Korean fire drill

William S. Lind warns that the next flash point in Asia may not be Indonesia, the Philippines, or the old Japan-China rivalry:

By now, the Korean drill is familiar to all. We take some symbolic action against North Korea. The North responds with its Tasmanian Devil act, threatening “lakes of fire”, firing missiles into the ocean and maybe, at the limit, shooting some artillery at South Korea. Casualties, if there are any, are few. South Korea in turn tugs at its leash, which we hold firmly. Yawn.

This time may be different. We did the usual, announcing some meaningless new sanctions on the North, though this time targeting its rulers by name, which slightly ups the ante. The North is playing its part, shouting hyperbolic threats, including war.

But here is where the current case departs from the script. No one is paying any attention to North Korea’s tantrum. We’ve seen it too often. The world’s reaction is, “let ’em starve in the dark.” From the North Korean perspective, the act no longer works.

Except in South Korea. This is the second change from the usual script. The South is fed up with the North’s antics. The South Korean president’s mother and father were killed years ago by North Korean assassins. She has not forgotten. In every recent incident, the South has suffered more casualties (when there were any) than the North. The general South Korean attitude seems to be, “We’re not going to take it any more.”

What can South Korea do? Invade North Korea.

Yet another warning about the risks created through the arrogant foolishness of the US playing globocop.

What the Alt Right is

In the interest of developing a core Alt Right philosophy upon which others can build.

  1. The Alt Right is of the political right in both the American and the European sense of the term. Socialists are not Alt Right. Progressives are not Alt Right. Liberals are not Alt Right. Communists, Marxists, Marxians, cultural Marxists, and neocons are not Alt Right.
  2. The Alt Right is an ALTERNATIVE to the mainstream conservative movement in the USA that is nominally encapsulated by Russel Kirk’s 10 Conservative Principles, but in reality has devolved towards progressivism. It is also an alternative to libertarianism.
  3. The Alt Right is not a defensive attitude and rejects the concept of noble and principled defeat. It is a forward-thinking philosophy of offense, in every sense of that term. The Alt Right believes in victory through persistence and remaining in harmony with science, reality, cultural tradition, and the lessons of history.
  4. The Alt Right believes Western civilization is the pinnacle of human achievement and supports its three foundational pillars: Christianity, the European nations, and the Graeco-Roman legacy.
  5. The Alt Right is openly and avowedly nationalist. It supports all nationalisms and the right of all nations to exist, homogeneous and unadulterated by foreign invasion and immigration.
  6. The Alt Right is anti-globalist. It opposes all groups who work for globalist ideals or globalist objectives.
  7. The Alt Right is anti-equalitarian. It rejects the idea of equality for the same reason it rejects the ideas of unicorns and leprechauns, noting that human equality does not exist in any observable scientific, legal, material, intellectual, sexual, or spiritual form.
  8. The Alt Right is scientodific. It presumptively accepts the current conclusions of the scientific method (scientody), while understanding a) these conclusions are liable to future revision, b) that scientistry is susceptible to corruption, and c) that the so-called scientific consensus is not based on scientody, but democracy, and is therefore intrinsically unscientific.
  9. The Alt Right believes identity > culture > politics.
  10. The Alt Right is opposed to the rule or domination of any native ethnic group by another, particularly in the sovereign homelands of the dominated peoples. The Alt Right is opposed to any non-native ethnic group obtaining excessive influence in any society through nepotism, tribalism, or any other means.
  11. The Alt Right understands that diversity + proximity = war.
  12. The Alt Right doesn’t care what you think of it.
  13. The Alt Right rejects international free trade and the free movement of peoples that free trade requires. The benefits of intranational free trade is not evidence for the benefits of international free trade.
  14. The Alt Right believes we must secure the existence of white people and a future for white children.
  15. The Alt Right does not believe in the general supremacy of any race, nation, people, or sub-species. Every race, nation, people, and human sub-species has its own unique strengths and weaknesses, and possesses the sovereign right to dwell unmolested in the native culture it prefers.
  16. The Alt Right is a philosophy that values peace among the various nations of the world and opposes wars to impose the values of one nation upon another as well as efforts to exterminate individual nations through war, genocide, immigration, or genetic assimilation.
TL;DR: The Alt Right is a Western ideology that believes in science, history, reality, and the right of a genetic nation to exist and govern itself in its own interests.

The patron saint of conservatives, Russell Kirk, wrote: “The great line of demarcation in modern politics, Eric Voegelin used to point out, is not a division between liberals on one side and totalitarians on the other. No, on one side of that line are all those men and women who fancy that the temporal order is the only order, and that material needs are their only needs, and that they may do as they like with the human patrimony. On the other side of that line are all those people who recognize an enduring moral order in the universe, a constant human nature, and high duties toward the order spiritual and the order temporal.”

This is no longer true, assuming it ever was. The great line of demarcation in modern politics is now a division between men and women who believe that they are ultimately defined by their momentary opinions and those who believe they are ultimately defined by their genetic heritage. The Alt Right understands that the former will always lose to the latter in the end, because the former is subject to change.

The 16 Points in other languages:

The tokens whine

Nnedi Okorafor, PhD ‏@Nnedi
I wish the media would discuss the stories we wrote more than the grumblings of&responses to a certain group of ppl I won’t name.#HugoAwards

EscapeVelocity ‏@EscapeVelo
@voxday getting the last laugh, once again.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
We do too. Because the stories you wrote are mediocre. An SJW-given affirmative-action award doesn’t make them good. #HugoAwards

This is why Mr. ZFG is willing to spend more time writing more words about how the Rabid Puppies don’t matter than he is on his overdue novels. Because the observable fact is that the only reason the media cares about the Hugos these days is because it is a cultural war battleground. It’s just another futile attempt to spin the narrative.

Meanwhile, the affirmative-action recipients declare that they did too get there on merit, despite the fact that even their so-called fans have nothing to say about their work beyond expressing wonder that the dog can walk on its hind legs at all. The media doesn’t want to talk about “Binti” because it is both a racist African revenge fantasy about white colonialism and a nasty, incoherent piece of work in which African hairstyles serve as a major plot point. They don’t want to make the RP point for us, which talking about the winners is bound to do.

Remember, according to the SF-SJWs, that is the VERY BEST that science fiction had to offer in 2015. No wonder people have lost so much interest in it.

And speaking of the narrative, I’m very amused by the various SJWs proclaiming, yet again, how the Rabid Puppies have been defeated. After all, we’re the ones desperately changing our rules as fast as possible at every opportunity, right? Forget not knowing the score, the SF-SJWs don’t even understand the game being played.

The rise of the #AltRight

James Delingpole explains it, and why the #AltRight is not wrong, in The Spectator:

Should more mainstream conservatives be worried by this? Well yes, of course, but they have largely themselves to blame. It’s why the alt-right refers to them disparagingly as ‘cuckservatives’ — that is, cuckolds whose spinelessness, compromise and me-too virtue signalling has enabled the social justice warriors of the progressive left to take so much territory.

You could argue that what has happened to conservative politics is not dissimilar from what has happened in Syria and Iraq: when there’s a lawless space, a power vacuum is created which sucks in the most aggressive and committed players and in the process crushes all the moderates.

The alt-right are, if you like, the vigilantes of conservatism. The regular authorities didn’t do their job to protect the conservative community from the marauding gangs of social justice warriors (think Mao’s Red Guard — only with hipster beards or feminist–blue hair) strutting round the neighbourhood enforcing their oppressive rules. So the alt-right stepped in instead. And are now preparing to claim the spoils.

Or as Red Eagle and I put it in Cuckservative: How “Conservatives” Betrayed America:

What is now taking place in Europe is a microcosm of what is happening, on a larger scope and timescale, in the United States of America. Although the European population of 508 million is larger than the U.S. population of 320 million, the 28 member nations of the E.U. fit into about half the land taken up by the 50 united States. Moreover, unlike the heterogeneous American “nation of immigrants”, the European nations are homogeneous and distinct, with long histories, traditions, and collective memories that stretch back for centuries. That is why a much smaller number of immigrants arriving in a much shorter period of time has triggered the powerful nationalistic response that is already overturning governments and will ultimately shatter the European Union.

That is also why it is important to realize that the same divisive process is well underway in the United States, albeit at a larger order of magnitude. And one of the tragic ironies of American politics is that it is the very group of people who most proudly proclaim their loyalty to the U.S. Constitution and to the traditional values of America’s founding fathers, conservatives, who have helped lead the way to America’s decline and eventual collapse. They have done so by forgetting the central purpose of the very document they revere.

The Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America contains an extremely important phrase that is almost always ignored by those who appeal to it, or to the men who wrote it, in defense of immigration. It states:


We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The key phrase is this: “to ourselves and our posterity.” The blessings of liberty are not to be secured to all the nations of the world, to the tired and huddled masses, or to the wretched refuse of the teeming shores of other lands. They are to be secured to our children, and their children, and their children’s children.

To sacrifice their interests to the interests of children in other lands is to betray both past and future America. It is to permit an alien posterity, like the newly hatched cuckoo in another bird’s nest, to eliminate our own, and in doing so, defeat the purpose of the Constitution. It is, like the cuckolded husband, to raise the children of another man instead of one’s own sons and daughters.

It is, in a word, cuckservative.

The Narrative shifts

Let us all share a moment of silence for the previous “the Alt-Right is a small group of irrelevant teenagers in their parent’s basements” Narrative. Hillary Clinton is running as the American Angela Merkel.

Hillary Clinton will deliver a speech Thursday linking Donald Trump to the “extremism” of the “alt-right” movement. Clinton’s campaign announced Tuesday morning that her Reno, Nev., speech would focus on Trump and his aides’ “embrace of the disturbing ‘alt-right’ political philosophy.”

“This ‘alt-right’ brand is embracing extremism and presenting a divisive and dystopian view of America which should concern all Americans, regardless of party,” her campaign said.

The alternative right, or so-called alt-right, movement has generally been comprised as those opposed to multiculturalism and immigration, according to The Washington Post, and has gained mainstream attention during this year’s presidential campaign as Trump seeks to maximize support among white voters.

Notice how, in nine months, the Alt-Right has scared the Democrats more than the entire conservative movement has since Ronald Reagan left office. This is for several reasons:

  1. The Alt-Right is already a potent force embedded in rising political parties in Europe.
  2. Multiculturalism and immigration are winning issues for the first party to embrace white American identity politics. Throw in gun rights, tax cuts, debt write-offs, and a credible anti-war stance, and you’ve suddenly got a party that is playing for keeps on the national stage. 
  3. The Alt-Right does not consist of professional politicians more interested in their Washington careers than their nations.
  4. The Alt-Right is not a Potemkin opposition, it is a genuine one.

Souldancer is free

The Campbell- and Dragon Award-nominated author Brian Niemeier has made the second book in his Soul Cycle series, Souldancer, free this week. That means you can pick up both books in the series, which is described as “Space Pirates in Hell”, for less than $4, as the first book, Nethereal, is only $3.99.

I should probably also mention that Brian is a Castalia-author-to-be, as we will be introducing a new science fiction series with him in 2017. And by new, I mean “mind-blowing”.

How PACs murdered the Tea Party

Keep the demise of the Tea Party in mind as the Alt-Right grows in popularity. Many, if not most, of these PACs are little more than scams with a political brand.

The Tea Party movement is pretty much dead now, but it didn’t die a natural death. It was murdered—and it was an inside job. In a half decade, the spontaneous uprising that shook official Washington degenerated into a form of pyramid scheme that transferred tens of millions of dollars from rural, poorer Southerners and Midwesterners to bicoastal political operatives.

What began as an organic, policy-driven grass-roots movement was drained of its vitality and resources by national political action committees that dunned the movement’s true believers endlessly for money to support its candidates and causes. The PACs used that money first to enrich themselves and their vendors and then deployed most of the rest to search for more “prospects.” In Tea Party world, that meant mostly older, technologically unsavvy people willing to divulge personal information through “petitions”—which only made them prey to further attempts to lighten their wallets for what they believed was a good cause. While the solicitations continue, the audience has greatly diminished because of a lack of policy results and changing political winds.

I was an employee at one of the firms that ran these operations. But nothing that follows is proprietary or gleaned directly from my employment. The evidence of the scheming is all there in the public record, available for anyone willing to look…. According to Federal Election Commission reports between 80 to 90 percent, and sometimes all the money these PACs get is swallowed in fees and poured into more prospecting. For example, conservative activist Larry Ward created Constitutional Rights PAC. He also runs Political Media, a communications firm. The New York Times reviewed Constitutional Rights’ filings and found: “Mr. Ward’s PAC spends every dollar it gets on consultants, mailings and fund-raising—making no donations to candidates.” Ward justified the arrangement by saying Political Media discounts solicitations on behalf of Constitutional Rights.

Let that sink in. Ward takes his PAC’s money and redistributes it to his company and other vendors for more messaging and solicitations, but suggests critics should rest easy since the PAC gets a discount on Political Media’s normal rate. Constitutional Rights PAC may be extreme but it’s hardly an outlier.

POLITICO last year reviewed the activity of 33 conservative PACs for the 2014 cycle. Combined, they raked in $43 million dollars, according to the POLITICO report. Of that, $39.5 million went to overhead including $6 million to entities owned by PAC operators; candidates got $3 million. Another report analyzed 17 conservative PACs from the 2014 midterm. It came up with different numbers than POLITICO, finding that the bottom 10 PACs in terms of the ratio of spending to actual candidate support received $54,318,498 and spent only $3,621,896 supporting candidates.

Don’t even think about supporting any big-money Alt-Right PACs that come into being in the next 2-5 years. If the real Alt-Right figures want your support, we’ll not only request it directly, but we’ll do so for specific purposes and projects whose progress you can track for yourself. We don’t play the “overhead” game.

Why Worldcon changed the rules

Year: votes (nominations)
2012: 1922 (1101)
2013: 1848 (1343)
2014: 3587 (1923)
2015: 5950 (2112)
2016: 3130 (4032)

The number of nominations rose in 2014 and 2015 due to the appearance of Sad Puppies, then Rabid Puppies. The big influx of Supporting Members began in 2014, when the SJWs, alarmed, gathered the herd to No Award Larry Correia and the rest of the Puppy finalists. They made an even bigger effort in 2015 in response to the Rabid Puppies.

However, their morale suffered a terrible blow when, despite there being nearly four times as many nominations cast in 2016 than in 2012, the Rabid Puppies selected more finalists than the Sad Puppies ever did. While most RP’s didn’t bother getting MidAmericaCon memberships in order to vote, what’s interesting is that over 2,000 SJWs didn’t either.

Anyhow, the first stage is now over. The new award has been established and the Hugo rules have been modified and complicated, as anticipated. Now we’re onto the second stage, which will last longer and promises to be more interesting than the first. RPs, be sure to keep your voting/nomination emails from Sasquan and MidAmericaCon, as you may need them next year if you are neither Brainstorm nor VFM.

We got here one year faster than I thought, as apparently a) we scared them worse than I’d expected and b) it turns out they care a lot more about me than they do about quality science fiction or science fiction history.

I wasn’t surprised that Toni Weisskopf didn’t win last year, but I was surprised that they voted her below No Award. This year, it doesn’t even surprise me a little bit that they would No Award an objectively high-quality work such as Between Light and Shadow or accomplished, highly respected individuals in the field such as Larry Elmore and Jerry Pournelle, who reportedly had the longest book-signing line at Worldcon.

I wonder how many SJWs who were begging for Dr. Pournelle’s signature had previously claimed that he did not merit a Best Editor award with their vote? Do tell us more about how the Hugo Awards concern quality and standing in the field, not SJW-driven politics.

951 No Award
766 Jerry Pournelle

893 No Award
497 Larry Elmore

That says it all about how seriously the awards deserve to be taken by science fiction readers these days. John Scalzi summed up the SF-SJW position rather well in a long diatribe yesterday. It’s rather remarkable how he devotes nearly 1,500 1,887 words to informing the world that absolutely none of it is about me, and somehow manages to do so while giving absolutely zero fucks.

  • What [the man whose blog traffic is now 6x that of the erstwhile “most popular blog in science fiction”] is really doing at this point is trying to mitigate his own inability to have the status and influence he assumed would be his, by pathetically attempting to shoehorn himself into the history of others who have done more, and better, than he has.
  • An active association with [the man who exposed Scalzi as a fraud] is, bluntly, death for your Hugo award chances. I mean, it takes a lot for someone as esteemed in the field as Jerry Pournelle to finish below “No Award” in Hugo voting, and yet, there he is, sixth in a field of five in the category of Best Editor, Short Form.

Translation: Vox Day is totally irrelevant and pathetic and doesn’t matter at all, so don’t you dare to associate with him in any way, shape, or form, or it will kill your career, no one will ever give you a Hugo Award, and everyone will hate you. Please, please, don’t do it!

What a masterpiece of its kind. As it is written, SJWs always lie. Just wait until Mr. ZFG learns what names are risking SJW disapproval to actively associate with Castalia House in 2017. But if an author doesn’t want to associate with the publishing house that is the fastest-growing in the field and pays such high royalties that the much larger publisher who inquired about acquiring it begged me to consider reducing them, that’s certainly their right. We don’t publish SJWs anyhow.

I particularly enjoyed McRapey’s attempt to cling to the original Narrative he’d tried to spin about the nomination of “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” being a devastating mistake on my part.

Rather than being appalled that Tingle had been nominated, the Worldcon community largely embraced him (or whoever Tingle is; no one is really sure). Here was someone who was nominated by a bigot to antagonize other people, who instead allied himself with those folks and was appreciated by them in return.

1508 No Award
659 “Space Raptor Butt Invasion”

Apparently those folks appreciate Mr. Tingle just about as much as they appreciate me. Did I not tell you that would happen despite the SJW’s feigned joy over how terribly funny and brilliant they found Mr. Tingle’s work?

Because, as we know, SJW’s always lie.

UPDATE: Dr. Pournelle is quite clearly crushed, and duly penitent, in consequence of his well-merited rebuke at the hands of Worldcon’s SJWs.

UPDATE: The Reverend 3.0 considers his failed prediction concerning “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” winning Best Short Story:

I was incorrect. And while I’m ready to tuck in and eat my words, it’s interesting to look at where my logic broke down.

My logic was the following:
-Puppies will vote for it because they think it is hilarious, embarrasses the Hugos, and Chuck is one of them.
-Puppy Kickers will vote for it because they think it is hilarious, embarrasses the Puppies, and Chuck is one of them.
-If the two largest blocks vote for it, it can’t lose.

But lo and behold, one of these two voting blocks failed to vote for SRBI and instead propelled Cat Pictures to victory and Noah Ward to second place. One of these two blocks was either lying to itself or lying through its teeth.

My prediction failed, and it failed because one of these two groups said one thing and then did another. So which group is the group of dirty liars? The Puppies? The Kickers? I’m sure the ballot numbers will tell.

Either way, learn from my mistake. Take that group’s tendency to lie into account in the future.

Now, I wonder who might have been lying and putting forth a false Narrative? 

10 best Murakami books

Publishers Weekly provides a list:

1. A Wild Sheep Chase – The original title of this novel is “An adventure concerning sheep,” and it lives up to that title. In it, the Murakami hero takes on a political-business-industry syndicate with apparently limitless money and power, and he does it on his own terms. Some of the most interesting parts of the novel take place in the rural wilds of Hokkaido, which has been interpreted alternately as the hero’s inner mind, or as a mythological land of the dead. At its heart, like many Murakami novels, this is a tale of conflict between the will of the individual and the demands of an impersonal State. Oh, and there is a really cool, all-empowering sheep, too.

2. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – This is another novel that features an “other world,” this time taking the form of a labyrinthine hotel, in which the hero’s wife, Kumiko, is held prisoner by her evil brother, Wataya Noboru. The hero, a mild-manner, unemployed house-husband named Okada Tōru, must find his way into this metaphysical labyrinth, confront Noboru, and rescue Kumiko. Meanwhile, he must also deal with those awkward moments when the coiled springs of time run down, and different historical epochs slam into one another. The work is a study of sex, violence, and collective memories lost and regained.

3. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World – If Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and H.G. Wells has gotten together to write a novel, it might have looked like this. Its dual narratives portray, alternately, the mean streets of a slightly futuristic Tokyo embroiled in an information war with real casualties, and a bucolic fantasy world in the form of a Town, surrounded by a massive, perfect wall, populated by people without shadows, a fearsome Gatekeeper, and unicorns. The hero, finally, must choose between the two worlds for his permanent home.

4. 1Q84 – This is the first novel in which Murakami takes up the risky topic of fringe religious groups—a sore spot in Japan since the Aum Shinrikyō terrorist attack of 1995. As the work’s fictitious cult, Sakigake, attempts to re-establish its connection with earth spirits known as the Little People, the novel pursues a central plot of bringing together its two soul-mate heroes: a fitness instructor who moonlights as an assassin of abusive men, and a math genius who moonlights as a copywriter. As with other Murakami novels, this one looks hard at the tension between political and religious ideology and the inner soul of the individual.

5. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage – Tsukuru Tazaki spends much of this story trying to understand why his circle of friends in high school expelled him from their group shortly after he left Nagoya to attend college in Tokyo. His quest for understanding takes him al the way to Finland, where he confronts some hard truths about his own inner self. It is a novel of betrayal and forgiveness, but above all, it is about growing up.

While they get the #1 book right, that’s not how I see it. This is my top 10 Murakami list, keeping in mind that they specified “books”, not “novels”, which thereby permits the inclusion of both non-fiction and collections of short stories.

  1. A Wild Sheep Chase
  2. Kafka on the Shore
  3. Underground
  4. 1Q84
  5. The Elephant Vanishes and Other Stories
  6. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
  7. Hear the Wind Sing
  8. Dance Dance Dance
  9. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
  10. Norwegian Wood

Haruki Murakami is, without question, one of the greatest living writers, if not the greatest one now that Umberto Eco is dead. While he lacks any sense of spirituality, particularly in the Christian sense, and his grasp of human socio-sexuality is marginal, he more than makes up for these flaws by his observational skills, his intellectual curiosity, and his penetrating insights into human behavior.

Kafka on the Shore is this week’s book of the week.

The third or fourth book on my list of books to write is a literary novel written in a style that is chiefly influenced by a) Murakami and b) Banks. I’ve already started it, and I’m hoping to be able to get back to it in the second half of next year.