjecture that the necessity of a non-material world does at least open up the possibility of the existence of god more greatly than atheists would like. After all, I ask, if a non-material realm of the Forms exists, what is preventing there from being a non-material realm of flying monkeys, or other nonsensical abstractions? I don’t believe Plato’s philosophy expressly and logically forbids the possibility of other non-material worlds.

While Occam’s razor could be invoked, the razor alone wouldn’t necessarily bring truth to the discussion. Plus, the razor could work against Plato’s world of the Forms if there were a simpler non-material realm available. I don’t particularly care for Plato or Socrates. They’re fun to read at times, but…well, I think you have similar sentiments. While definitions may be the beginning of wisdom, they can also be the seeds of deceit; Socrates takes advantage of that time and time again.

I am a nominal platonist in the sense that I believe in the supernatural realm but I am not a Platonist who subscribes to Plato’s various theories concerning that realm. Just to be clear, “platonism refers to “the philosophy that affirms the existence of abstract objects, which are asserted to “exist” in a “third realm distinct both from the sensible external world and from the internal world of consciousness, and is the opposite of nominalism”, which is either the assertion that everything that exists is a particular thing, or that everything that exists is concrete.

So, while it is technically possible for an atheist to be a platonist, at least in the case of a Christian atheist such as Scheisskopf from Catch-22 who does not believe in a very particular god with very specific attributes, it is extraordinarily unlikely. A platonist, by definition, believes in the supernatural, and it is absolutely impossible for a platonist to be a rational materialist, which is the spectacularly ill-named nominalist philosophy to which most atheists subscribe.

MJ’s two fellow students are no more platonists than they are giraffes, indeed, they demonstrate very beautifully the intellectual shallowness of the militant atheist as well as the truth of Chesterton’s quote concerning how those who do not believe in God will readily believe in anything, no matter how absurd.

As for definitions being the seeds of deceit, well, we have certainly seen that in the series on the Fifth Horseman. While I am a fan of utilizing the Socratic method, I believe it should be used honestly, to better open men’s eyes to the truth, not deviously in order to trap people into confessing falsehoods in which they do not believe. As I demonstrated in The Irrational Atheist, Socrates is not above cheating and moving the goalposts, taking his opponent’s agreement and applying it to something to which Socrates himself admits the other man did not agree.

I vastly prefer Aristotle to either Socrates or Plato. And Aristotle correctly identified “ambiguity” in definition as being one of the chief rhetorical tactics of the sophists. And indeed, we see that very ambiguity utilized on an almost daily basis by intellectually dishonest interlocutors here on this blog and elsewhere. The sophistical manual of the Street Epistemologist is nothing but one long exercise in rhetorical ambiguity.

A THRONE OF BONES is back

I am extremely pleased to see that the first volume in Arts of Dark and Light, A THRONE OF BONES, is available again on Amazon. Seeing as I am elbows’ deep in the guts of the sequel, (and a very convoluted, but action-filled Book Two it is too), I found it more than a little irritating that all of the secondary works were back up online again, but the central one was not.

If you haven’t read A Throne of Bones yet, it is my answer to the modern epic fantasy. Interestingly enough, Amazon appears to have categorized it in the category Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy > Myths & Legends > Greek & Roman. I take this as the same sort of compliment that a Black Gate reviewer once paid to Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy when he commented on the arguments by Thomas Aquinas it contained. I don’t claim that A Throne of Bones rises to the level of Greco-Roman myth, much less that my argument for elven ensoulment is as logically sound as the arguments in the Summa proper, but the mere fact that my works can be mistaken for such things, however briefly, is interesting in its own right.

As for the present lack of reviews, I am confident that all 134 reviews, including the spurious ones, will soon be attached to the new Castalia House listing. The price remains the same as before, and at $4.99 for 854 pages, A Throne of Bones has to be one of the better bargains Amazon is presently offering. As for the book itself, this three-star review might provide an informative perspective:

“Vox is adept at balancing out a very complex story. This is only the first book, but Vox wastes no time establishing what are, I assume, the majority of the key forces at play on the chess board so to speak. And that’s one of the biggest draws of the book, because I don’t know how you could read it and not at least be a little curious who’s going to come out on top considering not just the volume of opposing forces, but the variety as well, between demons, different humanoid races, and monsters. Vox has created a house of cards that should be entertaining to watch come crashing down.

“Making this conflict an even more exciting prospect is the way he handles the battles. The battles are some of the best I’ve read in a fantasy novel. Whereas Tolkien didn’t care about strategy, or going into the specifics of the personal impact of the conflict, and seemed to only put the action into his books because he thought that’s what the readers wanted, Vox relishes in strategy, and the up close and personal consequences of the violence. The battles are great, and they don’t feel forced in just to add conflict. The final battle in the book was the end result of a chain of dominoes first tipped over right at the start of the book. Kudos on that, because it definitely has more impact when the battle literally couldn’t exist without the prior 600+ pages setting it up.

“I’d like to give this book a four star review, because I enjoyed reading it despite its flaws, but it’s a three star book. With just a couple of (easier said than done) improvements, this could be an easy four stars if not five. Vox has laid a solid foundation, and I’m still looking forward to seeing who dies next, who betrays who, and how the alliances change.

“Also, just sayin’, I’d much rather read this than Martin’s Game of Thrones.”

I don’t know if I will succeed in making the series continuously improve or not; presumably no author wants to see his books on a downward-trending arc. But I have paid attention to all of the substantive criticism that has been offered. Some of it is admittedly beyond me: it is clear at this point that I’m not going to magically become a more talented weaver of prose. Some of it is simply misguided: “a shrieking, struggling dwarf-sized body” is not necessarily a dwarf and if you can’t figure that out, well, that’s perfectly understandable, but in that case you are not my ideal reader. Some of it is simply subjective and therefore irrelevant. But some of it is very useful indeed, and I very much appreciate those who have criticized the book with the objective of making the subsequent ones better.

I am presently on track for Book Two to be published in ebook in December. Kirk and I were discussing the cover just yesterday, and there will be a hardcover versions of both Book One and Book Two available, although I can’t guarantee that the hardcover release will coincide with the electronic one.