The incipient Trumpslide

I believe we are now beginning to see the signs of a preference cascade that are necessary if there is to be the predicted Trumpslide in November:

Donald Trump’s lead over Hillary Clinton in the USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times national tracking poll grew to nearly six percentage points on Thursday, his largest advantage since his post-convention bounce in July.

The biggest reason appears to be an increase in the likelihood of Trump supporters who say they plan to vote, combined with a drop among Clinton supporters on that question. The nominees are now roughly equal in the voting commitment of their supporters, erasing an advantage previously held by Clinton.

The poll shows Trump leading Clinton, 47%-41%.

Yes, it’s just a national poll. But the state polls are showing a distinctly Trumpward direction as well.

  • Florida: CNN/ORC Trump +3
  • Florida: CNN/ORC Trump +4
  • Ohio: CNN/ORC Trump +5
  • Ohio: Bloomberg Trump +5
  • Nevada: Monmouth Trump +2 

Keep in mind that as recently as August 21, Clinton was +5 in Ohio. That is a ten-point swing in three weeks. If the trend continues, Trump won’t just win, it will be a Trumpslide. I’ll be interested to get dh’s read on this, if he stops by the blog today, as he’s more up on the state polls than I am.

A tale of two structures

Delta Man contrasts the Gamma novel with the Delta novel at Alpha Game:

GAMMA

Act 1

  • GP (Gamma Protagonist) is awkward, unattractive, and misunderstood, but smart and snarky
  • GP discovers the heart of the misunderstanding is his previously unknown incredible gift
  • GP enters a whirlwind of an adventure of discovering his gift as people are suddenly after him
  • GP defeats some minor foes with his gift but doesn’t know how
  • MV (Male Villain) is introduced, an ass for no reason, is a jock, and good-looking
  • MV has control over seductress Female Villain (FV) The FV is shown not totally responsible for being a villain

DELTA

Act 1

  • DG (Delta Guy) leads a pretty normal life, but is good at one thing in particular
  • He has a PG (Pretty Girl) who he really likes, and is on again and off again as he chases her
  • PG is pretty, not hot, wholesome, and DG comments he really doesn’t deserve her
  • GE (Great Evil) is introduced and may be led by an evil man but is larger than one person
  • DG cannot ignore the GE and is called to action

It’s very eye-opening to see the way in which socio-sexuality so strongly dictates the very form in which an author’s storytelling takes. It’s not hard to see that one way in which science fiction and fantasy has changed dramatically, even outside the female influence and social justice obsession, is that it is no longer a Delta genre full of stories of challenges to be solved through technical competence and personal maturation, but a Gamma genre of full of stories of effortless success through the intervention of third parties or intrinsic wonderfulness.

Techno-thrillers and military fiction are now the Delta genre; one cannot read the Delta structure without stories such as Saving Private Ryan springing immediately to mind. As a general rule, revenge and the public acknowledgment of the secret king as the true king are Gamma themes, while becoming a man and reluctantly defeating evil then going home are the primary Delta themes.

I haven’t really begun to consciously make use of this socio-sexual theory of literature in my own writing, but I am increasingly aware of the way in which my own perspective tends to affect my writing. As one critic noted, there are few incompetents in my books; even the most evil characters usually have a legitimate point-of-view, and it’s not always clear who is supposed to be good and who is supposed to be bad.

Prolonging my career

We had a make-up game last night against one of the better teams in our league. It didn’t look promising, as neither of our goalies could make it and we had no substitutes. I don’t think I’ve been that nervous taking the field in the 30 years since the high school state tournament, because for the first time in my entire soccer career, the captain had me playing defense, specifically, left defender.

Fortunately, I knew the other team’s attackers and I’ve been watching Ender play defense for several years now, so I wasn’t completely lost. Their best attacker and leading scorer knows I’m as fast as he is, so he focused his runs on the right, which left me to become the goalie’s primary outlet. This meant that I found myself in a very unfamiliar and unwelcome role, which is essentially that of point guard bringing the ball up to half-court.

I played it very conservatively at first, passing the ball to the closest unmarked midfielder; if there wasn’t one, I just passed it inside to the sweeper. That worked well, and for the first 20 minutes, we didn’t permit any good chances and I only made one mistake when I had no unmarked options and made a dumb pass in between two of our midfielders instead of putting it right on the feet of the better midfielder and allowing him to try to beat his man.

One of our starting defenders showed up late, so once he was ready I took myself out of the game with some relief. It was a solid 20 minutes, though, and I’d realized that from the back, I could see the lanes which the other team’s defense was leaving for our attackers and wings. I even made two long passes past the defense which created decent chances for us, although their keeper kept the ball out of the net.

Ironically, I’d only been out for 30 seconds when they scored their first goal. Then they scored a second one a few minutes later, and the captain put me back in at my traditional position of attacker. We managed to get a goal back, then promptly gave up a third right before halftime, which was frustrating.

I was a little shocked at halftime when the captain moved me back to right defender, especially since that’s where all three of their goals had come. It struck me as a fairly solid recipe for disaster, but I figured that we were already down 3-1, so how much worse could it get? So, I assured him I was happy to play wherever I was told and did my best to try not to look too nervous.

Now, I was under strict orders not to dribble around or try to beat anyone with the ball. One of the huge problems with putting midfielders on defense is that they frequently, and stupidly, try to beat the fastest players on the field, the attackers, and often end up losing the ball and leaving the defense in a very vulnerable position. That being said, when the attackers put on pressure, it is sometimes necessary to do something to avoid blindly kicking the ball up the field to no one. The safest thing, of course, is to take the ball outside, where one can simply kick it out if necessary, thereby giving up the ball, but also giving the defense time to get set.

About one minute in, a long ball rolled to our goalie, who passed it to me, at which point it became apparent that they were going to play pressure, as one attacker cut off my inside pass to the sweeper, while the left wing rushed me. However, as basketball fans know, speed beats pressure. So, I just pushed the ball outside and up the field, beating the wing, which left open space all the way up to the middle of the field. I brought the ball up, spotted our center mid open, sent him the ball, which he one-touched to our best attacker, who hit the ball on his first touch. Bang-Bang-Bang-Goal. 3-2.

We fought our way back into the game and actually managed to take the lead, 4-3, but their leading scorer beat our offsides trap –  he didn’t really, he was two steps off, but the ref was at a bad angle to see it – and managed to somehow get a step on our sweeper and slide the ball past our stand-in keeper. That was disappointing, but 4-4 was a very good result considering we were playing 12 against 18 and without a proper goalie.

And after the game, the captain told me “that was really good, no more attacker for you”. Which I doubt is entirely true; I’m still the fourth-best attacker on the team and I expect I’ll be moved up front when needed from time to time. But I already knew something had changed when our longtime starter on right defense was ready to come back in towards the end of the game, I automatically moved up to take the place of the right wing who was going out, and the captain ordered me to stay back at right defender while he put the defender on the wing in front of me.

The truth is that I’m only 80 percent as good as the average defender when it comes to defense. I’m weak in the air, I’m not very tall, I can’t take the ball away from anyone, I don’t win enough 50-50 balls, and I need to be more disciplined about holding the offsides line. My speed and strength somewhat make up for those deficiencies, but I’m still decidedly below-average. However, when it comes to assisting the attack, I’m probably 150 percent as good as the average defender, maybe even more. I can see the lanes where I would want the ball myself, and more importantly, I can deliver them there. Two of our four goals came actions that started with my long passes, and I dropped in a high cross that really should have been a third. So, I can see why the captain is reconsidering how to use me, and I’m no longer terrified by the prospect even though I prefer to play in my traditional position up front.

This team doesn’t play to my strengths as an attacker anyhow, so it would probably benefit the team to move me back. I have no idea if I’ll end up starting on defense, or if I’ll start on the wing, come out to recover, then move back to defense in the second half when the starters need a break. I’m not concerned either way; I’ll play wherever they want me to play. If you can’t be a star, the next best thing is to be a utility player capable of playing multiple positions. And I suspect that adding outside defender to my existing repertoire of attacker/outside midfielder will grant me another two or three more years of effective playing time.

Can’t say I didn’t warn you

Do not – repeat – DO NOT – post pictures of your children on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or anywhere else on the Internet. They are not old enough to consent to it or understand the long-term consequences, and you are violating their privacy. It’s particularly egregious when you see parents posting pictures of their kids all over the place, but they refrain from posting pictures of themselves.

I expect there are going to be a lot of these cases in the future, and that the children are going to win because the parents quite clearly did not have their children’s interests at heart, but were merely indulging their own egos:

A 18-year-old woman from Carinthia is suing her parents for posting photos of her on Facebook without her consent. She claims that since 2009 they have made her life a misery by constantly posting photos of her, including embarrassing and intimate images from her childhood. Her lawyer Michael Rami says that to date, her parents have posted 500 images of her on the social media site without her consent, and he believes she has a good chance of winning in court.

You may now proceed with the expected snowflaking.

The Flight 93 election, revisited

Publius Decius Mus is taking a considerable amount of flak from conservatives because he is directly over the target, which is the staunchly pusillanimous way in which they have betrayed America and Americans for at least 50 years, and the way some of them are still trying to do so:

Conservatives have shouted since the beginning of Trump’s improbable rise: He’s not one of us! He is not conservative! And, indeed, in many ways, Trump is downright liberal. You might think that would make him more acceptable to the Left. But no. As “compassionate conservatism” did nothing to blunt leftist hatred of George W. Bush, neither do Trump’s quasi-liberal economic positions. In fact, they hate Trump much more. Trump is not conservative enough for the conservatives but way too conservative for the Left, yet somehow they find common cause. Earlier I posited that the reason is Trump’s position on immigration. Let me add two others.

The first is simply that Trump might win. He is not playing his assigned role of gentlemanly loser the way McCain and Romney did, and may well have tapped into some previously untapped sentiment that he can ride to victory. This is a problem for both the Right and the Left. The professional Right (correctly) fears that a Trump victory will finally make their irrelevance undeniable. The Left knows that so long as Republicans kept playing by the same rules and appealing to the same dwindling base of voters, there was no danger. Even if one of the old breed had won, nothing much would have changed, since their positions on the most decisive issues were effectively the same as the Democrats and because they posed no serious challenge to the administrative state.

Which points to the far more important reason. I urge readers to go back through John Marini’s argument, to which I cannot do anything close to full justice. Suffice to say here, the current governing arrangement of the United States is rule by a transnational managerial class in conjunction with the administrative state. To the extent that the parties are adversarial at the national level, it is merely to determine who gets to run the administrative state for four years. Challenging the administrative state is out of the question. The Democrats are united on this point. The Republicans are at least nominally divided. But those nominally opposed (to the extent that they even understand the problem, which is: not much) are unwilling or unable to actually do anything about it. Are challenges to the administrative state allowed only if they are guaranteed to be ineffectual? If so, the current conservative movement is tailor-made for the task. Meanwhile, the much stronger Ryan wing of the Party actively abets the administrative state and works to further the managerial class agenda.

Trump is the first candidate since Reagan to threaten this arrangement. To again oversimplify Marini (and Aristotle), the question here is: who rules? The many or the few? The people or the oligarchs? Our Constitution says: the people are sovereign, and their rule is mediated through representative institutions, limited by written Constitutional norms. The administrative state says: experts must rule because various advances (the march of history) have made governing too complicated for public deliberation, and besides, the unwise people often lack knowledge of their own best interests even on rudimentary matters. When the people want something that they shouldn’t want or mustn’t have, the administrative state prevents it, no matter what the people vote for. When the people don’t want something that the administrative state sees as salutary or necessary, it is simply imposed by fiat.

Don’t want more immigration? Too bad, we know what’s best. Think bathrooms should be reserved for the two biological sexes? Too bad, we rule. And so on and on.

To all the “conservatives” yammering about my supposed opposition to Constitutional principle (more on that below) and who hate Trump, I say: Trump is mounting the first serious national-political defense of the Constitution in a generation. He may not see himself in those terms. I believe he sees himself as a straightforward patriot who just wants to do what is best for his country and its people. Whatever the case, he is asserting the right of the sovereign people to make their government do what they want it to do, and not do things they don’t want it to do, in the teeth of determined opposition from a managerial class and administrative state that want not merely different policies but above all to perpetuate their own rule.

If the Constitution has any force or meaning, then “We the People” get to decide not merely who gets to run the administrative state—which, whatever the outcome, will always continue on the same path—more fundamentally, we get to decide what policies we want and which we don’t.

Conservatism as we have known it since Reagan is dead. Whether the Alt Right or NeoTrumpism or something else will ascend in its place is presently unknown, but we can be fairly certain that conservatives will never win another national election, thanks to the demographic transformation they supported, and, in many cases, still support.

Shed no tears and spare no pity for them. Like every ideology that stands in opposition to observable reality, their eventual irrelevance is assured, it is merely a question of time.

The importance of rhetoric

A few facts:

  • 78% of Clinton supporters don’t believe that blacks are less intelligent than whites. 
  • 68% of Clinton supporters don’t believe blacks are less law-abiding than whites.
Wow, they’re all pretty stupid, right? No, because intelligence has NOTHING to do with it. Greater intelligence just means that an individual has an enhanced capability for rationalizing his belief in even more ridiculous falsehoods.

After all:

  • 68% of Trump supporters don’t believe that blacks are less intelligent than whites.
  • 53% of Trump supporters don’t believe blacks are less law-abiding than whites.
Let’s throw in a few more facts.
  • Average white American IQ: 103
  • Average black American IQ: 85
  • Average sub-Saharan African IQ: 70
  • The 12% of the male US population that is black provides 37% of the male prison population.
  • Blacks commit violent crimes at 8.5 times the rate that whites do.

In other words, facts are observably incapable of persuading MOST of the US population. Their minds are not changed by the receipt of new information, regardless of how accurate it may be. As much as 80 percent of the population is totally impervious to observation, statistics, eyewitness testimony, genetic science, and documentary evidence. Considering their ability to resist observable reality, how susceptible do you think they are likely to be to logic and abstract reason?

I conclude that less than five percent of the population is even subject to persuasion by logic and less than two percent are reliably capable of being persuaded by it. And if these facts is insufficient to persuade you that dialectic is an intrinsically limited tool that must always be supplimented by rhetoric to be generally effective, well, welcome to the 98 percent.

T-shirts and whatnot

After nearly 10 years of requests for Ilk-related paraphenalia, we’re finally going to make t-shirts available through a Dread Ilk vendor. These are not going to be the usual Cafe Press junk, but custom designs and select t-shirt styles. There are only going to be 12 designs available at any one time, so once we rotate a design out, it may not be back.

The first five are going to be:

  • [Redacted] for original Big Fork supporters only. Sold at cost + shipping. Limited time.
  • [Redacted] for anyone.
  • Trumpsl!de
  • Whip It Out (Harambe)
I’m interested in knowing which designs are of most interest to the Ilk. So, here are a few random ideas; let me know which would be of the most interest to you, assuming that the designs are well-executed. Or if you have any other ideas, feel free to throw them out.
  • Evil Legion of Evil (member’s edition)
  • Evil Legion of Evil (Red Meat cartoon)
  • Vile Faceless Minion
  • Dread Ilk
  • Rabid Puppies 2015
  • Rabid Puppies 2016
  • Vox Day Che
  • Just Say N20 (Psykosonik lyrics on back)
  • Spacebunny (cartoon logo)
  • Supreme Dark Lord (Altar of Hate mask logo)
  • SJWAL cover
  • Cuckservative cover with 1790 law quote
  • That Red Dot On Your Chest Means My Daddy Is Watching
  • Castalia House logo “Restoring Science Fiction Since 2014”
  • There Will Be War
  • The Missionaries
I’m hoping that we’ll do some caps at some point too, but I am very, very picky about my caps, so that may take a while. We can also discuss this a bit at the Brainstorm tonight; don’t forget, if you’re an O[BF] you are also invited.

Of faith and fairy tales

John C. Wright considers the charge that Christianity is nothing more than a fairy tale:

There are those who call Christian faith a fairy tale. I assume such scoffers are not old and wise enough to believe in fairies.

To them, I give the answer of that most excellent marshwiggle and insightful theologian, Puddleglum: Suppose my account is a fairy tale. Your account is not even that.

Let us contrast and compare the Christian fairy tale with the tale told by witches both white and green, both modern and ancient.

One modern account of the world consists of little more than saying “Life is a bitch, and then you die, and in the end nobody lives happily ever after. Entropy triumphs over all, a nightfall of endless darkness and infinite cold.”

Well, says I, if you actually believed your account, the wise thing to do is to swallow cold poison and jump into the sea: so the fact that you are still here hints that at some level you know your account is unsatisfactory: a poorly constructed story, pointless, plotless, and with a weak ending. It is not a tale at all, but a complaint.

Another account, this one with considerably more pedigree, says, “We are all just naked apes or meat machines: our souls are made of atoms blown together by the twelve winds with no more purpose and meaning than the shape of the sand dune: we are helpless and without free will, victims of blind evolutionary forces and blind historical forces. Atop the Holy Mountain no gods dance, and no burning bushes speak. Death is dreamless sleep and soft oblivion. Therefore let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. Entropy triumphs over all, a nightfall of endless darkness and infinite cold.”

This is a poor story: a tale of despair, a myth to justify hedonism.

A nobler version of this same account says, “Man is a rational animal, capable of moral reasoning, creativity, productiveness, love. Man is heroic. Therefore let us live rationally working with mind and heart and soul to produce such works of art and science as befits so dignified a creature: let each man to live for himself alone, a paragon of self-reliance  each man in the solitary but invulnerable tower of his self-made soul, never demanding nor making any selfess sacrifice. Nor hopes nor fears of after-lives or nether-worlds need detain us: Therefore let us think, and work, and triumph, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. Entropy triumphs over all, a nightfall of endless darkness and infinite cold.”

This is a poor story: vanity, vainglory, and blindness to the pain and misery of life. The pretense that bad things never happen for no reason to good people is a very thin pretense: since the days of Job, we have all known better. This is a tale of vainglory.

He is correct, though, to conclude that there is no better answer than the marshwiggle’s. We choose the fairy tale regardless. And there is nothing in your moralities, nothing in your philosophies, nothing in your sciences that can provide one single legitimate reason to criticize that choice.

That dark magic

Needless to say, the meme magic has the Hillary campaign, or what is left of it, running scared.

Hillary Clinton has officially declared war on Pepe the Frog, a popular Internet meme.
The embattled candidate has dedicated an entire page on her campaign site about the cartoon frog she believes is “racist.”
“That cartoon frog is more sinister than you might realize,” declared HillaryClinton.com. “Pepe is a cartoon frog who began his internet life as an innocent meme enjoyed by teenagers and pop stars alike. But in recent months, Pepe’s been almost entirely co-opted by the white supremacists who call themselves the ‘alt-right.’”
Additionally, the Hillary campaign linked Alex Jones and Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos to Pepe the Frog, implying they are also “white supremacists. Yiannopoulos in particular is a predominant commentator on the alt-right who’s often mislabeled as its leader.

If I was Horde, I would say “kek”.