Category: Uncategorized

Why Trump?

Tom Kratman answers the question and explains why anyone, with any sense at all, will be supporting Trump over the status quo candidate:

Trump is pissed – dare I say “royally pissed”? – at the DC establishment that wants his money but shuns him. There’s a better than fair chance, and a better chance than we’ve had since Reagan who, at the time, had bigger sturgeon to slice, for us to have someone in the White House who may actually purge the bureaucracy that’s taken over the country. Oh, no, he won’t do everything we need and stand the upper echelons of the Agency and State, EPA, Justice, etc., against a wall with the Old Guard providing the firing squads. But he’s fairly likely to trim them badly enough to put the fear of God – which is to say the fear of you and me; “Vox Populi, vox Dei!” – into the remaining swine.

And then there’s what I think is the most important thing, the answer to the question of why Trump is even running. To me, it’s obvious: He doesn’t need graft or girls; he wants a better place in the history books than the one he’s earned so far as “slumlord to the elite.” He wants to earn that better place. This will tend to make him controllable, to make him at least try to keep his campaign promises in a way we haven’t seen since Reagan and defeating the Soviet Union. I expect that wall on our Southern border to go up. I expect him to repudiate the globalist “Free trade” agreements that have allowed the world’s piratical and parasitic “elite” to loot us, Russia, Europe, everyone not of their little class. I expect some bureaucracy trimming. Why? Because he’s such a great guy? No, because he wants that place in the history books.

That’s my impression too. Trump doesn’t need the money or the power. He doesn’t need the fame or the babes. What he wants is a meaningful place in history, and there is only one way he can achieve that.

You can’t trust Donald Trump’s principles, his words, or his commitment to Jesus Christ. But if you can’t trust in his vanity, if you can’t place any faith in the vanity of a egocentric man who has stamped his name in gold letters on everything he can, in what can you possibly trust?

Another Magic Dirt fail

Well, that, or Germans are taking an extraordinary interest in Turkish politics:

Around 50,000 supporters of Turkey’s Islamist president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan have rallied in Cologne, Germany to demand his authoritarian reign continues. The Islamist crowd chanted “Allah hu Akbar!” and held signs reading, “Erdoğan is a human rights activist”, whilst opponents waved banners insisting “Stop the Erdomania!”

Members of the Turkish-nationalist, fascist-leaning “Grey Wolves” group were among the crowd that gathered on banks of the Rhine River with the city’s huge gothic cathedral in the background.

I wonder why these bona-fide, no-question, Genuine and Real True Germans are so interested in Turkish politics all of a sudden?

And to think people ask how mass deportations could possibly be conducted. I should think there is a pretty good hint right there.

“Viva Mexico rally today. Free burritos and tequila shots!”

A new milestone: 2.5 million

I have a good reason to appreciate the material contribution that McRapey and a few of his more rabid fans have made to this site. For the first nine years of the blog, I didn’t pay much attention to my site traffic. The traffic had grown steadily over time, but it never occurred to me to think much of it because most of my readership was at WorldNetDaily and the blog had initially been little more than a place for me to record my passing thoughts and address many similar emails in one fell swoop. I started VP in 2003, but it wasn’t until 2012, when some of Scalzi’s fans began repeatedly mocking the way in which my site traffic compared unfavorably with that of Whatever, that I began looking into the implied connection between Scalzi’s perceived success in the science fiction community and his reported traffic.

As Verne, a commenter at AG, put it: “Once upon a time there was a low level geek (gamma) who managed to get himself a wee bit of power and bragging rights by way of the stupid Whatever blog and a position in a Sci/Fi org that no rational man would seemingly want. He used that power to tear into man of greater station and talent. That better man had up to that time not taken his blog and many other forms of networking seriously. A angry bear was awakened and has been steamrolling all in his way ever since.”


That’s more or less how it went, although I’m not angry at anyone about any of this. I realize many people won’t believe it, but until 2013, the 10th year of the blog, I didn’t care much about its traffic because I simply didn’t believe it had any particular significance beyond simple vanity. After all, what difference did it make if you had 5,000 pageviews in a month or 250,000 when WorldNetDaily had 5 million, the Atlanta Journal/Constitution had 19 million, and your column appeared weekly in both? I have to conclude that my very modest amount of success in the old media and old publishing worlds misled my perception of the digital media’s importance.

That’s why I was late to ebooks, why I was late to Twitter, and why I was very late to the utility of site traffic. It’s also why I rather cluelessly ran for SFWA office.

But just because I’m late to the party doesn’t mean that I’m stupid, or that I’ve lost my ability to see things that most people can’t. As chronicled in SJWs Always Lie, once I started paying attention, I very quickly recognized that McRapey was significantly exaggerating his traffic. More importantly, I also came to understand why he was lying about it and how he was effectively using public perception of that “extraordinary amount of traffic for a writer’s website”.

And I was downright astonished to discover that my blogs were already seeing very similar traffic, as I learned after reading McRapey’s 2012 summary that, as  it later turned out, proved to be the high water mark for Whatever.

That looks genuinely impressive at first glance.  8.165 million views!  But the last number made me do a double-take. And then it made me laugh. You see, Google Analytics also tracks Vox Popoli and Alpha Game. Those two blogs happened to combine for 719,700 views in December.  719,700, if I recall correctly, happens to be a little bit more than 718,000.  Nor is it an anomaly, as that was actually down from 745,857 in November.  This inspired me to look further into the matter of comparative blog traffic.

Of course, it’s not much of a comparison anymore, as Whatever now averages less than 500,000 pageviews a month while Alpha Game alone sees more than that. July 2016 saw record traffic for both VP and AG, with 2,078,989 pageviews for the former, 510,093 for the latter, and a total of 2,589,082 for the month. It may not be a competition, but as long as Whatever exists, it will serve a useful purpose for me as both a goad and a scalp.

So, 2.5 million monthly pageviews, what does that matter? Isn’t that just vanity and ego-stroking? Well, no. That’s the same mistaken perception that I used to harbor. The truth is that engagement is the social media fuel upon which the engine of Internet influence runs, and pageviews are how engagement is measured. That’s why so many people try to fake engagement by click-baiting and buying fake followers and posting pictures of cute girls in bikinis and videos of cute animals doing cute things. If gold can be adulterated and inflated, then it should be no surprise that pageviews can be as well. As we know, they can even be entirely fictitious pageviews that are invented in interviews.

But as with gold, only pageviews based on genuine engagement matter in the end. And the sort of pageviews one receives on an old-fashioned, text-heavy site are 24-carat quality. I’d much rather have my readers, and their 2.5 million pageviews, than 10 million pageviews of the sort produced by the readers of a Gawker-style clickbait site. I think VP will eventually reach 10 million monthly pageviews, and it will probably do so sooner than any of us reasonably expect. But we’ll do it for real or we won’t do it at all.

Castalia House and DevGame and Brainstorm and Big Fork and other projects that you haven’t heard about yet all exist because there is a material difference between 5,000 pageviews and 2.5 million pageviews per month. That is why this milestone matters, and that is why I am pleased to be able to celebrate it with you today.

It survived the Borgias and Avignon

So one would presume the Catholic Church will also survive the increasingly disastrous Pope Francis. But I expect he is testing the Catholicism, though not the Christianity, of more than a few Catholics these days. I mean, seriously, “a new humanity”? What sort of Communist post-Christian anti-Biblical happy talk is that?

Flying back to Rome Sunday night from Krakow, he was asked by reporters why he has never used the word “Islam” when denouncing terrorist attacks.

Francis said he thinks “it’s not right to identify Islam with violence.”

He added that every religion has its “little group of fundamentalists.'” He said that if he speaks of violent Islam, he’d have to speak of violent Catholicism, since Catholics kill, too.

Referring to Isis, also known as Islamic State group, Francis said it “presents itself with its violent identity card, but it’s not Islam.'”

God, said Francis in his final homily of the pilgrimage, “demands of us real courage, the courage to be more powerful than evil, by loving everyone, even our enemies.”

“People may judge you to be dreamers, because you believe in a new humanity, one that rejects hatred between peoples, one that refuses to see borders as barriers and can cherish its own traditions without being self-centered or small-minded,” Francis told his flock.

Earlier in his pilgrimage, Francis had expressed dismay that many people and places aren’t welcoming enough to refugees or those fleeing poverty in their homelands.

That’s not Catholicism. That’s not Christianity. That’s raw Neo-Babelism. One observes that despite his attempt to encourage Poles to meekly accept Islamic invasion, Francis has taken in fewer refugees than the so-called Nazi Pope took in Jews.

He’s literally preaching an anti-Crusade of Muslim occupation. I understand that his comments often get taken out of context, but this is straight from the jackass’s mouth. No wonder the very Catholic Polish government wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit.

I’m very interested in knowing what the Catholics here think about this pope. I am NOT interested in hearing the various anti-Catholics spewing their usual venom nor is this an invitation to do so, so be aware that I won’t hesitate to delete Protestant comments on this post. But from an outsider’s perspective, considering the way in which this pope followed on the heel’s of Benedict’s resignation, there does appear to be something seriously wrong in the Vatican.

Evil in high places

Read this, then keep in mind that the sort of people who swept these crimes under the table are still in power, in both Britain and the USA:

How the great and the good let Jeremy Thorpe get away with sex abuse… and gave a green light to monsters like Cyril Smith and Jimmy Savile

There was no doubt that what they had heard was evidence of a criminal offence. But the culprit named by Scott was a prominent public figure — no less than the flamboyant and hugely popular Liberal MP Jeremy Thorpe, an increasingly impressive figure on the political stage and, then aged 33, clearly destined for greater things.

Should they delve deeper and risk infuriating a man whose friends in high places meant he wielded considerable influence? Or should they wash their hands of the whole business?

Predictably enough — as author John Preston writes in his book A Very English Scandal, a new and scintillating account of the Thorpe affair — ‘self-preservation won the day’.

They made a few cursory inquiries among police in Thorpe’s North Devon constituency, then sent their file to Scotland Yard. From there it was passed on to Special Branch and copied to MI5, which kept files on all MPs.

Despite Thorpe’s homosexuality making him liable to blackmail and therefore a possible security risk, Special Branch also chose to take the path of least resistance. The file was locked in a safe in the office of an assistant commissioner. The cover-up of the bizarre and criminal antics of Thorpe had begun.

Keep in mind it wasn’t merely the rape and sexual abuse, but attempted murder, that was covered up, covered up so successfully that child molesters – and perhaps even murderers – were able to operate with impunity for decades afterward.

We’ll make it up on volume

Steve Sailer observes that Muslims serving in the US military have been a net negative since 2000:

As far as I can tell, 14 Muslim-American U.S. soldiers have died in this century versus 15 American soldiers murdered in a couple of terrorist attacks by Muslim-American U.S. soldiers.

Okay, so we’re losing soldiers on each one. (Never mind 3,000 dead civilians in the U.S.)

But we’ll make up for it on volume!

But that’s not the point. The point is that global empire costs a lot of money, which lines a lot of pockets around the Beltway, so we need to keep the Invade / Invite perpetual motion money machine going.

The Khizr Khan story was pretty good rhetoric for the Democrats. But it was hampered by the fundamental weakness of rhetoric that is used to sell falsehoods rather than the truth. Of course, one can’t effectively counter rhetoric with dialectic, although Trump could have been even colder than he was in pointing to the silence of Khan’s headscarf-wearing mother.

The more effective rhetoric would have been to point out that Khan’s death likely saved American lives, as he was killed before he experienced an attack of Sudden Jihad Syndrome and turned his guns on his fellow soldiers. The outrage would have been epic and would have served to underline the fact that even some who wear the uniform and are sworn to defend the US Constitution are not, and never will be, Americans.

Submissions and so forth

Amanda addresses the business of submissions at Mad Genius Club:

Yesterday, as I was looking at FB, I came across a post from someone I respect a great deal. He also has one of the most unverifiable jobs there is in publishing. No, not reading the slush pile, although that is part of his job. He has taken it upon himself to do what so many publishers don’t do. He responds to those who send something in, letting them know whether or not their work has met the minimum threshold to be passed up the line for further consideration. Believe me, that is definitely more than a number of publishers do. Too many simply never get back to you unless they are interested.

What caught my eye with his post was how unprofessional someone had been in response to his email letting them know their story had not been passed up the line. Now, I know how it stings when you get a rejection. It’s like someone telling you your baby is ugly. But it happens and we have to accept it with grace and move on. Yes, we can kick and scream and curse in public but you do not send a note back telling the editor how wrong they were. Nor do you tell them that the title has been published during the time the editor was considering it, especially if the editor has gotten back to you in less than half the time they say it normally takes.

And that is where this particular author screwed up.

Having been on both ends of the process, perhaps some of you might be interested in an editor’s perspective.

  1. Most of the stuff that is submitted isn’t anywhere near ready. Seriously, we’re talking “WTF were you thinking” territory. Don’t submit just to submit, practice, then file it away if it’s not genuinely on par with what the publisher publishes and move on to the next work.
  2. You have VERY little time to impress the slush reader, who is wading through large quantities of writing that ranges from barely literate to mediocre. Make it count.
  3. Keep the cover letter short and to the point. No one is going to be impressed by how BADLY you want to be published or HOW MUCH you want to work with the publishing house. What you want has nothing to do with how good your book is.
  4. Pay a modicum of attention to whom you are submitting. If you submit a gay teen werewolf romance to Castalia, we’ll reject it right away. If you’re an SJW, don’t bother.
  5. Spellcheck, particularly your cover letter, bio, and first chapter. The occasional typo is forgivable, but if you simply can’t spell, most slush readers will quite reasonably assume you can’t write.
  6. Pay attention to who else the publisher publishes. Be familiar with some of their authors and read a few of their books to see how your work compares to them. At Castalia, our goal is for me to be the worst writer we publish. If your stuff isn’t objectively as good as my books, or Peter Grant’s, or Rod Walker’s, (and read the Amazon reviews to see how THOSE books are regarded) then you simply have no chance of being published by Castalia. Because John Wright and Owen Stanley and Nick Cole are even better.

All that being said, sometimes a submission does make it through the process. Last night I was discussing some editorial changes I wanted to see with the author of an unsolicited submission who hit several of our interest triggers with a solid, well-written murder mystery and political thriller set in feudal Japan that reads very much like military SF. If he can nail those changes, and I have no reason to think that he can’t, Castalia will be delighted to publish it.

Mailvox: Churchianity and Cruz

JM is mystified by the continued enthusiasm of Churchian cuckservatives for Ted Cruz:

I used to respect the authors of this blog and some of those they quote with approval, but I’ve lost respect for them in the last few months, and have dropped them from my blogroll.  I find it both interesting and annoying to see how they rationalize Ted Cruz’s refusal to keep his word into an act of Christian principle.  To be charitable, they may be unaware of all the dirty tricks pulled by the Cruz campaign, but they’d probably find some way to justify them, anyway.

I suspect that Cruz, Jeb, and Kasich never had any intention of supporting Trump regardless of the pleedge they made, and they’re just making up excuses to rationalize their dishonesty.

Most of the women mentioned in this post who are so upset at Trump and Christians who favour Trump are extremely judgmental Calvinists, who seem to be making this a test of Christian orthodoxy.

If these people are so enthusiastic about Cruz’s alleged adherence to the Constitution, why don’t they notice that he isn’t even constitutionally eligible to hold the office he was running for?

It’s just a form of Christian identity politics, that’s all. After all, once you’ve determined that Ted Cruz is the Holy and Anointed One, it’s a little hard to back down and admit that not only are you wrong, but you’ve been listening to false prophets you should never again give any credence.

Like any other cult that’s faced with dealing with false prophecies, the response of the hard core is to double down even as everyone else falls away.

The only reason they’re so upset with Trump is because he has shown their prophets to be false, their principles to be fake, and their pretensions to be ridiculous. I suspect that most of these die-hards are either women or gammas, as neither can ever forgive someone who humiliates them by publicly proving them to be wrong.

I wasn’t even a little bit surprised to see the poster boy for Churchian cuckservatives, Matt Walsh, being prominently featured in the approved quotes club. That is the sort of people JM is dealing with here.

It’s not about hearts on sleeves

I always enjoy it when cucks go straight to rhetoric. It’s just not a field on which they’re really prepared to play.

(((Popehat))) ‏@Popehat
When I think about it, my clients who are the most modestly, convincingly, and devotedly patriotic are immigrants. Hearts on their sleeves.

Supreme Dark Lord @voxday
And yet, they managed to destroy the nation all the same. It’s not about hearts, but genetics and culture.

(((Popehat))) @Popehat
This guy still exists, I guess.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
Glad to see you’re still out of the funny farm. For the time being, anyhow.

(((Popehat))) ‏@Popehat
This is an adequate insult, I suppose, graded on a curve. Hardly MENSA though.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
I try to keep things at a level the other guy will understand. Communication is so important, after all.

(((Popehat))) ‏@Popehat
Yes, I’ve heard your books are very easy to read.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
That’s why they’re bestsellers.

He just never learns, does he. But to return to the point, no matter how much you may like something,  no matter how strongly you may identify with it, that liking for it doesn’t make you that thing. I really like the Minnesota Vikings. I have since I was a child. But that doesn’t make me a professional football player, much less a member of the Vikings. Seriously, this isn’t that hard.

Do you regard me as an Italian, no different than Garibaldi or Totti or Dante? Or is the dirt of Italy simply less magic than that of America? No, the simple fact is that the state is not the nation. And that is why even the most loyal immigrant can never be a genuine national, even unto the third generation.

Meanwhile, this proud assimilator apparently doesn’t understand his own (((heritage))) well enough to know that Judaism is matrilineal.

(((Schröd’s Täint))) ‏@SmuggieMike
hey pal, I’m a Jew immigrant l who had two kids with a white Christian from the south. #ImGenocidingYou.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
And now your kids are no longer Jewish. You’re self-holocausting; you’re almost Hitler.