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Mailvox: the reluctant revolutionary

From a reader deep in the belly of the Beast:

I am a teacher at a public school in [REDACTED].  During our first professional day this year our faculty was introduced to a new administrative mandate from the state bureaucracy.  At the conclusion of the presentation we were permitted to comment.  I asked the presenter if she thought the educational bureaucracy was insane, evil, or both.  My comment elicited a few chuckles from my colleagues.  She responded that she thought the new procedures would make her a more accountable teacher.  I rejoined that it would make of me a revolutionary.  Once again my colleagues chuckled.  Teachers are some of the worst sheeple on the planet.

I later approached a colleague who is a close ideological ally.  “Well, [REDACTED], which is it?”  As is frequently the case with him, he was quick to hit the mark.  “If they’re insane, it makes logical sense to accommodate them.  If they are evil, then we are morally obliged to fight them.”  Spot on.  He is good like that.

I tried to suppress my thoughts for the rest of the week, but the realization wouldn’t let go.  I had become a reluctant revolutionary.  Or rather, to be more accurate, the state had made me a revolutionary.  The idea sickens me.  I didn’t ask for this.  I have never aspired to this sort of vocation or anything like it.  It’s one of the last things I would ever wish upon myself.  But here I stand.

The comment you posted this morning from the German president about something being wrong with the people brought to me another sudden realization. Leaders as a class have never studied the antecedents of revolution.  If they had, they would keep on their desks a handy checklist and refer to it often.  But they truly are clueless. Revolutions are not a form of spontaneous combustion.  I am reminded of the final words of Madame Ceausescu as she was put up against the wall:  “You can’t do this; I treated you like my children.”  Clueless to the bitter end.

Or, as Aristotle put it, some people cannot be convinced by information. Never forget that. They genuinely believe they are our masters. I expect events will eventually convince them otherwise.

A new rule

Apparently this was insufficient warning for some commenters:

14. If you give a moderator reason to believe that you are not interested in honest, straightforward interaction, he will simply spam your comments. Continued attempts to post comments here will be considered harassment and dealt with accordingly. 
So, I’m adding a new Rule 17.
17. Speak for yourself, not for anyone else. If you falsely characterize or inaccurately summarize someone else’s statements, arguments, or conclusions, your comments may be deleted and you may be banned. This is particularly true if you attempt to falsely characterize or inaccurately summarize something I have written.

I’m not going to be playing Summary Cop, so don’t complain about this sort of thing at every possible opportunity. It’s not a weapon for commenters to use against each other, it’s intended to shut down a common professional troll tactic. The moderators and I will apply it judiciously, as we see fit.

You can speak your own opinion. You can criticize my opinion and the opinions of the other commenters. But what you are not permitted to do is to try to speak for others in order to set up straw men that you can criticize in lieu of their actual opinions.

And if you’re not sure of what someone else is saying, the solution is eminently simple. Just ASK them for clarification. It’s not that hard.

You say you want a revolution?

Germany’s elite is going to get a well-deserved one soon.


“The elites are not the problem, the people are the problem.”
– German President Joachim Gauck

That may be the dumbest thing anyone has said since Marie Antoinette, and even she wasn’t dumb enough to actually say it!

A few thoughts on Worldcon

MidAmericaCon II is approaching, and as one could expect in a world where we’re waiting to learn if “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” is a Hugo Award-winning short story, things are getting weird. First, someone had the bright idea of a caption contest. Below is The Alt Right DM’s entry.

Add caption

Meanwhile, MidAmericaCon II had a big announcement yesterday, and by the sounds of it, McRapey is VERY excited.


John Scalzi @scalzi
The @HugoAwards will have GENDER FREE BATHROOMS! Can’t wait to spend all day in there listening to the sexy ladies going tinkle!”


Unfortunately, Jim “McCreepy” Hines could not be reached for comment, as we are informed that he was already out at Radio Shack purchasing portable recording equipment.

It’s a peculiar sort of convention that sees its bathroom policy as a major selling point, whatever that policy might be. But what was either the most amusing thing, or the most tragic thing, depending upon your perspective and how cruel your sense of humor happens to be, was NK Jemisin coming out and admitting that she knows she’s nothing more than science fiction’s affirmative-action pet. It’s a modestly profitable gig, to be sure, but not one that lends itself to much in the way of self-respect.

Throughout the Sad and Rabid Puppies saga, in which some readers protested progressive themes in sci-fi, Jemisin has been an outspoken voice advocating for diversity in science fiction. (Read her musings on “reactionary assholes” in the interview she did with the WIRED Book Club for more on that.) But too often, she has also found herself unwillingly cast in another role: the token non-white writer.

Ever since a report from magazine Fireside Fiction called out a lack of diversity in sci-fi on July 26, Jemisin has received six invitations to contribute to anthologies or magazines—and she’s leery of being one of the few go-to names when panicked editors scramble to be more inclusive. And in a tweetstorm this afternoon (below), Jemisin placed the onus on the markets, not aspiring authors, to make writers of color welcome. “The front gates are still shut, see,” she wrote. “You’re just letting a few more exceptions in the side door.” Jemisin may have broken into the world of science fiction, but for other writers to do the same, those gatekeepers need to open those doors wide.

Jemisin didn’t break into the world of science fiction. She’s the token African-American. She’s a diversity totem. She was picked up at a kennel for Peeple of Kolor Who Dont Rite Good, brought home, and is now proudly displayed to anyone who visits or even even happens to walk past outside.

“See, we got DIVERSITY!”

And she’s been defecating on the bed and the carpets, and urinating on the legs of the homeowners, ever since.

“After I read that book I realized two things: a) that Heinlein was racist as *fuck*, and b) most of science fiction fandom was too.”
– NK Jemisin

The decline of white America

Is the decline of America because America is, by definition, white:

Surveys by the Public Religion Research institute show that nearly 40 percent of Americans say that newcomers from other countries threaten traditional American customs and values. Thirty one percent of white people say that “the idea of America where most people are not white bothers me.”

This discomfort with growing diversity is generally most evident among Americans who are older and more conservative. To understand it, it helps to understand where they’re coming from. The census data show that roughly half of white Americans lived in a county where 9 out of 10 people were white in 1980. Today, just over a quarter do. Raising our threshold to 98 percent white, as in the maps above, shows that 15 percent of white Americans lived in these near-exclusively white areas in 1980, while less than one percent do today.

Of course, these thresholds are somewhat arbitrary. A county that goes from 98.1 percent white in 1980 to 97.6 percent white in 2010 is not necessarily experiencing a demographic revolution. But the sharp drop in the aggregate number of these nearly all-white counties makes for a useful marker of demographic change.

This 30-year timespan is within living memory for many of the people expressing unease with racial changes. They can look back on a time when literally everyone around them looked like them, and compare it to the present day, where people are becoming more and more different from each other — at least at the level of skin color.

What is so brutally dishonest about this coverage by the mainstream media is that it completely ignores all the other reasons Americans might not be enthusiastic about seeing their country invaded and their nation destroyed, for one or more of the following reasons:

  • Reduced average intelligence
  • Fewer jobs
  • Lower wages
  • Less political representation
  • Reduced political influence
  • Less community engagement
  • Increased pollution and environmental damage
  • More expensive housing
  • More crowded roads
  • Uglier people
  • Differing standards of home and yard maintenance
  • Increased difficulty in communicating
  • More support for government intervention in their lives
  • The increased likelihood of war and ethnic cleansing
To boil all that down to racism and a desire to see people who look like you is not merely disingenuous, it is completely dishonest.
Never forget that homogeneous nations come out of heterogeneous empires.

An NCO leaves the US Army

And none too soon, by the looks of things:

I leave the Army for good in September of this year.  My chain of command has been shell shocked that I am going through with it.  Two years ago when I first came to grips with what was happening and resolved to no longer be a part of it, there was derision and even an officer telling me that voicing my opinions about the state of the US economy and its moral failings could be considered a violation of the UCMJ for conduct “prejudicial to good order and discipline.”

When I gave my Operations NCO a copy of the book “A Distant Mirror” by Barbara Tuchman he came to me a month later stating that if there is a civil war, he and his fellow Hispanics will “have to choose sides.”

When I told my first sergeant why I would not be re-enlisting, she said “Don’t you want to re-enlist to get your 20?”

I said that I wanted to re-enlist, but I couldn’t, that my pension was nothing compared to being prepared to sacrifice my life. Then she and I went on to discuss my (your) ideas on why there was a possible collapse of the US government in the future, she went from denying the possibility to stating “Well, it all depends on what level of collapse you’re talking about,”  needless to say I was stunned.

The re-enlistment NCO refuses to talk to me, and several other mid to senior level NCOs who previously thought I was kidding have left the Active reserves for the Individual Ready Reserves.

One stated that he too was disgusted with both candidates for president and then asked me if I thought things would be so bad, why wouldn’t I stay in and try to fix things “from the inside”?  I cited the example of the Yugoslav army and how there were fire fights within units and stated that I would refuse to follow unconstitutional orders.  I then asked, “Don’t you think if one of the two candidates gets in power that either might order the power of the state to be used against their political enemies?  That’s what would be likely to START those kinds of firefights, right?”

If you’re not familiar with military culture, NCOs are the mortar that hold the whole thing together. Young officers are eminently replaceable, as new ones can be trained up in a matter of months, but the veteran NCOs that provide them guidance are not.

The fact that the NCOs are leaving is an even more damning indictment of the current US military than women being permitted to serve in combat units or homosexuals and transvestites being allowed to serve at all.

I don’t find this chilling, though. I find it a somewhat positive sign. Because I suspect the American people are at least as likely to be designated the enemy by the US government one day as the Russian or Chinese militaries. And the prospects for We the People’s will be considerably better if most of those veteran NCOs are on the side of the nation, rather than serving the government against them.

A tale of the Unwithering

Given the number of new readers who may not be familiar with it, I thought its recent Dragon Award nomination for Best Science Fiction novel justified posting this recent Amazon review of John C. Wright’s Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm. Congratulations, John, on your Dragon Award finalist!

Just finished rereading Somewhither, a grand tour through John C. Wright’s daunting and vivid imagination, wherein dwell creatures eldritch, fell and fantastic beyond anything any one, or even any small number taken together, of earth’s many mythologies ever dreamed. Plus all the worlds and trained warriors and assassins and spies and superheroes from a dozen cultures, comics and RPGs kicked up a notch or two by Wright’s deft muse, and all tossed into one epic blender of an adventure, of which this is only Part I.

Which is why I needed to read it twice. At least.

Illya Muromets is a odd teenage boy living in rural Oregon with his even odder family. Illya has grown very large and very ugly – heavy brow ridge, huge teeth. He looks nothing like his 2 brothers or his parents. His homeschooling includes rigorous physical and combat training, as well as Latin and Hebrew. He doesn’t see this as particularly weird, just sort of odd like everything about his life. His best friend is Foster Hidden, fellow Boy Scout and champion archer.

Dad takes ‘business trips’ that involve getting armed and armored to the teeth, which arms and armor include any number of holy relics and silver bullets, and and hiking up the hill to the ruins of an old monastery and disappearing for days on end. His mother went on one such trip, and never came back.

Illya gets a job doing grunt work at a nearby ‘museum’ for the mad and colorful Professor Dreadful, who has an inexplicably beautiful and brave daughter Penelope. Penny Dreadful tries to become the youngest person to sale around the world alone, but her yacht goes down and troubles beset her. She doesn’t get the record, but she survives and returns in time for Illya’s raging hormones to inflict the world’s worst crush on him.

Professor Dreadful gets locked up in the local nuthouse, to the surprise of few. He had been working to decipher a set of what might be cuneiform letters that appeared mysteriously on a wall at CERN after a fatal accident.

Illya gets a desperate message: Professor Dreadful has deciphered the cuneiform, which contained instruction on how to build a gateway between worlds in Ursprache, the one language spoken before the fall of the Tower of Babel.

He has constructed the gateway. He left it running in the museum basement….

Pity the poor Millennials

Literally. Generation X is often hard on the Millennials, and deservedly so. They’re soft and whiny and stupidly idealistic, and they’re susceptible to buying into the most transparent nonsense. That being said, they face the most difficult economic circumstances of any American generation since the so-called Greatest Generation was born into the Great Depression.

Baby Boomers and Gen Xers still seem to find it hard to believe that basic economic math can explain much of the younger generation’s behavior.

After several news outlets, including The Daily Beast, reported that rates of millennial sexual inactivity in early adulthood are surprisingly high, armchair social theorists came out in force to blame it on everything but the fact that nearly one-third of young adults are still living at home.
One right-wing college news website found a way to attribute the finding to millennials’ desire for “safe spaces.”

Conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat speculated on Twitter that it was an example of the “porn paradox,” whatever that means. Others attributed it, predictably, to the effects of technology or increased anxiety. A Rutgers biological anthropologist even suggested that millennials might be too “motivated” and “ambitious” to even bother with sex.

The most likely explanation—which was mentioned in the study itself—is that parents’ basements do not make great boom boom rooms. But who needs Occam’s razor when you’re publicly opining about the behavior of an entire generation? Lower wages sending 22-year-olds back home after college isn’t nearly as sexy as complaining about porn or political correctness.

The truth is that lower wages and poverty can account for so many of the things that older generations find so mystifying about millennials.

For example, millennials drive less than their parent’s generation—and until recently, at least—were relatively uninterested in buying cars. As The Atlantic reported in 2012, this crisis prompted automakers to appoint “youth emissaries” and come up with new car colors like “techno pink” and “denim.”

But trying to make cars cooler doesn’t change the fact that, as CityLab found, there’s a significant gap in vehicle miles traveled between millenials who make over $30,000 a year and those who make less. Simply put: Cars cost money and millennials have less of it.

Millennials have also been shamed for how much they spend eating out instead of say, saving for retirement. “Millennials Are Spending an Embarrassing Amount on Brunch and Takeaway Pizza,” Vice recently declared.

It’s easy to chalk that generational difference up to some sort of narcissistic short-sightedness but the truth is probably a lot closer to fatalism: When millennials can’t save for retirement anyway, why not spring for some bottomless mimosas instead of enrolling in a 401(k)?

Difficult circumstances don’t excuse behaving with all the foresight of a retarded chimpanzee on crack, or dying your hair blue and calling yourself a lady pony, but they do merit some degree of patience and even forbearance on our part. Since their parents, teachers, and professors all maleducated them, they’re going to need someone to help set them straight.

Mailvox: an SJW Narrative sale

One of the things I describe in the political philosophy bestseller SJWs Always Lie is the way in which SJWs communicate like advertisers who are trying to sell you something. SJWs don’t talk about the world that is, but rather, the world they are trying to convince you it should be. From Chapter 2:

The reason SJWs are so inclined to make false assertions stems from a motivation that is very similar to that of the professional propagandist, which is the need to disregard existing reality in order to bring about the preferred alternative. In the case of the SJW-preferred reality, this nonexistent alternative is known as the Narrative. The Narrative is the story that the SJWs want to tell. It is the fiction they want you to believe; it is the reality that they want to create through the denial of the problematic reality that happens to exist at the moment.


A recent comment from HGL is an almost flawless example of this. Here is his attempt to reshape reality by doing what SJWs always do:

Meh, Wright had some talent befor castalua. I think what’s telling is that although vox makes himself out to be the next big thing (constantly), his scifi posts get fewer and fewer hits and everyone ignored the hell out of him on Brad’s blog recently. No one who matters is buying it.

Let’s count the false assertions. I get five.

  1. He implies that John Wright has less talent now than he did 36 months ago. Speaking as an 3x Hugo-nominated editor, who has read and edited the forthcoming Swan Knight’s Son, Mr.Wright clearly has no less talent now than he did when he published the Nebula-nominated Orphans of Chaos, or his excellent debut novel, The Golden Age. In my professional opinion, the first Moth & Cobweb novel is better than the Dragon Award finalist Somewhither, and I expect the reviews will demonstrate that accordingly.
  2. I do not make myself out to be “the next big thing”, much less “constantly”. I think it is entirely obvious that Mike Cernovich is the next big thing. I am content to simply continue doing what I do.
  3. My SF-related posts do not get fewer and fewer hits. The site traffic has continued to increase; it hit 2.5 million pageviews in July and is on track to exceed 2.7 million this month. The month-to-month growth alone exceeds the total monthly traffic of most SF-related blogs.
  4. I’m not sure what the level of interest in a single comment on someone else’s blog is supposed to indicate, but the Dragon Award finalist Dave Freer responded directly to my comment there. 
  5. There are tens of thousands of people who are buying Castalia books. All of them matter. Regardless, the key thing to note here is the appeal to those “who matter”, which is typical SJW-speak, because it permits them to disqualify everyone whose behavior falsifies their false narrative.

The divergence between HGL’s Narrative and the objective, observable reality demonstrates why SJWs are so desperately unhappy, and explains why so many of them, like HGL, are mentally unstable and on various mood-altering medications. Reality is simply not what they want it to be, and so they insist on constructing their own delusional form of it, then attempt to sell others on their false Narrative.

After all, if you can convince someone else of it, then it must be true, right? As the Anonymous Conservative puts it, “their whole focus is on establishing a false reality in which everyone else is defective, and they are superior”. Here he uses the same technique of example analysis to demonstrate SJW projection at work:

Now, the analysis:


“Could it be perhaps that you are out of sync with the mainstream?”

You will see this throughout his writings. This, to him, is exposing an amygdala bombshell. If you exposed him as “outside the mainstream,” it would elicit reflexive waves of angst, terror, and misery. For him, being on the outside is associated with agony. That is why he put this here. Remember “out-grouping,” in Touching the Raw Amygdala? This is it.

Since deep amygdala pathways are either laid through isolated, but massive and shocking stimuli, or minor, but highly repeated stimuli, and they are best inculcated in childhood instead of maturity, you can usually assume the trigger you see was most likely created repetitively, when the individual was young. Larger stimuli, or stimuli repeated enough in adulthood to burn in these pathways are far more rare, than small stimuli seen often when young.

So here, Sam was conditioned to feel aversive stimulus whenever he let himself be “outside the group.” It speaks to a childhood spent around bullies, and his coping mechanism was to try and disappear into the crowd, which was controlled by the bully. When he was under the bully, in the bully’s group, he felt safety. When the group was focused on someone else, he felt safety. If he were thrown outside the group he felt horror. The amygdala learns from precisely that type of thing. Now, that simple picture – being outside the group – is a trigger.

Once you are in that milieu, it is a small jump to realize that if you can cast someone else out of the group, and expose them to that terror, it would feel good to do it to anyone who bothered you. From there, it is a small jump to being conditioned to feel good about doing it, even to people whom you don’t really care about.

Despite their solipsism and penchant for navel-gazing, SJWs are astonishingly unself-aware. That is why they will blithely hand you the keys to carving up their psyche, not only without hesitation, but under the delusion that they are doing devastating damage to your psychology by doing so.

Ben Shapiro is glad you hate him

Or at least he would like you to think so. After all, he must maintain his pose as a brave conservative culture warrior, or people might figure out that he’s a fraud.

Supreme Dark Lord@voxday
My readers really hate @benshapiro.

“Chickenhawk does not even BEGIN to describe this supercilious neo-con asshole.”


Ben Shapiro ‏@benshapiro
Good.

Supreme Dark Lord@voxday
You’ve always been a fraud, Ben. I still have your emails to me when you were full of self-doubt about being a little parrot.

Supreme Dark Lord@voxday
I told you to strike out and become your own man. Instead, you chickenhawked and went media whore. It was a foolish call.

Supreme Dark Lord@voxday
Your problem is that you’re a puppet and you know it. Here’s the thing. So do we.

What many of you probably don’t know is that Ben and I used to be colleagues of a sort at WND. My columns were much more popular, as I was reliably the number three most-read, behind Ann Coulter and Pat Buchanan. Ben’s readership was never more than about one-tenth of mine, but he was a smart little kid and did a good job of parroting the usual Republican boilerplate.

We corresponded a few times and were on friendly, if distant, terms. I mean, what do you talk about with a little kid whose idea of a good time is launching obvious rhetorical attacks at liberals? As he matured, he gradually began to question the ideas he was parroting, and reached the point where he considered quitting the media game.

I’ll have to dig out the emails to figure out exactly what I told him, but if I recall correctly, I encouraged him to resist the temptation to become a media whore. I understood the allure, as it was a poisoned apple that was also offered to me, but perhaps it was easier for me to turn it down since I was living in Europe and already established in the game development world.

Ben, unfortunately, couldn’t resist the apple, or the easy way forward, writing whatever his backers told him to write. I haven’t read him much since he wrote those dreadful, chickenshit columns in 2005, so I don’t know how much of what he writes he genuinely believes now and how much he is still parroting. Of course, the human mind being the incredible rationalizing machine that it is, it’s entirely possible that he has come to believe what he’s been told to say.

What I found most amusing is the way that the Littlest Chickenhawk’s supporters alternate between crowing about what a formidable debater he is, and trying to excuse the way he ran away from a proposed debate on free trade with me.

Gone Fishing
LOL! All these Ben haters. You guys wouldn’t stand a chance in hell vs him in a debate on social issues. #CryMeAriver

Gone Fishing ‏@jgfleet661
Shapiro kicks the ass of real decision makers in this country in debates. He does with facts not feelings.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
I will debate Ben on any topic. He’s already run away from me on a proposed free trade debate.

Gone Fishing ‏@jgfleet661
 ????! Yeah, he totally ran away from you. I mean, you’re the SUPREME DARK LORD! There’s no way he could beat you, right?

 Valerie ‏@vpak77
yes, you two are definitely not in the same league. That is true.

ryedog™
Totally, it’d be a complete waste of Ben’s time.

Gone Fishing ‏@jgfleet661
He has to run. He’s busy debating important people on major news networks all over the country. #PuttingInWork

Some things never change.