Category: Uncategorized

How big is your brand?

Castalia author Mike Cernovich puts things in perspective:

You can monitor my brand in real-time on Amazon by watching my sales rank. You can do this for any author. Amazon ranks books based on how many copies have been sold over the past hour to 24 hours.

  • Mike Cernovich, Gorilla Mindset – #9,431
  • Robert Cialdini, Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade Kindle Edition by  #5,476
  • Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life – #6,548
  • Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned” – #23,209
  • MILO, Dangerous – #897
  • Donald Trump, The Art of the Deal – #1,646
  • Hillary Clinton, Stronger Together – #152,422
  • Mike Cernovich, MAGA Mindset – #47,065
  • Ben Shapiro, True Allegiance –  #40,936
  • Vox Day, SJWs Always Lie – #5,022
  • Mike Cernovich, Danger & Play: Essays on Masculinity – #27,356

For those keeping track at home. I’ve surpassed Ben Shapiro, who had a ten-year head start on me and also has many billionaire sugar daddies, and am on par with Vox, whose IQ is way higher than mine and who has been writing longer than I have. (He’s my editor, proof that I work with the best!)

My brand is bigger than a Hillary Clinton surrogate (Lena Dunham) who had her own TV show, and not as large as MILO, Trump, or Scott Adams.

MILO is a once-in-a-generation talent, so there’s no competing with him, ever. No one can.

Amazon sales rank is much more relevant than the mainstream publishers, and the authors published by them, want to admit it is. Yes, it doesn’t capture all possible sales, but the fact is that it captures far more than is required for a statistically relevant sample.

And while it is only a snapshot in time, and cannot capture the conventional sales from major publishers made via the bookstores, it is a vastly more accurate, and comprehensive, picture than that provided by the newspaper bestseller lists, or, God forbid, the SJW-converged awards. As Spacebunny mentioned to me yesterday, the Newbery Medal used to be an indicator of great books you should read, like The Black Cauldron, A Wrinkle in Time and The Dark is Rising. Now it is a reliable indicator of books you should avoid reading at all costs.

But the fact of the matter is that the Amazon rankings correctly indicate that bestselling authors such as Vaughn Heppner (#1,005), B.V. Larson (#884), and David VanDyke (#2,058) have bigger personal brands, and are much bigger influences on SF readers, than conventional authors such as John Scalzi (#8,062), Charles Stross (#9,127), and even China Mieville (#28,169), especially since the latter are heavily reliant upon their publisher’s brands, distribution, and marketing efforts. Sure, more people recognize the names of the latter trio, but far more people actually buy and read books published by the former. And that’s the aspect of brand that counts.

At Castalia, we’re intent on building up the personal brands of our authors, not churning through authors with one predatory two-book deal after another, sitting on the rights as long as possible, then begrudgingly purchasing the mercenary allegiance of those who sell the best. Whether an author sells 50,000 books or 25 books, if we like the quality they are producing, we’ll keep working with them. That’s why you almost always see the authors we’ve published bring us additional books. And also that’s why we’ve invited our authors to begin blogging at the Castalia House blog, including Nick Cole, David the Good, Peter Grant, and Mr. John C. Wright, Esq.

Our goal this year is to make Castalia House the best, most intelligent, SF/F-related site on the Internet. I hope you’ll be a part of that.

He did not enjoy the smell of heresy

The God-Emperor Ascendant puts the fear of himself into the House Republicans:

The Trump effect has landed forcefully on Capitol Hill.

Less than two hours after President-elect Donald Trump criticized House Republicans — in a tweet, of course — for trying to gut an ethics investigative unit on the first day of business in the new Congress, those plans lay in shambles in the Republican conference’s meeting room…. By aiming his social-media fire hose on fellow Republicans — even as he assembles a Cabinet filled with billionaires and insiders — Trump made clear that he intends to continue giving voice to the anti-establishment outsiders who propelled him through the Republican primaries against much more seasoned politicians and to an electoral-college win against Democrat Hillary Clinton.

That may give Trump leverage over those members of the Republican conference who have claimed the “outsider” mantle for the past six years, a period when the most conservative Republicans have gained stature back home by flouting leadership, whether it was John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) as speaker or Ryan for the past 15 months.

These Republicans regularly turned their backs on party leadership and claimed ideological purity in their carefully crafted districts that were bastions of like-minded conservatives. They operated on the assumption that the only likely political penalty was a primary challenge from the right.

Now, their party’s leader wields a Twitter account with 18.5 million followers. As he prepares to enter the Oval Office in little more than two weeks, Trump is far more popular in their districts than they are. He employs as his chief strategist the former leader of Breitbart News, a conservative media outlet that has included among its top targets the skewering of Republicans not deemed suitably conservative.

As a result, the first day of the 115th Congress served as a sort of beta test of how some Republicans will react when Trump sics his media power on them. If the most conservative flank tries to buck Trump on a pricey infrastructure deal, how will they handle the heat from Trump’s Twitter feed? If moderate Republicans try to block his moves on health care, will they withstand the heat if Trump goes to Breitbart to attack them by name?

On Tuesday the answer came fast: Run for cover.

It is good to see Donald Trump putting the bully back in the bully pulpit. Someone needs to keep the corrupt bastards in line.

Want to get re-elected, Congressman? Then you’d damn well better play ball.

Con star or fighter?

Todd Kincannon explains the difference on Gab:

Todd Kincannon · @ToddKincannon
If you are ever wondering whether somebody is a real fighter or just a Conservative Media Star™ (or wannabe), ask me. Ann Coulter, fighter. A.J. Delgado, fighter. John Derbyshire, fighter. Everybody at Taki’s Magazine and @VDare, fighters. 99% of National Review, Conservative Media Stars™.

Todd Kincannon · @ToddKincannon
I’ve always thought military analogies in politics are lame, but here we go: I fought in the trenches to get Trump elected. The Trump people know who I am and what I did. All of them think Bill Mitchell is a useless clown who did nothing but run his mouth to people who were already voting Trump.

Todd Kincannon · @ToddKincannon
Tweeting “Rah Rah Sis Boom Bah” stuff all day does not tangibly help the cause. That’s all Bill Mitchell has ever done, and all he appears capable of doing, either due to a lack of brains, a lack of balls, or both. My money’s on both.

Todd Kincannon · @ToddKincannon
People who only preach to the converted are not useful allies in fighting the Left, especially when their entire goal is to become a Conservative Media Star™. That’s Bill Mitchell. People like that are useless and always have been. And there are a helluva lot of them.

Todd Kincannon · @ToddKincannon
Bill Mitchell, Erick Erickson, Jonah Goldberg, Kurt Schlichter, George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Glenn Beck, and many, many more, far too many to name. All each cares about is being a Conservative Media Star™. Not one of them actually cares if we accomplish anything in fighting the Left.

Todd Kincannon · @ToddKincannon
Seriously, the number one word associated with Bill Mitchell in real Trump operative circles is “clown.” The number two word associated with Bill Mitchell by actual Trump operatives is “who?”

Todd Kincannon · @ToddKincannon
There is a third category of people who are fighters but not for the things we believe in. Bill Kristol is an example. He’s a true fighter, but he fights for the globalists. I respect Bill Kristol, though I strongly disagree with him. I do not respect the Conservative Media Star™ crowd.

I’m not part of the Trump People, nor am I an actual Trump operative, but I have to confess, when this Bill Mitchell stuff blew up on social media as the post-election drama du jour, my reaction was most definitely “who?”

Followed by: “I don’t care.” I still have no idea who he is. NB: This is not an invitation to inform me. I rest content in my ignorance of the matter.

The banished slave-girl

After which the God-Emperor Ascendant sent her to NBC, shorn, dishonored, unwanted, and unloved. From the Carlos Slim blog:

Megyn Kelly, who arrived at Fox News 12 years ago as a television news neophyte but rose to become one of its two biggest stars, has decided to leave the network to take on a broad new role at NBC News for an undisclosed amount, people briefed on the negotiations said on Tuesday.

The NBC News chairman, Andrew Lack, wooed Ms. Kelly away from Fox News by offering her a triple role in which she will host her own daytime news and discussion program, anchor an in-depth Sunday night news show and take regular part in the network’s special political programming and other big-event coverage.

The move will herald a seismic shift in the cable news landscape, where Ms. Kelly had become the second-most watched host — after Bill O’Reilly of Fox News — and often helped define the national political debate, especially over the last year as Donald J. Trump regularly attacked her, at times in viciously personal terms.

All their base

In which we are reliably informed that their base, such as it is, are now belong to us. A rhetorical strategy courtesy of the Evil Legion of Evil’s Xcruciator, which, uncharacteristically, does not involve wood, nails, or hammers.

Ordinarily, which is to say ordinarily when dealing with a sane enemy, it would be considered unwise to do him a small injury, or to motivate him to greater efforts. And, were we still dealing with the old mainstream Democratic Party, especially the party as it was before the Dixiecrats became Republicans, it would be a mistake to provoke them in minor and non-ruinous ways. Happily or unhappily, that party is deader than chivalry. What’s left are mostly the Trigglypuffs, along with the genocidal lunatics – like the aforementioned incestuous child molester, Lena Dunham – who want straight white men extinct, reinforced by the left-wing professorial freakshow, and egged on by myriad self-righteous and unutterably stupid assholes, molesting innocent women and their families, on public conveyances, when said women have had the bad judgment to be fathered by men the assholes don’t like.

Oh, yes, yes, there are, no doubt, some sane men and women hovering around the top echelons of the Democratic Party. But if they’re sane, they’re equally corrupt, venomous spiders, dripping with poison, at the center of left wing insanity. However, those spiders aren’t really in control of the movement anymore. Nobody is. Instead, the left is largely a bunch of self-willed, albeit unintelligent, bombs, just like Trigglypuff, waiting to go off at the slightest emotional jar.

And we – yes, we right wing knuckle-draggers – control those bombs because we can emotionally jar them. Hence, to paraphrase, ‘somebody set up them the bomb.’


Take Off Every Zig…

where “zig” is equal to “act , to include speech, perpetrated by the right that causes Social Justice Warriors to emotionally explode.”

Now think about that, for a bit. As I began, quoting Jean Raspail, the left is humorless and grim. They cannot take a joke. Indeed, they have only one joke: “He’s stupid,” as they have only one insult, “you’re stupid.” (Why is that? Well…it’s because they’re rather stupid, really. Exceptions are just that, exceptional.) We can provoke them at will, easily, any time we like.

Moreover, the more we do provoke them, for the next four years, provided we do so with humor, hence the more we can get them to act like the fascisti they are, the more likely it is that the Democrats cannot return to power, because social justice is now at the core of their base, so much the core, in fact, that they cannot repudiate it. White men? Hell, white people? Pretty much gone now, and apparently not broadly welcome to return.

That’s how we got Trump elected, really, that working class whites – and not inconsequential numbers of high quality blacks and Hispanics, too, be it noted – got tired of being ignored, except to be disadvantaged, and tired of being insulted. That’s why we’re in control of both House and Senate. That’s why we have a fairly hefty majority of state governorships. And that, o, most blessedly, is why we, not the left, are going to set the immediate tone for the Supreme Court and quite possibly create a supermajority within it that will last generations

But to make absolutely sure of that, to save the country, we need to keep the left out of power not merely through 2020, but all the way to 2024 and maybe beyond.

To that end I propose the following highly amusing program. I am going to drop a line to every right wing pundit I can think of, from Ann Coulter to Rush Limbaugh, referencing this column and suggesting that we should greet the ascension of Donald Trump to the oval office, this 20th of January, by flooding the internet, the airwaves, and the legacy media with the old but still fun meme:


All Your Base Are Belong To Us.

Make it so.

An unamenable authority

Notice how Apple attempts to utilize its position as a market gatekeeper to force other companies, such as Gab, to jump through various hoops, and potentially, even converge itself, in order to access the customers Apple controls.

An abbreviated summary of Gab’s travails, as described by Andrew Torba:

They want us to include our guidelines in the app and update guidelines to include the NSFW language. It’s absolutely beyond ridiculous the hoops they are forcing us through. Every rejection has more requirements. We will get there. Or we will raise hell about it.

Folks this is what we got back from Apple. Every time we fix what they want, they magically come up with new requirements. It’s absolutely disgusting. They want us banning people. They want us to add blocking. They want us removing content within 24 hours. This is insane.

Folks we are pushing back on Apple bigly.

  • We have feed filters. 
  • We have user muting. 
  • We have the ability to flag content.

There is absolutely no way this app should not be approved. Submitting an appeal, then raising hell on this issue in a very public way. Apple wants to play? We will play.

Here is our reply to Apple folks.
-We have feed filters.
-We have muting.
-We have flagging for illegal content.
-We review flagged content and can address it quickly if it breaks the law/guidelines.
-We can certainly show examples of “objectionable content” on any other social platform.

Now, as anyone who has been on Twitter or Wikipedia knows, there is a considerable amount of NSFW content, none of which is marked as such. But it’s pointless to try to base an argument on this obvious double standard, because SJW-converged corporations are shamelessly hypocritical and they don’t hesitate to play ideological favorites.

Just as a right-wing employee will be fired over the smallest perceived infraction that doesn’t even violate company policy while an SJW employee can violate multiple company policies at will without suffering any consequences, every Alt-Tech organization will be, to at least some extent, obstructed and frozen out by the SJW-converged tech giants.

That’s to be expected. The problem will get worse before it gets better, but it is only a problem in the short run, because whether the Alt-Tech organization runs the gauntlet, as Gab has, or elects to simply ignore it, as Infogalactic has to date, the experience will only make the Alt-Tech stronger and more disruptive.

On the radio

Today at 9 AM Eastern I’ll be appearing on Jesse Lee Peterson’s show. For details concerning where you can hear it, check @jlptalk on Twitter.

And for those who might be tempted to sperg about my “don’t talk to the media” policy, note that he’s a WND man. I am always pleased to speak with friends, allies, and colleagues, in public or in private.

UPDATE: the link to the recording.

I disavow

Barack Obama is guilty of being the worst anti-semite in the world, according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center:

Obama’s refusal to veto anti-Israel U.N. vote ranked most anti-Semitic incident of 2016. Simon Wiesenthal Center puts U.S. abstention at top of annual list.

Dreadful. I disavow Obama and all his works. And anyone who doesn’t is a Nazi and worse than Hitler.

The price of thought-policing

Is eternal vigilance. Fortunately, several intrepid Wikipedia admins are up to the task of patrolling the Wikipedia page devoted to me. It’s rather amusing; first David Gerard, who is an admin and is so neutral on the subject that he cited Phil Sandifier as a reliable source, removed all references to Infogalactic and tried to deny my involvement with it.

  • (single source and that questionable; see talk page. it is entirely unclear this warrants mention *at all*, let alone two subsections. get consensus for inclusion first.)
  • (rm infogalactic – cut’n’paste of multiply-deleted article, closest it has to third-party coverage is one Breitbart article; not notable in mainstream or its field)

He even tried to justify his own patrolling of the page on the basis of his own bias.

I might note, I just today published a negative review of a Castalia book on Phil’s site, so I hold the WSJ-certified typical opinion of Vox Day, but that I find doubles my caution and I’m second guessing myself – David Gerard (talk) 00:37, 10 September 2016 (UTC)

However, when editors kept putting mentions of Infogalactic on the page, he finally gave up, although he was careful to add an irrelevant detail concerning something we have not only never denied, but have repeatedly pointed out to others.

In 2016 Day launched an online encyclopedia called Infogalactic,[25] forking the content of Wikipedia.

This is how the Wikipedia admins police thought there, by constant nibbling away at the edges. Infogalaxians chronicles how two admins, David Gerard and Dragonfly Sixtyseven slash repeatedly away at the page over the course of a week in the interest of removing all the material they think they can justify removing.

The reason they do all this repeated nibbling and sausage slicing is because the editors eventually start to notice something isn’t right.

  • Day published his recommendations in his blog, which is the primary source but in the article, this is now also documented through secondary sources, i.e. SF magazines. I think it’s a good idea to include both, as it allows the reader to independently verify the information. The primary sources show that respected publications like Slate and the Guardian in this case are clearly unreliable. Pkeets (talk) 16:55, 7 September 2016 (UTC)
  • I’m kind of appalled looking at some of these articles from sources that are usually considered reliable. It looks like they didn’t even talk to Day when writing these articles about him. Kelly hi! 17:24, 7 September 2016 (UTC)
  • Or, do any research about the subject. They seem to have worked off assumptions. That means identifying bias and reliability in the sources will be important in establishing a neutral POV info in the article. Pkeets (talk) 19:09, 7 September 2016 (UTC)

I’m far from the only individual targeted in this way. Another tactic, which was previously utilized unsuccessfully against my page, is the “denial of notability”. In this case, they use the fact that the mainstream media ignores massively successful self-published authors – in this case, one of the top 20 SF authors on Amazon – in order to claim that they are not notable and delete the page.

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/B. V. Larson

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article’s talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
The result was delete. The “keep” arguments are considerably weaker in terms of policy and guidelines, and often add up to “but he’s very commercially successful, so he must be notable”. Well, not according to our inclusion guidelines, as Tokyogirl79 points out. Her thorough analysis of the available sources hasn’t been seriously addressed by those wanting to keep the article, which also weakens their side of the argument.  Sandstein  17:13, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

Non notable author with no adequate references for notability. none of his books are held in more than 80 libraries a/c Worldcat; Technomancer has 79, and the others are fewer than 20. DGG ( talk ) 21:00, 15 August 2015 (UTC)

Delete References now on page (Amazon.com, Audible.com) cannot support ntability. He gets a few press mentions, Here: [1],and here: [2], news google search on his name [3], but not enough to source a page or support notability.E.M.Gregory (talk) 15:01, 16 August 2015 (UTC)

Delete. I found the same results: he’s brought up occasionally as a WP:TRIVIAL mention, but sadly he has never received the type of coverage that Wikipedia would require to satisfy notability guidelines for authors. He’s pretty much one of many authors whose works are self-published (either partially or entirely) or indie that has a fan following, but not one large enough to attract attention from places Wikipedia would consider reliable. Most of the sources I found were either WP:SPS or in places like SFFAudio, which are kind of squiffy as far as whether or not they’d pass Wikipedia’s fairly strict verification guidelines. Tokyogirl79 (｡◕‿◕｡) 08:13, 18 August 2015 (UTC)

Your argument is well-reasoned, but the sources still don’t add up, from what I can see. Essentially, in the reliable sources (newspapers, mainly, and the one book) Larson is merely “name-checked” — that is he is mentioned by name in sentences like: “…self-published writers including B.V. Larson and A.G. Riddle.” And that’s all. What we need is for there to be an article ABOUT him, or at least that goes into some depth, in such a source. That’s what WP requires for notability. Sources that aren’t neutral (like Kindle, which publishes him and therefore has a vested interest in making him look good), can’t be used; nor can personal web sites and blogs. One of the sources starts out “Guess what! My cousin Brian is also a science fiction and fantasy author!” That’s obviously not a neutral source. I agree with you that it’s unfair that self-published authors don’t get more attention, but until they start getting reviews in established sources, we have no reasoned way to separate wheat from chaff — and, quite honestly, from the few self-published books I’ve opened up, there’s a lot of chaff. LaMona (talk) 18:37, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

I would think that going platinum as an author would be one adequate way to separate the wheat from the chaff; selling a million books is inherently notable. This is why Infogalactic is so important, and why it will be necessary for us to ruthlessly crack down on admins and editors who want to play the same shady game of shaping a particular narrative to suit themselves, regardless of what it is.

The response is still restrained

I expect Europe will see considerably more violence in 2017. And unlike in previous years, it won’t all be one way.

A group of Muslims reportedly stabbed a 21-year-old polish man to death in the street on New Year’s Eve after he threw a firecracker in the general vicinity of their Kebab shop. Poles responded the next day by smashing their shop up and throwing bricks through their windows.

Video of the incident shows a large crowd cheering their retaliatory strike.

“I would be happy if there weren’t a single Arab in our country,” one protester who did not take part in the vandalism said. “I am against foreigners ruling in our country, in our beautiful town, and that they would do such things! We don’t need them here! They have their own countries, they should rule in their home countries,” he said.

The attackers were reportedly two Algerians, a Tunisian and a Moroccan.

If the murderers aren’t executed, I expect the next ones won’t escape with merely having their shops destroyed. Europeans have lost all confidence in the willingness of their governments to provide them with either protection or justice. And they are gradually beginning to understand that no amount of tolerance will bring peace now that diversity is upon them.