Category: Uncategorized

The inevitable decline of atheism

Another reminder that the future belongs to those who show up for it:

The world could see a resurgence of Christianity driven by population decline
in sceptical countries, the geneticist Steve Jones has claimed. Professor Jones said history had proven that religion grows rapidly during
large population booms, particularly in poorer countries. He argued that rapid growth in Africa could spark a new resurgence of major
religions like Christianity. However in increasingly atheist countries in Europe people are no longer
reproducing in sufficient numbers to avoid population decline, he told the
Hay Literary Festival.

“We atheists sometimes congratulate ourselves that the incidence of religious
belief is going down. But religious people have more children. Where are people having the most
children? It’s in the tropics and in Africa. It’s clearly the case that the future will involve an increase in religious
populations and a decrease in scepticism.”

It’s not only that. There is also the fact that most of the children raised in an atheist home eventually become religious; the only reason that the rate of growth of atheism briefly, (in historical terms), was fast enough to surmount that inhibiting factor is because the atheist population was so small. Atheists are at the literal bottom of the retention rate in comparison with every religious group from Hindus to Jehovah’s Witnesses. Even the mealy-mouthed Anglicans fare better.

A more important factor is that times of wealth and peace have always been a counter-indicator of religious belief. The rich and fat seldom believe they have any need for God, and they deeply resent any divinely inspired restrictions on their descent into decadence. At the end of the longest period of peace and economic expansion in the history of the West, it should be no surprise at all that we have an obese, decadent, depraved, diseased population that fears no God.

They will learn better soon enough. Both history and the Bible are very clear concerning the eventual fate of such societies.

The Tetsubo strikes

Larry Correia addresses the wannabe’s latest hit piece in the Guardian. It’s as if he thinks he cries about us enough, Tor will reward him a book contract:

Women writers have asserted a growing presence in the genre, leading this year lead to a strong presence in all of the genre’s major awards.

Great. Despite the narrative about me to the contrary, I like female authors. I support female authors. I support authors from any group you can think of as long as they tell a good story and they’re not complete douchebags, so I guess you could say that I just support authors in general. I’m all in favor of anybody from any group being able to write what they want, more power to them.

So if we want true equality among writers how about we give awards based on quality rather than what box the author checks on an EEOC form?

Oh, but wait. I forgot. I like to judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. That’s racist now. I also like to judge a book based upon whether I like it or not, rather than ranking the nominees based upon the acceptability of their political outlooks or which ones best assuage my warm-beige guilt.

(speaking of irony, when the announcements were made and I immediately started getting character assassinated for being a hater of women, homosexuals, sunshine, and goodness with zero evidence, the book of the week I was promoting on this blog was written by a non-white immigrant woman and had a gay hero, but hey, narrative).

Women and non-white writers swept the board at the Nebula awards, winning every major category.

Normally, if there is a bunch of gloating and back slapping about how one particular group was totally shut out of something, we’d consider that bigotry. However I tend to forget that to a libprog diversity is literally only skin deep, while diversity of thought is evil and must be crushed. The same people crowing about this year’s diversity were happy to attack nominees last year for their religious beliefs, because that’s the wrong kind of diversity. They routinely attack non-whites and women if they aren’t of the correct political persuasion.

Speaking of gloating, Twitter after the Nebulas was interesting. If you take the tweets of the Social Justice Warrior crowd, Ctrl H, find and replace White Male with Jew, they totally sound like snippets of Heinrich Himmler speeches. It is hilarious until the nausea sets in.

And in the meantime, Damien tweets: “Vox Day is VERY upset that other conservative writers are distancing themselves from his extremism.” 

(laughs) Now that I posted it here, that’s probably the most-read piece of fiction he’s ever written. See, I’m not a rabbit. I’m no more concerned what other conservative writers think of my opinions than what Damien or the SFWA does. They don’t need my approval, and I most certainly don’t need theirs.

And The Rapier finishes off the remains. Sweet Shakespeare, but the man’s blog posts make for far more entertaining reading than any 10 Pink SF/F novels. Read the whole thing. It is… Mr. John C. Wright at his soul-withering best.

Dear sir,

I reject your kindly-meant advice with the wholehearted yet instinctive contempt a clean-minded bridegroom uses when throwing aside a disease-raddled whore who has lept from the garbage pit to embrace him.

My reason is this: It is not that I think Vox Day good, Mr. Walter. I do not know much of anything about him. I think you are evil. I know enough about you to know that, you smarmy, unctuous, long-haired, dough-faced, damp-fingered, weak-minded, small-souled, craven, race-baiting, unutterable failure of a human being.

The more you talk, the stronger your opposition grows, as the science fiction readership slowly comes to understand that you and yours hold them in contempt. You regard them as lesser beings. You talk as if they are the merely passive recipients of the political opinions you and yours want to program into their unwinking and dull eyes. You speak as if they are bags of meat, whose only dignity is in their most shallow surface features, namely, their skin color.

That is your picture of the men and women I revere as my patrons and patronesses.

You think you are better than them. Your reason for thinking yourself better is that you abandoned the intellectual clarity and moral discipline, that you call ‘reaction’, which they embrace. You think you are better than them, not despite, but because you are  worse; objectively and obviously worse; worse as a thinker, worse as a man.

Ultimately people judge a man by how often his mouth is full of manure, I fear you will deeply regret your public display of coprophagy in the future.

Millennial marriage, or the lack thereof

Bryan Preston points out what appears to be a very ominous statistic concerning the Millennials:

Millennials are slower to marry than previous generations. They have moved the median marriage age up to 29 for men and 27 for women. They are largely delaying marriage because they are loaded down with massive student debt, and because there are few jobs available to them upon which they can build their lives. The current Democratic administration’s anti-jobs policies are largely to blame for the latter. The lack of accountability in university practices and tuition is largely to blame for the former. Millennials are being squeezed by the Obama economy. Yet they remain more likely to vote for Democrats, if they vote.

I’m not here to slam single parenthood, but single parenthood has proven to be a very strong predictor of one’s economic outcome and one’s politics, meaning, one’s relationship to the government and the policies one tends to vote for. Simply put, single adults tend to vote in a certain way, and children of single adults tend to have poorer economic outcomes, which leads to a certain voting pattern. Marriage is a strong predictor of political behavior.

Currently just 26% of millennials — those between age 18 and 33 — are married. At the same age, 36% of GenX and 48% of the Baby Boomers were married. And 69% of millennials say they want to get married, but the lack of jobs is holding them back.

However, one thing that is often left out of the equation is that the racial demographics of the Millennials is very different than those of GenX and the Baby Boomers. It is risky to base too many conclusions on the generational data without first breaking out the various racial sub-groups. For example, I have seen data that suggests white Millennials don’t actually vote very differently than white GenX voters, which, based on the historical age-shift, would tend to indicate that white Millennials are trending to the right of white GenXers.

The concern rabbit

There is no need for me to address Damien Walters’s latest attack on Larry Correia and me, since the big guy is going to be doing one of his monster fisks on it. I will link to it later. One Jared Garrett summed up the Guardian article succinctly: “This is one of the single stupidest pieces I’ve ever read. I
know who you’re referring to in this clownish rant and you have
absolutely zero clue. Either you’re too stupid to read and comprehend or
you’re being deliberately obtuse.”

What I found more interesting than Damien’s customary moronics was the rabbiting that took place in the comments, wherein Damien purported to be deeply concerned about the career of the very man he is publicly attacking and calling “not very intelligent”. Consider his comments of that follow the article.

  1. I think you’ll find they lumped themselves in with Vox Day. Why they
    wanted to do something quite so suicidal to their careers, we can only
    speculate.
  2.  I think Correia did two things. The first was appeal for
    votes on the basis of a perceived liberal bias in the genre. That was
    the basis of his campaign, a protest vote against liberal influence.
    That was divisive and did a lot to spark the backlash he’s still
    feeling. Secondly, and this is going to be much more damaging for him
    longterm, he allowed himself to become very closely associated to Vox
    Day in the process. Ultimately people do judge others by their
    associations, and both Larry Correia and John C Wright have made very
    public declarations of support for Day, that I fear both will deeply
    regret in the long run. I’m quite serious about my suggestion by
    the way. I think if Correia wrote publicly to support the new diversity
    in the genre, and apologised for any perception he was campaigning
    against it, that might help him a lot. Remember, we won’t know who
    missed out on shortlist places until after the awards. At that point
    Correia et al could find the response to them gets much, much worse even
    than when the story broke. 
  3. I’d suggest those 25 other writers work harder not to be associated with
    Vox Day. it seems to be doing the public perception of them a great
    deal of harm.
  4. The reactionary conservative movement in SF has many members, Corrreia,
    Wright and a number of others mentioned. Vox Day goes far beyond that.
    You’re welcome to defend his opinions if you wish, and good luck to you
    in the task. I think even the reactionaries would do well to distance
    from him if they have any sense.
  5. I have no clear idea what you mean by shunning or writing people out of
    the genre. I assume you’re bringing in baggage from other discussions.
    We have a genre growing ever more diverse, and a small clique of
    reactionaries behaving very poorly in response to that. And doing
    immense damage to their own careers in the process. Sad for everyone
    involved.

Meanwhile, the Blue SF/F market continues to grow, as do the submissions to Castalia, as does the readership of this blog. May 2014 marked the 14th straight month in which the average blog traffic was more than 100,000 Google pageviews more than Whatever’s best-ever month of May 2012. 

It’s fascinating to see how desperate the pinkshirts are to try to separate me from Larry, John, and everyone else. This is classic rabbit behavior; when they can’t exclude themselves, they try to convince others to perform the exclusion for them. Not that it would do any good anyhow. They don’t understand that Larry, John, and me are under absolutely no illusions that we agree on everything. Or even most things. We are three very different men who belong to different population sub-groups, different Christian denominations, we vote for different political parties, and we have very different interests and communication styles. Larry is the tetsubo, John is the rapier, and I am the Ka-Bar, best suited for close-in combat gutting. We simply happen to have earned each other’s respect for various reasons and to share a disdain for SF/F that elevates left-wing ideology over every other aspect of storytelling.

Nor are we alone. Damien doesn’t mention Tom and Sarah and Ringo and Amanda and Kate and the other Tom and Lou and Brad or any of the many other writers who have observed precisely the same problems with the left-wing infestation of SF/F that the Big Three have, (just a joke, John, I can see you wincing now) except to say that “the reactionary conservative movement in SF has many members”.  But that’s not the real issue, the real issue is that there are far more “reactionary conservative” readers than there are readers of the progressive Pink SF detritus that the mainstream SF/F publishers have been aggressively pushing on SF/F fans for the last two decades. And apparently two decades of a consistently shrinking market isn’t enough for them, because #weneeddiversebooks!

Damien is making the same mistake that Whatever readers did two years ago, the same mistake that CNN made in 1996, and the same mistake that Newsweek made in 1998. He is assuming, all the evidence to the contrary, that the numbers are on his side. Throughout his piece and his comments, he foolishly attempts to minimize the other side: for example, he refers to “little-known writers” even though Larry is a best-selling author, I have the best-trafficked blog in SF/F, and John C. Wright was voted the sixth-greatest SF writer alive.

Indeed, if there is not this institutional left-wing influence that we “reactionaries” all observe, and all oppose, how can anyone be “doing immense damage to their own careers” by opposing it? If it doesn’t exist, then how would being lumped in with me, in any way, be “suicidal to their careers”. Setting aside the humor inherent in an unpublished nonentity like Damien giving literary career advice to the Nebula-nominated Mr. Wright or the Hugo-nominated Mr. Correia, it should be obvious that Damien has assumed the very point that he was attempting to refute.

So, in the end, this is nothing more than a petty rabbit with a soapbox attempting to DISQUALIFY, DISQUALIFY. Again. The most offensive aspect of Damien’s latest attack is the insult to both Larry and John in the implication that they are any more susceptible to the Left’s blandishments than I am. I, for one, find it impossible to imagine either man being even remotely willing to submit to the Left’s ritual of public recantation and self-abasemen.

Why, one wonders, is it such an imperative for the Left to separate me from everyone else it is attacking?

New update policy

Because some readers have complained about typos in outdated versions of various Castalia ebooks, we’re going to be tweeting every time we update an ebook with corrections and typo fixes.

We make corrections very rapidly, usually within a day or two of receiving a list of typos. For example, the current version of A THRONE OF BONES is 009. Since we come from the game industry, and since our focus is on electronic publishing, we have decided to take an iterative approach to editing. This allows us to publish books quickly, and to also ensure that they rapidly reach a state of minimal errors.

All books from all publishers have typos. That’s the reality. When we converted the EW books to ebooks, we discovered that the professionally edited, professionally line-edited manuscripts, from a major New York publisher, one of which had been through three print runs and two layouts, contained an average of 165 typos. The core problem is that each individual editor and proofreader has a tendency to see certain problems and not see other ones. For example, the maximum amount of overlap I’ve seen from two different proofreader lists is on the order of 20 percent. Now, we could delay publication by a month and expect to catch somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of the version 001 typos or we can do a run through Team OCD, publish it, and then catch 85 percent of them in the first three or four days after release with the assistance of the first readers.

And because we always publish ebooks first, this also permits us, unlike most publishers, to ensure that our hardcovers will be exceptionally clean.

Since it’s very easy to automatically receive the updated versions through Amazon, and it’s not much harder to get one directly from us, we think this approach is much preferable to the conventional one. If you have any better ideas, we’re certainly open to hearing your suggestions, but in the meantime, we will be transparent about when the updates are released. If you want to be apprised of them, please simply follow @castaliahouse on Twitter.

While I’m at it, I should mention that version 002 of John C. Wright’s excellent TRANSHUMAN AND SUBHUMAN is now the current version on Amazon.  And, having finished editing his forthcoming CITY BEYOND TIME , which is now in the hands of the proofreaders; I am hoping we will be able to release it this week.

Mailvox: the irrelevance of raciss

The Left is finally, dimly, beginning to grasp that they have inoculated everyone from the charge of racism by virtue of accusing nearly everyone of it.

I just caught the end of a lefty, high-brow (in relative terms) BBC political show (The Marr Show).  At the end a black guy, a lefty trade union leader sitting next to Nigel Farage said that he was troubled…(my pause for effect)…that the word ‘racist’ had been so devalued as to mean very little any more. And that was a very bad thing.  (Nigel agreed)

Once you can debate without sexist, racist etc being used to shut down everything…where does it end? I mean, you might be able to have adult discussions about issues, which could mean real progress towards tackling the tractable issues.

I don’t think it’s a bad thing at all. The devaluation of “racist” was always inevitable, which is one reason that I never feared cretins trying to make it stick.  We see the same thing writ small and large. In the SF/F world, the pinkshirts foolishly thought that by pointing and shrieking and crying raciss would harm me. One Hugo nomination and 10 straight months with at least 100k more pageviews than the leading pinkshirt site has ever had later, it is obvious that their slanderous approach was a complete failure. In the world of UK politics, three straight weeks of every major media institution daily crying racist at UKIP resulted in the first national election in over a century in which neither the Tory nor the Labour party finished first. That is beyond complete failure, it was an epic failure the likes of which have seldom been previously seen.

In a civilized Western world enduring an active decades-long invasion by tens of millions of the half-civilized and uncivilized, it should not be at all surprising that accusations of racism, whether true or false, now tend to do the accused more good than harm. Especially in light of the fact that the core concept underlying anti-racism, the idea that all human beings are fundamentally the same under the skin, has now been completely disproven by genetic science.

Science is always on the side of the realists, no matter their ideology. If your beliefs are in line with both logic and science, truly in line with them, they will eventually triumph in the end, no matter how unpopular they might be today. Prior to the mass invasion of the vibrants, it was possible to claim that the barbarian non-Western populations could be transformed into civilized quasi-Westerners by pretending everyone was the same. A few decades, and more than a few riots, street beheadings, mass rapes, murders, and sex enslavements later, it is no longer possible to credibly claim that multiculturalism, diversity, or anti-racism are intellectually viable positions.

So the Left is beginning to mourn the effective loss of what has been its most important political weapon in the last 50 years. And despite their desperate efforts, I tend to doubt “homophobe” and “transphobe” are likely to serve as adequate substitutes. It would be nice if this meant we could have genuinely dialectical debate, but I tend to suspect it will do little more than change the form of their rhetoric rather than the substance.

World Cup 2014

This is shaping up to be an interesting and wide-open Mondiale. Brazil would normally be the big favorites, as the home countries usually do well, but as one newspaper has commented, the corruption of the Brazilian government and the shameless fraud associated with the construction of the tournament stadiums has actually turned the majority of the Brazilians against the World Cup. This is a staggering achievement and is a testimony to the unvarnished corruption rife within FIFA.

Literally dozens of international friendlies and qualifiers are suspected of having been at least partially fixed; there are even some serious questions about the legitimacy of a number of games leading up to the previous World Cup in South Africa.

A soccer referee named Ibrahim Chaibou walked into a bank in a small South African city carrying a bag filled with as much as $100,000 in $100 bills, according to another referee traveling with him. The deposit was so large that a bank employee gave Mr. Chaibou a gift of commemorative coins bearing the likeness of Nelson Mandela.

Later that night in May 2010, Mr. Chaibou refereed an exhibition match between South Africa and Guatemala in preparation for the World Cup, the world’s most popular sporting event. Even to the casual fan, his calls were suspicious — he called two penalties for hand balls even though the ball went nowhere near the players’ hands.

Mr. Chaibou, a native of Niger, had been chosen to work the match by a company based in Singapore that was a front for a notorious match-rigging syndicate, according to an internal, confidential report by FIFA, soccer’s world governing body.

FIFA’s investigative report and related documents, which were obtained by The New York Times and have not been publicly released, raise serious questions about the vulnerability of the World Cup to match fixing. The tournament opens June 12 in Brazil.

The report found that the match-rigging syndicate and its referees infiltrated the upper reaches of global soccer in order to fix exhibition matches and exploit them for betting purposes. It provides extensive details of the clever and brazen ways that fixers apparently manipulated “at least five matches and possibly more” in South Africa ahead of the last World Cup. As many as 15 matches were targets, including a game between the United States and Australia, according to interviews and emails printed in the FIFA report.

Apparently, it’s nearly as bad as the NBA during the David Stern era. As for the tournament itself, Italy’s slim chances just took a blow with the loss of Riccardo Montolivo. Spain is beginning to look a bit creaky and underpowered up front, and both Argentina and Portugal look more like potential semifinalists than potential champions. In the end, I think Germany and Brazil look like the two teams to beat, with a slight nod to Brazil for being the home team. Let’s face it, once the games actually start, the Brazilians are going to rally round their team.

Of the lesser teams, Switzerland looks solid. The USA has a decent young team, (although I would have brought Landon Donovan along in-case-of-emergency-break-glass purposes), but I can’t see them getting out of the Group of Death, not with Germany and Portugal in Group G. Ghana isn’t bad either, so it’s not inconceivable that the USA could go pointless despite playing well. Holland is good, but Van Persie isn’t enough to get them past the second round.

Why rabbits utilize exclusion

Ostracism is actually more harmful than bullying:

The famous quote claims the only thing in life worse than being talked about, is not being talked about – and a new study may have proved this to be the case.  Being ignored at work has been found to be worse for a person’s health than people who are harassed or bullied.

Researchers found that while most consider ostracism less harmful than bullying, feeling excluded is significantly more likely to lead job dissatisfaction, quitting and health problems.

‘We’ve been taught that ignoring someone is socially preferable – if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all,’ said University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business Professor Sandra Robinson, who co-authored the study.

‘But ostracism actually leads people to feel more helpless, like they’re not worthy of any attention at all.’

It would be interesting to learn if the effects of ostracism are similar on men and women, and if they are similar on the r/selected and the K/selected. My guess is that the effects are stronger on women and the r/selected than on men and the K/selected.

Rabbit people obviously find ostracism extremely painful. Years, even decades later, they still speak of being crippled by it. I can’t speak for all non-rabbits, but I tend to find being surrounded by people and being obliged to pretend to take their every inanity seriously much more painful than not having to deal with them. I suspect ostracism is harder on the extrovert than the introvert. I feel drained after spending more than three hours at a social event. Friends are great, but one can always have too much of a good thing.

On the other hand, it would bother me greatly to be expelled from my team or to have everyone ignore me in the clubhouse on game days. So, I suspect the negative effect on the ostracized individual does not come from the intent of others to ostracize, but rather, is derived from degree to which the individual wishes to be part of the group.

So, perhaps it isn’t enough to not be cruel to individuals with lower social status and to leave them in peace, perhaps it is necessary to be civil to them, even friendly if one can find the wherewithal within oneself to make the effort. And, of course, it’s a useful anti-rabbit weapon, as whenever they resort to their usual tactic, one can point out that what they are doing IS WORSE THAN BULLYING and that THERE IS NO PLACE IN SOCIETY for terrible people like them.

Gatekeepers vs the defensor lector

A pair of contrasting views on the Amazon vs Major Publishers battle appear in the New York Times. Joe Nocera writes of Amazon’s “bullying” tactics:

The story really began some years ago, when Amazon began issuing a standard price for e-books of $9.99 — in some cases selling below cost. Publishers feared that they would become locked into the $9.99 price the same way the music industry had been locked into 99-cent songs by Apple’s iTunes service. They fought back by joining forces with Apple, cutting preferable deals to participate in Apple’s e-book-selling service, and then forcing Amazon to go along with the same terms. E-book prices quickly rose.

Unfortunately for the publishers, their brilliant idea turned out to be an illegal conspiracy, and the government forced them to settle on terms that had the effect of boosting Amazon. Although Amazon has not entirely reverted back to $9.99 e-books, it could if it wanted to, and it has in some cases. In other cases — especially with self-published books or romances — e-book prices are down to $5.99 and even $2.99. “There is a strong gravitational pull downward,” said one publisher (who did not want to be quoted, fearing Amazon’s wrath).

The way I hear it, what Amazon is insisting upon is a deal where it would no longer have to bear the full brunt of its discounting — the publisher would have to bear some of it, in the form of tighter margins, or even losses. Hachette, meanwhile, contends that it needs to be compensated for the important things publishers do: editing, marketing, and curating.

This is an argument that may appeal to the cultural elite, but it is unlikely to move Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive. Publishers, he has been known to say, are gatekeepers. “Even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation,” he wrote in his 2011 letter to shareholders, according to Brad Stone, the author of a recent book about Amazon, “The Everything Store.”

The very complaint that Amazon is selling $9.99 books at a loss reveals that it is the publishers who are the bad guys here. They are desperately trying to retain the outdated model for physical books and apply it to ebooks, which makes absolutely no sense, because that allows them to significantly increase their profit margins at the expense of a) Amazon, b) book buyers, and c) authors. Bezos is correct to dismiss the publishers as gatekeepers, and I very much doubt he considers them to be well-meaning ones.

The other article, a defense of the publishers, inadvertently proves the exact same point:

How did Amazon attain such monopsony power? By providing valuable services? Perhaps, to some extent. But consider that from the moment it introduced its Kindle product, Amazon sold e-books at prices far below what it was buying them for. If Amazon bought an e-book from Hachette for $13, it resold it to a consumer for $9.99, losing $3.01 per e-book. It should come as no surprise that under these circumstances, e-book buyers flocked to Amazon….

So far, Hachette, to its credit, has been unbending. But Amazon still
has its nuclear option. It would appear that unless Amazon backs down —
through public pressure or government intervention — publishers will
have no choice but to employ their own nuclear option: pull all their
books from Amazon and throw their weight behind a law-abiding
alternative. Perhaps the best solution would be an online marketplace
controlled by the publishers — with the 30 percent commission being
split 50-50 with the authors in addition to the author’s royalty.

The ironic thing is that the pro-publisher position is based on the fear of the possibility that Amazon might one day do what the publishers have already done. It is based on the idea that Amazon will eventually jack prices up, never mind the fact that Amazon’s entire business model is based on selling more goods and lower prices. The thing is, even if Amazon QUADRUPLED its average price to the book buyer after driving all the major publishers out of business, retail prices would still be lower than the suggested retail price given by most of the major publishers.

Seriously. The average Amazon price for an ebook is around $6.94. The publishers have been trying to push ebook retail prices up to $27.99; as I pointed out the other day, a new Tor ebook has a digital list price of $27.99, one dollar more than the retail price of $26.99 for the hardcover.

The inept nature of the defense of the publishers can be seen in the proposed solution. The publishers would NEVER be content with such a system; they would fight it even more vehemently than they are fighting Amazon’s attempt to bring ebook prices down below $5. The major publishers want the old system where they sell the book for half the retail price and pay $2.50 to the author. At $28, they get $14 from which they pay $2.50. That is $11.50 gross profit with an 82 percent profit margin; very healthy indeed.

If they set up Publizon, they’d have to reduce their prices to $9.99 to compete with Amazon. They’d pay $2.50 to the author as a royalty, plus another $1.50 as per the suggested model. That means that their gross profit would fall to $5.99 and their profit margin to 60 percent. Still healthy, but far less profitable and probably insufficient to maintain their New York office space and the rest of their expensive overhead. And that’s assuming people are willing to buy books at Publizon; knowing the publishers’ general contempt for the book buying public, it is highly unlikely they can successfully set up a retail operation catering to it.

Meanwhile, they are also competing with Castalia and the other independents, who are selling high-quality ebooks for $4.99. As well as with the self-publishers selling books for as little as $0.99. Any way you look at it, the major publishers cannot possibly survive with their current editorial and distribution structures intact.

Amazon isn’t the bad guy here. Amazon is the defensor lector, the hero of the hour. And speaking of Amazon, fans of a certain fedora-wearing author will no doubt be pleased to know that Castalia will be announcing the release of a new book on Amazon in the coming week, one entitled CITY BEYOND TIME: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis.

Richard Dawkins is a self-described Christian

Of sorts, anyhow. It seems the Pope of Oxford is more than a little disappointed in the direction that Western post-Christianity is taking:

 Richard Dawkins, the prominent atheist and scientist, has admitted that he is a “secular Christian” because he hankers after the nostalgia and traditions of the church.

Speaking at the Hay Festival, where he was presenting the first volume of his memoirs An Appetite For Wonder, the evolutionary biologist claimed that although he does not believe in the supernatural elements of the Christian church, he still values the ceremonial side of religion….

“I would describe myself as a secular Christian in the same sense as secular Jews have a feeling for nostalgia and ceremonies,” said Dawkins.

Other comments Dawkins has recently made make it readily apparent that he’s not entirely comfortable with the ability of atheism to fill in the void that Christianity leaves behind. It will be fascinating to see which of the vocal anti-theists becomes the first champion of cultural Christianity. On the other hand, Dawkins doesn’t seem to be thinking the matter through.

“You do not have to be reticent in what you say. You do not have to look around and say, ‘I hope I am not offending anyone’. You can pretty much speak your mind now in a way that you could not 50 years ago.” 

Oh, can you now? It seems to me that 50 years ago, British people were not being beheaded in the street. Many atheists, and indeed, many Christians, have assumed that although Christianity was integral to the development of Western civilization, it was not necessary to its continuation. And while many people still believe that, an increasing number of people are beginning to realize that is simply not the case.

Of course, there are also those who think that Western civilization is possible without Christianity or people who are genetically Western, but then, they are the modern equivalent of the Green Cheese Society and all that is necessary to refute them is to point out, and I quote: “de de de de de dink, the niggers is not able to survive. Man’s sole “jabringing” object disfigure religion trauma and nubs the inside the trauma of representation.”

And it is very hard to refute that.