For grognards only

I have to say, I, for one, am really enjoying what Task Force Wargames has been doing over at Castalia. Reading Alex’s post on the old Avalon Hill game, Air Assault on Crete, is the first time I have ever wanted to play that game. The unusual zone control rules sound fascinating, and frankly, superior to the norm.

This game is hard. Very hard. Part of why it is hard is because it is rules heavy even for a wargame, but it is doubly so because it is so different from most war games I’ve played. This difficulty is a bit asymmetrical, as many of the special rules apply only to the German player (such as conveys, paratrooper drift and air power) but you’ll find in the options of the advanced game plenty of fiddly bits to keep the Allied player scratching their head and checking the rulebook. You also can’t bring with you any mechanical assumptions you may have based on other similar wargames because so many of those assumptions would be wrong in the case of Air Assault on Crete.

In several games, fog of war rules may be limited or optional, but I can’t imagine the Allies having a chance in this without the facedown setup. The Germans have to land, take and hold at least one of the three air bases at Maleme, Heraklion and Retimo. In the basic game, the Allies win by preventing this (an almost impossible task). In the advanced game, the Allied player wins by putting up a decent fight and successfully evacuating a sizable portion of their forces. The fog of war effect is continuous throughout the game, in that any Allied units that are not adjacent to German forces or actively being targeted by German bombardment are kept face down. This allows the Allied player to mask his strength and shuffle non-combat units to evac points, but can sometimes be a bit of a hassle, as one will constantly be checking their piles for AA units and defensive artillery anytime anything happens.

This sort of thing isn’t for everyone, or even very many gamers, let alone normal readers, but it is illustrate of the depth to which we intend the Castalia posts to increasingly go. If Wargame Wednesdays aren’t your cup of tea, one of the other days will be. And the newly discovered HP Lovecraft letter that Jeffro posted which mentions A. Merritt’s work is intriguing for any fan of the writer.

In barely tangential news, I am having a great time reading through the Domains of War rules that I acquired as part of the Sinister Stone of Sakkara kickstarter that I backed last year. If they’d been around when I was in junior high, I probably would have played a lot more RPGs. Forget role-playing as an adventurer wandering through caves and dungeons, it’s a lot more interesting to role-play military campaigns and battles.

Standing by the faith

Wheaton College is showing some spine in insisting that its Christian professors actually be Christian in a theologically meaningful sense:

Wheaton College can confirm reports that on January 4, 2016, per College policies and procedures, Provost Stanton Jones delivered to President Philip Ryken and to Dr. Larycia Hawkins a Notice of Recommendation to Initiate Termination-for-Cause Proceedings regarding Dr. Hawkins.

The Notice is not a termination; rather, it begins Wheaton College’s established process for employment actions pertaining to tenured faculty members.

This Notice follows the impasse reached by the parties. Following Dr. Hawkins’ written response on December 17 to questions regarding her theological convictions, the College requested further theological discussion and clarification. However, as posted previously, Dr. Hawkins declined to participate in further dialogue about the theological implications of her public statements and her December 17 response.

This is the woman who claimed that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, which appears “to be in conflict with the College’s Statement of Faith.”

And it is in conflict. Christians don’t worship the same God as Muslims, which should be obvious since Christians consider Jesus Christ to be divine and part of the Godhead, whereas Muslims consider Jesus Christ to have been nothing more than a mortal prophet and a lesser one at that.

Any time you hear that Jews, Muslims, and Christians all worship the same God, you know that you’re hearing little more than fatuous unitarianism.

How can I help?

That is the question we should be asking ourselves regularly, advises Mike Cernovich:

Luck rules our lives, although we can increase our odds of winning – of getting lucky – by taking more spins of the wheel. Thus you must stay busy.

Your life is the sum total of your activities and the people in your life. Be useful to other people. Find ways to meet market demands. Be good to your friends. When is the last time you emailed a friend to say, “How can I help you?”

People are doing poorly at being useful as they believe simply being around a person adds value to their lives. Yet many people are vampires.

Too many people are out for themselves, trying to extract as much value from others as they can.

That’s one way to live, but it doesn’t work for me.

I find ways to be useful to other people, and it works for me.

Instead of wondering why people don’t reach out to you or old friends fall away, why not stop working angles on people, being a manipulator, and simply saying, “Is there anything I can do for you?”

Too many of us practice a warped secular churchianity, where we congratulate ourselves for donating a modicum of money here and there to savages we don’t know in lieu of helping our friends and allies.

But you’re not a better person for helping the stranger and ignoring your neighbor. You’re a worse person, you’re a performance artist. As Jesus himself said, even the tax collectors love those who love them and even the pagans greet their own people.

Now what does it say about you if your own behavior doesn’t even rise to their level?

Just as only the strong can turn the other cheek, only those who help their own first can help others.

This is not a criticism; the readers of Vox Popoli are well-known across the Internet for their strength of support. You not only support me, but you support my allies and you support each other. But it is a reminder, to me, if no one else, that instead of waiting for others to ask if they need our help, we should proactively go to our friends and ask if there is anything we can do.

In that vein, I know there are a number of people here who would very much like to attend the Dev Game course, but cannot afford to do so. Perhaps you lost your job. Perhaps your kids need braces. Perhaps you’re a young man who probably shouldn’t be reading here in the first place, but wants to get into game development.

So, in the interest of following Mike’s lead, I’d like to offer seven free course passes to readers who would have signed up for Dev Game if they’d had the ability to do so. Write me an email today with DG in the subject and a one-paragraph description of what you’d like to do in the game industry; I will select the seven I believe will most benefit from the course and send them registration links.

And be sure you can actually attend on Saturdays before emailing me.

UPDATE: A donor, who wishes to remain anonymous, has made 10 additional seats available for those who cannot afford it. So, if you would like to utilize one of those seats, let me know.

Metaphor and harbinger

No doubt the Swedish family of the 7-year-old girl murdered by an immigrant are pleased to know that although they are burying their little girl, at least no one will be able to call them racist:

A seven year old girl was stabbed to death in an apartment in Upplands-Bro in northern Stockholm on 25 July this year by a 36 year old man, Daniel Gebru. Ten months earlier Gebru arrived as a welfare of migrant from Eritrea to Sweden…. Gebru has not been able to give any concrete reasons for why he cut the throat of the seven-year girl in the bathroom of her home. He had previously been living in the apartment.

Sooner or later, reality always punishes insanity. Immigration is societal suicide. At this point, it seems the only thing that will save Sweden is a) a new Northern Crusade or b) the blood eagle.

Sic semper cuculis.

Dev Game registrations

All right, I finally got the Dev Game emails sent out with the registration links. If you signed up but did not receive an email tonight, please email me right away and I will send it to you.

You don’t need anything except a mike setup and perhaps something with which to take notes.

The small-ship navy

In USA TODAY. Now, I wonder where Instapundit might have come across this bit of discussion on reshaping the military?

When it comes to the Navy, we can have a big fleet of small ships, or
a small fleet of big ships.  For quite a while now, we’ve gone with the
big ships, but some people are arguing that that’s a mistake.

One of those is Commander Phillip E. Pournelle, U.S. Navy, who recently wrote in the Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute that
“In an age of precision-strike weapon proliferation, a big-ship navy
equals a brittle fleet. What’s needed is a revamped force structure
based on smaller surface combatants.”

He makes some excellent points. Currently, the U.S. Navy dominates the seas. A U.S. Navy Carrier Battle Group can project power
in a way no other nation’s navy can approach, essentially placing a
large airbase within striking range of pretty much any place on the
planet worth striking. Of course, the problem with this is that
aircraft carriers aren’t just powerful. They’re also big, expensive and
vulnerable. (The non-carrier part of a Carrier Battle Group is basically there to protect the carrier from submarines and missiles).

However, the fact is that regardless of how the USN reconfigures, it can’t expect to dominate the coastlines like it did in the heyday of the aircraft carrier. Great Britain managed the transition from the age of the ship-of-the-line to the age of the battleship without losing its dominance of the high seas, but there is no guarantee that the USA will be able to do so.

In fact, in light of the demographic changes and consequential decline in national capabilities, I expect that China will surpass the USA as the leading naval power before the 22nd century.

“We have lost the city”

It’s hard to feel too sorry for the lutefisk-eating surrender monkeys of Norway:

Grønland is only two subway stops from the Parliament, and one from the Central Station, fairly close to the government offices that were bombed by Breivik.

It looks like Karachi, Basra, and Mogadishu all rolled into one. People sell drugs openly just next to the Grønland subway station.

It’s not Norway or Europe anymore, except when there is welfare money to be collected. The police have largely given up. Early in 2010 Aftenposten stated that there are sharia patrols in this area, and gay couples are assaulted and chased away. “Immigrant Fatima Tetouani says that ‘Grønland is more Muslim than Morocco.’”

Readers should remember that Aftenposten, which is the largest newspaper in the Oslo region, is normally pro-Islamic and very Multicultural.

Sturla Nøstvik (36) did not suspect any danger when the barrel of a pistol was smashed into his forehead. That was the beginning of fifty minutes of hell as a hostage of the robbers.

The women are being raped at night in Oslo, and the men are robbed more than ever.

In just the past ten years more than 4,000 people have been robbed in the town center and the area of the Grønland police station [an immigrant ghetto]. Most of them are young men. Sturla Nøstvik is robbery-victim 351 from Grønland just from this year, the same period in which around fifty assault-rapes have been reported in Oslo. The robbers play on fear, violence, and severe threats that leave a mark on the victims. Police superintendent Inge Sundeng in Grønland describes them as the “somewhat-forgotten victims”.

The police visited Sturla Nøstvik in the emergency room after the robbery. They told Nøstvik that a gang of robbers had committed many similar robberies in Grünerløkka and surrounding areas in thee past weeks. They told him that everybody should have the right to feel safe, but that they had no way of halting the robberies. “We have lost the city,” they said…

It’s a good thing they burned dead Vikings rather than bury them. Because if they had graves, they’d certainly be spinning in them at the sight of their descendants meekly accepting conquest without any resistance, out of nothing more than fear of being called racist or jailed by their treasonous leaders.

So you’ve lost the city. Big deal. Go take it back, or lose the rest of the country.

To H or not to H

There is some doubt over whether North Korea’s H-bomb test was successful or not:

North Korea dictator Kim Jong Un vowed to celebrate the New Year with ‘the thrilling sound of our first hydrogen bomb’ when he signed to order for today’s nuclear blast.

The hermit state claimed it had detonated a ‘successful’ hydrogen bomb this morning, triggering a 5.1-magnitude earthquake and propelling Kim on a new collision course with world powers.

But experts have been quick to cast doubt on the claims, saying the size of the explosion and resulting earthquake was far too small to have come a failed H-bomb and was likely disguised to appear like one.

I fail to see why it matters all that much either way. North Korea clearly has acquired what it wants, which is the ability to deter any U.S. aggression against it. In light of the numerous U.S. attacks on countries everywhere from Serbia to Syria, it would be very strange if governments around the world did not make a priority of acquiring similar nuclear deterrence.

SJWs, exposed

The SJW calling himself Hawk S. Rabidus made a risibly false claim.

Nobody else is organizing or manipulating things on Goodreads (or the Hugos) using concerted action. There is no cabal.

There most certainly is, as in both cases, the emergent behavior of the various individuals who share an interest in pushing social justice is observably manifest. In the case of the Hugos, the editors at Tor Books have been engaging in concerted action for decades. They have, by their own admission, decided when new awards will be created, when they will win those awards, and when they will step back and permit others to win them. In the case of Goodreads, it is a group of petty SJWs and SJW librarians who have collectively sought to lower the ratings of right wing authors. Thanks to Sean O’Hara, we were able to put together the list of all 100 or so, including moderators like rivka, and librarians like banillah, Bryan Young, davidofterra, and Getty Hesse.

 SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police
by Vox Day, Milo Yiannopoulos (Foreword)
Getty Hesse’s review
Jan 04, 16

did not like it

I’m putting this review up because the book desperately needs a lower rating. One does not need to read this book. The very blurb is resplendent with contradictions.

SJWs subject the world to “their intolerant thought and speech policing,” and yet the VERY NEXT SENTENCE speaks of “the SJW agenda of diversity, tolerance, inclusiveness, and equality.” Tolerance cannot be intolerant. Vox Day is saying here that something is not itself. And he doesn’t even suggest that their “agenda” is something else masquerading as “diversity,tolerance, inclusiveness, and equality,” oh no, rather these things contradict “both science and observable reality.” I’m not even going to bother to explain why that statement is incredibly idiotic. Anyone with half a brain cell should be able to figure it out.

And, for the record, Vox Day is not “the most hated man in science fiction.” He’s the most laughed at.

If SJWs could do logic, they wouldn’t be SJWs. Forgive the digression, but Getty Hesse’s pseudo-dialectic makes my teeth itch. It’s true that X cannot be Not X, but Y most certainly can be. In much the same way Tom Brady is not the New England Patriots playbook, SJWs are not the professed SJW agenda. As usual, both Vox’s First Law and the First Law of SJW can be seen here.

What is interesting about Goodreads is that it provides an excellent way of publicly identifying where people stand on the socio-political spectrum. Aside from the amusement that this latest showdown has provided, it has sparked some very interesting discussions in our tech circle, including some things we’re going to discuss in our next Brainstorm, where we will talk about the planned fork of Wikipedia and the shape of its eventual replacement.

More importantly, this has finally allowed me to answer the core question with which I have been wrestling: do we create something that is a right-wing alternative to Wikipedia or do we shoot to replace it entirely with something better that the left can be safely permitted to use without converging it like they always do?

Speaking of things that provoke laughter, Rolf Nelson received an email from The Goodreads Team explaining why they would not be removing an obviously fake review in which it was apparent that the reviewer could not possibly have read the book.

Goodreads policy allows users to rate a book as soon as it is listed on the site. We do not dictate on what basis Goodreads members form their personal opinions about a book, so we have no rules about reading the full text of a book before rating and reviewing it. We recognize that not everyone will agree with this policy, but it is one that has worked well for the Goodreads community over time.

Users are entitled to express their honest opinions about the book,
even if others feel them to be misguided or wrong. We don’t evaluate a
reader’s opinions based on how, when, or why they made a judgement about
the work that they read. Given the subjective nature of reviews, it’s
hard to designate one review as “wrong” and another “right.” Even if we
could, it would be impractical to manually verify the authenticity of
every statement made in a Goodreads review, and we have to be consistent
in how we apply our policies.  

That would explain why they were able to ban me in good conscience: they have no need to be consistent about how they apply their unviolated non-policies.

But we shouldn’t be surprised that Goodreads’ policy permits the review of books one hasn’t read, as it even permits the review of books that don’t exist. Two Goodreads librarians have one-starred a book that I supposedly wrote for Ben Bella that was never signed to a contract, that I never wrote, and Ben Bella never published. It’s nice that ignoring reality has worked well for the Goodreads community over time, but history is quite clear on the way that reality tends to impose itself in the end.

One more tangent, if you don’t mind. Ben Bella graciously returned to me the audiobook rights to The Irrational Atheist and we expect it to be available on Audible from Castalia House sometime in the February-March timeframe.

Viktor Orban was right

What a pity that the British didn’t come around as quickly when they were warned by Enoch Powell:

Like most members of Hungary’s liberal intellectual elite, George Konrad, a distinguished novelist, loathes his country’s stridently illiberal prime minister, Viktor Orban.

“He is not a good democrat and I don’t believe he is a good person,” said Mr. Konrad, a veteran of communist-era struggles against dictatorship.

All the same, he thinks Mr. Orban, the self-declared scourge of mainstream elites across Europe, was right and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany was wrong about how to respond to the chaotic flood of migrants seeking refuge from war and poverty — perhaps Europe’s most serious crisis since World War II.

“It hurts to admit it, but on this point Orban was right,” Mr. Konrad, 82, said, lamenting that in the absence of a joint European effort to control the flow, Hungary was wise to seal its borders and sound the alarm over the perils of allowing hundreds of thousands of migrants, mostly Muslims, to enter Europe willy-nilly.

Quietly, and often with similar misgivings, a growing number of people in Hungary and beyond are wondering whether, despite his shrill and often bigoted message, Mr. Orban had a clearer view of the scale of the migration crisis and its potential hazards than technocrats in Brussels and leaders in Berlin and other European capitals….

In a recent interview with European newspapers, Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, the body that presides over European Union summit meetings, described Ms. Merkel’s welcoming approach to migrants as “dangerous”
and endorsed the view long promoted by Mr. Orban — that most of the
asylum seekers entering Europe were not Syrians fleeing war but economic
migrants seeking jobs.

If Europeans are forced to choose between Muslims and nationalists, they will choose nationalists. If they are forced to choose between Muslims and fascists, they will choose fascists. And if they are forced to choose between Muslims and neo-nazis, they will choose neo-nazis.

The secular elites who have welcomed this invasion should rethink their attempt to cling to power and manage the situation they themselves created. They are the problem, not the solution. And all that trying to prevent those who warned them of the consequences of their actions from addressing the situation will accomplish is ensure that more extreme measures are taken.

Very nearly everyone with whom I have spoken is furiously angry. The situation is extremely unstable, and I suspect there will be more than a few newsworthy events in 2016. The mass sexual assault at the Cologne train station is merely the first of many to come.

“There is a shift to the extreme right because the left, or what is left
of the left, and the moderate center right were offering answers that
were wrong,” said Mr. Gyarmati, who heads the International Center for
Democratic Transition, a group that promotes democracy. “Now we are in a
situation where the answers are unpleasant to say the least.”

Sooner or later, reality always imposes itself, no matter how many people insist that 2+2 equals 37.