A pair of reviews

Josh Young, who very recently turned in his long-awaited debut novel, Do Buddhas Dream of Enlightened Sheep?, wrote a detailed review of Rod Walker’s Mutiny in Space at Castalia House:

One of the things that I’m grateful to my parents for is that they made sure I knew the value of media from by gone decades. I grew up watching Arsenic and Old Lace, Charade, and North by Northwest. When I watched This Island Earth it was with wonder and without the ironic overlay of MST3K. And as much as I enjoyed Encyclopedia Brown and Choose Your Own Adventure books, I spent way more time reading things like Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus, Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, and Andre Norton’s Star Rangers. I say all this because I want you to understand that when I say Rod Walker’s Mutiny in Space is the product of a by-gone age, I’m giving it the highest praise I can.

I’m not sure that Mutiny in Space would be considered a
juvenile, but it’s clearly got that adventure in its DNA and an
old-timey vibe. Even though Nikolai’s world has things I never remember
seeing in the juveniles– video games, artificial gravity, quantum
entanglement– there’s plenty in it that conjures up the memories of all
those old adventures I used to read. The heroes are bold and heroic, the
villains villainous and craven. And looking at that sentence, it seems
ridiculous that I’d have to type “the heroes are heroes and the villains
are villains,” but I think we all know the world well enough to
understand why that’s refreshing. I mean, heck. I intentionally
use a grey morality in my own writing, and I’m part of a group or
writers that are theoretically not fond of those things.

If you enjoy old school Blue SF and you haven’t picked this one up yet, you really should. I mean, I’m the editor and I can’t wait to see what Mr. Walker has up his sleeve next.

On the fantasy side, the Hugo-nominated Appendix N author Jeffro Johnson demonstrated the superlative nature of John C. Wright’s excellent Iron Chamber of Memory by selecting a series of choice quotes from the book.

The book that all of these passages are taken from is Iron Chamber of Memory by John C. Wright. And while you’ll see contemporary authors ranging from Saladin Ahmad to Terry Brooks, N. K. Jemisin, George R. R. Martin, and Patrick Rothfuss incorporated into the latest iteration of D&D’s “inspirational reading list”, I’m doubt any of those additions are going to be anything like this. Fantasy role-playing and the genre of fantasy in general have just changed too much over the years.

Speaking for myself, reading this book… it was as if someone had read everything I liked about Appendix N books and everything I disliked about post-1977 science fiction and fantasy… and then made a novel that addressed every single point I’d made about them. It’s astonishing, really, but this is the book that has forced me to retire my “they don’t make ’em like this anymore” spiel. Today’s fandom may be divorced from its roots for the most part, but I think it’s fair to say that the depth and breadth of classic science fiction and fantasy informs nearly every paragraph of Wright’s stories.

Speaking of book reviews, I just finished reading Roosh’s new book, Free Speech Isn’t Free. I’ll write a full review soon, but suffice it to say that it is very detailed, very good, and very useful in the manner of SJWAL. I think I must have highlighted 12 or 15 quotes for future reference.

Go with your gut

Looks like my first instinct was correct and the Orlando shooting appears to have been gay-on-gay:

Omar Mateen, the gunman who murdered 49 people in an Orlando gay club early Sunday morning, was a gay man himself according to multiple people who knew and had met the man.

A gay man who attended the police academy in 2006 with Mateen said that the pair went out to gay bars and that at one point Mateen told the man he wanted to pursue a relationship.

Meanwhile, multiple people are now coming forward to say that they had spoken with Mateen on gay hookup apps including Grindr and Jack’d.  

The attack, which many assumed was an act of Islamic extremism, now appears to possibly be tied to Mateen’s own shame over his sexuality and investigators are now looking into this internal conflict as a possibly motive. 

The shooter’s father, Seddique Mateen, made his beliefs on gay people very clear in a video he posted to Facebook on Monday saying ‘homosexuals will be punished by God.’

ISIS meanwhile, the terrorist group some believe Mateen killed in the name of, executes gay men on a daily basis in horrific fashions.

‘He’s a homosexual and he was trying to pick up men,’ said Jim Van Horn, who called Mateen a Pulse ‘regular’ and described his approach to chatting with people in the club.

Of course, this doesn’t negate Islam as an additional motive; human beings are complicated creatures and seldom do anything for one and only one reason. But there is a genuine problem with the Muslim motive, as the Saker observes:

While most of us have now heard that Omar Mateen was a Muslim and that he had pledged allegiance to Daesh. It now turns out that he did pledged allegiance to both ISIS and Hezbollah! It might be useful to repeat here that while nominally both ISIS and Hezbollah are “Muslim”, the ISIS Takfiris consider Shia as kufars, as apostates, who betrayed true Islam and turned to idolatry. They also consider them “Iranian agents”. As for Hezbollah, they are The Number One (all in caps) enemy of Daesh/ISIS gang and they refer to these Takfiri maniacs as “devils” (shaitan). What this means is simple and leaves only a few options:

1) Either Omar Mateen knew nothing about Islam

2) Or Omar Mateen was coerced into making this statement and he deliberately made it absurd

3) Or Omar Mateen never said any such thing

Pick your favorite hypothesis, but what is darn certain is that the contents of his alleged statement leave the “Islamic theory” shattered into pieces. There is simply absolutely no way any real Muslim would simultaneously pledged allegiance to ISIS and Hezbollah at the same time.

Well, I suspect you might if you’re an unbalanced, self-hating Muslim homosexual who knows considerably less about Islamic political theology than about the bathrooms of the Orlando gay clubs. Furthermore, the Saker clearly doesn’t know much about the cruel reality of gay life, as he admits he doesn’t “believe that homosexuals are more likely to commit violent crime than heterosexuals.”

However, not only are gays more likely to commit violent crime, but when the violence of a murder is particularly over the top, the police and profilers usually assume, correctly, that the perpetrator is gay.

And all of this assumes, of course, that the Official Story is a reasonable approximation of the truth, which one can no longer reasonably assume these days.

Irreconcilable conflict

West must remain West, declares Pat Buchanan:

“East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat.”

So wrote Kipling. Islam, not only in its extremist forms but in its pure form, is incompatible with modern Western democracy.

And the conflict appears irreconcilable.

The policy that should result from this reality is that while we fight side-by-side to annihilate our common enemies, ISIS and al-Qaida, the West should give up the idea of democratization and secularization of the Islamic world.

And those who believe Islam is the one true faith, to which all of mankind must eventually submit, should be told that they are welcome as visitors — but not as immigrants. For that would ensure endless conflict.

The more Islamic the West becomes, the less it remains the West.

And really, the West could doesn’t need the visitors either. The outcome is either West becomes East, or Reconquesta 2.0. The sooner the West realizes this, the less violent it will be.

More Islam, more peace

Another Islamic shooter reported in Texas:

The Amarillo Police Department have confirmed an active shooter situation at the Walmart on I-27 and Georgia.
Police are asking the public to stay away from the area so officers can focus on the scene instead of traffic.
ADVERTISING
APD and other agencies, including the DPS helicopter, are on the scene.
Witnesses have stated that the shooter was an employee that took another employee hostage

Remember, immigrants are good for the economy!

McRapey is lying AGAIN

McRapey is obviously having difficulties accepting the fact that in traffic terms, I passed him by like a Porsche blowing the doors off a Yugo on the Autobahn.

 John Scalzi ‏@scalzi
(A minor footnote to my bio will be how some jackasses said I lied about my site traffic because they didn’t understand the phrase “up to.”)

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi
My Web site’s having one of those high-volume traffic days certain detractors of mine loudly say I never have, because they’re always wrong.

Being both an SJW and a Gamma male, you know John Scalzi is always going to lie. He did say “up to” in an attempt to deceive the New York Times reporter about his traffic in an interview, but he straight up lied to Lightspeed and on Twitter, when he did not.

EXHIBIT ONE

“For one thing, his blog gets an extraordinary amount of traffic for a writer’s website–Scalzi himself quotes it at over 45,000 unique visitors daily and more than two million page views monthly.”
– Lightspeed Magazine, September 2010 interview 

I note that the word “over” is not the phrase “up to”. At the time, in August 2010, he didn’t have “more than two million page views monthly”, he had 409,745.

EXHIBIT TWO

John Scalzi @scalzi 6:20 AM – 4 Dec 12
Hey, authors of non-traditionally published books! Promote your book to my 50K daily blog readers TODAY

“Up to” 50k daily blog readers? No. Do you spot the phrase? I don’t.

EXHIBIT THREE

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi 3:33 PM – 10 Aug 13
@gregpak I think if people like the content they will keep coming in regardless. I mean, my site gets 50K readers a day 

“Up to” 50K readers a day? No. Do you spot the phrase? I don’t.

So, as usual, McRapey is lying about his site traffic. Second, he is also lying about what I have said about it. I have never said that Whatever never gets the occasional spike, usually as a result of external links to it. I know exactly when, and how big, those historical spikes were, going back to 2008.

What McRapey does is talk very loudly about those spikes when they occur in order to try to deceive people into believing they are generally indicative of his overall level of traffic, which is simply not the case. Unlike me, he never mentions his average daily traffic, because it is much lower than he wants everyone to believe. He doesn’t even report his annual traffic anymore, because it is now so embarrassingly low in comparison with mine. The most traffic he has ever had was just over 8 million pageviews back in 2012; in 2016 Whatever is unlikely to reach even one-quarter the traffic here, which is on track to be in excess of 25 million pageviews.

I’m not surprised he had a short-term spike in traffic; they often occur in the aftermath of an event like the Orlando shooting. My traffic also increased, from a daily average of 76,166 pageviews in June to 91,796 yesterday. But unlike McRapey, you’ll never see me claiming “up to 119,699 daily blog readers”, as I could, because I feel absolutely no need to deceive or mislead people about my site traffic.

Book of the Week

Free Speech Isn’t Free: How 90 Men Stood Up Against The Globalist Establishment — And Won is a fascinating look behind the scenes of Roosh’s notorious speaking tour, which culminated this spring in one of the biggest, most unjustified attempted media lynchings I have ever witnessed. Roosh walks the reader through the entire experience of the tour and its aftermath, from conception to conclusion, in remarkably honest detail. He not only bares his thought processes, he bares his hopes and his fears in a way few writers would dare.

It is well worth reading, not only in its own right, but also to better understand the way in which the media SJWs and the SJW activists operate when they go into seek-and-destroy mode.

As some of you know, I played a very small part in helping Roosh turn the tables on the media lynch mob that was attempting to discredit and destroy him; in the section quoted below, Roosh describes how the unexpected viciousness of the attack journalism affected him, how he reestablished his equilibrium, and how he adroitly forced them to choose between serving as his microphone or backing off him and his family.

There are many battles in the future that I’m sure we will engage in, but one where a small guerilla army walked out on the open battlefield against a large regiment of infantry that had multiple reinforcements simply wasn’t one of them.

I firmly believe that it would have been absolute folly to proceed in such an engagement. While I wouldn’t mind gathering my best men and showing up at one of the locations, I couldn’t send others into the meeting when the local hosts weren’t properly vetted and where they didn’t even know beforehand who else would be attending. It was a recipe for disaster, and based on the events that ended up taking place on Saturday, my fears about members being harmed turned out to be accurate.

At the time the outrage was happening, I happened to be visiting my father’s house in a Washington, D.C. suburb for a short stay before returning back to Eastern Europe. On Thursday, February 4, a news crew with the Daily Mail came to the house while I was sleeping. They failed to hector my stepmom, a gentle Persian woman, into admitting I was there, and camped out in front of the house in the hopes of getting a story.

I went online, wondering how they were able to find my dad’s address so quickly, and noticed a series of messages from the hacking group Anonymous. It turned out that they had doxed the house earlier that morning. I was already under stress due to the media and government pressure, but now my mood turned to near panic.

Up to Thursday, I received over 100 threats, many of them credible. Now all of those deranged and gullible idiots had my father’s address. The threats continued to come in, including one that stated my family’s house would soon be burned to the ground. I figured that people would at least try to “swat” the house by making bogus calls to police saying there was a hostage situation inside, or even worse, come to the house and attempt to harm my family.

The first thing I did was call the local police. I opened the door when they came, not knowing that the Daily Mail had a telephoto lens pointed at the door. After explaining the story, they put a flag on the address against swatting attempts. Besides that, all they could do was advise me to contact the FBI because nearly all the threats were coming in from other jurisdictions. The Daily Mail story went live not long after they left.

Not so cool now! Pro-rape pick-up artist pictured in a sweat-stained T-shirt at the door of his mother’s home (where he lives in the BASEMENT!)

This is the man at the center of a worldwide storm after advocating legalizing rape on private property – in a sweat-stained T-shirt at the door of his mother’s house.

Daryush ‘Roosh’ Valizadeh, 36, the self-proclaimed ‘King of Masculinity’ called police after receiving death threats from around the world and canceled a series of ‘tribal meetings’ in 45 countries set for this weekend.

Valizadeh, who is at the center of public protests at home and in Canada, Australia and the UK, is on record as advocating women be banned from voting, describing a woman’s value as dependent on her ‘fertility and beauty’, and stating that women with eating disorders make the best girlfriends.

The article was shared over 100,000 times. While I could do without the false claim that I live with my mother, the story confirmed the dox and told the world that I was in fact currently located at the released address, which was shared on a Facebook account controlled by an Anonymous group with over 300,000 subscribers. The dox went viral itself, being viewed over one million times. I had friends from around the world asking me why my family’s address was popping up on their Facebook feed. It may have been the most viewed dox ever.

The situation seemed dire. After the media successfully painted me as a monster who is trying to legalize rape and organize rape mobs in cities around the world, they added a cherry on top by helping publicize my family’s address to people who wanted me dead. The media, whether deliberately or not, had put my family in great danger. I called a security firm and by nightfall there was an armed guard in front of the house. In the subsequent week, they defended the house against multiple news crews, pizza deliveries, and random men claiming to be plumbers or painters, but who suspiciously lacked work equipment.

I was relieved when the Daily Mail published a follow-up story claiming that I hired a “burly security guard,” because I knew it would deter people from coming to the house.

The self-styled ‘King of Masculinity’ has called in his own private security guard after claiming he had been threatened.


Roosh Valizadeh, who used a blog post – which he later said was satirical – to say that if a woman was on private property she could be legitimately raped, hired the bodyguard as global revulsion over his views grew.


When Daily Mail Online attempted to speak to Valizadeh at his mother’s basement where he is in hiding, his guard leaped up and warned our reporter off.


He said: ‘I can’t let you go there. I have got to protect him and myself. Nobody is going near his door.’

That night I apologized to my family for bringing danger upon them. They would have none of it, instead blaming the people who were responsible for the manufactured outrage. My dad said, “What are they going to do to me, anyway? Kill me? I’m already old.” My stepmom was as calm as a lamb, like nothing at all was happening. I asked her how she could remain so unaffected. She replied, “I prayed to Allah to keep us safe. Everything will be okay for us.” From outward appearances, they seemed relaxed while I was the nervous wreck.

I responded online to my family’s dox by sending a tweet that was less of a counterattack than a means to garner sympathy.

Whatever I’ve done in my life, my parents don’t deserve to be harmed because of my work.

While it wasn’t quite a nervous breakdown, it was a departure from my normal aggressive demeanor. Soon after I sent it out, I received an email from Vox Day asking for my number. He called me the next day, Friday, February 5, when I was in the middle of packing my bags. I planned to leave that night because the security firm advised me that it was best to make a visible exit from my family’s house to take the spotlight off of them.

“You’re reacting right now,” Vox said. “You’re not working based on a plan.”

“I’m feeling shell-shocked,” I replied. “I was prepared for a lot of things but not my family getting doxed. Besides hiring the security firm, I’m not sure what to do next.”

“You have to get the narrative back. The best way to do this is to call a press conference with the D.C. media and go after them hard. Otherwise they’re just going to keep attacking you.”

The last thing on my mind while trying to defend my family was going back on the attack, but I knew he was right. I sent out a tweet inviting members of the media to a press conference for the next evening. Within a couple of hours, I had over ten responses. I called up a hotel I used to take dates to when I was in my mid 20’s and reserved a conference room for one hour.

As you may recall, Roosh’s performance at the press conference was superlative. By the time it was over, the various reporters and their camera crews were scuttling back to England and Germany with their tails between their legs. The book includes the full transcript of the press conference in an appendix, and it merits inclusion in a future textbook that teaches one how to deal with a hostile crowd of journalists.

“I will suspend immigration”

Donald Trump continues to talk the talk in response to Orlando:

We need to respond to this attack on America as one united people – with force, purpose and determination.

But the current politically correct response cripples our ability to talk and think and act clearly.

If we don’t get tough, and we don’t get smart – and fast – we’re not going to have a country anymore — there will be nothing left.

The killer, whose name I will not use, or ever say, was born to Afghan parents who immigrated to the United States. His father published support for the Afghan Taliban, a regime which murders those who don’t share its radical views. The father even said he was running for President of that country.

The bottom line is that the only reason the killer was in America in the first place was because we allowed his family to come here.

That is a fact, and it’s a fact we need to talk about.

We have a dysfunctional immigration system which does not permit us to know who we let into our country, and it does not permit us to protect our citizens.

We have an incompetent administration, and if I am not elected President, that will not change over the next four years — but it must change, and it must change now.

With fifty people dead, and dozens more wounded, we cannot afford to talk around the issue anymore — we have to address it head on.

I called for a ban after San Bernardino, and was met with great scorn and anger but now, many are saying I was right to do so — and although the pause is temporary, we must find out what is going on. The ban will be lifted when we as a nation are in a position to properly and perfectly screen those people coming into our country.

The immigration laws of the United States give the President the power to suspend entry into the country of any class of persons that the President deems detrimental to the interests or security of the United States, as he deems appropriate.

I will use this power to protect the American people. When I am elected, I will suspend immigration from areas of the world when there is a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe or our allies, until we understand how to end these threats.

After a full, impartial and long overdue security assessment, we will develop a responsible immigration policy that serves the interests and values of America.

We cannot continue to allow thousands upon thousands of people to pour into our country, many of whom have the same thought process as this savage killer.

Many of the principles of Radical Islam are incompatible with Western values and institutions.

Radical Islam is anti-woman, anti-gay and anti-American.

I’d prefer it if he dropped the adjective “Radical” and if he said “end” rather than “suspend” immigration, but that’s a hell of a lot better than any candidate in any party has ever been on immigration.

Mark Kern banned by Twitter

World of Warcraft developer Mark Kern kicked off Twitter:

Twitter has joined Facebook and Reddit in Silicon Valley’s post-Orlando hall of shame. They’ve become the latest social media platform to censor users for discussing this weekend’s Islamic terror attack.

The victim is Mark Kern, a highly prominent video game developer who worked on the original edition of Blizzard’s highly acclaimed World Of Warcraft, who was suspended from Twitter earlier today.

Kern currently runs the League For Gamers, a consumer advocacy group fighting censorship and moral panic in the video games industry. Kern, who had more than 61,000 followers on Twitter prior to his suspension, was a frequent critic of the platform for its drift towards censorship over the past two years. Now he’s been censored himself.

Unbelievable. The thought police are running completely amok in the wake of Orlando. Too much dangerous thinking!

UPDATE: And after stories on Breitbart and Drudge, he’s back.

Milo condemns Muslim apologists

The Left chose Islam over gays, and one man is reminding everyone of that choice:

A lot of people laughed at Donald Trump when he suggested a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country. No doubt they thought he was further harming his chances in the general election.

No one is laughing now. What’s more, I expect many are quietly wondering if the “temporary” ban might have to be permanent. Western capitalist democracy gave women and gays equal footing in society; Islam has arrived to roll the clock back.

Only one presidential candidate is being honest about it, which is why, if you are gay, there’s really only one choice in this election. (It was Latino night at the gay club, incidentally — Hispanics may wish to consider that, too.)

We’ve also learned in the past few hours that the killer was already being watched by the FBI. This happened in Brussels, too. Both times, the security services dropped the ball. Something tells me that they’d be a lot more vigilant, and a lot less lenient to their surveillance targets, under a Trump administration.

It’s not just gay people under threat. Atheist satirists in the west now live in fear of being executed because they drew the wrong cartoon. Women face the terrifying prospect of being attacked at night for wearing a short skirt.

The barbaric cultures of Raqqa, Riyadh, and Kabul now prowl the streets of Cologne, Paris, and Orlando, Florida.

Atheists, previously wedded to the political left, have started to grow sick of the constant Islam apologia. Left-leaning atheists like talk show host Dave Rubin and cult YouTuber Carl Benjamin have realised that the right is a greater ally against this barbaric, dark-age ideology than the left ever will be.

Might have to be permanent? It will be permanent. There is no place for Islam in the West, just as there is no place for human sacrifice in the Christian Church. The former negates the latter, by essence and by definition.

With each and every Orlando, the West moves one step closer to Reconquista 2.0.

4GW in Orlando

Glenn Reynolds contemplates the Orlando shootings and gives a shout out to William S. Lind in USA Today:

In the wake of the Orlando shootings, people are trotting out the usual
post-massacre talking points about gun control, terrorism, etc. But the
solutions aren’t so easy. Gun control is much stricter in Europe, but that hasn’t stopped mass shootings like the ones at Charlie Hebdo’s offices or at the Bataclan concert hall. (It’s also very strict in California, but that didn’t stop the shootings at San Bernardino.) Talking about gun control is mostly a way of avoiding a tough problem.

Donald Trump, meanwhile, was quick to tweet out that this vindicates his positions: “Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don’t want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!” But Trump’s proposal of a temporary moratorium on immigration of Muslims to America wouldn’t have prevented shooter Omar Mateen’s actions. Mateen wasn’t a recent immigrant but a  U.S. citizen born of Afghan parents, and he pledged allegiance to the Islamic State terrorist group, according to a Department of Homeland Security report cited by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.

The thing is, proposals such as gun control are basically peacetime remedies, which don’t apply in time of war. But traditional wartime remedies might not work, either, because this is not a traditional war.

Instead, what we are facing is what William S. Lind calls “fourth-generation warfare.” Or maybe it’s even fifth-generation warfare: We’re not fighting armies. We’re not fighting guerrillas. We’re not even fighting traditional terrorists. Instead, we’re fighting an opponent who turns apparently law-abiding citizens (Mateen was licensed as a security guard and thus had passed background checks) into killers without anyone noticing. They’re not actually “lone wolf” terrorists; they’re more like human drones, attacking distant targets on command without warning.

While I disagree with Reynolds on the root of the problem – the problem is Islam’s physical presence in the West, not merely addressing “the jihadist strain of Islam” – it’s good to see him bringing a more sophisticated modern take on warfare into the public discourse. There is simply no way a conventional military approach, much less a conventional police approach, is going to suffice to address the challenge being posed by the third great wave of Islamic expansion.

It will take time for people to realize that this is an existential crisis for the West, as existential crises are, by their nature, much larger in scope than the average person can readily comprehend.

But, as those who have read the 4GW Handbook know, the answer to 4GW is either a) eliminating the fish by draining the sea, or b) more effective 4GW utilizing a better light infantry. It will be several years before either option will be on the table, but the sooner they enter into the conversation, the better.