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Interview with Martin van Creveld

Daniel Eness interviewed Dr. Martin van Creveld, the author of the newly published Equality: The Impossible Quest, at Castalia:

Q: Do you think that some of the contradictions regarding equality in the U.S. Constitution made the document a more stable guide for a new society, or do you see similar contradictions in Rousseau’s influence on the French Revolution?

MvC: Any attempt to institute equality, of any kind, is bound to result in restrictions on freedom. Personally I think that the U.S Constitution did a credible job in balancing between the two (and, of course, justice). Not so Rousseau who, in his quest for equality, went much too far. Not for nothing did my teacher, Jacob Talmon, see him as the father of “totalitarian democracy.” More problematic still, with him equality is the product of, and requires, constant plebiscites about everything. Given the technical means of the age—there was no Net—such a system implied a very small polity indeed. Against the fiscal-military states of the time it simply stood no chance.

Q: You argue that social equality is not a necessary outcome of economic or legal equality. Can social equality be achieved? Should it?

MvC: The only way to achieve equality is to restrict, or even do away with, liberty. Along with liberty justice and the quest for truth—namely the right to think, believe, say and write that equality is not the supreme good—will also disappear. With political correctness reigning as hard as it does, in many places that is already the case. Just try and say that women, or homosexuals, are and should not be equal in this or that way, and you will see what I mean. So I would argue that equality is a dream, and not even a beautiful one.

Q: What are the sexual and property impacts of organized equality in communal bodies?

MvC: It would differ from one type of community to the next, so let me focus on the kind of community, the Israeli kibbutzim, I know best. The kibbutzim were famous for having no private property. Everybody had his or her meals in the communal dining room and his other needs from the machsan, or magazine. Couples lived in “rooms” Children grew up not with their parents but in their own houses. A few specialists apart, people took turns at doing all kinds of jobs. Decisions were taken by the kibbutz assembly in which everybody had one vote. It elected the secretary-general and also set up special committees for such things as education, culture, etc.

For some two generations, it did not work badly at all. The fact that kibbutzniks saw themselves, and were seen by the rest of Israeli society, as an elite helped. What brought the system down was the women. First, they were unhappy with the endless routine of communal kitchen/communal laundry/communal child houses. Starting in the 1970s, they started taking on paid work outside the kibbutz. Next, they wanted their children back home with them. Families with children at home needed better houses, more appliances, and so on. Gradually the place of the communal dining room as the center of kibbutz life was taken by the home. Once that happened private property re-emerged and the kibbutzim started falling apart.

Read the rest of the interview there. And if you’re interested in the book, you can find it on Amazon as well as at Castalia House.

The new fApplism

Why developers are terrified of speaking truthfully about Apple:

According to Ian Parker of The New Yorker, “Apple has made missteps, but the company’s great design secret may be avoiding insult.” It seems curious that they are able to avoid criticism and instead create a “reality distortion field,” in a way that so few other companies have been able to.

Some might explain this fear away as standard corporate procedure. Developers in relationships with Apple are argued to have been required to sign NDAs in order to test prerelease software. Indeed, some developers felt pressure to take down blog posts critical of iOS 7 because they did not want to go against their contractual obligation to secrecy. On the other hand, there are plenty of public screenshots and walkthroughs available during any of Apple’s releases and journalists and public commentators have made hardly a squeak when it comes to criticism of Apple, particularly relating to design. Non-disclosure agreements cannot be the explanation.

James Allworth, a former Strategist for Apple currently with the Harvard Business Review who partners on the Stratechery Podcast with Ben Thompson, sheds light on how Apple has gone about avoiding insult, and it has been anything but a passive strategy. He explains: “I’m generally pro-Apple. I love what they do, I’m completely invested in their ecosystem, I loved working there previously.”

You are surely noticing a pattern here where would-be critics are preemptively apologizing for admitting publicly that Apple is imperfect. Allworth was brave enough to continue at this point: “at the same time, it [Apple] shouldn’t be above criticism. But anytime you think about wanting to write something like this [anything critical] you just pause before pulling the trigger.”

In his days at Apple, Allworth recalls having been a member of a mailing list led by Apple’s Chief Evangelist at the time, Guy Kawasaki. It was on this mailing list that a brigade of devout Apple employees and fanatics would go about promoting Apple’s interests by destroying the opposition. Allworth described what was expected of him when Kawasaki would rouse the mailing list:

    I was one of the ones that used to send emails to journalists that said anything other than kind things about Apple. Like they used to post negative articles about Apple and a whole horde of Apple proponents would bear down upon this poor unsuspecting soul.

This is why you’re a fool to buy into their walled garden. It’s like volunteering to live on the wrong side of the Berlin wall. And it’s why they’re never going to own the game market that they threw away after the Apple II. Android will eventually beat out iOS on all mobile platforms for just that reason; game developers are among the few developers where the users are essentially platform-independent.

Eventually someone is going to figure out what Intel did back in the late 90s and realize that they can dominate the mobile platform with killer game applications across the various game genres. And it’s not going to be Apple. Because fApplism.

The Clausewitzian Congress

One would think that the experience of Napoleon and Hitler would be sufficient to convince anyone that getting into a land war with Russia is something that you simply do not do. But apparently the military geniuses in the US Congress know better:

Yesterday, in a vote that largely slid under the radar, the House of Representatives passed a resolution urging Obama to send lethal aid to Ukraine, providing offensive, not just “defensive” weapons to the Ukraine army – the same insolvent, hyperinflating Ukraine which, with a Caa3/CC credit rating, last week started preparations to issue sovereign debt with a US guarantee, in essence making it a part of the United States (something the US previously did as a favor to Egypt before the Muslim Brotherhood puppet regime was swept from power by the local army).

The resolution passed with broad bipartisan support by a count of 348 to 48.

According to DW,  the measure urges Obama to provide Ukraine with “lethal defensive weapon systems” that would better enable Ukraine to defend its territory from “the unprovoked and continuing aggression of the Russian Federation.”

“Policy like this should not be partisan,” said House Democrat Eliot Engel, the lead sponsor of the resolution. “That is why we are rising today as Democrats and Republicans, really as Americans, to say enough is enough in Ukraine.”

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. That’s the thought that ran through my mind when I read this.

Spy vs spy

The latest revelations of Israeli spying on the USA may, in part, account for the increasing indifference the White House and the Democratic Party are showing to Israeli interests:

It is – rightfully – front-page news that Israel was caught spying on the closed-door negotiations between the U.S. and Iran. And the Obama administration is particularly outraged that Israel allegedly shared that information with Republican congressmen who want to stop any peaceful deal with Iran.

This is certainly outrageous … but small, in the grand scheme of things.

Why? Because Israeli spying on America is so rampant that U.S. officials have labeled it “alarming, even terrifying”.

And because the U.S. has only half-heartedly asked Israel to stop … Israel has told the U.S. to pound sand. As if that isn’t bad enough, the NSA voluntarily shares the raw data it collects on American citizens with Israel. This includes raw data on U.S. government officials.   This not only raises major privacy concerns for American citizens, but it might mean that Israel is spying on the American Congress and other high-level politicians.

Indeed, leaked NSA documents show that U.S. intelligence officials are concerned that the NSA may be putting Israel’s security needs ahead of America’s.

If true, the NSA is only doing what Tom Friedman does. I had to laugh after reading the conclusion of his article in the New York Times today:

So before you make up your mind on the Iran deal, ask how it affects
Israel, the country most threatened by Iran. But also ask how it fits
into a wider U.S. strategy aimed at quelling tensions in the Middle East
with the least U.S. involvement necessary and the lowest oil prices
possible.

This is rather remarkably blunt. Apparently US interests are now supposed to be an afterthought for Americans. Of course, it’s a little difficult for the US government to convincingly affect much outrage about Israeli spying, when the US is so actively spying on the rest of the world.

Onward and upward

An ex-Gamma writes the fourth, and probably the most important, section in his Graduating Gamma series at Alpha Game:

There is no man on the planet more intellectually dishonest than a
Gamma, as even an Omega has enough self-awareness to avoid being a
buffoon at social event and will instead stay at home and play computer
games. Everything from a Gamma is a con or a presented image, because
behind that shell is a scared, miserable boy who uses whatever tools are
at his disposal to build the Gamma Delusion Bubble. The Gamma Delusion
Bubble shields the Gamma from somehow and some way ever being wrong
about anything, as there is no being wrong about “something”, there is
only being a wrong “person”. His identity is so tied up in his opinions
about everything, including himself, that any slip-up is a catastrophe
which must be avoided at all costs.

I’ve learned a tremendous amount from this series, some of which I’ve even been able to apply here. The most important thing for me has been the explanation of a) why Gammas like Scalzi, Brayton, and Myers flee from public debate when they are so otherwise argumentative and contentious, and, b) why it is almost impossible to get a Gamma to admit that he is wrong without him going through every definition in the dictionary, every pedantic nitpick, and every contortion in the Kama Sutra in order to avoid it no matter how obvious it is to you and everyone else.

Some of you have noticed that I’ve gotten increasingly intolerant of rhetorical arguments, particularly pseudo-dialectical ones, of late. This is because I now understand that there is no real prospect of normal dialectical closure if the other party shows repeated signs of being a Gamma and is engaging in customary Gamma argumentation. Chief among these signs are false summaries, digressions into motivation and psychological diagnosis, appeals to emotion, the production of ad hoc definitions, and the targeting of strawmen rather than the actual statements made. If you happen to be aware that you are prone to utilizing any of those rhetorical tactics, I would strongly recommend that you read the linked article, because you’re not going to find much toleration for them here.

Interview with Vox Day

Sam Roberts at Reaxxion interviewed me about the game industry, the SJW attack on it, and our upcoming plans for First Sword:

SR: Many commentators, at our site and elsewhere, have noticed the sudden outbreak of prudishness in the gaming industry. We saw this with PAX and its ban on booth babes, even to the point of specifying a minimum length for girl’s skirts. Even Mortal Kombat, the franchise that established itself in the 1990’s through its willingness to break all the rules, is moving to “more realistic” characters with smaller breasts and thicker waists. What do you think has changed in the gaming industry in the past 20 years that’s made it so much less able to resist moral scolds?

VD: The most important change is that game development no longer belongs to the mavericks. When we started Fenris Wolf in 1993, literally everyone thought we were crazy. We were throwing away good jobs and wasting our educations to do what people considered to be the equivalent of playing with digital Lincoln Logs. Now that games are widely understood to be big business, many of the jobs pay decent salaries, and you can get degrees in “game development” and “game design,” you have considerably more risk-intolerant, conflict-avoidant people entering the industry.

Twenty years ago, the average developer would have laughed his ass off at the idea that he should design or develop anything other than whatever the hell he wanted to do. These days, there are a fair number of bed-wetters in game development who are terrified at the idea that someone, somewhere, might take offense at something in one of their games. And then, of course, you’ve also got SJWs trying to stick their noses into the industry in order to change it, just as they did in comics and science fiction & fantasy fiction.

You’ll definitely want to check out the screenshots of the 3DV engine in action. Be sure to click on the image of the High Elven archers. 3DV is visually spectacular and is intended to do for miniature gaming what VASSAL did for board-and-counter games. In addition to various other topics addressed, you can also see our response to the SJW demands for more women in games, beginning with the introduction to Morwyn Shadowsong, a female elf gladiator who is the face of First Sword, the fantasy gladiator miniatures game.

It probably won’t take a genius to put two and two together and realize that the Tactical Uncertainty model I’m developing, which has been discussed in some detail over at Castalia, is intended for the third edition of Striker that Marc Miller has asked me to develop. The rules will be developed for use in 3DV and on the tabletop alike; the challenge is how to make something that works almost automatically in the former can be translated to the latter. With regards to some of the other games mentioned, we will have some exciting new announcements soon.

The benefits of abolishing high school

It wouldn’t just help those on the bottom, but quite a few of those on top as well:

[A]bolishing high school would not just benefit those who are at the bottom of its hierarchies. Part of the shared legacy of high school is bemused stories about people who were treated as demigods at seventeen and never recovered. A doctor I hang out with tells me that former classmates who were more socially successful in high school than he was seem baffled that he, a quiet youth who made little impression, could be more professionally successful, as though the qualities that made them popular should have effortlessly floated them through life. It’s easy to laugh, but there is a real human cost.

I think we see some of the human flotsam and jetsam that is the result of high school shipwrecks floating through here from time to time. From the overconfident midwit who has never recovered from the experience of being the smartest guy in a room with a 115 IQ to the deluded ex-cheerleader who is now fifty pounds overweight but still thinks she’s as attractive to men as she was when she could fit into her little skirts to the bitter omega who can’t accept a compliment at face value for fear that it is another cruel trick intended to humiliate him, the psychological scars of the high school experience are often visible to complete strangers on the Internet.

I tend to include myself in that mix, although perhaps wrongly since my psychological idiosyncracies tend to trace back deeper, which is to say, back to elementary school. My suspicion is that being constantly pushed around and marginalized by one’s intellectual and athletic inferiors, and thereby simultaneously finding oneself at the bottom of some social hierarchies and at the top of others at a very young age, tends to leave one permanently unable to take any of them very seriously or place much value upon them, for good or for ill. When one is both king and beggar, how can one find one’s identity in either state?

For a while, I thought it was strength of character or innate stoicism that enabled me to so easily walk away from various attachments and obligations without looking back. But eventually, it became clear that it was not a positive attribute, it was simply that I was lacking something normal, in much the same way sociopaths lack empathy, autistics lack social cognizance, and atheists lack an intuition of the supernatural. Specifically what it is, I don’t know, but one might describe it as lack of set bonding.

So, I don’t think the abolition of high school would have made much difference to me, but I do think it would greatly benefit those who are either oppressed by the social hierarchy or crippled by too much success too soon in it. And, of course, ending the intellectual lobotomization of entire generations by maleducated, intellectually sub-standard propagandists of the State would be a desirable outcome too.

Yemen falling to Shia

It looks like there is a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia being fought in Yemen. And Iran’s proxies are winning.

The Iran-backed ethnic Houthis that captured and occupied Yemen’s capital city Sanaa last year are following up from Friday’s announce military mobilization have seized much of the city of Taiz and the surrounding province. They’ve taken control of the airport and security and intelligence buildings in Taiz, and have set up checkpoints in the area.

Yemen’s internationally recognized president Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi was forced last month to flee Sanaa, which is Yemen’s largest city and is in in the north of Yemen, to Aden, which is Yemen’s second largest city, and is a port city in the south of Yemen. Taiz is Yemen’s third largest city, and it’s located about halfway between Sanaa and Aden, so it’s a critical waypoint on the Houthis’ planned assault on Hadi’s forces in Aden.

The Houthis have been using Yemen’s air force for bombing strikes on Aden every day since Thursday. Now that the Houthis have control of Taiz airport, it’s expected that further air strikes will be launched from there.

It now seems unavoidable that within the next few days there will be a sectarian civil war between the Shia Houthis versus Hadi’s Sunni tribal militias. This will be further complicated by the presence in Yemen of two Sunni terrorist groups, the Islamic State / of Iraq and Syria (IS or ISIS or ISIL or Daesh) and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

The Houthis are now in control of the army and air force, and they’re backed by Iran which is suspected of shipping additional weapons to them. Saudi Arabia and the other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) have expressed deep dismay at the Shia takeover of Yemen, but it remains to be seen whether they take any military action to counter it. If they do, then the result will be a sectarian proxy war in Yemen between Saudi Arabia and Iran. The National (UAE) and CNN and AFP and AP

Meanwhile, the US has been forced to retreat and evacuate Al Anad air base.

Another SFWA resignation

Holly Lisle resigns from Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America:

Ms. Kate Baker
Operations Manager
SFWA

Dear Ms. Baker,

I’m canceling my SFWA membership.

While it was encouraging to see SFWA edging toward acceptance of the indie publishing model, it’s too little and too late, and offset by an appalling reason behind the change of SFWAs incorporating state.

SFWA moved from Massachusetts to California for the purpose of allowing SFWA to claim tax dollars to offer grants. I’m aware that there were other—good—reasons for the organization’s move, but this particular poison pill in the changes made to SFWA requires me to walk away and never look back.

This is interesting, as her letter indicates how the SJWs in the SFWA intend to survive the opening up of the SF/F market and the inability of the publishing gatekeepers to protect their income: as government-funded parasites.

It helps make their continued move towards unpopular academic-style fiction somewhat more comprehensible, as you may recall Neal Stephenson’s explanation of the difference between popular fiction that is funded by fans and academic fiction that is funded by bureaucrats.

Ed Brayton wants to kill nationalists

Ed Brayton is one of those low midwits who stumbles through life thinking that he’s intelligent because he’s a little smarter than the average idiot. I’ve rubbed his nose in his own incompetence several times in the past; believe it or not, he’s actually dumber than PZ Myers. But he’s really outdone himself this time:

People often ask me how I manage to troll the right-wing fever swamps without becoming hopelessly misanthropic. Mostly I’m able to laugh rather than cry or explode in anger. But bullshit like this makes me want to climb a tower with a high-powered rifle and start picking people off.

When Andrew Zink passed the microphone over to his classmate and allowed her to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in Arabic, he said, he knew most students wouldn’t support his decision.

As president of the student senate at Pine Bush High School in New York, Zink leads the pledge every morning. But on Wednesday, a teacher asked him if he would mind if a classmate did it instead. It was National Foreign Language Week, and the students were encouraged to learn about different cultures.

 “I wanted to say yes because I felt this is the right thing to do,” Zink, 18, said in an interview Thursday with the Los Angeles Times.

Outrage quickly flowed throughout the campus, about 75 miles north of New York City. The principal apologized to the school later that day, Zink said, for allowing the Pledge of Allegiance to be recited in a different language.

  But the apology did little to quell student and parent anger.

 “The anti-Muslim sentiment started to build,” Zink said. “The poor girl who read it, she’s so sweet and when she finished reading it people called her a terrorist. They told her to go back to the Middle East. They mercilessly degraded her and I felt awful for her.”

 Zink didn’t get by unscathed either. He said he was threatened over Twitter and received death threats.

Of course he did. Because xenophobes are fucking idiots and I really don’t want to share this planet with them anymore.

I don’t wish to share the civilized West with fifth column-coddlers like Mr. Brayton myself. I suggest we send Mr. Brayton to live in the Dar al-Islam where he can discover what true xenophobia is, and why it exists in the first place. When the civil wars start across the West, don’t forget what side these treasonous idiots were on. And don’t offer them safe haven when they try to escape those whose invasion they supported either. When they cry and plead that they’ve seen the light, tell them “too late now.”

Speaking of Brayton’s reliable intellectual ineptitude, this is my favorite set of Braytonisms, from when he was running away from a proposed 2010 debate with Ellis Washington:

“As for your challenge to debate, I will consider it – if you can give a coherent answer to the following question”
– Ed Brayton, February 26, 2010

“Ellis Washington did not challenge me to a debate.”
– Ed Brayton, March 1, 2010