Category: Uncategorized

The end of the Diaspora

Martin van Creveld anticipates it. The Learned Elders of Wye see it. David Goldberg sees it. As does Rich Cohen:

The horror of the Holocaust purchased us a 70-year vacation from history, though we didn’t know it. We believed the world had changed, as had human nature. Jews remained distinct in the new dispensation, but in a good way—a near-at-hand exotic, a symbol of exile, which we were told was the natural state of modern man. For perhaps the only time in history, you might actually want to be a Jew. Because of the close families and good husbands and yada yada. Saul Bellow, Phillip Roth, Mel Brooks. To those of us who came of age in these years, the future seemed like it would be more of the same, the present carried on forever.

We were wrong.

If you go online and read the comments on any story about Israel or George Soros or search certain terms on Twitter, you begin to feel the golden age of the American Jews was just a moment in time. Perhaps the old paranoia stirs in me, but I see ominous signs everywhere:

What changed? Well, for starters, there are just
fewer of us in proportion to the whole. Whereas Jews once constituted
five percent of America, and as much as forty percent of New York, those
numbers have shrunk. We’re perhaps thirteen percent of New York and
around two percent of the nation. In this sense, American Jews are
living with the results of their success. This is indeed the promised
land. It’s where Jews fulfilled the dream which, for many, has been to
stop being Jews and become part of the imagined whole.  Like the caboose
of a train, we’re getting smaller as we go away.

I think Cohen is leaving out three of the more important reasons for the Jewish decline. First, being the most left-leaning portion of the American electorate, Jews are disproportionately affected by the dyscivic and dysgenic consequences of their own social policies. In the traditional 1950s America they so hated, a Jewish man with abnormal inclinations would be heavily encouraged to resist them, get married, and have at least three Jewish children. In post-traditional America, such a man is encouraged to do anything from play house with another man to put on a dress, mutilate himself, and call himself Esther. But whatever non-traditional lifestyle he chooses, his line is going to end with him.

Second, as Cohen says himself, “Jews had re-imagined the nation.” Of course, they didn’t merely reimagine it, they helped remake it more to their liking out of the mistaken belief that a multi-ethnic America would be better and safer for them than an Anglo-Saxon America. This is turning out to be wildly untrue, as the genteel disdain they so resented on the part of the elite White Anglo-Saxon Episcopalians is considerably milder than the way in which they regarded by nearly every immigrant group that the Jews have sought to import, from Central Americans to Eastern Europeans to Asians.

(The same is true in England, for that matter; the rise in anti-semitism in the UK isn’t merely the result of Muslim immigration, but Polish immigration as well. Until I moved to Europe, I had no idea that Poles tend to dislike Jews even more than they dislike Russians and Communists. I’m not sure they entirely distinguish between the three.)

The third is that a number of elite Jews in America have increasingly attempted to use America’s military on behalf of Israel’s foreign policy. This is increasingly resented by Americans across the political spectrum; for example, neither Right nor Left is even remotely interested in invading Iran as the neocons have been demanding for the last 13 years. Their efforts have not yet boomeranged, as Dr. van Creveld fears, but at some point they most likely will if they do not cease.

I don’t see it getting as bad for American Jews as it will for their few remaining European cousins, mostly because Americans are much less ethno-nationalistic and there is considerably more space. But I do think Cohen is correct in anticipating the significant decline of Jewish influence in America. Because, at the end of the day, Israel is the Jewish nation and the idea of the functional multi-ethnic society is not long for this world.

Of course, the idea was always bound to fail. It was obvious, on the basis of the assumption on which the belief was founded: “We believed the world had changed, as had human nature.” The world may have changed, for a time, but it will always change again. Human nature, on the other hand, doesn’t. 

Shelving Aristotle

Now the SJWs are openly coming out against Aristotle’s logic at File 770:

Stevie on June 4, 2015 at 6:21 pm said:
Incidentally, had not Athens been Lords of the Sea then we not have their Golden Age. We would not have the works of Aristotle. For one brief moment I thought wistfully of what an improvement this would be, but came down on the side of sanity….

Chris Hensley on June 4, 2015 at 6:26 pm said:
The works of Aristotle are important. Much of it has been replaced by
better knowledge, but we wouldn’t have that knowledge was still built
upon Aristotle. It is time that his logic be put upon the shelf next to
his physics.

One thing that is readily apparent is that they very much resent how we have correctly identified them as rhetoricals incapable of rational dialectic and ruled by their feelbads rather than reason. Consider exactly what it is that they are rejecting. They are rejecting logic for fantasy because they cannot be instructed by information, they are only guided by emotion.

They are, quite literally, irrational. And in the SJWs always lie department, there is this:

Dex on June 5, 2015 at 6:20 am said: 
I think this, more than anything, is the accurate way to approach
characters like VD. The man is a grifter. For all the outrage he
manufactures, it appeals to a fringe group that flocks to him and is
happy to throw money his way so long as he seems to be fighting the good
fight. The entire Hugo situation is nothing but a scam for him to earn
the publicity that his talent can’t, and entice a small group of
hardcore followers to financially support him. It’s Alex Jones without
the audience. I have no doubt that within six months, his publishing
house will include links to buying gold coins, Prepper food packs and
herbal cures to diabetes.

It’s interesting that he makes such claims, in light of the email I received just two hours ago from the company with whom I tried an advertising experiment about two years ago.

We’ve been working with you some time ago and I believe we can make a good partnership again. Since last time we worked we have grown up a lot and made a lot of improvements for our publishers. Get back to me if you are interested and I will help you to resume a campaign according to your needs.

Anyone want to see those ads for celebrity feet again? I certainly don’t, so I politely declined. It’s a strange sort of grifter who turns down over $1k in advertising money per month just because I prefer to not annoy my readers. And considering that I have written more than 500 columns and 15,000 blog posts, and Castalia has given away over 32,000 free books in the last 18 months, I daresay I’ve provided more free content than anyone else in the entire science fiction field in recent years. Even Brainstorm has a not insubstantial free component to it.

That being said, I very appreciate the willingness of my hardcore supporters to support me and Castalia House. And because I appreciate it, I try to make sure that every time anyone pays for anything, they feel they are receiving substantive subjective value.

Transcript available

From last weekend’s Brainstorm event with Dr. Martin van Creveld, Israeli military historian and the author of The Transformation of War and A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind:

VOX: Speaking of the US, I am curious to know what the general opinion in Israel is of the American neocons who, like you said, have been trying to overthrow Assad. They have overturned the Ukrainian government, the Libyan government, the Iraqi government, etc. What is the general view of the neocons in Israel?

MVC: Oh, we love them. The Israelis are very happy to fight the Arabs and the Iranians with American blood. During the first Gulf War, Israel was then under Yitzhak Shamir and did whatever it could to encourage an American invasion of Iraq. I wouldn’t say that this was decisive but they tried. It was the same when the Americans invaded Iraq for the second time. It was the same when Americans clashed with Iran over nuclear weapons. Each time you can see this very consistently. You can see the Israeli Right and, to some extent, even the Left say okay, this is lovely, we are going to let the Americans put the chestnuts in the fire for us.

Myself, I must say, that I dislike this policy very much. But certainly most Israelis like it. They like to be on the side of the strong as I see it. They push America as much as they can into these ventures. Just today I saw a famous t-shirt that says “Don’t worry America, Israel is behind you.” I also know that some Americans, like Pat Buchanan, have been writing that these lousy Israelis have been trying to use American for their own purposes and have unfortunately they have succeeded. So, personally I am not happy about this policy. I think that it may well one day act as a boomerang.

 VOX: Do you think it is bad for Israel to be dependent in that way?

MVC: Yes, because, as we say in Hebrew, “the one who’s got the money has the say.” It’s bad in several ways, it is bad in the sense that we are tilting too much in the Republican direction. That is a bad thing in my view. It’s not bipartisan. There is a danger that one day support for Israel will probably fade and people will say enough of this. They will say Israelis are exploiting us with American-Jewish help. They are exploiting us for their own purposes. Let them go and fight their own wars. I have been warned more than once by my American friends that this is one day going to happen. It hasn’t happened yet but it is going to happen one day and it worries me. Frankly, it worries me.

VOX: Yeah, you don’t want to use your allies on a war that you don’t need and then not have their support when you actually need it.

MVC: Exactly.

In the event you are not a Brainstorm member but happen to be interested in obtaining a transcript of the interview with Dr. Martin van Creveld, it is available in EPUB and MOBI format at Castalia House.

We haven’t scheduled the times yet, but William S. Lind has agreed to do a future event, as has Dr. Helen Smith. I’ve also contacted Ann Coulter’s publisher and am expect to arrange an interview with her at some point about her new book, Adios America. If there are others you might be interested in seeing on Brainstorm, feel free to make suggestions here. The objective is to maintain a consistently high level of intellectual discourse for the open and closed events alike.

You can join Brainstorm as an Annual or Monthly member
to receive free transcripts as well as taking part in the closed
events. Now that we have 500 seats in the virtual auditorium, there
isn’t much risk of not being able to attend the open ones. On which
note, I should mention that there are still 240 seats left for next week’s event with Roosh V.

A juxstaposition

If there is one lesson, just one, from all of Martin van Creveld’s books, it is that technology does not guarantee military victory. Here is a vivid comparison that shows why things are looking rather grim for the US military if it is ordered to intervene in the Middle East for a third time in three decades in order to take on the Islamic State there:

  1. Let Transgender Troops Serve Openly by THE EDITORIAL BOARD. The Pentagon’s ban on transgender troops is based on obsolete policies and must be rescinded.  The Williams Institute at the U.C.L.A. School of Law, which researches gender issues, estimates there are about 15,500 transgender troops serving in uniform.
  2. Using Violence and Persuasion, ISIS Makes Political Gains. Amid punishing American-backed airstrikes, the Islamic State militants have advanced in Iraq and Syria using a dual strategy of purporting to represent Sunni interests and attacking any group that vies to play the same role.

Military history clearly demonstrates that the side that executes homosexuals, whether throwing them off buildings or having their fellow soldiers beat them to death, reliably defeats the side that allows its soldiers to dress up and pretend they are women.

Yes, wealth and technology are on the side of the crossdressing military. But attrition, geography, and history are on the side that does not tolerate effeminacy.

It’s true that the US military roundly defeated the Soviet-trained, Soviet-equipped Iraqi army twice, the second time largely without a fight. But then, the Islamic State has defeated the US-trained, US-equipped Iraqi army.

If You Were an Award, My Love

“If You Were An Award, My Love”
by Juan Tabo and S. Harris

If you were an award, my love, then you would be a Hugo™. You’d be a big one, five feet, ten inches, the same height as human-you and twice the height of Regular Size John Scalzi, You’d be made of brass, and wood and plastic, and difficult to take on an airplane as carry on due to enhanced security precautions. Your eyes wouldn’t exist, because you were a rocket, stupid.

If you were a Hugo®, then I would become Taller, Stronger John Scalzi so that I could spend all my time with you. I’d bring you raw chickens and live goats, if you were into that kind of thing.  I’d make my bed right under the trophy case, in the basement where my wife lets me sleep. When I couldn’t sleep, I’d sing you lullabies.

If I sang you lullabies, I’d soon notice how you were still a statue. You’d just sit there, because you were still a statue. When you thought I was asleep, you’d still be a statue, and I would still be Taller, Stronger, John Scalzi.

If I were still Taller, Stronger John Scalzi, I would rage against Puppies, Sad and Rabid, and my friends the League of Social Justice Warriors would rally to fund new research into defeating Puppies. Money would flood into the World Con. Biologists would try to figure out how to give rabbits jaws with big sharp teeth. Then I would know that I lived in a world of magic where anything was possible and a story with no fantasy and no science and very little fiction could be nominated for a Hugo©.

If we lived in a world of magic where anything was possible and a story with no fantasy and no science and very little fiction could be nominated for a Hugo™ then you would be an award, my love. You’d stand for everything progressive and PETA© and transgender and carbon-neutral and GMO/peanut free and latina and pro-Palestine and LGBT friendly and you’d miss the Soviet Union in a melancholy kind of way. Your Social Just-Us Warrior supporters would intimidate your foes effortlessly through coordinated campaigns of doxxing and public hateshaming. Whereas you—fragile, lovely, human you—must rely on threats and intimidation and troll-like slow-writing George R. R. Martin.

A Hugo©, even a large one, would never have to end up in the hands of John C. Wright or Jim Butcher or Steve Rzasa or Vox Day because they are insufficiently progressive, and are likely soaked in gin and malice.  A Hugo®, my love, would eschew gin and malice and instead be soaked in Grand Marnier® and love©.  A Hugo™ would bare rocket engine and liberal pedigree and they would cower. They’d hide in the Internet instead of crashing our party. They’d grasp each other for comfort and shout “Remember Heinlein and Campbell” instead of seizing the ballot and not letting anyone at all but the Puppies vote for the nominations and would then vote again in a completely democratic process on the nominated works as we slipped in the pools of our aggregated tears.

If you were an award, my love, I’d teach you the scents of those men. I’d lead a large herd of rabbits to them quietly, oh so quietly. They’d laugh, and probably not be scared since they are feelbad hurtspeak people. Your nostrils would flare as you inhaled the night and then, with the suddenness of prey, you’d run and cry. I’d cry, too.

If I cried, cried, cried, I’d eventually feel shame. I’d promise to change the Hugo rules so no one could ever do something like that again through voting. I’d avert my eyes from the newspapers when they showed photographs of the Hugo nominees, just as they must avert their eyes from the newspapers that show my crying face. How reporters adore my face, the face of the writer with his half-written acceptance speech, tickets to Washington, green chiffon bridesmaid dress.  The writer who sits by the bedside of another writer who wrote about tribbles and is hurtbad because our insular community is not now sufficiently insular for my taste.

If you were an award, my love, then no one could take you, and if nothing could take you, then I would be externally validated as my persona requires. I would bloom into the most beautiful Socially Just Warrior Flower. I would stretch joyfully toward the left. I’d trust in your shiny brass and wood to keep you/me/us safe now and forever from the feelbad hurtspeech men, and the tally of the ballots and the internet, and the shuttering of my empty trophy case.
 
UPDATE: I just what can’t words wow just wow…. 

UPDATE 2: Yeah, we’re going to need a bigger harpoon.

He REALLY likes rape

George Rape Rape Martin explains that books without rape are “boring and “fundamentally dishonest”:

Martin, 66, said that the characters in his novels using rape to get their way is legitimate because it reflects European history, which inspired his own fantasy novels.

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Martin said: ‘I’m writing about war, which is what almost all epic fantasy is about. ‘But if you’re going to write about war, and you just want to include all the cool battles and heroes killing a lot of orcs and things like that and you don’t portray [sexual violence], then there’s something fundamentally dishonest about that.

‘Rape, unfortunately, is still a part of war today. It’s not a strong testament to the human race, but I don’t think we should pretend it doesn’t exist. I want to portray struggle. Drama comes out of conflict. If you portray a utopia, then you probably wrote a pretty boring book.’

Sure, but one has to question his devotion to historical realism when there is one rape every twenty-four pages, while children apparently spring into existence without married couples ever having sex.

You can’t compost an ebook

But you can certainly compost this, if you are so inclined. The #1 Gardening bestseller is now available in paperback for $9.99.

“This is a quick, easy read that
will dump as much information as it possibly can into your brain in an
hour or so. If you compost, buy this. If you want to compost, buy
this. Don’t buy some $20 how-to manual, just buy this.”

“He makes it very easy and fun to grasp gardening concepts. He is very well read and has done a lot of personal experimentation. He has taken a broad range of information and distilled it into something cohesive and contemporary.”

Post-evolutionary Man

Roosh not only observes that natural selection no longer applies to human evolution, but concludes that this indicates the inapplicability of the evo psyche model to human behavior:

Anti-evolutionary behaviors should have been weeded out of the gene pool according to the idea of natural selection, but the more I looked around, the more I saw nothing but my own behavior, of people who were actually frightened to death about being a parent even though they were healthy and could afford to raise children. In fact, the sum of Western ideologies seem aimed to specifically halt human reproduction.

Western people are structuring their lives in deliberate ways to not reproduce at all and where their cherished hedonistic lifestyles would be greatly harmed if children entered the picture, and while it’s easy to use evolutionary theory in describing which man a woman chooses to have sex with, how can that possibly be correct if the man used condoms or the woman used birth control? Darwin’s theory refers to reproduction, not recreational sex and definitely not a prolonged period of sterile sport fucking, which has no benefit to the genes of the “athlete.” Having an explanation for why a girl on birth control went home with the “alpha male” after meeting him in the club has nothing to do with evolution or natural selection, since they both knew that no child would result and used the full force of their consciousness to prevent the creation of life. If reproduction was the purposefully blocked intent, evolution was not present during the sex event….

We must therefore conclude, with logic and rationale, that evolution is so flawed at explaining modern human reproductive
behavior (and not merely casual sex where reproduction was never the
intent), that evolution is not an observable or correct principle for
human beings living in Westernized nations. We must discard evolutionary
theory as applying to all humans through the mechanism of natural
selection and begin a search for a new explanation that explains our
current biological behavior.

Evolution may have been the correct theory for a window of human
existence, but that window has now closed and theories for
post-evolutionary man, one in which there is no struggle for survival
and where the strongest of the species are not reproducing, must be
devised.

Even if we were to concede that we got here through the process of
evolution from a primordial soup, and that our brains are the result of
it, these brains are now in a modern environment which has tripwired,
hijacked, or corrupted any applicable evolutionary program. We have
become one with the plugged-in cosmopolitan borg, and that regardless of
the process that caused us to come about, that process is no longer in
effect and a new process, yet to be described or understood, is
manifesting itself throughout humanity and shattering Darwin’s “survive
and reproduce” model.

I never bought into either the natural selection explanation for human evolution or the evo psych explanation for human behavior, but it is fascinating to see other high-caliber thinkers like Roosh who did beginning to reach similar conclusions.

Needless to say, this is one of the many topics we will be discussing at next week’s open Brainstorm event. There are 500 290 seats left and seats can be reserved here: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/5402452949014075905. But whether you’re interested in the event or not, you should definitely read the piece linked above.

Western society is now dysgenic as well as dyscivic. This means it cannot survive in its current form. Regardless of how fervently you support concepts like women’s suffrage, equality, diversity, immigration and so forth, it is important to understand that, in the long term, you are choosing them over indoor plumbing, cheap and plentiful water, airplane travel, living wages, access to high-tech medical care, and reasonably full employment.

Believe or don’t believe that you are doing it, but that is exactly the choice you are making every single day. The fact that you can’t see the brick wall looming a few miles down the road does not mean it is not there.

Tales of Vibrant America

The wondrous benefits of diversity in action:

On April 22, Baltimore resident Richard Fletcher looked out his window and saw two teenage girls fighting — on top of his car. He went outside to ask them to take the fight elsewhere, and was then jumped by approximately 50 “teens” and beaten within an inch of his life. The attackers crushed his eye sockets and broke his nose, as well as several ribs.

61-year-old Fletcher is now out of the hospital but facing medical bills of “$200,000 to 400,000.”

According to the Daily Mail, the teens kicked Fletcher until he fell to the ground and then continued to beat him once he was down. Police have since arrested 17-year-old Antoine Lawson, a 15-year-old girl, and three others in connection with the beating “and are hoping to bring all of the teens, who are believed to be students at Baltimore Community High School, that participated in the beating to justice.”

Teens. The vibrant youth, the hope of tomorrow’s America. Just remember, no matter what happens, diversity is good. And the Zombie Apocalypse is totally about the undead.

Repent, racist white people! Celebrate diversity! Surely nothing like what befell Richard Fletcher will ever happen to anyone who believes with his heart and confesses with his tongue that there is no such thing as race.

Speaking of a true believer, Glenn Reynolds directs us to the attention of a white male who is is burdened by his Original Sin:

I am a white, male poet—a white, male poet who is aware of his privilege and sensitive to inequalities facing women, POC, and LGBTQ individuals in and out of the writing community—but despite this awareness and sensitivity, I am still white and still male. Sometimes I feel like the time to write from my experience has passed, that the need for poems from a white, male perspective just isn’t there anymore, and that the torch has passed to writers of other communities whose voices have too long been silenced or suppressed. I feel terrible about feeling terrible about this, since I also know that for so long, white men made other people feel terrible about who they were. Sometimes I write from other perspectives via persona poems in order to understand and empathize with the so-called “other”; but I fear that this could be construed as yet another example of my privilege—that I am appropriating another person’s experience, violating that person by telling his or her story. It feels like a Catch-22. Write what you know and risk denying voices whose stories are more urgent; write to learn what you don’t know and risk colonizing someone else’s story. I genuinely am troubled by this. I want to listen but I also want to write—yet at times these impulses feel at odds with one another. How can I reconcile the two?

 My advice? Stop appropriating and othering, move to Baltimore, and start experiencing vibrancy in all its diverse fullness. After all, nothing makes a poet’s name like a young and untimely death.

In the SF world rages a war

A translation of the article on Castalia House in Finland’s largest newspaper.

IN THE SCI-FI WORLD OF USA RAGES A WAR, IN WHICH EVEN THE GAME OF THRONES AUTHOR IS ENTANGLED WITH – AND IN THE EPICENTER OF IT ALL IS THIS KOUVOLA MAN

Sci-fi literature enthusiasts in USA are in civil war. A conservative mutiny is trying to push out of bestseller lists and awards the mainstream, “tolerant” sci-fi. The battle is already being called culture wars – and one of the headquarters is located in Finland.

There is a man in Kouvola, and before the man, a computer.

Together, the man and the computer are in the front lines of a battle that is shaking the entire world of sci-fi literature.

The man and the computer were revealed to the world, spring this year.

At the time was published “the Oscars of sci-fi books” – Hugo-awards – nominees.

The entire sci-fi world roared: lists were full of works by religious extremists and ultraconservatives.

The surprise was so big that even The New York Times and Washington Post wrote about it.

And behind the entire surprise were a man and a computer in Kouvola.

The name of the man is Markku Koponen, and on the computer runs a company called Castalia House.

Koponen publishes conservative science fiction to everywhere in the world, mainly as e-books to the web store Amazon.

Who on earth is this man?`

“I suppose you could even call me ultraconservative”, Koponen says on the phone.

At least judging by his authors, the characterization rings true. On Koponen’s list are, among others, the authors at the center of the Hugo-brouhaha, John C. Wright and pen name Vox Day, who is Theodore Beale.

Both men are known for their extreme opinions: Wright’s comments have been characterized as anti-gay, and Beale’s racist and misogynist.

Koponen tells he has founded Castalia House due to having been fed up with contemporary science fiction.

He thought it too left wing, too tolerant and full of the preaching of such things – “message fiction”.

Koponen has never been much involved with Finland’s sci-fi scene. He has been in contact with them to the degree of breaking fellowship.

According to Koponen his name and address were mentioned in a sci-fi enthusiast mailing list – at which point he wrote to the members a response saying he indeed is in an opposite corner with them, and will walk his own path with his publishing house, apart from them.

So, in Finland Koponen is alone, but in the world out there he is part of an entire army.

In the sci-fi and fantasy circles – fandom – in USA there is a controversy which is already being called a culture war.

Outside the mainstream of sci-fi there is a conservative cabal resisting the majority of fandom, which has assumed the name Sad Puppies. In spirit, Koponen is part of this group.

According to Sad Puppies, over-tolerating forces keep the entire fandom in their grip so tightly, that authors and fans who support conservative values are shut out of the circles.

This irritates Sad Puppies, who consider proper sci-fi and fantasy to be in the same vein as in, for example, the forties and fifties.

Such “proper sci-fi” is one where heroes are manly, white hetero men, women are victims to be rescued and enemies are disgusting aliens.

Black and white settings are not confused with deep moral considerations, and most assuredly not with leftist or feminist thoughts.

Koponen thinks fandom and mainstream sci-fi publishing is riddled, both in Finland and elsewhere in the world, a “tolerant consensus”. This leads to censorship of “proper sci-fi” and the dominance of preachy message fiction.

“They are quite like-minded folks. And it’s no conspiracy really, likeminded people simply easily flock together”, Koponen says.

“A common climate of opinion emerges naturally: just the way it happens on our side too.”

Examples of this “real sci-fi” that Koponen admires, were written in past decades for example by such authors as John W. Campbell and Robert A. Heinlein.

Many of their works are considered sci-fi classics these days, but also products of their era. For example, Campbell’s views are, according to modern standards, thoroughly racist and conservative.
Nowadays “traditional” sci-fi or fantasy is represented by such people as the American author Larry Correia and Brad R. Torgersen. Correia rose even to the New York Times best seller list with his Monster Hunter -series, but in his own opinion he has been discriminated against among fandom for his views.

Behind the entire rebellion, in a sense, is actually Correia.

You see, two years ago he started an internet campaign for his own Hugo-nomination.

In it, he blamed the usual Hugo-voters as arrogant elitists, who only value left-wing messagefiction and turn their noses at Correia’s Pulp-style entertainment books.

He amped up his appeal ironically with a picture of a sad dog puppy, from which the Sad Puppies name was born. Then along came Torgersen, the campaign got bigger, and the duo started putting together their slates on not just their own books, but others – all of them naturally works that they’d consider discriminated against by fandom elite.

Eventually Vox Day aka. Theodore Beale came to stir the soup.

Beale was an influential figure in the techno band Psykosonik, and video game company Fenris Wolf. At the beginning of 2000’s Beale started his writing career with his strongly religious War in Heaven -fantasy book and has since released dozens of works.

Beale has written, among other things, how women’s suffrage should be ended and called an African-American woman who criticized him a “half-savage”.

The radical Sad Puppies movement got even more radical Rabid Puppies -slate.

And then, in the Hugo-vote of this spring, the conservative sci-fi -people’s project brought returns. In nearly every category there was Sad- and Rabid Puppies’ favorites, and a central publisher among them was Koponen’s Castalia House.

There was an uproar.

Several Hugo-nominated authors gave up their nomination and well-known sci-fi and fantasy authors expressed their disappointment towards what happened. Among the latter were, for example, the Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin, who opined that the rightist sci-fi -wing has destroyed the entire award. In his blog Martin ended up in a long debate with Larry Correia.

Many sci-fi fans expressed their protest by intending to vote, instead of the official nominees, “Noah Ward”. This is not a person, but a pun on “no award”.

Most of all, the roar happened in Finland: What on earth was the Finnish publishing house amidst it all, of which nearly no-one knew anything?

Until last year, Markku Koponen was quite the ordinary engineer.

He graduated from Tampere University of Technology and programmed code for industrial use. Koponen was writing actively on politics in the internet: he calls himself a social conservative. He also read lots of sci-fi.

Koponen became acquainted with Theodore Beale in the Internet, some years ago, when the ideologies of the two men “clicked”. As a result came mutual projects, latest of them being Castalia House.

In the partnership, Beale is the foaming-at-the-mouth spokesman, and Koponen handles the business in the background, and constructs technical architechtures. Koponen might be described as the weaponsmith of Sad Puppies, of a sort.

He says he is in agreement with Beale on the “general lines”, although there are some doctrinal disagreements on the matters of faith.

Koponen describes himself as a fundamentalist Christian, in the sense of agreeing with the document The Five Fundamentals, published by the American Presbyterian Church in 1910 about the mandatory, non-negotiable content of the Christian faith.

In any event, Koponen is in line with the Sad Puppies movement.

Foundational to Castalia House according to Koponen is to give a guarantee to the authors that their religious or political views will not be censored.

For example, John C. Wright, whom Koponen describes as a devoted Catholic, will be allowed to include his ideology in his books as much as he damn well pleases, and Castalia House will publish.

“With this promise it has been really easy to get authors onboard. Many are fed up with their books being censored for ideological content with quite the heavy hand.”

However, Koponen has not been involved in the Sad Puppies -campaigning, social media arguments nor otherwise – except by publishing books that the activists will enjoy.

He says that he would not have founded Castalia House either, had he not very early on realized the commercial potential in the conservative sci-fi, so loved by Sad Puppies.

This has also proven true: Koponen says he has only invested his own money the necessary 2 500 EUR required to start a Limited Liability Company, and now the firm produces a gross profit of about 30 000 EUR already.

Castalia House mostly sells e-books. According to Koponen, in good months a few thousand books get sold. Physical books get sold only some hundreds of units a month.

Castalia Housen books have been translated to other languages than English, among them Finnish, but Koponen says 99 percent of the market is currently in the United States.

To Finland, the Sad Puppies -movement and culture war – Koponen agrees with this word – has not spread yet in a large degree.

But it will in a few years, he believes.

“At least, if Worldcon is held in Finland in 2017, I expect some sort of a clash here too”

Indeed, the mainstream sci-fi circles in Finland are active, and are attempting to get the largest event of the sci-fi world to Finland: Worldcon. The annual, controversial Hugo-awards are handed out in it.

Finnish fandom has raised its flag for equality. Also in the “Worldcon to Helsinki” -project, this flag for open-mindedness is very visible – and it’s a flag against Sad Puppies’ values.

The chairman of the science fiction society in Helsinki who has been active in Finnish fandom for decades, is the reporter and author Vesa Sisättö. He doesn’t believe that the upheaval comes here.

Sisättö opines that in the American fandom, the debate that happened in Finland already in 1980’s is happening now.

“At the time there was a minor brawl in the fan circles when Johanna Sinisalo came and spoke on behalf of the status of women in Sci-fi. The contrarians came silent pretty fast, and in the nineties it was not an issue any longer.”

Sisättö considers Sad Puppies a backlash to the fact that old, traditional values no longer hold – quite the same phenomenon as with the Finns Party in Finnish politics, Sisättö mulls.

“What was mainstream in the past, is now minority. Culture changes, and when it happens, certain fellows wake up to it and start raising a ruckus.”

He doesn’t believe the movement is viable in the long run.

“The most active Sad Puppy -buzzers run out of steam, the followers get tired too, and eventually we reach a “is this worth the fight any more?” -phase.

Nor does the conservative Koponen wish to eradicate the mainstream sci-fi, but rather wants to raise his own genre to parity with it.

“At that point, we can live in as much peace as is possible.”

Also worthy of note is that in the spring, another Finnish Hugo-news turned up: First time ever, a Finnish candidate is on the shortlist: The illustrator Ninni Aalto, who competes in the best fan artist -category.

That category has no Sad Puppy nominees.