Platform and publishing, 2017

MT White considers the pros and cons of self-publishing:

Notice, you’re not writing your book to appeal to readers. You’re writing your book to appeal to agents and acquisition’s editors. Naturally, they are looking for product that will sell, but to them it is just product—to you it will be a book written full of compromise…maybe. No matter what, you have to appeal to THEM first before your book hits shelves. And THEY might have very different tastes than you. They live in a different city (probably New York), while you might live in rural Texas. They might have polite sensibilities, while you have vulgar ones. You might find someone who is in alignment with you but as I stated above, there is a 99.9% you won’t. You have to appeal to THEM before your book even makes it to the press.

In short, it’s a road filled with compromise. You’re going to write thinking about THEM, appealing to THEIR tastes, hoping they align with yours. While you write, you might question certain passages, lines that may be too politically incorrect, or just too offensive for someone who might dine at Per Se every now and then. You might change character arcs around, change the villains, modify complete dialogue exchanges, not to please the reader at home who is reading your work to get their mind off of their dick boss—no you’re modifying your work to please THEM.

The only reason most people publish with a publisher is a) validation or b) market reach. And of the two, it’s only the latter that matters. The problem, of course, is that the publishers who provide the greatest market reach also take the much larger portion of the revenues, and worse, have absolutely no loyalty to their authors, and even worse, are strongly inclined to thought-police them.

No one knows the risks of that better than Castalia House author Nick Cole as he considers the importance of a platform in light of the independent ones Stefan Molyneux and I have constructed with a little help from our friends:

Neither of these people are at the mercy of a big publisher, as I once was.  So… If some petty little  corporate thug decides he/she doesn’t like Vox’s opinion about something they have no ability to silence Vox.  Vox maintains his own website and blogs heavily from it.  Same with Molyneaux. I think Molyneaux once mentioned he’d sold over a hundred thousand books through his website.  Wow!  He’s even cutting Amazon out of the picture and keeping all the money for himself.

Thus proving to the rest of us if you build your own platform you can weather the storms of corporate social justice shenanigans/intrigues/nepotism and connect directly to your audience to sell your product.

So no matter what happens in these times of faux moral outrage and someone demanding someone we don’t like must be silenced because they’re “Hitler,” these two can still directly connect with their audience and sell some books. And laugh all the way to the bank.

Here’s what you need to know to do the same thing.  It’s easy.  In fact, it’s never been easier.

Blog regularly.  Six days a week.  Say something.  Anything.  Even repost someone’s article (like this one) and add a comment to get readers interested and sharing the post even if it’s not yours. People who click on it will land on your website and they might get interested in your books. Stop going on Facebook and giving them free content by just posting stuff.   Take the time to write a blog post from your own website and then post it to Facebook.

Do this faithfully and start connecting with your readers regularly.  In time you’ll build an audience that will be yours and not some SJW media mogul’s who might decide to blacklist you because you think DNA determines gender.  Or global warming is a big lie.  Or civil rights is just a con game some crooks are using to stay in power.  Or Gwyneth Paltrow’s latest film sucks.  Whatever. Build your own platform.

Nick is one of the Castalia authors who will be building his platform at the Castalia House blog. What I would add to his advice is to consistently work to build up others, not merely yourself. There is a virtuous circle effect that the Left has historically been much better at utilizing than the Right, which is much more inclined to purity-spirals.

But we’re learning and we’re improving constantly. And that’s why we’re winning.

McCain, the FBI, and Showergate

The Fake News Showergate saga just keeps getting better. Now McCain and Carl Bernstein are involved.

Sworn Donald Trump enemy John McCain admitted Wednesday that he passed the dossier of claims of a Russian blackmail plot against the president-elect. The Arizona senator issued a public statement amid mounting questions of his exact role in the affair – and how a document riddled with errors and unverifiable claims came to be published.

‘Late last year, I received sensitive information that has since been made public,’ he said. ‘Upon examination of the contents, and unable to make a judgment about their accuracy, I delivered the information to the Director of the FBI.’

The chain of how the document reached the FBI is not officially known. However Carl Bernstein, the Watergate reporter who contributed to the first story about its existence, published by CNN on Tuesday afternoon, suggested that McCain was handed it by a former British ambassador to Moscow.

Bernstein told CNN: ‘It came from a former British MI6 agent who was hired from a political opposition research firm in Washington who was doing work about Donald Trump for both republican and democratic candidates opposed to Trump.

‘They were looking at Trumps business ties, they saw some questionable things about Russians, about his businesses in Russia, they in turn hired this MI6 former investigator, he then came up with additional information from his Russian sources, he was very concerned by the implications of it, he then took it to an FBI colleague that he had known in his undercover work for years, he took it to this FBI man in Rome who turned it over to the bureau in Washington in August.

‘And then, a former British ambassador to Russia independently was made aware of these findings and he took the information to John McCain – Senator John McCain of Arizona – in the period just after the election, and showed it to McCain – additional findings.

‘McCain was sufficiently disturbed by what he read to take it to FBI director James Comey himself personally, they had a five minute meeting the two men, very little was said, McCain turned it over to him and is now awaiting what the FBI’s response is to that information.’

The identity of the former British ambassador has not been disclosed.

Only one former British ambassador to Washington remains in UK government service, Sir Tim Barrow, who went on to be Foreign Office political director and is now Britain’s ambassador to the European Union.

Obama was a terrible president. No doubt about it. Dreadful. But it really does appear that McCain would have been considerably worse. Anyhow, by the time this is over, I won’t be surprised if Lee Harvey Oswald, Madonna, and Woodstock all somehow factor in.

Meanwhile, the God-Emperor Ascendant himself is giving a press conference that will presumably address this. He’s every bit as combative as during the campaign; now he’s talking about the DNC vulnerability to hackers and “the horrible things” that John Podesta said about Hillary.

The media is addressing him as “Mr. President-Elect”. Feels good. HOLY CATS! He just announced that both the President and the Vice-President are NOT governed by conflict-of-interest laws and has been for several administrations.

I don’t think the media is ready for this level of openness.

“I am not going to give you a question. You are fake news” 
– President-Elect Donald Trump to CNN

This is what EIGHT YEARS OF WINNING is going to look like.

The power of the bully pulpit

Trump has a powerful weapon to wield against corporate America’s free trade mythology:

Some U.S. companies are reviewing potential mergers while others are rethinking job cuts or looking at their manufacturing operations in China for fear of being cast as “anti-American” by President-elect Donald Trump, according to Wall Street bankers, company executives and crisis management consultants.

Having seen some of America’s largest companies, including General Motors Co, Lockheed Martin Corp and United Technologies Corp, bluntly and publicly rebuked by Trump on Twitter, many others are worried they may be his next target – especially if they have significant overseas manufacturing, have had U.S. job cuts or price increases for consumers.

“Any business that leaves our country for another country, fires its employees, builds a new factory or plant in the other country, and then thinks it will sell its product back into the U.S. without retribution or consequence is WRONG!” Trump, who assumes office on Jan. 20, tweeted in December.

Trump campaigned on an “America First” anti-globalization platform that promised the return of thousands of U.S. manufacturing jobs to economically depressed areas.

That nationalist rhetoric and Trump’s willingness to use his Twitter account as a cudgel has so rattled some companies that they are putting on hold mergers and acquisitions that may involve significant job cuts or moving production or tax domicile abroad, out of fear that such deals could be seen as “unpatriotic”, several top Wall Street bankers said.

This is excellent news. It also shows how perilously thin the corporate case for free trade is.

The fear of woman

Is the beginning of dyscivilization. Pastor Doug Wilson addresses one way in which modern Churchians have attempted to neuter the Christian man.

If over the course of a few months of pastoral counseling, say, I encounter three instances of husbands and fathers getting angry in the home, you can expect that problem to start showing up in sermons—either in sermons on anger, or passing illustrations about anger in sermons on something else. My assumption is that the instances I have found out about are the tip of the iceberg.

Now suppose—just suppose—the presenting problem in three marriages I am trying to help is the problem of lazy and idle housewives. Is there any practical way, without becoming a Pariah for the Ages, to preach on “Lazy Housewives”? I could get myself into a fit of the giggles just thinking about it.

Anything said along these lines will be immediately translated into an “attack on all women.” The violent response will insist that what you said about a small subset of women is to be understood by the entire world as an attack on all women, and the violent response will be led by women who also insist that they are every bit as rational as men, and should therefore be trusted to preach and teach and handle the text of Scripture, and they will do this when they have just finished parsing a statement that some mammals are marsupials into the clownish doctrine that all mammals are marsupials, and how dare you say that all mammals have pouches? Whales don’t have pouches, you maroon.

The reason for this reaction is that Satan hates women, and does not want them to have any pastoral care. He does not want them to have husbands who protect them. He wants them to be surrounded by feckless cowards, who refuse to tell them the truth.

He wants them to have men in their lives who would rather lie than lead.

I don’t know if I can go along with this hateful attack on women. After all, did not Judeo-Christ say: “I do not permit a husband to criticize or to assign blame to his wife; he must be silent in his servant-leadership. For Adam was formed first, then Eve.”


I am confident all right-thinking Churchians will agree with me that it is both wrong and sinful for a man to criticize any woman, but particularly a woman to whom he is, or was formerly, married, and that the proper role of a husband is to provide, without complaint, for his wife and his wife’s son.

Metafake news and golden journalism

Apparently it’s not that hard to provoke the mainstream media into eviscerating itself:

The saga over alleged Russian interference in the U.S. elections took another sinister turn Tuesday, as it was claimed that U.S. intelligence officials provided President-elect Donald Trump with a charge that the Russians had obtained dirt on him.

U.S. officials allegedly included a two-page synopsis of ‘kompromat’ – Russian for compromising material – as part of their security briefing of Trump on Friday.

The material was based on memos compiled by a British intelligence operative who was considered ‘credible’ by the U.S. intelligence community, CNN reported. Disclosure FBI sat on damaging allegations will enrage Democrats after Comey went public with Anthony Weiner material just before election

What is believed to be the 35-page document itself was published by Buzzfeed, which pointed out that it contained errors. Little of its contents can be independently verified, while there has been no official confirmation of the details of the briefing and Donald Trump has branded the claims as ‘fake’.

The document claims Russian sources told the operative that they had extensive material on the now president-elect – including a secret film of him in the suite where President Obama stayed in Moscow, watching prostitutes committing degrading sex acts on the bed where the president slept.

Trump himself has already dismissed the claims, tweeting: ‘FAKE NEWS – A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!’

See, now THIS is how you mock the media and take away its credibility and power, not NAZI-Larping. Let’s just say any time you manage to get Rick Wilson, the CIA, and CNN to bite – and inspire a formal denial from the Kremlin – you have achieved MegaTroll status. One simply has to give the media what they desperately want in a multilayer package that sounds sufficiently believable to them.

MILO himself is looking on with appreciation and thinking, “damn, this guy is good! I mean, like ME good!”

It’s really rather remarkable that neither the conservative nor the mainstream media have developed any ability to scent the presence of channers at work yet. This tends to support the notion that they mostly consist of hypersolipsistic women and socially challenged gamma males, neither of whom have any idea how humans actually work.

From Writeup for Cernovich:

On january 10, Buzzfeed posted a story under the byline of Ken Bensinger, Mark Schoofs and Miriam elder titled “these reports Allege Trump Has Deep Ties To Russia” and posted a link to a document alleging, among other things, that russia has been cultivating trump for 5+ years, that trump has been in constant contact with the kremlin for information on his opponents, and perhaps most inflammatory, that there are many recorded instances of blackmail of trump in sexual misconduct. A prominent claim is that trump rented the presidential suite of the Ritz Carlton Hotel in moscow, where he knew that the Obamas had slept in; he them hired a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden shower’ (pissplay) on the bed and in the room.

Noted #nevertrump voice Rick Wilson later commented on twitter, stating that the report “gave a new meaning to Wikileaks” and that the report was the reason everybody was fighting so hard against the election of Trump.

The remarkable thing? It’s all fake. And not only fake; it’s a prank perpetuated by 4chan, on Rick Wilson himself. A post on 4chan on october 26 stated “mfw managed to convince CTR and certain (((journalists))) on Twitter there’ll be an October surprise on Trump this Friday” along with a picture of a smug face with a hash name.


on november 1, a person without a picture but is assumed to be the same person posted “So they took what I told Rick Wilson and added a Russian spy angle to it. They still believe it. Guys, they’re truly fucking desperate – there’s no remaining Trump scandal that’s credible.”

on january 10, moments after the story broke and began to gain traction on social media, a person with the same smug grin face, and the same hash title for the picture, stated “I didn’t think they’d take it so far.”

This story has taken on something of a life of it’s own. Going through Rick Wilson’s twitter, you can find many different stories from the time that he had shown the story to a wide number of anti-trump news sources, trying to find a news organization that would actually publish the story. During that time period, he referred to it often as ‘the thing’, and often playing coy with followers on the content with the story with anybody who was not also a #Nevertrumper. Unconfirmed sources has people as high up as John McCain giving the story to FBI Director James Comey to attempt to verify the story. Given that Rick Wilson runs in Establishment circles, it is not an impossible scenario that long-serving senators are falling for what amounts to a 4chan troll trump supporter creating an ironic October Surprise out of wholecloth to punk a GOPe pundit who derogatorily referred to them as single men who masturbate to anime.

I remember Rick Wilson’s “October Surprise” hints and assuming that they would amount to nothing. But I was wrong. /pol/ rickrolled him. This truly exceeds expectations.

UPDATE: The Kremlin has officially denied the story.

UPDATE: Even a cursory read should have been sufficient to determine the report was fake. From Instapundit: British intelligence describes events surrounding the “World Cup Soccer tournament.” This is a dead giveaway. First, the Brits don’t say “soccer”. Second, as far as the Brits are concerned, there is only one World Cup. “World Cup Soccer tournament” sounds about as credible as “The National Tackle Football Premier Cup”.

UPDATE: Jake Tapper was involved in CNN pushing the story. He must be really desperate to move the focus away from Pizzagate. I wonder why?

UPDATE: Downing Street sought to distance itself from a report – apparently compiled by a former MI6 operative – claiming the Russians have a file of incriminating material on the president-elect.

“Muh Constitution,” he cucked, cuckingly

Alex Rawls has absolutely no idea what the U.S. Constitution is or for whom it was written:

The CONSTITUTION does not define a white ethnostate. It is no contradiction of the constitution to welcome many of those from other races that share a commitment to liberty under law and to Christian morality (which most religions other than Islam do in large degree).

Alex is absolutely and utterly wrong. The Constitution doesn’t define a white ethnostate, it clearly establishes a BRITISH ethnostate. It exists solely to defend the rights and liberties of the genetic descendants of the Founders and no one else. It does not welcome anyone and it does not indicate any interest in any other race or nation regardless of their commitment to anything, much less “liberty under law” or “Christian morality”.

The purpose of the Constitution is laid out in the Preamble:


We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Many, if not most, descendants of immigrants are not the Posterity of the then-People of the United States. Neither are people living in Mexico, Germany, Israel, or even Great Britain. The U.S. Constitution was not written for them, nor was it ever intended to secure the Blessings of Liberty for them.

The idea that the Constitution was intended to do anything at all for immigrants, resident aliens, or foreigners is as absurd as the idea that its emanations and penumbras provide them with an unalienable right to an abortion. The fact that courts have declared otherwise is totally irrelevant.

The proposition nation is a lie. There is no such thing, there never was any such thing, and there never will be any such thing.

Rabid Puppies 2017

Worldcon helpfully gets in touch:

I’m very glad to be able to tell you that nominations for the 2017 Hugo Awards are now open! As a member of MAC2, you are eligible to nominate in the 17 Hugo ballot categories covering the best of the genre in the last year, and for the John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

The deadline for nominations is 17 March 2017 at 11:59pm Pacific Daylight Time (2:59 am Eastern Daylight Time, 06:59 Greenwich Mean Time, 0:859 in Finland, all on 18 March). Although members of MidAmeriCon II, Worldcon 75 and Worldcon 76 in San José can nominate, only members of Worldcon 75 will be eligible to vote on the final ballot and choose the winners of the 2017 Hugo Awards. We expect to announce the final ballot in early April, and the awards will be presented on 11 August at Worldcon 75 in Helsinki, Finland.

The World Science Fiction Society’s Business Meetings in 2015 and 2016 made some changes to the way nominations will be tallied this year to produce the final ballot. You can find a summary of the changes here. In addition, Worldcon 75 is trialling a proposed new category, Best Series. Nothing, however, has changed about the mechanics of making nominations. You still choose up to five nominees in each category. We recommend that you nominate whatever works and creators you have personally read or seen that were your favorites from 2016.

While I will certainly be making my 2017 recommendations soon – particularly for Best Series – I would NOT recommend anyone to register. As the God-Emperor Ascendant demonstrated so masterfully, there is a time to press forward and there is a time to sit back and see how things play out. Now, obviously, those of us who are already registered can, and should, nominate, but there is no sense in wasting money that might be more effectively utilized elsewhere on Worldcon this year.

Let the SF-SJWs do their happy dances and celebrate the success of EPH, little realizing that in adopting it, they have done exactly what we intended in pursuit of our long term objective. Let’s face it, thinking through the logical consequences of their actions has never exactly been their strong suit. It’s bewildering that they genuinely appear to believe that we did not anticipate their changing the rules, even though I said right from the very start that they would have no choice but to do so if we were successful.

Later this year I will also be making recommendations for the Dragon Award, which is in the process of becoming the more significant SF/F award. Keep in mind that you should NOT vote yet for the Dragon Award.

Book of the Week: Uncertainty

The following review appeared in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons:


This book has the potential to turn the world of evidence-based medicine upside down. It boldly asserts that with regard to everything having to do with evidence, we’re doing it all wrong: probability, statistics, causality, modeling, deciding, communicating—everything. The flavor is probably best conveyed by the title of one of my favorite sections: “Die, p-Value, Die, Die, Die.”


Nobody ever remembers the definition of a p-value, William Briggs points out. “Everybody translates it to the probability, or its complement, of the hypothesis at hand.” He shows that the arguments commonly used to justify p-values are fallacies. It is far past time for the “ineradicable Cult of Point-Oh-Five” to go, he states. He does not see confidence intervals as the alternative, noting that “nobody ever gets these curious creations correct.”


Briggs is neither a frequentist nor a Bayesian. Rather, he recommends a third way of modeling: using the model to predict something. “The true and only test of model goodness is how well that model predicts data, never before seen or used in any way. That means traditional tricks like cross validation, boot strapping, hind- or back-casting and the like all ‘cheat’ and re-use what is already known as if it were unknown; they repackage the old as new.”


Some of the book’s key insights are: Probability is always conditional. Chance never causes anything. Randomness is not a thing. Random, to us and to science, means unknown cause.


One fallacy that Briggs chooses for special mention, because it is so common and so harmful, is the epidemiologist fallacy. He prefers his neologism to the more well-known “ecological fallacy” because without this fallacy, “most epidemiologists, especially those employed by the government, would be out of a job.” It is also richer than the ecological fallacy because it occurs whenever an epidemiologist says “X causes Y” but never measures X. Causality is inferred from “wee p-values.” One especially egregious example is the assertion that small particulates in the air (PM 2.5s) cause excess mortality.

Quantifying the unquantifiable, which is the basis of so much sociological research, creates a “devastation to sound argument…[that] cannot be quantified.”

I could not agree more. As I have repeatedly observed, the only theories that are worthwhile are those that serve as the basis for successful predictive models. Or, as the ancients put it, let reason be silent when experience gainsays its conclusions. All the backtesting and p-values and statistical games are irrelevant if the predictive models fail.

All your rhetoric are belong to us

A GamerGate tactic goes mainstream and the mainstream media backs down fast.

When Jim DeMint wanted to dis a TV interviewer’s suggestion that Obamacare has merits as well as flaws, the former senator and tea partyer used a handy putdown: “You can put all that under the category of fake news.”

When conspiracy theorist Alex Jones wanted to deny a CNN report that Ivanka Trump would take over the East Wing offices traditionally occupied by the first lady, he used the same label.

And when a writer for an arch-conservative website needed a putdown for ABC’s chief White House correspondent Jonathan Karl, he reached for the obvious: “fake-news propagandist.”

Fake news has a real meaning — deliberately constructed lies, in the form of news articles, meant to mislead the public. For example: The one falsely claiming that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump, or the one alleging without basis that Hillary Clinton would be indicted just before the election.

But though the term hasn’t been around long, its meaning already is lost. Faster than you could say “Pizzagate,” the label has been co-opted to mean any number of completely different things: Liberal claptrap. Or opinion from left-of-center. Or simply anything in the realm of news that the observer doesn’t like to hear.

“The speed with which the term became polarized and in fact a rhetorical weapon illustrates how efficient the conservative media machine has become,” said George Washington University professor Nikki Usher.

As Jeremy Peters wrote in the New York Times: “Conservative cable and radio personalities, top Republicans and even Mr. Trump himself . . . have appropriated the term and turned it against any news they see as hostile to their agenda.”

So, here’s a modest proposal for the truth-based community.

Let’s get out the hook and pull that baby off stage. Yes: Simply stop using it.

The Alt-Right and conservatives managed to jujitsu the rhetorical term “fake news” so easily because the best rhetoric is rooted in truth. And because it is readily observable that no one reports more false information than the mainstream media, there were far more examples that could be reasonably described as “fake news” to be found in the mainstream media than were being spread around social media by the Right. Ergo, it stuck to them rather than to their targets, and blew up in their faces.

That doesn’t mean the tactic will work every time, only when the truth is more in line with the Right’s use of the rhetorical term than the Left’s. Of course, that will be most of the time, as the shameless dishonesty in this piece demonstrates:

“the label has been co-opted to mean any number of completely different things: Liberal claptrap. Or opinion from left-of-center. Or simply anything in the realm of news that the observer doesn’t like to hear.”

No, it hasn’t, as it was instead applied to mean false information presented as accurate news by the mainstream media. Notice that Left can’t afford to be completely honest even when they are affecting to do so, which is why they will always be vulnerable to rhetorical jujitsu of this sort. And on a tangential note, observe that this is why larping and “mocking” the media by playing along with its narrative is always a mistake, as doing so strengthens their rhetoric and eliminates the possibility of turning it around on them.

If you don’t understand the tactic’s connection to #GamerGate, it is an application of the frequently used GG tactic of taking over enemy hashtags, also known as “all ur hashtag are belong to us”. I even described this specific tactic in modest detail in SJWs Always Lie.

German father rescues daughter from immigrant

I’m astonished that he was content to turn the “suspect” over to the police.

A German father has been hailed as a hero after rescuing his daughter from an attacker
The 57-year-old man raced to the crime scene in the town of Kleve after his daughter telephoned him to say; “There’s a man following me home dad…..”

When he got there the man had punched his daughter almost unconscious, was on top of her and tearing at her clothes after dragging her from the side of the road into undergrowth.

The 57-year-old raced to save his daughter after she called him to say she was being followed
Her dad, who arrived at the scene on a push-scooter, leaped off screaming, hauled the drunken attacker off his daughter and punched him several times.

He then held him down with his body while calling police and an ambulance on his mobile phone.

What is the point of calling the police? When the authorities aren’t even jailing, let alone executing, immigrants for raping five-year-olds, they can’t be expected to even slap this guy on the wrist. The Czechs have the right of it.

On the other hand, at least he didn’t invite the guy into his home. So, there is that.