The corruption continues

As if we needed more confirmation that there is no rule of law in the USA:

According to sources that are familiar with the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton‘s use of a private email server, the former Secretary of State is not expected to face charges in the probe. This, according to CNN’s Senior Producer Edward Mejia Davis, who took to Twitter shortly ago to indicate the likely announcement of “no charges”:

Edward Mejia Davis @TeddyDavisCNN
Sources tell CNN’s Evan Perez: expectation is that there will be announcement of no charges in Clinton email probe w/in next two weeks or so

The world of the 1980s appears to have gone full circle. The Americans are evil totalitarians bent on global conquest through their third-world proxies, the Russians are good guys defending Christianity, and Italy’s politicians are less criminal and corrupt than their US counterparts.

Mailvox: SJW convergence at Baen?

A new anthology would not appear to bode well for the future of right-wing authors at Baen Books who are not named “John” or “Larry”:

I finished the anthology SHATTERED SHIELDS. Supposedly a “military fantasy” anthology though there was precious little military anything about it. Two stories blatantly homosexual. Robin Wayne Bailey has a spunky warrior women sorceress who is also a lesbian.

James L. Sutter had a story of an “elite” legion of 100 pairs of homosexual lovers who fight as pairs in battles. Total bullshit on the fighting…. A Jennifer Brozek co-edited the anthology. An overweight red head from her picture. Edited a book called CHICKS DIG GAMING, a non-fiction book on how females love gaming. Ever hear of her before? She also wrote a Valdemar story for one of antholgies of stories set in Mercedes Lackey’s horse world.

I have no idea who Bryan Thomas Schmidt is.

Take home point: convergence is taking place at Baen. SJWs are infiltrating there. Nowhere is safe with the big publishers. I notice women seem to like the anthology at Goodreads. Some of this stuff manages to make Joe Abercrombie look good in comparison.

I was wondering how long it would take SJWs to go after military science fiction once Kameron Hurley won the Hugo for her ahistorical and risibly stupid blog post “We Have Always Fought”. After all, there is nothing to stop them from turning Mil-SF into converged Romance the way they did to science fiction proper, especially in the era of She-Rangers and infantrymen in red heels. Now we know. At least the Sacred Band of Thebes really existed, although I find it moderately amusing that they now appear in practically every historical fantasy for either bathetic or virtue-signaling purposes.

Baen has always been uniquely at risk of SJW entryism for two reasons. One, it is 25-percent owned by Tor Books. Two, many of its authors are libertarians who are fairly sound on the economic and political fronts, but are more than a little prone to virtue-signaling on the cultural side. It’s one thing to have the occasional gay character – but when you have more gay characters than Catholics or Baptists appearing in your work, it’s readily apparent that you are, at best, virtue-signaling for the SJWs.

And when you make a point of bragging about how your protagonists are diverse in one way or another, well, it’s not exactly hard to predict which way you’re going to bend when the cultural winds blow. Or the road you’re going to walk in the future.

aliceination @frumiouslyalice
@saladinahmed just finished your book! excited for the next one but wondering – any chance of some more explicitly lgbt+ chars in future?

Saladin Ahmed ‏@saladinahmed
yes. A 100% chance.

Despite what many SJWs think, Baen is not actually on our side, rather, Baen is the No Man’s Land between the SJW and the Right. I suspect we’ll know Baen has fully converged when it abandons its garish trademark covers in favor of the washed-out faux literary style favored by Tor. Not that there is anything right about one or wrong about the other, but SJWs always have the need to let everyone know they have taken control, and that would be the most public way of making it clear to all and sundry.

Anyhow, should Baen eventually go the way of its big brother, Castalia will be here
to assist any of its authors who prefer to align with the Alt and Traditional Rights rather
than with the cultural Marxists.

The minor hubbub over Judith Merril and the long, sordid history of the Left’s baleful influence in science fiction makes it clear what a unique opportunity is being presented today by the confluence of technology and events. No wonder they call us Nazis. No wonder they are terrified.

They should be.

Peccato!

To be honest, Germany deserved to win what was a very open, hard-fought 1-1 game, although that was the WORST penalty-taking by both sides that I have ever seen, and I have seen penalty shootouts all the way from the international down to the local scuola calcio. While I’ve seen penalties reach the #8 shooter before, that’s only because both sides were systematically making their penalties, not because both teams had 3 of their first 5 penalty-takers miss.

What on Earth was Antonio Conte doing substituting in Zaza right before the end of the second extra-time period? I would have said it was the worst penalty I’d seen taken in a Euro championship were it not for Bastian Schweinsteiger putting a bizarre lob over the net a few moments later.

The operative theory in the household was that the shooters were intimidated by going up against Neuer and Buffon, the two best keepers in the world. That’s as good an explanation as any, I suppose.

This has been a fun Euro, though, what with both Iceland and Wales upsetting everyone. It’s probably too much to expect Iceland to upset France, even though most of Europe will be pulling for them.

Good for the economy

I was thinking about it was strange how the mantra that immigration is “good for the economy always remains the same no matter what the costs imposed on the invaded nation are.

The tidal wave of refugees that crashed through Germany’s doors last year has long turned to a trickle, but the costs of the inflow will remain a burden on the country for years, budget figures released on Friday showed. The German finance ministry expects to spend $86.2 billion over the next four years feeding, housing and training refugees as well as helping their home countries to stem the flow.

So, the economy is measured in terms of GDP. GDP = C+I+G+(x-m)… wait a minute!

Immigrants are good for the economy, by definition, because they always increase government spending!

Converged from the bottom

Lest you think I exaggerated when I described the SJW-converged state of publishing in my latest appearance on Stefan Molyneaux’s podcast:

I struggled with rejections, too. Not because I feared crushing someone’s literary dreams (I had faith you’d be okay) but because we were asked to send personalized rejections for promising but still lacking work. There were four templates for rejection: 1) form rejection, 2) I liked a, b, and c but no. Go ahead and submit more work if you want,  3) Wow so close, but not quite. Definitely send us more work though, and 4) I loved this so much that I’m writing a response from scratch instead of inserting my thoughts into a pre-written paragraph, but unfortunately no *frowny face*.  We left #4 to the editors.

Like the nonexistent length requirements, this take on rejecting work is great for writers. I loved it until I realized it’s way easier to send a form rejection than come up with even a personalized one. Even submissions I loved ended up getting a form rejection after a week trying to convey my appreciation while still saying no. We had to be careful about this because we didn’t want to say something dumb or be too encouraging and have someone resend a piece with whatever corrections we’d accidentally proposed.

Moving things toward acceptance wasn’t much easier. We passed work we liked to another intern. If that intern liked it, they passed it to another intern. And if they liked it, one of the editors got it and made the final call. So it mattered little, dear author, if I thought your work was a masterpiece. A second or third reader who disagreed could kill it as easily as an editor. Once I got a submission that I thought was a great commentary on race, and another intern dismissed it because she didn’t see the “thematic relevance” – a very annoying phrase uttered so many times it ceased to have meaning.

I’m sure I annoyed other interns with this, too. Like when I said no to a piece on gentrification in NYC ( two other interns loved it) because its white dude perspective killed its otherwise stellar structure and language for me. I did the same with other pieces that were good except for their sexism or racism or *insert other -ism here*.

Slush reading is a necessary evil for all publishers; Castalia House now have sufficient admissions that we need to extend our one-month review policy to three months. Also, we will not provide any comments or advice on a submission, as Castalia House is a publisher, not a writer’s workshop. However, we have no SJWs involved in the process and your work will be given a fair shake so long as you are not an SJW yourself and your work is not Pink SF or some other SJW strain. We have a “kill-on-sight” policy with regards to SJW-related submissions.

Hhowever, I will say that in my experience, far too many would-be writers are far too eager to submit what is clearly incomplete, unpolished, and unoriginal work. If you haven’t even demonstrated that you have the discipline to finish a single novel, the chances that anyone is going to be so blown away by the talent demonstrated or the ideas presented in your unfinished work that they will leap to sign it is remote, to put it mildly. And not being Hollywood, Castalia is really not interested in the X meets Y formula. Do something original. And if you can’t do that, you’d better do something great (John C. Wright, Owen Stanley), something genuinely classic (Jerry Pournelle, Rod Walker), or something world-class (Martin van Creveld, William Lind, David the Good.)

Most writers, and I include myself in this, simply don’t put in the time and effort that even the second-rate successes like George R.R. Martin do. And no one these days goes to the lengths of a Tolkien or an Eco, both world-class academic specialists in fields intimately related to their writing. One reason that The Missionaries is such a stand-out novel is that Owen Stanley not only has first-hand knowledge of “Elephant Island”, he quite clearly knows the Moroks very, very well.

At this point, the very best thing you can do to get published these days is to either a) become famous or b) develop a large Twitter following. I am reliably informed, by a VERY inside publishing industry insider, that the major publishers are increasingly disinterested in the content of the books they are signing, and their primary concern is the social media outreach of the author. This is not true of Castalia House, of course, as we are getting even more selective about the content we publish.

As I’ve said before, if there is no sound reason to believe your work has the probability of being a category bestseller, Castalia probably will not publish it. The Missionaries is the first debut novel we have published, Loki’s Child will be the second, and both of them are manifestly not your average genre novel. We are more interested in quality than we are in staying in our genre lane. While we won’t reject your novel because it doesn’t conform to the SJW Narrative, that’s not sufficient reason to publish it either.

Meanwhile, Barry Malzberg makes it clear that some women have always been bent on destroying science fiction.

Judith Merril (1920-1997) had big ideas in the 1950s: she was going to take down all of the barriers between what she called the science fiction “ghetto” and the “mainstream.” She was going to prove that the barriers were artificially constructed and made no sense.

We were living in a science fiction world: Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth had proved that on the social register. And Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Sputnik demonstrated that this was not a sick little genre for (what Isaac Asimov called) “crazy kids.”

She embarked upon her campaign, writing book reviews (she eventually became Fantasy & Science Fiction‘s regular reviewer) and inaugurating her Annual Best SF series in 1957, which was taken on by Dell for mass market and which became immediately the most significant and influential of all the annuals. She wrote pandering introductions to stories by Russell Baker and Jorge Luis Borges reprinted in her annuals, arguing that they proved that literary figures and New York Times columnists were writing the stuff just as well or better as the hacks in Astounding and Galaxy.

She persuaded Anthony Boucher (who had his own shaky and ambivalent fix on the field) that everything was science fiction. And Boucher hired Arthur Jean Cox to write an ongoing movie column in which he noted that the musical Li’l Abner was hard-core science fiction. Her columns in Fantasy & Science Fiction disdained or ignored category publications as largely hackwork, and she used the space to dismiss almost all of it and surely to propagate the British New Wave writers who were really shaking the earth and changing everything. That led to her commercially disastrous Doubleday anthology England Swings! SF, which Donald A. Wollheim, who published the paperback, told me was the worst-selling Ace paperback in history. This is just part of what the former Josephine Grossman was doing in the critical period 1955-1968 after she had essentially written finis to her career as a fiction writer; but it was quite enough to get the job done. A decent writer and a highly intelligent person, she did the field more damage than Raymond Palmer or Roger Corman, Ed Earl Repp or Ed Wood. The field certainly survived, it had demonstrated the pre-Lucas capacity to survive anything, but it was irreversibly damaged.

It was irreversibly damaged because Merril’s influence in those years was great, and she was on a methodical, hardly understated campaign to tear down the walls and destroy the category. As a failed mainstream writer who had essentially been rescued by her friends Theodore Sturgeon and Philip J. Klass, and pointed toward commercial writing, Merril was determined to find another way into the mainstream. And if that involved rupturing or destroying science fiction, well, that would be collateral damage.

I had a little of this syndrome myself—like Merril I came to science fiction in my mid-twenties as a failed angry quality lit writer. But I never forgot that science fiction had essentially rescued me, that Final War which had been deemed “too grimly realistic” for The Hudson Review and condescendingly bounced had been taken by Edward L. Ferman, and in that simple act he had saved my creative life, and I was grateful. I was not contemptuous of science fiction or anxious to pummel the misshapen but occasionally beautiful field of literature because it was a means of default. Rather, I was grateful and having read a great deal in the genre at a formative time (so had Merril) I knew that it was a legitimate brand of literature which was being screwed mercilessly by the academy and the quality lit gatekeepers and spirits. Their casual contempt (like the contempt of the Hudson Review) infuriated me and still does. But I never blamed science fiction for what the larger culture had done to it. Merril did. Merril was the kind of liberal who in different circumstances would blame James Baldwin and Cassius Clay for bad manners, for giving their people a bad name.

The SF-SJWs are, of course, furious about this, as they always are when their dreadful behavior is revealed. They want to bury the past and pretend that the present is as it is for no reason beyond inevitable Progress. And it is all too typical of SJW entryism that a woman who hated science fiction would position herself as the arbiter of what was best in the field.

Which, of course, is how we eventually ended up with dreadful schlock like Redshirts and “The Rain That Falls On You If You’re Gay” and “If You Weren’t Beaten Into a Coma By Political Stand-ins For the Mean Girls Who Called Me Fat in High School, My Love” being deemed the best science fiction has to offer. Just the title of “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” is more thoughtful and entertaining than the sum total of those three award-winning works.

Also amusing is the protests of the SJWs. “But consider all her contributions to the field!” they cry. That’s the point and that’s also the problem. She did contribute a lot, and those contributions were negative and damaging to the field of science fiction. None of this really matters, though, as the SJW-converged world of mainstream SF is a dying one, and a new world, in which Castalia House is going to be a powerful force, is rising to take its place.

Thanks to you, June was another record month for Castalia House. Thanks to you, June was another record month of traffic for VP. Thanks to you, our hot new releases and category bestsellers have brought us to the attention of much larger companies who are extremely interested in working with us. Thanks to you, our productive capacities have expanded. Thanks to you, top authors are starting to work with us.

Thanks to you, the turbo-boosters are being fitted. Buckle up.

Anti-nationalist voter fraud

The Austrian globalists were caught with their hands in the voting jar; they were cheating to keep out the nationalists:

Austria’s Constitutional court has today ordered May’s presidential election be annulled and another called after “particularly serious cases” of voting fraud were detected in the photo-finish vote.

The Green party-backed candidate Alexander Van der Bellen originally snatched victory by a mere 0.6 per cent in the second round vote, which was taken to decide the new president of central-European state Austria in May. He had made it to the round alongside Freedom Party (FPO) candidate Norbert Hofer, who campaigned to protect Austria from mass migration and Islamification.

Now the Austrian Constitutional court has upheld a complaint by the FPO about conduct in the election. The party had alleged that there were voting “irregularities” in 94 of the 117 total electoral constituencies in the country, reports Kronen Zeitung.

It is not known how many of the 94 areas alleged to have voting irregularities have been investigated, but the court identified “20 particularly serious cases” after interviewing 67 witnesses. Two witnesses are reported to have refused to give a statement. The allegation is that in these areas the postal ballots were opened and sorted before the arrival of Electoral Commission arrivals, meaning they could have been easily tampered with.

One hopes the Austrian people will have the good sense to resoundly reject the party that doesn’t respect their democratic will.

Mailvox: teaching 4GW

William S. Lind and LtCol Thiele are improving the state of American university education:

I teach undergraduate courses in Political Science and after reading Lind’s Four Generations of Modern War on your recommendation, I had to throw out two whole lectures on war and terrorism.  I’ve gone two semesters with new lectures and I’m looking to expand on this theme in my Intro course through some form of non-lecture activity.  After reading an article from Jeffro on wargaming in the classroom, I’m considering introducing a game which would demonstrate thematic concepts on 4GW, but I have little experience in wargaming beyond Risk and PC gaming. 

Could you recommend an appropriate game?  My classroom size is approximately 10-12, making 2 or 3 person teams possible, and I can probably devote two 1.5 hour sessions to this activity.  Andean Abyss and Cuba Libre have come up but I can’t afford to buy multiple games in a trial-and-error fashion.  Thank you.

Interesting question. Let’s throw this out to everyone and discuss the matter. My first thought was Junta, but that’s probably too focused on the traditional civil unrest. And it has made me think that perhaps it would be worthwhile to design a game around the core 4GW concepts. It wouldn’t be too hard, the first question would be deciding whether to make it totally theoretical or utilizing real and/or historical settings.

Another possibility would be Fallujah 2004: City Fighting in Iraq. This wouldn’t teach 4GW concepts per se, but would help illustrate some of the challenges involved. However, it’s a solitaire game, which could be seen as a positive or a negative, depending upon the professor’s perspective. Decision Iraq is a two-player game that deals directly with the insurgency, so I’d probably take a close look at that one. The rules can be found on the Decision Games site here in RTF format.

Free trade: bad idea or bait-and-switch

Gary North believes it is the latter:

What was the bait and switch? This. Lure intellectuals and then politicians into a lobster trap of one-world government by means of the promise of greater wealth through free trade. Create free trade alliances that are in fact not free trade but rather trade managed by international bureaucrats. This is a combination of low tariffs and detailed regulations of production and distribution. Economic regulation favors large multinational firms that can afford lots of expensive lawyers. This regulatory system creates economic barriers against newer, more innovative, but under-capitalized competitors. In short, use the bait of greater national wealth to persuade national leaders into agreeing to a treaty-based international government that requires member nations to surrender much of national sovereignty. The final stage is the creation on centralized regional governments that absorb national governments into an immense international bureaucratic system that regulates most areas of life.

The arguments favoring free trade go back to David Hume in 1752, and later to his friend Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations (1776) presented a comprehensive case. Liberty is more productive than statist bureaucracy.

Free trade simply means that two people can legally agree to an exchange if they choose to. Simple. The idea of voluntary exchange is hated by those producers who cannot compete effectively, but the case is both logical and moral.

The reason why the Rockefeller Foundation paid F. A. Hayek, Wilhelm Röpke, and Ludwig von Mises to write books on international trade was to provide the economic bait.

Raymond Fosdick went on John D. Rockefeller, Sr.’s payroll no later than 1913. He went on Junior’s payroll no later than 1916. He had met Fosdick in 1910. Fosdick was one of Woodrow Wilson’s protégés at Princeton. A brief summary of his career is here. It does not cover his time at the Versailles Peace Conference, where he and Jean Monnet worked together in 1919 to create the League of Nations. It does not mention Monnet. It also does not cover his time as Junior’s personal lawyer and advisor, 1920-1936. His brother Harry was on the board of the Foundation from 1917 on.

Another Wilson protégé was John Foster Dulles. He was the grandson of John Foster, Secretary of State under Harrison, known as “the fixer.” He was also the nephew of Robert Lansing, Wilson’s Secretary of State, who helped take the government into World War I. He was Secretary of State under Eisenhower. He was the defense attorney for Harry Emerson Fosdick in Fosdick’s 1924 trial for heresy in the northern Presbyterian Church. He had been one of America’s richest lawyers in the 1930’s. He was a committed globalist. He was a deal-maker between American firms and the Hitler government until a revolt in his own firm got him to stop. He was an early promoter of the World Council of Churches, founded in 1948. He also presented a program in the 1930’s for creating an international government funded by a low tax on international trade that would be created for the sake of huge firms — his clients. They would be exempted from national tariffs.

These men were globalists. They proclaimed the doctrine of free trade, but always with this proviso: free trade was the bait for creating an international government with managed trade.

My belief is Gary North is gradually stumbling his way towards the truth, which is that there is no bait-and-switch, the globalists genuinely believe in free trade because free trade destroys nations and national sovereignty. After all, no less a personage than Karl Marx supported it for precisely that reason; he considered it a weapon in the arsenal of international socialism.

But regardless of whether they do or not, note that even this staunch defender of free trade is observing that free trade is a trojan horse. Therefore, it should be opposed on that basis alone, even by those who genuinely believe it increases national wealth in any and all circumstances.

Dunning-Kruger + Gamma = Aaron

The most intellectually challenged gamma at File 770, much to everyone’s surprise, doubles down.

I disagree. I think I’m very smart. And you’re dumb. I’m easily smarter than most people on this blog, including Vox. Vox said something pretty stupid, and instead of having the balls to man up, he doubled down. I’m not impressed. At all.

Easily smarter… than people with confirmed +3SD and +4SD IQs. I have no doubt whatsoever that he believes that, as he’s an example of both Dunning-Kruger Syndrome and Vox’s First Law in action.

What’s particularly funny about this is that he’s referring to this post. Notice how much of it is devoted to intelligence and immigration. Aaron, as wounded Gammas are wont to do, leaped to attack one minor point that he interpreted to be in error, then attempted to build an entire edifice of discredit and disqualify upon it, even going so far as to claim, on that basis, that “You always double down. I’ve never seen you concede any point at any time anywhere.”

No doubt this would confuse James Miller, Robert Murphy, and Thomas Woods, to say nothing of Ian Fletcher, to whom I have conceded considerably more than just a single point. Some other readers attempted to explain to Aaron that he’d missed the salient point, which he not only ended up rejecting but also claims I did not mean despite the readily available evidence to the contrary.

So, the immigration of stupid people has created conditions that make the super smart innovators have less babies, and that many of the super smart who have babies do so with Mexican fruit pickers and Somali gangsters and such like.

THAT’S what Vox meant when he said the immigration of stupid people has led to a lower average national IQ, and thus fewer smart people to be entrepreneurs.

If you SERIOUSLY think this is what Vox meant, then that’s a perfectly coherent position, although to my mind, not plausible.

But I for one, don’t think that’s what vox meant.

Of course it is part of what Vox meant, though only part, as should be obvious to anyone who is familiar with my writing about feminism’s effect on declining Western intelligence. One wonders what else I could have possibly meant, considering the following:


As the average IQ of the population declines, the number of members of the cognitive elite being born similarly decline. If the smart population mixes with the less intelligent immigrants, or even fails to breed at replacement levels, the ABSOLUTE number of smart people will decline. Do either of those scenarios happen to apply here?

Of course, both scenarios do. Aaron’s assertion of my “error” relied upon no native-immigrant intermixing and non-declining birthrates among the native cognitive elite, both false assumptions. What Aaron is exhibiting, in addition to the usual gamma “You are wrong and stupid due to incorrect assumptions on my part”, is typical SJW reasoning in action.They are binary thinkers, which renders complexity a complete mystery to them. That’s why they think that “well, it’s more complex than that” is a sufficient rebuttal, because the possibility of unraveling the complexities and successfully accounting for more than one influential factor is not only beyond their capabilities, but beyond their actions.

Notice how the SJW ends up relying upon his interpretation of what he imagines the other person to be thinking so that he can himself the victor, regardless of what every other observer concludes. The Secret King triumphs again, if only in his own head. But usually, the gamma doesn’t pay enough attention to what others are saying to even understand them correctly.

But isn’t that exactly the point? They’re in a position of weakness, so they’re using bluster and bravado to regain momentum. Thats what I said. File this under “making my point for me again” dpt. You’re good at that, vox.

No, it’s not exactly the point. Aaron failed to understand that I was correcting his statement that “pushing through their agenda in an even more ruthless and uncompromising way is the best tactic they have to deal with a moment of weakness”.  Yes, we both agree that the EU elite is in a position of weakness, which is precisely why bluster and bravado is not their best tactic if they wish the EU to survive. To the contrary, it’s a very risky bluff, which the Euroskeptics should call and exploit to the full, in order to destroy the entire edifice.

The sad thing about the gamma is that he neither knows himself nor his enemies. That is why he is, per Sun Tzu, destined for repeated failure:

YOU’RE answering ME, but it is *I* who engage in the detestable gamma behavior of never letting things go or lashing back – and since when are you known for letting go or refraining from lashing back? I get it. When you do it, it’s super duper genius rhetoric alpha Aristotle stuff, when anyone else, why, it’s a gamma. 

Yes, you are indeed a gamma male. No, you clearly don’t get it. Let’s consider the facts.

  • I very seldom write about Aaron or pay any attention to his activities. Even when I did, recently, he was not the topic at hand. The battle on A Game of Thrones was.
  • Aaron frequently opines about me and my various activities, as a search of File 770’s comments will demonstrate.
  • Aaron is here commenting repeatedly on my blog. That’s fine, but the point is, he came here to do it because he is still feeling butthurt about his risible defense of the LEEEROY JENKINS strategy in the Stark-Bolton battle. His response was so predictable that another game-savvy reader even predicted it.
  • I often respond to critics who comment on this blog. That was not a unique event.
  • I let go of most attacks directed at me. As numerous critics who comment here can testify, I don’t even reply to most of them, let alone lash back at all of them. Moreover, I am quite willing to let bygones be bygones, as numerous commenters with whom I have had differences in the past can also testify.

Unlike the gamma, I don’t dwell upon past injuries and insults, licking my wounds and biding my time until an opportunity to lash back presents itself. Nor do I feel any need to reinterpret past defeats as victories, or pretend to myself and others that my failures are successes. I don’t pretend to understand why gammas behave in this way, but I have observed the pattern of behavior often enough to be able to reliably predict it. Since most male SF-SJWs are gammas, it’s not hard to anticipate their reactions to any given stimulus.

UPDATE: Oh dear. Timing, it seems, is everything.

Aaron: It is masculine to admit when you’re wrong. Just very few people do it, and certainly not vox.

Two hours ago on Twitter:

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
Daikatana was, like my Rebel Moon designs, too ambitious for its own good.

John Romero ‏@romero
it wasn’t an ambitious design that was Daikatana’s problem

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
I stand corrected.

Reviews of The Missionaries

Rawle Nynanzi reviews Owen Stanley’s satirical bestseller, The Missionaries:

When academic theories collide with practical reality, fun is had by all and sundry. The Missionaries is a hilarious book that will have you turning the page to see how badly a UN bureaucrat’s quest to modernize a distant tribe can go — and believe me, it goes really wrong. It shows the limits of the academic way of thinking while making you laugh all the way.

In the book, Dr. Prout is on a mission from the UN to develop the tribes of Elephant Island. As he does this, he finds himself going up against Roger Fletcher, a local administrator who prefers to let the tribes live as they always have, with him smoothing over any disputes. Despite Fletcher’s crude behavior and jokes about the natives’ culture, he clearly understands and respects them on a fundamental level. Dr. Prout, on the other hand, strides in like a know-it-all, spouting a mix of UN propaganda and left-wing orthodoxy while making no effort to understand the people in front of him. Most of the book’s humor comes from the collision of Fletcher’s practicality and Prout’s theoretical thinking…. I would proudly say that I loved the book. Highly recommended.

While you’re on Nyanzi’s site, I recommend having a look at his interesting take on proposition nations and the problem with them.

Some other comments about The Missionaries by reviewers.

  • A fun read that reminds me of Voltaire’s Candide.
  • This book is absolutely hilarious and a must buy. 6 stars out of 5.
  • I cannot praise the craftsmanship that went into the plot too highly; the entire novel is as tight-knit as a Chekov short story.
  • The way the bureaucrat reinterprets everything to fit his academic theories will leave you rolling on the floor.
  • HitchHikers Guide meets social justice warriors in a United Nations 3rd world development project.

I think it should now be clear that we have not exaggerated, in the least, how good this book is. If you haven’t picked up a copy yet, you really, truly, should. When readers are openly comparing it to Voltaire, Chekov, and Douglas Adams, you know it is a classic-in-the-making.