He Knew It Was Coming

Neil Gaiman appears to have engaged a damage-control firm and begun an extensive social media campaign TWO MONTHS BEFORE the podcast that broke the news of the alleged sexual assaults, based on what the members of the Neil Gaiman Facebook group have observed.

In the past few weeks, there have been reports that a reputation management firm has been hired by Neil or on his behalf, and their activities may include astroturfing X with positive comments about his work. Messages take the form of paragraph of Chat-GPT-style text praising a Gaiman project, or describing it as if readers will never have heard of it before (which is not appropriate for the intended audience, who have already been discussing it for years). There is then a bunch of replies to the post expressing delight about the work. I assumed that couldn’t happen on Facebook.

A few days ago I was concerned by a post that was shared to this group from the Neil Gaiman group. Now, we’re all positive folks and we’re here because we like Neil’s stuff (or did until recently), so it’s not unusual for the mood to be on the enthusiastic side. It’s possible I’m seeing more than is there. But…
You can check how long somebody has been a member of a group, so I had a quick look for each of the posters. Tortoise Media’s podcast was published on 3rd July so there would have been an awareness of their initial investigations in the months running up to then. A remarkable number of commenters only joined the Neil Gaiman group in May, June, and July.

A Reddit commenter points out that Gaiman’s claims to have been diagnosed with autism – at the age of 62 – appear to be rather dubious. He first made the claims on March 8, 2023. That would appear to have been before the podcast production was underway, but well after Gaiman was aware that he was going to be facing public accusations of sexual assault.

If I remember correctly, didn’t he also talk about having autism for the first time a few months before the podcast was released? I think he confirmed it for the first time on Tumblr earlier this year, (and surprise, that was one of the defenses used by a friend of his who talked to Tortoise). Seems like he and his team were already long prepared for the podcast episodes to drop and had a plan in place.

It’s certainly interesting that while Gaiman is more than willing to tell people that he’s autistic – which apparently has not impressed anyone as an even remotely legitimate diagnosis – while continuing to conceal what appears to be his continued involvement with Scientology. Personally, I think he should have gone with sociopathy, although perhaps that would have struck just a little bit too close to home.

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At Least They’ll Warn Us

Simplicius analyzes the recent release of secret Russian nuclear doctrine dating back to 2014:

The first truly eye-opening detail is the claim that these secret internal Russian documents include plans for a potential nuclear “demonstration” strike, if things really begin escalating:

The presentation also references the option of a so-called demonstration strike — detonating a nuclear weapon in a remote area “in a period of immediate threat of aggression” before an actual conflict to scare western countries. Russia has never acknowledged such strikes are in its doctrine.

Such a strike, the files say, would show “the availability and readiness for use of precision non-strategic nuclear weapons” and the “intention to use nuclear weapons”.

To clarify: we’ve often talked about Russia doing a demonstrative nuclear test in order to get NATO’s attention in the Ukrainian conflict. That is something entirely different. A nuclear test would be something run by scientists for measuring purposes, conducted in a safe and controlled way, with a nuclear device usually detonated in a stationary mode somewhere on or near the ground.

That is why this is particularly eye-opening because it is something far more aggressive and threatening. It would entail Russia not setting up a test, but actually live-firing a real tactical nuke from one of their many systems into a remote area. The simple acknowledgment that Russia even has such contingencies drawn up is fairly startling and clearly draws a heavy shadow over the now-escalating Ukrainian conflict, where NATO’s involvement continues to grow more out of control each day.

I don’t view this as a bad thing at all. The threat of tactical nuke strikes to eliminate Europe’s already limited war-making capacity has existed all along, whether we think about it or not. So to know that the official doctrine incorporates a demonstration strike and a warning period is actually rather comforting, as it provides time for people to get away from any obvious military targets.

The risk of tactical strikes is much higher than strategic strikes, because the USA is not going to put itself on the line for Europe, not even if its own military bases are hit there. That’s the whole point of “foreign adventures”; keep them foreign and keep the bloodshed well away from the homeland. Even the foreign elite that runs the US empire is unlikely to react to tactical strikes on Europe for the same reason; they don’t want their homeland turned into a glass desert either.

It’s informative to observe how the USA, Germany, and the UK are all disavowing any knowledge of, much less involvement with, the Ukrainian Kursk offensive now that it has proven to be a tactical defeat and a strategic disaster.

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One Arrest, Two Deaths

Richard Medhurst was arrested at Heathrow just two days before one man he was supposed to interview was killed in a car accident and five days before the other man was killed in a boating accident.

“On Thursday, as I landed in London’s Heathrow airport, I was immediately escorted off the plane by six police officers who were waiting for me at the entrance of the aircraft. They arrested me – not detained – they arrested me under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act of 2000 and accused me of allegedly ‘expressing an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organization’ but wouldn’t explain what this meant,” Medhurst says in the video.

Section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000 has a clause that was added in 2019 that made it illegal to “expresses an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organization” if “in doing so is reckless as to whether a person to whom the expression is directed will be encouraged to support a proscribed organization.”

I have very little doubt that neither of those two deaths were genuinely accidents. As for the idea that a waterspout could be a man-made weapon, I remind you of my introversion of the famous Holmsian aphorism: due to the finite bounds of human knowledge, the impossible is always far more likely than the improbable.

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DWFC: 25 for 25

Dorking Wanderers Football Club – of whom Castalia Library is a sponsor – has announced a new ownership program called 25 for 25, which involves the sale of 25 shares of the club plus a special limited edition retro jersey. Here’s a video of Marc White himself announcing the program and here is the link if you’d like to join the ownership club and join what I can attest is truly an absolutely fascinating ride.

I can also announce something that will not yet be apparent, since it was only settled this morning, but the limited edition 25th Anniversary retro jerseys will, like the three 2024-25 season jerseys, sport the Castalia Library logo on the back. It’s a smaller logo above the number, since there is no need to leave that space for the players names.

It would certainly make for a very cool and unusual Christmas gift, even if you’re not into English soccer. The price of the shares and shirt is around $460 at current exchange rates, which is a very good price for being able to genuinely tell people that you own a real English football team with short, but already legendary history.

Forget Wrexham. Imagine when DWFC makes it to the Premiership in 15 years or so…

UPDATE: Here is the retro jersey. The logo on the back signifies that it is truly elite.

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Immigration and the USA

A few of the smarter observers appear to finally be recognizing that not only is diversity not a strength, but that the immigration which was wrongly believed to have been responsible for the century of American greatness is actually assuring the inevitable fracturing of the US polity and the ongoing demise of the American empire.

From my days in high school, perhaps in history class, I saw an invisible common thread that ran through history. Every empire, nation, and city-state had risen with such hope, believing they would last forever, only to fall to dust and be swept aside into a common grave. In recent years, I have grown steadily more concerned about the prospect of a complete democratic breakdown in America. I have studied how such grand empires, always founded for eternity, crumble, split, and then turn into revolutions spawned by civil unrest. I have immersed myself in the centuries of literature describing the polarization of societies and the rise of political violence. It appears that the common source has always begun with this idea of a federal government that then seeks to impose its will upon the people in a one-size-fits-all approach…

Except they still don’t get it. They still subscribe to the ridiculous Melting Pot myth, and erroneously insist that the problem is a) Democrats and b) illegal immigration.

We face the very same crisis in this mass migration of illegal aliens, and the purpose is the very same as I encountered in 1997 in Australia – yet the opposite. Biden opened the border with an Executive Order on the first day he entered office. The Democrats know that their Marxist Agenda, like Communist China and Russia, is losing. The simple stats reveal their peril. This chart takes the total number of seats in the Senate and House and plots the combination held by each party. The Democrats were the slave party and lost during the Civil War. They flipped their fate by adopting Marxism, which was successful during the Great Depression. They have never been able to exceed the highs achieved by FDR at that time and have been making lower highs and lower lows, which, in market terms, is a bear market.

Biden isn’t the problem. Illegal aliens aren’t the problem. The cancer that will kill the USA dates back to 1965 and the Naturalization Act that ensured the demographic demolition of the USA. (Don’t be pedantic, one could also make credible cases for 1913 and 1865.) Unless a nationalist leader the quality of Xi or Putin comes to power and immediately begins a repatriation program of a scale that rivals the Chinese Great Leap Forward, the USA will likely collapse within ten years.

And there is no such leader on the horizon. We know it isn’t Trump. We know it isn’t Vance. And so it will be collapse, which is why major powers like China and Russia, and lesser powers like Iran and Indonesia, no longer consider the USA to be a major limitation on their freedom of action. The US military still has to be respected, but it is no longer feared, as it is only a matter of time before its capabilities are degraded to the point that it can no longer even threaten foreign interventions.

The collapse of the USA isn’t the end of America. In fact, it may very well be good for Americans, since the US government observably isn’t. The patterns of History always play out in the end.

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Satanists Confirmed

Ukraine bans the Orthodox Church, which has been established in Kiev since 988.

Ukraine has adopted a law to ban religious groups linked to Moscow in a move targeting the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which the government has accused of complicity in Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The parliament passed the law by 265 votes to 29 on Tuesday.

Lawmaker Iryna Herashchenko said it was an issue of national security.

“This is a historic vote. Parliament approved a legislation which bans a branch of the aggressor country in Ukraine,” she wrote on Telegram.

Most Ukrainians are Orthodox Christians but the faith has split between the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), which is traditionally allied with the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow, and the independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine, which has been recognised since 2019.

The UOC says it broke ties with Moscow after the February 2022 invasion, but Kyiv has questioned that claim and launched dozens of criminal proceedings, including treason charges, against the church’s clerics. At least one has been sent to Russia as part of a prisoner swap.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy hailed the vote as a step to strengthen Ukraine’s “spiritual independence” and is expected to sign the bill into law.

Neither the USA nor any other Christian country should offer any support to Ukraine now. The foreign Kiev regime can cry RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA all they like, but it’s clear that this is pure anti-Christian persecution. This is a serious end-stage, Hitler-in-the-bunker, sort of thing, just seeking to do whatever evil they can before they are defeated.

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Liberalism is Dead

All of its supposedly good points that justified it have been proven to be false. The so-called neoliberal world order turned out to be Clown World:

What remains of the supposed upsides of liberalism?

Human rights? You aren’t a Somali rapist facing deportation, you don’t have human rights

Freedom? Tell it to Sam Melia

Democracy? 20% of the electorate delivered Labour the 4th largest parliamentary majority in history.

And let’s not even get started on so-called “free speech”, which was nothing more than an attempt to replace Christian blasphemy laws with satanic blasphemy laws. It turns out that all of the supposed economic benefits of an open society were nothing more than the short-term benefits of a long-term debt bubble based on usury.

There is truly nothing new under the sun.

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An Outdated Review

Didact’s Mind wrote a very favorable review of the preliminary edition of A SEA OF SKULLS back in 2017. It would be interesting to know if he feels the completed work holds up to his initial perspective on it.

Vox Day has not merely matched George R. R. Martin’s fantasy writing skills and output. He has exceeded him, by miles, leaving old Rape Rape wheezing and panting in the dust.

In fact, I am willing to go so far as to argue that, with this book, Vox Day has catapulted himself into the storied and rarefied rank of writers that sits just below The Master himself.

That’s right, I went there. I just said that Vox Day has written a book that is nearly as good as J. R. R. Tolkien’s work.

Not as good. But not terribly far off, either.

From one fantasy fan to another, praise simply does not come any higher than that.

Vox’s accomplishment is made all the more astonishing by the fact that this isn’t even the completed book yet. It’s less than half of the full work. This book is already far more complex, more layered, and simply bigger in scale and scope than its predecessor. There are far more point-of-view characters, the battle sequences are way bigger, the size of the world that Vox Day is playing with is far greater…

The result is so good that it deserves to be called the finest high-fantasy book of its time.

Make no mistake: this now puts Vox Day right below The Master himself in terms of writing- right up there with C. S. Lewis, John C. Wright, and maybe two or three others. And that is an astonishing achievement, given that neither Tolkien nor Vox can rightly be considered first-rate fantasy writers.

One of the interesting things about the comparison between Tolkien and Day is that neither of them are really writers to begin with. Vox Day started out as a musician and a game designer. Vox himself will readily admit that his writing is not as good as Tolkien’s- because it isn’t. Yet Tolkien was a linguist, whose strong Christian faith and interest in Scandinavian mythology helped him create a fantasy world. The reason both Tolkien and Day succeeded, where so many dedicated professional authors would have failed, is because they focused on their respective strengths and wrote works of epic fantasy that played to them…

This book is, quite simply, an extraordinary achievement. With it, Vox has separated himself from all of his contemporary rivals and has clearly laid down a marker for everyone else to match- and I personally don’t think anyone will be able to do so for years, maybe decades, to come.

It’s entirely up to the reader to see if the most recent volume in ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT holds up to the promise of its earlier and abbreviated release. But for my part, what I will say is that one reason it took me so long to complete the book and get it out is that I was determined to at least try to deliver something that was consistently at the same level as A THRONE OF BONES. I took PG Wodehouse as my inspiration here, as his work is remarkably consistent throughout a novel; he was quite purposeful in attempting to ensure that every scene and every page stood up well on its own. This required a significant amount of discipline in not permitting the story to expand willy-nilly in any direction that happened to capture my attention at the time.

As we’ve seen from George Martin’s failure to finish his epic fantasy, while it’s much easier to churn out words by following one’s momentary whims and exploring whatever tangent happens to strike one’s fancy, this inevitably leads to a wider scope and excessive perspective characters that will, sooner or later, render the story too large to write. One of the many geniuses of JRR Tolkien was his ability to keep his epic story tied very tightly to a fairly small number of key characters, keeping them in physical proximity to each other, and thereby preventing the story from continually expanding to the point that it escaped his ability to reasonably describe it.

Only time will tell, but in A SEA OF SKULLS, I believe that I successfully conquered the challenge of the middle book, which in any trilogy is always the hardest book to write because it has to expand upon the first book without exploding in a manner that renders closure in the third book impossible. It’s interesting that one seldom hears writers discussing these technical matters, but this is probably because the sort of writers who attend workshops mostly write short stories, while the writers who teach them are either self-promoters like John Scalzi or successful mediocrities cruising for starstruck young women like Neil Gaiman, neither one of whom could write epic fantasy if they tried.

Anyhow, for better or for worse, it’s done now and I’m on to the final volume in the series. If Didact’s Mind updates his review, I’ll be sure to post a link to it here.

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The Narrative Shifts

It’s fascinating to see that while historians have completely disproven the old Black Legend about the Spanish Inquisition and corrected the number of people prosecuted and executed by several orders of magnitude, Clown World is still trying to present what was a very minor and non-noteworthy exercise in successfully maintaining the social order into one of the worst historical iniquities in human history.

Beyond its endless sunshine and sandy beaches, Spain has a dark history that has stained the nation to this day. For hundreds of years, people were burned at the stake, stretched to death, or otherwise tortured for the sole reason that they were not Catholic.

The Spanish Inquisition is considered to be one of the most shameful and grotesque periods in Roman Catholic history. According to some modern estimates, around 150,000 people were prosecuted for various offences during the three-century duration of the reign of terror, of whom between 3,000 and 5,000 were executed after enduring some of the most spine chilling acts of torture imaginable.

Extensive archival material contains accounts of torture victims’ cries and descriptions of funeral pyres, atrocities which continue to horrify historians to this day. The horrors of the Inquisition are among some of the most sadistic acts of terror in history, which extended into every area of Spanish society and almost every corner of its global empire.

This is total historical nonsense. Even if we assume the very worst of it, the Spanish Inquisition was less lethal than children’s bicycles are today. The Inquisition prosecuted 421 people per year for the crime of pretending to be something they were not in order to feign loyalty to the Spanish crown; just last year, the British crown prosecuted 419,000 people in England and Wales alone, many of them for simply expressing their opinion about the migrant invasion of their country.

Modern Britain is more than three orders of magnitude worse than the Spanish Inquisition, and that was prior to the establishment of the Keir Starmer regime. This is an indisputable historical fact.

And as for those 3,000 to 5,000 executions over a period of 356 years, during the 38-year reign of the King of England, Henry VIII, as many as 72,000 people are estimated to have been executed.

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