Lockdown in Germany

More refugee drama in Germany:

Heavily-armed officers are surrounding a home in the town of Chemnitz

A German town is in lockdown as armed police are hunting for a man suspected of planning a bomb attack on an airport. The suspect has been named locally as Jabir A – a Syrian who was under surveillance by the Federal Office for Constitutional Protection in Cologne, say reports. He is suspected of plotting a bomb attack on a German airport, according to Online Focus.

It is understood the suspect entered Germany last year with refugees from Syria. Residents have been ordered to remain indoors as large-scale closures and evacuations take place in the town and the suspect remains at large.

Ah, those poor Syrian refugees. I’m sure the good people of Chemnitz are so glad now that they opened their hearts and homes to them. After all, who could possibly have predicted something like this would happen!

It won’t be too long before refugees will be shot on sight and the policy will be celebrated by many of the very people who welcomed them. I said at the time they should have simply sunk the boats and blocked the borders. Now the moral cost of resolving the situation will be considerably higher.

Mailvox: category error

Do you discuss ‘category error’ somewhere in your past blogs?

No, but here is a brief explanation, although upon looking at it, it really could be considerably improved as the examples are rather pedantic.

A category mistake, or category error, is a semantic or ontological error in which things belonging to a particular category are presented as if they belong to a different category, or, alternatively, a property is ascribed to a thing that could not possibly have that property. An example is the metaphor “time crawled”, which if taken literally is not just false but a category mistake. To show that a category mistake has been committed one must typically show that once the phenomenon in question is properly understood, it becomes clear that the claim being made about it could not possibly be true.

Category errors are very common, particularly when engaged in discourse with intellectually sloppy or dishonest individuals. For example, after I pointed out that weakness combined with a request for help was not “true strength”, or even strength at all, Mark Butterworth responded by quoting a Psalm about David’s sacrifice to God.

He wasn’t merely wrong, by which I mean a failure to successfully make a point, he committed an error of category, because offering up one’s weaknesses to God in praise is fundamentally different in nature than determining if the characteristic one possesses is a weakness or a strength.

The abstract category under discussion was “the nature of human strength.” To respond by pointing out that God does not despise weakness offered up to Him as sacrifice is to shift the discussion to a different and tangential category, “things that God values”, which is a category that is simply not relevant to the matter being discussed.

So, to point out that someone has made a category error does not necessarily mean that one is saying their statement is intrinsically false or incorrect, only that it is irrelevant. People usually commit category errors out of carelessness or ignorance or a desire to virtue-signal; when they do so out of dishonesty it is often as part of a bait-and-switch technique to which they resort because they know they cannot defend their position within the bounds of the relevant category.

Cuckservatives signal their virtue

You know the GOP establishment cucks were just waiting for the opportunity to have an excuse to wash their hands of Donald Trump:

House Speaker Paul Ryan will not campaign with Donald Trump Saturday as he had previously planned. Ryan made the decision after Trump’s lewd comments about women were leaked Friday afternoon.

“I am sickened by what I heard today,” Ryan said in a statement Friday evening. “Women are to be championed and revered, not objectified. I hope Mr. Trump treats this situation with the seriousness it deserves and works to demonstrate to the country that he has greater respect for women than this clip suggests. In the meantime, he is no longer attending tomorrow’s event in Wisconsin.”

The House speaker’s staff said the event in Wisconsin was a Ryan event at Fall Fest at the Walworth County Fairgrounds, and that Trump was disinvited after the Washington Post published video of Trump talking on a hot microphone in 2005 about kissing and having sex with a woman, in which the GOP nominee can be heard saying that “when you’re a star, they let you do it.”

If you ever wanted to know why I’m not a conservative or a Republican, this craven pandering to women pretty much sums it up. I’m not sickened by Trump’s locker room talk. I’m sickened by the fact that weak little gamma males like Ryan and Erickson have any influence in Western society at all. The only correct response to this “scandal” should have been a single question: “so the fuck what?”

Never trust a moderate, a Churchian, or a cuckservative. Never. They will stab you in the back in order to virtue-signal every single time. Trump made a big mistake in trying to accommodate them and play nice with them rather than treating them with the contempt they deserve.

We’re getting ominously close to war with both Russia and China, and these idiots are preening and posturing over the fact that an Alpha male talked like an Alpha more than 10 years ago? At least we know one thing. If the USA does get into a war, it’s going to lose. I don’t care what its advantages in men and material might be. Leadership matters, and we don’t have it.

UPDATE: National Review is clutching at its pearls and collapsing on its collective fainting couch and the cucks are falling all over themselves to finger-wag and demand ever-more-abject apologies from Trump. He shouldn’t have even given the limited one he offered.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell issued a similarly terse statement. “These comments are repugnant, and unacceptable in any circumstance,” he said. “As the father of three daughters, I strongly believe that Trump needs to apologize directly to women and girls everywhere, and take full responsibility for the utter lack of respect for women shown in his comments on that tape.” Like Ryan, however, McConnell gave no suggestion of withdrawing his support for Trump. Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus offered his own brief rebuke: “No woman should ever be described in these terms or talked about in this manner. Ever.” And yet there is no question the party chairman will continue to back Trump — in fact, a statement from the nominee’s campaign late Friday night said Priebus would be joining him in New York on Saturday for debate prep. It’s not just the party leadership in Washington that’s showing no appetite for taking on Trump.

A whole host of Republican senators, including nearly all of those facing reelection next month, issued statements Friday night expressing outrage at the nominee’s remarks. They came from: Arizona’s John McCain; North Carolina’s Richard Burr; Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey; New Hampshire’s Kelly Ayotte; and Ohio’s Rob Portman, among others. But not one of these senators announced any kind of opposition to Trump — whether by withdrawing their support or by calling on him to step down as the nominee.

A few Republicans, in fairness, did just that. Illinois Senator Mark Kirk, who’s facing certain defeat next month, tweeted: “.@realDonaldTrump should drop out. @GOP should engage rules for emergency replacement.” Utah Governor Gary Herbert tweeted: “Donald Trump’s statements are beyond offensive & despicable. While I cannot vote for Hillary Clinton, I will not vote for Trump.” Utah Senator Mike Lee posted a video calling on Trump to drop out. Another Utah Republican, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Jason Chaffetz, withdrew his support for Trump. And two House Republicans — Mike Coffman of Colorado and Barbara Comstock of Virginia — called on Trump to step down as the Republican nominee.

Is this going to change anything? For a few days of polling, perhaps. And then, once the virtue-signaling runs its course, everyone will remember that the alternative is letting Hillary Clinton start a war with Russia.

The Russian stance

The Saker considers Russia’s options in Syria:

The key thing to understand in the Russian stance in this, and other, recent conflicts with the USA is that Russia is still much weaker than the USA and that she therefore does not want war. That does not, however, mean that she is not actively preparing for war. In fact, she very much and actively does. All this means is that should a conflict occur, Russia you try, as best can be, to keep it as limited as possible.

In theory, these are, very roughly, the possible levels of confrontation:

1) A military standoff à la Berlin in 1961. One could argue that this is what is already taking place right now, albeit in a more long-distance and less visible way.

2) A single military incident, such as what happened recently when Turkey shot down a Russian SU-24 and Russia chose not to retaliate.

3) A series of localized clashes similar to what is currently happening between India and Pakistan.

4) A conflict limited to the Syrian theater of war (say like the war between the UK and Argentina over the Malvinas Islands)

5) A regional or global military confrontation between the USA and Russia

6) A full scale thermonuclear war between the USA and Russia

During my years as a student of military strategy I have participated in many exercises on escalation and de-escalation and I can attest that while it is very easy to come up with escalatory scenarios, I have yet to see a credible scenario for de-escalation. What is possible, however, is the so-called “horizontal escalation” or “asymmetrical escalation” in which one side choses not to up the ante or directly escalate, but instead choses a different target for retaliation, not necessarily a more valuable one, just a different one on the same level of conceptual importance (in the USA Joshua M. Epstein and Spencer D. Bakich did most of the groundbreaking work on this topic).

The main reason why we can expect the Kremlin to try to find asymmetrical options to respond to a US attack is that in the Syrian context Russia is hopelessly outgunned by the US/NATO, at least in quantitative terms. The logical solutions for the Russians is to use their qualitative advantage or to seek “horizontal targets” as possible retaliatory options. This week, something very interesting and highly uncharacteristic happened: Major General Igor Konashenkov, the Chief of the Directorate of Media service and Information of the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation, openly mentioned one such option. Here is what he said:

“As for Kirby’s threats about possible Russian aircraft losses and the sending of Russian servicemen back to Russia in body bags, I would say that we know exactly where and how many “unofficial specialists” operate in Syria and in the Aleppo province and we know that they are involved in the operational planning and that they supervise the operations of the militants. 

Translation: shoot down our planes and bomb our troops and we and our allies go after your “military advisors”.

There isn’t any doubt that the USA can beat Russia in Syria. The question is if they are willing to pay the price both there, and potentially, in Ukraine and the Baltics.

That this is all absolutely stupid and utterly unnecessary doesn’t mean it won’t happen. In the meantime, we should really all focus on what is truly important: did you know that Donald Trump was once ungallant in speaking about women?

Anyhow, I had been extremely skeptical about the reports that Russian missiles had taken out a command center of US and Israeli advisers, but the sudden increase in US bellicosity makes me wonder if there might have actually been some substance to it.

Retreat is pointless

Christian organizations might as well learn to start standing firmly on their principles, because you either use them or you lose them:

One of the largest evangelical organizations on college campuses nationwide has told its 1,300 staff members they will be fired if they personally support gay marriage or otherwise disagree with its newly detailed positions on sexuality starting on Nov. 11.


InterVarsity Christian Fellowship USA says that it will start a process for “involuntary terminations” for any staffer who comes forward to disagree with its positions on human sexuality, which holds that any sexual activity outside of a husband and wife is immoral.

One of Rod Dreher’s commenters adds an observation.


Federal law makes it pretty much impossible to take a stance along the lines of, “This is what we believe, but out of compassion and pragmatism we’re willing to be flexible for a certain amount of time, with certain people, and/or in certain situations.” Either you have a blanket policy that applies to all people in all instances, or federal courts will rule that you don’t “really” have a principled position and invalidate the broader policy because of the exceptions.

So, do the right thing. Don’t make exceptions. Tolerance is not a Christian virtue, it is the first step along the path to destruction.

The broken freaks of fandom

They really are mentally ill, self-hating nutcases. I’ve said for years that the SJWs of science fiction are a vast collection of human wreckage. That’s why their parasitical books are so dreadful, devoid of all beauty, joy, truth, and love, and from a literary perspective, amount to little more than fingerpainting in fecal matter. They are morally blind, mentally weak societal cancers. One would pity them if only they did not attempt to recreate the world in their ugly, soul-shattered image.

They have many reasons to dislike me, but they main reason they hate and fear me is because, in my self-assurance, I remind them of the bullies who scarred them for life. And here is the conclusive proof that I was right: 100+ Sci-Fi & Fantasy Authors Blog About Suicide, Depression, PTSD—a #HoldOnToTheLight Update by Gail Z. Martin

  • My wife, doctor, and I developed a scale of rage from 1 to 10, 1 being “everything’s cool” to 10 being “I am out of control and breaking shit in the house, car, and my body.” It’s been…let’s see…maybe a few months since I had no-holds-barred Level 10 outburst. But I come close every week or two. I probably reach an 8 once every ten days. But that’s down from a 10 every other week or so. I hate me more than any ten, a hundred, or a thousand people on earth combined could ever hope to. (Even more than Kirkus and Goodreads reviewers, if such a thing be possible!) That’s my legacy. 
  • I’ve dealt with depression and lingering self-doubt for much of my life, because of that long-ago bullying. Which gives me great compassion for those who are different or who feel like outsiders. And though I won’t name names, because it is not my story to tell – I can assure them that many of the writers and artists I’m friendly with have experienced either bullying, depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, or a combination of those things.
  • I grew up believing that I was not going to survive to adulthood. My parents were into doomsday politics and apocalyptic religion, so whether it was Soviet nukes or Armageddon, we were all going down in flames. Everyone around me—extended family and religious social group—echoed the same fears and beliefs. I was pleasantly surprised to still be alive at age 12, but I didn’t figure it would last. That’s the year I discovered Star Trek (original series) and read my first science fiction book (Destination: Universe by A.E. VanVogt). I still remember the moment when it hit me that other people saw the possibility of a completely different future than the fire and blood I’d been raised to expect. Cataclysmic destruction was not inevitable. I remember lying in the grass in my back yard, book open, tears running down my face when I realized I actually might live long enough to grow up.

Now, some of these people experienced genuine abuse. Most, however, experienced nothing worse than the usual societal disapproval for being weird little kids who couldn’t bother to abide by childhood social norms of behavior, conversation, and hygiene. But regardless, the ironic thing is that by wallowing incessantly in their “oh, poor me, I am so broken and depressed and suicidal” nonsense, they only cement their unhappy fate. Virtually none of them experienced the significant life challenges that Ivan Throne did. Very few of them were likely bullied as relentlessly as I was in my first three years of school, being younger, smarter, more athletic, and considerably smaller than everyone in my elementary school class.

I may, admittedly, have been a little arrogant in failing to conceal my intelligence, my athletic ability, or my interests.

(I couldn’t figure out why John Scalzi was such a broken little creature, given that he wasn’t particularly fat or ugly, and how he was handed educational opportunities of the sort one seldom sees outside of rich families sending their children to boarding schools, until I learned he’d spent a whole school year in a wheelchair hanging out with the school nurse during recess as the result of an accident. That’s where he learned to rely on snark and pretense as a means of psychological self-defense. An unsound body, when combined with a lack of honesty and courage, often produces a withered soul and an unsound mind.)

There is one, and only one, difference in the choice that these pathetic husks of human beings made, and the choice that men like Ivan and I made, when we were children under psychological pressure. We fought back. We never ran from reality. We never broke. We refused to accept our externally imposed fates, we also refused to pretend things were other than they were, and by doing so, we not only changed our fates, we changed who we were. They cringed, they cowered, they ran, and they have never stopped running.

About seven years after graduating from high school, I ran into the one boy who was smaller than I was in junior high in a weight room, a smart kid who also liked to write. We were doubles partners on the JV tennis team in ninth grade. He was still only 5’7″ but was 200 pounds of solid, barrel-chested muscle, and it turned out that he was the reigning state powerlifting champion. I’d added 40 pounds of muscle myself and was a ripped, skin-headed martial artist. We looked at each other and both burst out laughing. “You think we overcompensated a little?” were his first words to me.

The SF-SJWs genuinely can’t understand why their collective disapproval means absolutely nothing to me. They are confused and befuddled when a failure or a rejection fails to dissuade me from looking for another way forward. They can’t figure out why I get up and go back into the fray after I am knocked down. And that tells you everything you need to know, not about me, but about them. They cannot even imagine a scenario where you don’t curl up and die because someone doesn’t like you. They call me “the most despised man in science fiction”, but remember the Third Law of SJW: SJWs always project.

The reason the sad sacks of science fiction despise themselves is not because they have post-traumatic stress disorder or chemical imbalances in their brain or a crippling lack of god-belief. In most cases, those are consequences, not causes. They hate themselves because, knowingly or unknowingly, they harbor contempt for the child they once were. Their works are an endless and futile attempt to replay their childhoods to produce a different outcome.

And instead of humbling themselves, admitting that they are weak, fat, inferior, mentally ill cowards, and taking action to stop being those things, they band together and collectively proclaim that black is white, weak is strong, evil is good, and ugliness is beauty. The light onto which they’re holding is Luciferian, and nothing positive will come of their competition to be the most broken, the most abused, the saddest and least-deserving victim of them all.

“You’re not alone!” they cry. But you are. Everyone is. There comes a critical point in every man’s life when he faces the choice to accept reality and deal with it or deny it and enter a parallel world of self-centered delusion. You know what choice you made then, and you know why.

UPDATE: A reader comments: “My husband had a horrendous childhood. Beatings, starvation, severe neglect, homeless and living on the streets at age eight. He is a very high achiever, the strongest man I know, very happy, and successful. Why? He is a FIGHTER. A bad childhood is not a life sentence to misery.”

In fairness, I know who her husband is and to call him a “fighter” is akin to calling the Joker a guy with a few psychological issues. I like him, and he’s a good man, but on a “don’t mess with this guy” scale ranging from 1 to 10, his rank is “Vladimir Putin having a bad day”.

Childhood adversity will make you weaker or it will make you stronger. The choice is yours.

Another category bestseller

While I’m very pleased to be informed that THE NINE LAWS, Castalia’s new mindset book by Ivan Throne, has hit #1 in the Consciousness and Thought category, I am more than a little amused to see that two of the top three Gender Studies books are a) The Nine Laws and b) Gorilla Mindset.

Who would could have possibly imagined something like this happening back in the days when the chief adversary of the blog was Amanda Marcotte and the Pandagonian feminists? And now there are not one, but TWO Castalia House authors dominating the Gender Studies bestsellers.

From the reviews of THE NINE LAWS:

  • Ivan provides a counterpunch to the weakness permeating our culture.
  • This isn’t a book written by some nobody who’s lived an easy life and speaks only about theory. Rather, his struggles and endeavors have taught him firsthand how brutal the world can be and what you must do to survive and thrive.
  • “If you love Game of Thrones, this is the self-help book for you! P.S. You’re gonna die.” His pain is your gain.
  • This book is NOT for everybody. It reads like a gathering storm, and deals in hard truths.

On a tangential note, the first Castalia House “Revolution in Science Fiction” t-shirts are now available from Dark Lord Designs. I’d be interested in knowing what other Castalia-related designs might be of interest to the Ilk. Anything is possible, from There Will Be War covers to red Van Creveld Che shirts. I’d like a half-hex 4GW-logo baseball cap myself.

Always trust your lying eyes

Modern art, including Abstract Expressionism, was never anything more than government-funded bullshit.

There’s little more divisive than modern art—most take a staunch “brilliance” or “bullshit” stance. So it should come as a surprise that the straight-laced feds at the CIA leaned toward the former camp—or at least saw it as brilliantly exploitable in the psychological war against the Soviets. Reports from former agents acknowledge what was always a tall tale in the art world—that CIA spooks floated pioneering artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Robert Motherwell, to drop an aesthetic nuke on Communism. What seemed like natural popularity of certain artists was, in part, actually a deliberate attempt at psychological warfare, backed by the US government.

But why modern art? At the time period in question—the 1950s and 60s—the artistic style of the moment was Abstract Expressionism. Abstract Expressionism (or AbEx, if you want to impress people at your next snooty cocktail party) stood for, above all else, self expression. Radically so….

The CIA wanted this art to be global. So it dumped millions upon millions of dollars to be secret patrons of art world darlings like Pollock. Fake foundations, used as CIA slush funds, sponsored international exhibitions.

It’s not art. It’s propaganda, the so-called artists were government whores, and the high art cognoscenti were complete suckers.

You’re not a philistine for preferring Truth and Beauty to CIA propaganda and creative prostitution.

Russia warns USAF

No more “oops-sorry-we-bombed-your-allies” little “mistakes” will be permitted in Syria:

Russia’s Defense Ministry has cautioned the US-led coalition of carrying out airstrikes on Syrian army positions, adding in Syria there are numerous S-300 and S-400 air defense systems up and running.

Russia currently has S-400 and S-300 air-defense systems deployed to protect its troops stationed at the Tartus naval supply base and the Khmeimim airbase. The radius of the weapons reach may be “a surprise” to all unidentified flying objects, Russian Defense Ministry spokesperson General Igor Konashenkov said.

According to the Russian Defense Ministry, any airstrike or missile hitting targets in territory controlled by the Syrian government would put Russian personnel in danger. The defense official said that members of the Russian Reconciliation Center in Syria are working “on the ground” delivering aid and communicating with a large number of communities in Syria.

“Therefore, any missile or air strikes on the territory controlled by the Syrian government will create a clear threat to Russian servicemen. Russian air defense system crews are unlikely to have time to determine in a ‘straight line’ the exact flight paths of missiles and then who the warheads belong to. And all the illusions of amateurs about the existence of ‘invisible’ jets will face a disappointing reality,”  Konashenkov added.

Translation: if the US pretends to mistakenly bomb Syrian ground troops, Russia will pretend to mistakenly shoot down US planes.

Interesting that all the drums beating about how the evil Rooskies bombed an aid convoy have fallen completely silent. Sometimes, the probable truth of a narrative can be discerned by how quickly it is abandoned.

Peak NFL

Was apparently the 2015 season:

The NFL has been sacked for a loss. Once considered immune to the audience erosion plaguing the television industry, ratings for the National Football League have tumbled through the first four weeks of the season.

TV networks have bet heavily on sports in general, and the NFL in particular, because of the must-see value of their content. While more viewers are watching commercial-free streaming services like Netflix or recording shows on DVRs and skipping the ads, sports is still primarily watched live, making it valuable to advertisers.

Combined, ESPN, Fox, NBC and CBS are spending an average of $5 billion a year for football rights through 2021. The games not only score big ratings and ad sales, but are crucial platforms to promote other programming.

So far this season, viewership on those networks is down about 10% from last season, according to Nielsen, with steeper declines for prime-time games on Sunday, Monday and Thursday. The drop has caught advertisers and rights holders off guard and left them scrambling to find a cause.

All of the discussions about “a cause” for the NFL’s declining rating are somewhat missing the point. There is no single factor. It is undeniable that the quality of the product has declined, or that the relentless focus on making the passing game easier has imbalanced the level of competition between the QB-haves and the QB-have nots. It’s undeniable that the incessant politics, most of which is at least irritating to the core audience, has caused some people to stop watching. And it’s obvious that Hispanics are considerably less interested in the sport than the whites they have been demographically replacing while fantasy football has changed the way many fans watch the game. The fact that 8 years of economic depression means people have less average disposable income certainly hasn’t helped.

But the chief culprit, in my opinion, is overexposure. A Monday night game used to be a big deal. Adding Sunday night football and Thursday night football means there is insufficient recovery time to begin anticipating the next game. And the move from a 14-game season to a 17-game season means that there is too much football for too long a time, with too many injuries.

Here is my prescription for restoring football to its former glory.

  • Reduce the 17-week, 16-game season to 15 weeks, with 14 games.
  • Ban all politics by players and the league. No more flags on helmets, pink cleats, or protests. If the league can discipline a player for wearing the wrong color wristband, it can do so for failing to stand at attention, Bud Grant-style, for the anthem. Black helmet stickers for one game to honor a deceased player, coach, or owner are acceptable.
  • Cut down on the number of flags, particularly those that nullify a big play without having directly affected it. And get rid of instant replay. It’s only made matters worse, to the extent that no one even knows what a catch is anymore.
  • Stop emphasizing the pass. 500-yard passing games are flag football and BYU, not the NFL. Pass interference is 10 yards, automatic first down.
  • Encourage more white players by adopting standard, race-neutral 2-game bans for an arrest, 4 more games for a conviction. Teams will tend to prefer the more law-abiding marginal white players over the more athletic marginal black players because the former will be able to stay on the field.
  • No more wild card teams. Win the division, make the playoffs. Two rounds and the Super Bowl will end playoff fatigue.