If you’re not convinced

Perhaps you will be after reading the reviews of the recently released A SEA OF SKULLS, Book Two in the Arts of Light and Dark epic fantasy series. If you haven’t started the series yet, you will probably want to start with Book One, A THRONE OF BONES, which is available in Kindle Unlimited.


Worthy successor series to LOTR
“A Sea of Skulls” picks up and accelerates the pace from “A Throne of Bones”. We see some well-developed characters killed off, but encounter other interesting characters of multiple Selenoth races. Amorr and its former allies and provinces gird for war, while a Lost Legion allies with X to defend against a major orc invasion. The elves and dwarves gather their forces to defend against orcs, and also to keep a sharp eye on Man. At several places, you feel a cold chill as you realize one of the minor characters might well be one of the first race, hiding in shadows, biding its time and waiting to seize power for their own ends (enslaving or destroying the younger races). The action and lead characters are spread across the continent, where military action or political intrigue in one realm affects three or four others. The story line is woven more deftly than the first book, and increases the pull of action and intrigue.

Each race has its backstory and cultural values; gruesome as some may be, the cultures, assumptions, and lifestyles are internally consistent. Vox Day also describes each race’s military merit well, showing a consistent triad of strategy, tactics, and logistics that fits with the race’s culture. There are no all-powerful and ever-victorious species in Selenoth; the trick is in understanding your own strengths and then using you enemy’s weakness to best effect. Coalition forces work or don’t work, based on how well the commanders enhance strength and mitigate weaknesses. Political and social life are well written and reasonable for each race. Some of the best moments in the character views are watching how one observer looks in amazement or bemusement at how another race or culture lives – the fish out of water scenario. The set of viewpoint characters is finite and severely bounded, so it’s possible to keep several scattered event tracks in mind with minimal searching for a reminder.

There is a comparison to be made with A Song of Ice and Fire. By comparison, the Arts of Dark and Light is written much richer, more coherently, with a better span of scope, and with a definite conclusion in mind.

A Genre Revisited
From the moment you pick up, and/or scroll through your epub device, you will not be able to put this book down until you have finished it…. If ASOS were an MMA fight, you will be punched in the face in the first thirty seconds, and continually pummeled until the end. There is no respite, no pauses in the action…you will experience Ali fighting Frazier from the moment you begin until the instant you reluctantly put the book down. Each POV character introduced is both interesting and endearing. The characters are so expertly written, that you find yourself wondering who you are rooting for. You will not need to continually consult the appendix to figure out who is speaking…the characters are immediately apparent and recognizable.

I slogged through Jordan’s Wheel of Time series years ago. I thoroughly enjoyed, and struggled through, Martin’s endless introduction of characters in his later books. Regarding both great authors, I must admit that there were times where I scrolled quickly through the flotsam to get to the action. ASOS requires no such recklessness. For those who disregard Vox Day as a Christian seeking to further his evangelistic agenda, have no fear. There is none of that. The prelude itself will avail you of any attempt to evangelize the Christian agenda…. Vox Day has successfully taken a genre and, as no author has done in the past decade, rewritten the rules for fantasy and violence.




Great novel: Better than the first
As others have noted, this sequel is better than the original. The writing is better. The characters get better. The dialog gets better. Everything is better. And the first was great.

There is a love that Vox has for his characters. It shows in the richness of vision that describes them, and the way he holds them true to themselves and the culture that created them. It is easy to suspend disbelief in Selenoth and to get caught up in the narrative, carried along by the vivid “lifefullness” of his creations. Even the antagonists in the story, fighting for the “wrong” side, are delivered with an empathy to allow the reader to ride alongside them: Thinking what and how they think, feeling what and why they feel.

Wrap those characters around a exceptionally good story line and you come out with the absolute best novel of the year. I can’t recommend this book highly enough.




Fantastic Epic Fantasy
I have hours poring through this monster…. and I can say it is superior in every way to its predecessor. Be forewarned… if you haven’t read A Throne of Bones recently it may be worth your while to refresh your memory a bit. This book doesn’t hold your hand. There is no backtracking to catch you up on important details you may not remember. And if you haven’t read A Throne of Bones then you absolutely cannot start with this one.

The writing is more taut. The different races… orcs… elves… dwarves… are treated much better than the standard fantasy offering and genuinely feel like distinct cultures. Some of the best chapters of the book are actually written from an orc invader’s perspective. The book is courageously written. It doesn’t play nice with your modern sensibilities… and it does not shrink from the brutal realities of invasion, warfare, and barbarism


The ultimate argument for atheism

Even the formidable vocabulary of John C. Wright struggles to find the words required to address the most cogent argument in defense of atheism ever articulated:

When George Lucas sat down some autumn afternoon out on one of the verandas at Skywalker Ranch and began penning The Phantom Menace, with its two-dimensional characters and pointless plot, no all-powerful god living somewhere in the clouds stopped him.

When the first test footage of Jar Jar Binks surfaced and Lucas said something to the effect of, “Great job, guys. This really fulfills the vision of what I had in mind for this character,” no omnipotent deity struck him dead. There was no lightning from the sky, no sudden cardiac arrest. When we needed God most, he was silent.

He didn’t come to judge Lucas at any point during the travesty that was Episodes I-III. Any good and powerful god would have turned Skywalker Ranch into a smoldering crater where nothing else could ever grow, and yet your god remained silent.

I posit, then, that your “god” is no god at all. Either he was powerful enough to stop the Star Wars prequels from happening and didn’t, meaning he can’t possibly be all-good—or else he wanted the prequels stopped and couldn’t do it, meaning he can’t possibly be all-powerful.

Even the evils of Mao and Stalin and Hitler can be rationally explained by the ruthless pursuit of power. But there is no explanation for the so-called prequels. Free will? Nonsense! Nobody willed that. Natural selection? Even a blind and random process would not have chosen thusly.

It is a conundrum indeed.


Fake reviews as SJW weapons

I’ve been pointing out that fake reviews on Amazon are a potentially serious problems for years, but SJWs have repeatedly tried to claim that I am being a bully when I identify an individual has posted a fake review. I doubt they’re going to be able to get away with it much longer, though, as in addition to attacking the likes of Roosh, Cernovich, and me, they’re now attacking the President-Elect’s daughter:

Reviews of the Ivanka Trump Women’s Issa boots, which tout a list price of $180, included this: “These boots were perfect for wiping my feet on the Constitution and trampling the civil liberties and basic human rights of my fellow Americans,” wrote a user named Susan Harper. “The spike heel is ideal for grinding democracy into the ground, or simply kicking the downtrodden as you stride past.”

Amazon user AR called them “two extremely right boots” in her one star review and added that the “sizing and all other info is in Russian, but they are made in China.”

The stinging insults go on and on. Virtually every Ivanka Trump product on Amazon has at least one scathing review designed as a barb against the businesswoman, particularly as she relates to her father’s political agenda.

Rise of the ‘Activist Reviews’

This is hardly the first time products on Amazon (which did not return request for comment) have been assailed by trolls — just recently Megyn Kelly’s book “Settle For More” was targeted, and the site worked to scrub the hateful comments. These guerrilla attacks, if you will, have become more common in recent years.

“We’ve seen these ‘activist reviews’ for several years but they appear to be getting more common,” said Jason “RetailGeek” Goldberg, ‎SVP commerce and content practice at Razorfish.

“In some ways, these smear campaign reviews are the natural extension of ‘funny fake reviews,’ which have been occurring for a number of years. Amazon even embraced these joke reviews by curating a list of their favorites. So now that the ‘funny’ reviews have taken a negative turn, retailers need to crack down on them in order to preserve the credibility and trust in the whole review system.”

Speaking of fake reviews on Amazon, here is the latest, left on SJWAL by one “Em”.

There are much better critiques of the left out there. Skip this one.
By Em on December 22, 2016
Format: Paperback

The book is comical in its lack of self awareness and hypocrisy. I agree that there are some strains of liberalism that are obnoxious and bad and anti-free speech and so on. But Milo is one of them! One of the many examples: He complains about liberals getting others fired for their beliefs and then is smugly self-congratulatory when it happens to liberals after Gamergate. His examples of “the left” behaving badly include individual nobodies tweeting him. The whole book struck me as petty and quite frankly kind of pathetic.

Amazon is taking fake reviews seriously, but they haven’t designed a proper system for detecting them yet. I expect they will in the next year or two. Once they start banning fake reviewers from being able to access their system at all, and paying a bounty to people who correctly identify them, they’ll be able to clean up their system in no time.

Gisela Hausmann, Amazon e-commerce expert and author of “Naked Truths About Getting Product Reviews on Amazon.com” noted: “Amazon’s algorithm notices disproportionate numbers of negative reviews [and] weeds out these reviews according to their criteria, as defined in their Community Guidelines.”

In time, these reviews will be plucked from the site, and aggressive trolls could face lawsuits for their words, even if they were simply horsing around. Retailers are taking an aggressive stand to crack down on fake reviewers; Amazon has sued more than 1000, for example,” said Goldberg.


There are no “refugees”

It is neither “compassionate” nor “humane” to grant refugee status to any individual. It is now clear that granting residence on the basis of refugee status is an act of war against your own nation and society:

TOKYO (TR) – Tokyo Metropolitan Police have arrested two Turkish nationals currently applying for refugee status for allegedly raping a woman in Kita Ward, reports the Sankei Shimbun (Feb. 22).

At approximately 12:30 a.m. on December 27 of last year, Onder Pinarbasi, 22, and a 16-year-old boy allegedly took the woman, aged in her 30s, to a public toilet near JR Akabane Station and sexually assaulted her. The suspects also stole 9,000 yen in cash from the victim.

Pinarbasi, who has been charged with rape and robbery, claims the boy committed both crimes. The boy admits to only the robbery charge. “I did not force myself upon her,” he is quoted by police in denying the rape accusation, according to the Yomiuri Shimbun (Feb. 22).

The incident occurred after the suspects called out the woman, who was visibly drunk at the time, as she was walking home.

The suspects arrived in Japan last year. They applied for refugee status in August and October, telling the Immigration Bureau of Japan that they did not want to return to Turkey due to “problems that exist between relatives.” While their applications were being examined, the suspects received a visa status granting “special permission to stay in Japan.”

The two men are reportedly two of only 27 refugees recently allowed to enter Japan.

Refugees and immigrants have destroyed America. Other refugees are now attempting to destroy Europe. The very concept of “refugee” needs to be eliminated from the international system. There is no possible benefit to either the nations of the West, or in the long term, the world, to permitting foreigners to invade other countries under the guise of “refugee” status.

There is nothing humane or compassionate about ensuring that there are no safe or civil societies anywhere on Earth.


Berlin truck attacker dead

Shot to death by Italian police at a train station in Milano:

The Berlin attack suspect has been shot dead after a gunfight with police in Milan this morning, Italian police have said. A major international manhunt had been launched for Anis Amri who is suspected of ploughing a lorry into crowds of revellers in the German capital on Monday night, killing 12 and maiming dozens of others.

But the 24-year-old Tunsian asylum seeker has been shot dead in the suburb of Sesto San Giovanni in the northern Italian city of Milan shortly after stepping off a train from France. He pulled a gun on a police patrol after being stopped for a routine ID check before shooting an officer in the shoulder leaving him seriously injured. A shoot out then took place at about 3am local time and he was reportedly heard shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ as he tried to flee.

He is said to have run for cover and cowered behind a car before being shot dead by a trainee officer who had only been in the job for a matter of months. Police, who had been made aware Amri may have been in the city, had earlier seen a man in his twenties, of North African appearance, outside the deserted Sesto San Giovanni station in the north of the city at 3am. When the patrol approached him, he pulled a 22 calibre pistol from his backpack and shot one of the two police officers in the shoulder, according to Corriere della Sera.

On his body police found a train ticket that helped reconstruct the attacker’s movements in Berlin, revealing how he took a train from Chambery in France and then from Turin to Milan.

That tends to bring events a little closer to home. I’ve been at that train station two or three times. Believe it or not, the Italian police are pretty competent; over the last 50 years they’ve had run-ins with everyone from the Red Brigades to the Sicilian and Calabrian mafia, and have generally kept the peace more successfully than the US police have managed. They train a lot, too; I’ve had the opportunity to watch their training exercises on several occasions.


It wasn’t just the Democrats

In fairness, Obama left America in a weaker, more untenable state too:

The top candidates to lead the Democratic National Committee are positioning their campaigns as a repudiation of what they see as the political legacy of President Barack Obama.

Though they rarely mention the president by name or address his policies, Labor Secretary Tom Perez and Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison have sent a clear message that Mr. Obama has left the party in a weakened state.

Messers. Perez and Ellison—along with state chairmen Jaime Harrison of South Carolina and Ray Buckley of New Hampshire, who are also candidates for chairman of the DNC—are seeking a mandate to reverse Obama-era tactics that cut funding and attention to local parties and left Democrats with far less power in Congress, governorships and state legislatures than when his presidency began.

Ronald Reagan defeated the Soviet Union in the Cold War. George W. Bush defeated Afghanistan and Iraq, although he blew the occupation. Even George Bush oversaw the fall of the Berlin Wall. Obama managed to lose a proxy war in Syria, turn Libya into a Somali-style failed state, and abetted the invasions of Europe and the USA.

I’m not saying he was the worst president ever; that disgrace probably has to go to LBJ considering that he was responsible for Vietnam, the Great Society, and the 1965 Immigration Act. But he wasn’t even mediocre.


The emotional incontinence of the SJW

This is why you should NEVER expect sweet reason to succeed with an SJW:

Ivanka was on a JetBlue flight leaving JFK Thursday morning with her family when a passenger started screaming, “Your father is ruining the country.” The guy went on, “Why is she on our flight. She should be flying private.” The guy had his kid in his arms as he went on the tirade.

A passenger on the flight tells TMZ Ivanka ignored the guy and tried distracting her kids with crayons.

JetBlue personnel escorted the unruly passenger off the flight. As he was removed he screamed, “You’re kicking me off for expressing my opinion?!!”

BTW … Ivanka, her family and bunch of cousins were all in coach.

Don’t even try to reason with them. They’re not capable of it. Do you really think the guy thought through whether publicly accosting a woman with children and informing her of his opinion about the presidential election was worth the risk, however small, of being ejected from his flight?

And given his inability to understand why he was being kicked off the plane, do you really believe the man would have reached the correct conclusion if he had?

Don’t speak Chinese to an English-speaker. Don’t speak dialectic to a rhetorical. And SJWs are, by observation, uniformly limited to rhetoric.


Prospects for success

At Alpha Game, I answer a man’s question concerning the likelihood a Gamma-infested project will succeed:

It is not possible for an project, a business, or a nation to survive Gamma leadership, because Gammas are not leaders and are not successful people. They will cheerfully burn the entire thing down at a moment’s notice merely because they feel insufficiently appreciated or insufficiently respected, regardless of how bad their performance has been or how poorly the project is doing.

Because most people seldom find themselves in positions of leadership, they have absolutely no idea what it entails. As those who have worked with me know, I do not believe leadership has anything to do with bossing people around, telling them how to do their jobs, or chest-pounding. It primarily involves pointing them in the right direction, making sure they have everything they need to accomplish their objective, and ensuring they understand what that objective is.

The better the leader, the less he actually has to do. The greatest leaders are those who make leadership look entirely effortless, because they are so good at selecting lieutenants and sergeants, delegating decisions to them, and successfully communicating the organization’s vision, that they literally have nothing left to do.

The reason Trump may turn out to be a much better president than expected is because he shows the signs of a top-notch leader. He clearly likes to surround himself with high-quality subordinates and give them as much responsibility as they can handle.


The false faith of diversity

It is not merely ironic, it is literally diabolical, that white Americans celebrate their own population replacement by diversity while decrying that of the Tibetans by the Chinese:

The US government opposes the existence of a White majoritarian society, and it makes little effort to hide this. System sycophants can of course protest that this is not the case at all—that the government is just promoting equality and diversity, and that opponents of equality and diversity (and immigration, legal or illegal) are racists and bigots—but the result is still less White people. That’s what actually matters, the result. And if you care about that, you are treated like a two-headed person at best, or a terrorist at worst. If you want to save Tibet from population replacement by the Chinese though, then that’s very upright and good of you.

Framed in terms of genocide, replacement sounds conspiratorial because there is slim official acknowledgement of the desired impact for these policies to have on the European American population. Very, very few people in power go on the record explicitly calling for there to be less White people, and when they do it gets little coverage for obvious reasons. That Whites are becoming a minority is acknowledged as a fact and lauded as progress, but it is not overtly called for. President Barack Obama hasn’t said he wants to see less White people around; it is only noted that there will be less of them and that such an outcome would be good. But if we talk of demographic change in terms of holy diversity and sacrosanct equality, our greatest qualities as a nation of immigrants that is open to anyone who wants to come here and make a better life (especially those from the global south who outnumber Europeans by billions), suddenly things sound very different.

And familiar. Did any bells go off? If you’ve ever been through higher education, watched basic cable, joined the armed forces, had a white collar job, worked for a large corporation in any capacity, read an op-ed in major newspaper, or really interacted with any mainline institution in the United States, you’ve almost certainly been trained to celebrate diversity. Trained by those in power that to embrace and adhere to this belief system is the path to moral enlightenment and social mobility. This does not sound like a call for genocide at all but rather a religious vocation, a cause to be taken up.

Pursuing diversity is a righteous goal that only nasty and brutish people of rude inclinations oppose, such as rednecks, blue-collar Whites, or other lower-middle class people of European descent. The eloquent and charismatic Obama is a champion of diversity, is he not? Who in their right mind is opposed to there being less White people? And diversity is good for the economy too! You can actually sell Homo oeconomicus his own slaughter, for the last man has no ambitions beyond compliance.

Language has both the power to enlighten and obfuscate, but no matter what we call this, it means Whites becoming a minority. Academically this radical racial shift is referred to as the third demographic transition—the demographic cliff nearly all White countries have plunged off as their fertility rates sink below replacement levels (2.1 children per woman). At the same time, the share of foreign-born and non-European peoples in White countries is hitting record levels. What can be the end result of this if not a world where Europe and the Anglo countries become non-white, while Africa remains African and Asia remains Asian? This is an issue no government wants to formally address and something they won’t have a conversation about with their constituents. But it matters to these governments, as they’ve enacted policies that promote the third demographic transition. Therefore they must be held accountable for the consequences.

Maybe this still sounds crazy to you. What kind of government would go out of its way to replace its own native-born people with outsiders, and for what purpose? I would say any government that is motivated to and not prevented from doing so. In our case the motivation is the ideology of third worldism—the belief that people of color and their interests are morally superior to those of Whites. And there is no prevention, because outside of the government, all of its personnel feeders in the business, media, and academia spaces are on board with third worldism as well. Diversity is their credo, and celebrating diversity is their equivalent of going to church.

Then again, the Tibetans are unlikely to be the last to be replaced; there is a reason why Congress passed the Chinese exclusion laws in the early 20th century. One of the more interesting science fiction possibilities I haven’t seen yet is the genetic recreation of the white race from diversity in a Han-dominated world. That particular homogenuity is the most likely end result of diversity; Europe has demonstrated that the (((anti-whites))) don’t think ahead much better than the short time-preferenced third worlders they celebrate, or anticipate the logical consequences of their actions. They are tacticians, not strategists.

Meanwhile, both liberals and conservatives fail to grasp that Asians in general and the Han in particular, are considerably more than generic not-whites. They have the most successful, proudest, and most ethnocentric culture on the planet, and perhaps more importantly, they do not let ideologies sabotage their national self-interest for long.

Ethnicity is central to China’s national identity. It is the Han, 1.2bn of them in mainland China alone, that most people refer to as “Chinese”, rather than the country’s minorities, numbering 110m people. Ethnicity and nationality have become almost interchangeable for China’s Han, says James Leibold of La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. That conflation is of fundamental importance. It defines the relations between the Han and other ethnic groups. By narrowing its legal labour market almost entirely to people of Han descent, ethnicity is shaping the country’s economy and development. And it strains foreign relations, too. Even ethnic Han whose families left for other countries generations ago are often regarded as part of a coherent national group, both by China’s government and people….

Race became a central organising principle in Republican China. Sun Yat-sen, who founded the Kuomintang, China’s nationalist party, and is widely seen as a “father” of the Chinese nation, promoted the idea of “common blood”. A century on President Xi Jinping continues to do so. One reason for his claim that Taiwan is part of China is that “blood is thicker than water”. In a speech in 2014 he set his sights even wider: “Generations of overseas Chinese never forget their home country, their origins or the blood of the Chinese nation flowing in their veins.”

Many Chinese today share the idea that a Chinese person is instantly recognisable—and that an ethnic Han must, in essence, be one of them. A young child in Beijing will openly point at someone with white or black skin and declare them a foreigner (or “person from outside country”, to translate literally). Foreign-born Han living in China are routinely told that their Mandarin should be better (in contrast to non-Han, who are praised even if they only mangle an occasional pleasantry). China today is extraordinarily homogenous. It sustains that by remaining almost entirely closed to new entrants except by birth.

Moreover, having witnessed and become dominant through the diversity-assisted suicide of the European West, the Chinese of the future are unlikely to fall for the same conceptual bait as the foolish liberals and conservatives of the West. There is no equality, there never will be, and those who make it an article of faith will inevitably be conquered by those who wisely reject it in favor of reality.