I do not want. I WILL.

Mike Cernovich hits another one out of the freaking park.

How to go from “I want” to “I will.”

The first step from going from a day dreamer to a doer is recognizing the self-sabotaging language patterns we use as part of our self-talk.

As with all mindset training, vigilance is crucial. Stop yourself every time you say, “I want.”

When you say to yourself or others, “I want,” pause and reflect in the moment.

Do you want what you say you want?

Perhaps you don’t. I’ve caught myself saying, “I want…,” and upon reflection, realizing I didn’t want that person or thing in my life.

If you desire in your heart what your mind tells you what you want, begin creating a vision of what you want.

Create a clear vision for what you want.

I said on Twitter that the most significant event of 2016 for me was meeting Mike and Milo in Paris. It was pure serendipity; I didn’t really know who Mike was or why he was co-hosting GGinParis with us, but Mike, Shauna, Spacebunny, and I got together for dinner before the event and we really hit it off in a way one seldom does at my age.

I’m middle-aged. I’m reasonably successful, all things considered, and I’m fairly set in my ways. But Mike inspired me and caused me to need to adjust my thinking in a way that hasn’t happened in decades. Somehow, he made me realize that I’m too prone to thinking about things, and planning things, and contemplating things, and not actually DOING things.

I used to only feed on the Dark Side of the Force. I needed negativity to motivate me; I needed to feel the need to vanquish someone, or something, to really get myself in gear. I don’t think it is a coincidence that my best athletic performances have always come against archrivals or in playoff games. But since having the opportunity to sit down and spend some time with Mike a second time, in Spain, I’ve learned how to act without waiting for that motivation, without having a plan in place, and without overthinking the matter.

And I’ve learned that energy and momentum are contagious. Mike has it. I’m more introverted than he is, but I have more energy than most people my age and I’m learning to let it show so that others can be inspired and feed off it the way I am inspired by Mike’s energy.

Mike is right. Mindset is absolutely key; one of the primary factors in most of my successes has been my unshakable confidence in something, whether it is my speed, my strength, my ability to take a shot, or my intelligence. And two of the primary factors in most of my failures has been either laziness – which is a failure of the will – or a lack of willingness to expect excellence from myself or others – which is a failure of confidence.

In the end, it’s not about intelligence or natural gifts, it’s about mindset. Castalia House WILL become the dominant force in science fiction and fantasy. The Castalia Blog WILL become the leading blog in science fiction, fantasy, and wargaming. And Vox Popoli WILL pass 100 million annual pageviews. I know these things will happen because I can already see them happening.

We’re not there yet, but we’re a damn sight closer to them than we were 12 months ago.

The new sheriff

In order to better focus my activities in the coming year, I have relinquished my responsibilities as the manager of the Castalia House blog. If you’d like to see who is going to do a much better job of running it than I did, visit the CH blog to see who has been named the new Blog Editor at Castalia House.

Mark my words. In two years, the Castalia House blog is going to be the best and most popular SF/F and gaming blog. There are few pleasures as satisfying as handing off responsibility to someone who is more capable than you are.

Are you ready for 2016?

The Rabid Puppies are stirring in their kennels beneath the Dark Tower, straining at the chains that bind them. The Vile Faceless Minions are being starved, the better to whet their appetites. The Dread Ilk are gearing up and sharpening their blades. The Ilk are oiling their guns and adding to their ammo stores.

And we’re not alone. Because in 2016, an all-out war on social justice has been declared.

In 2016, battle lines will be drawn. On one side, people of all colours, genders and orientations are rallying around the flag of freedom of speech. On the other, a nasty set of authoritarians are rallying around a flag that identifies as a flag only on Mondays, uses they/them pronouns and will try to get you fired or expelled from school if you forget it.

Let me explain. In 2015, I saw the seeds of a movement begin to sprout. Across the internet, and even in fear-gripped halls on campuses, young people began to stand up and challenge the humourless, divisive, identity-obsessed elites that have taken over our cultural discourse. People of seemingly disparate interests and politics — gamers, pundits, metalheads, comic book and science fiction fans, atheists, Catholics, conservatives, libertarians and even many disaffected liberals — came together to agree on only one thing: art and culture should be left alone….

Had progressives wanted to stem the tide
of cultural libertarianism, the time to do it was a year ago. They could
have edged back, been reasonable and won us all over. But instead they
doubled down. Fine: now they get to lose. Let’s defend culture and free
expression and push these odious halfwits back into their dreary studio
apartments filled with cat-piss and alt rock-records and let them know
that we’ve decided to opt out of the soft bigotry of San Francisco-style
hand-wringing nonsense. We possess a working sense of humour and we’re
going to use it — whether they like it or not.
 

If you take their crybully pronouncements at face value, social justice warriors believe,
with all the fervor of a paranoiac, that they are helpless, fragile
things, buffeted by sinister structural forces they are powerless to
resist. They believe that their opponents possess power that, if used
ruthlessly enough, could eradicate them. What do you say we prove them
right?

Traffic report 2015

The growth in site traffic this year was more than expected, as a surprising number of people initially stopped by to see what was going on with the Hugo Awards in August and then stuck around for the remainder of the year. Last year we saw a single 1.5-million pageview month; this year we had 10 in a row. All of the growth was at VP, as AG was pretty flat due to my sporadic posting there. But as was the case last year, 2015 finished very strong; December was not only up 30 percent over last December, but was the second-most-highly-trafficked month of the year.

In 2015, Vox Popoli had 16,211,875 pageviews and Alpha Game 4,565,094 for a total of 20,776,969 Google pageviews. The blogs are now running at a average rate of 56,923 daily pageviews. And yes, I do find it amusing that the blogs are now seeing considerably more genuine traffic than the “extraordinary amount” a certain SF blogger once lied about having. As for the running annual totals, they are as follows:

2008: 3,496,757
2009: 4,414,801
2010: 4,827,183
2011: 5,969,066
2012: 7,774,074
2013: 13,111,695
2014: 15,693,622
2015: 20,776,969

Thank you all for the part you have played in making that happen. However, there are some more important numbers that merit mention. 2015 ended with 465 Vile Faceless Minions pledging their mindless obedience to the Supreme Dark Lord and preparing for battle in 2016. Expect heavier use this year, VFM, as the SJWs react to our media offensive in a variety of means both fair and foul.

On Twitter, I ended the year with 6,230 followers and 14.628 million impressions for 2015. Not bad, but I can clearly put in a little more effort on that front.

Castalia House grew from 21 books published to 37, including 5 in print and 1 in audiobook. Book sales increased 145 percent and no less than six category bestsellers were published. We also added three editors, an Editor-at-Large, an Audio Editor, and a Blog Editor; see the Castalia blog later today for more details there. Speaking of the Audio Editor, the audiobook for Cuckservative is now available on Audible and Amazon, and is already one of the top 50 Philosophy audiobooks. We expect even faster growth for Castalia in 2016 with the release of upcoming books such as Riding the Red Horse Vol. 2 by Tom Kratman and Vox Day, Iron Chamber of Memory by John C. Wright, Clio and Me by Martin van Creveld, Do Buddhas Dream of Enlightened Sheep by Josh Young, and There Will Be War Vol. XI by Jerry Pournelle, among others.

And yes, one of those others will be A Sea of Skulls.

Thank you for your interest, even if it is no more than morbid
curiosity, thank you for your support, and while 2015 was certainly intriguing, I believe 2016 is going to be absolutely extraordinary.

Do we want to reconcile?

Steve Davidson of Amazing Stories informs us how the Puppies can do so, should we be so inclined.

Want to reconcile?  Here’s what puppies must do.

  1.     stop scamming the system.  If you want to recommend works that you think are worthy of the award, go ahead and do so.  But drop the political agenda (you’re dragons are imaginary) and eliminate the hateful, snarky commentary
  2.     stop attacking the very people who are offering you a bridge
  3.     please learn a little bit about the history of Worldcon and the Hugo Awards
  4.     if you want to be counted as Fans, then be Fans.  Fans who care attend Worldcon, nominate their conscience and attend the business meeting to effect change they think is needed.  They work WITH and within fandom – they do not set themselves up as a cabal that engages in fear and hate.

My response:

  1. Recommending works we thought were worthy was all we did last year. I wrote one (1) single post to that effect. Chaos Horizon even demonstrated mathematically that there was no bloc-voting by the Puppies last year. But PNH and the Tor Cabal are not imaginary. The whisper campaigns and award pimpage of the past are not imaginary. People buying memberships for their underage children so they could bloc-vote for them are not imaginary. SJWs actively pushing a political agenda in science fiction are not imaginary. The rules changes they rammed through in order to defend their turf, exactly as I predicted, are not imaginary. So, no.
  2. No. It’s not a bridge, it’s an invitation to surrender.
  3. We know far more about the history of Worldcon, Fandom, and the Hugo Awards than you want us to know. We know all about Heidi Saha and David Asimov and the Greyland siblings and Kevin Smith, and the Sri Lankan cabana boys, just to name a few, and soon the entire world will know all about what happened to more than a few children at Fandom’s hands. Or to be more precise, what is happening to them. Fandom fosters, defends, and even celebrates a tremendously sick and twisted group of criminal deviants.
  4. We don’t want to be Fans. We don’t want to be anything like you. We don’t want anything to do with you. We are entirely content to be what George Martin dismisses as mere readers, writers, editors, and publishers. And what we intend to do in 2016 is continue to liberate a literary genre from the small collection of creepy left-wing monsters, rape enthusiasts, and social justice warriors who have made it their home for decades.

The caption reads: “Eat your heart out, Isaac Asimov – Heidi has promised to wait until Forry grows up!”

Note that the gentleman in the photograph above, Forrest Ackermann, was honored with a 1939 Retro-Hugo for Best Fanzine in 2014. He was also nominated for Best Fan Writer.

I said in 2013, there can be no reconciliation. Everything I have learned over the last two years has confirmed that. Decent human beings who respect traditional morality don’t reconcile with child abusers and the amoral Fans who enable, celebrate, and associate with them.

So, I vote no to reconciliation. What do you say, Rabid Puppies? What do you say, Dread Ilk? What do you say, Sad Puppies?

Even the moderate leader of Sad Puppies 3, Brad Torgersen, sounds as if he considers the prospect of reconciliation to be a dubious one.

An analysis of the post-Hugo numbers identifies a 2,500-vote block of individuals who seemed to think the best way to annihilate the infamous forces of the Kurgan — Vox Day — was to accept Vox’s challenge to play chicken. Now, I warned everybody that chicken is the Kurgan’s favorite game. But that 2,500-vote block went ahead and played the game anyway, nuking five whole categories, and cheering themselves in the process. It was their finest moment. It was also precisely what Vox Day wanted them to do, because it gives Vox his pretext for further assaults on the Hugos in future years, while also radicalizing and alienating many people who wanted nothing to do with Vox, but who did want to see justice done at the Hugo awards proper.

As I warned Mike Glyer of File 770, I am a patient man. We didn’t fight back in the media last year, but let them take their best shot at calling us bigots, racists, neo-nazis, and so forth. Last year, I did nothing more than post a single list of recommendations.

And now that 2015 has come to an end, it’s our turn.

Who needs seminary?

I know when I’ve got a question concerning some of the trickier aspects of Tertullian or the Summa Theologica, the first person I always turn to is a journalist:

Every journalist in America has been secretly attending seminary, and now understands Christianity better than most Christians do. This is the only conclusion I can draw after months of theology lectures from reporters whose most recent encounter with religious terminology was Hozier’s “Take Me to Church.”

To those of us for whom church isn’t a metaphor for sex, it’s been a frustrating few months. First, the chattering class endlessly assured Christian bakers, restaurant-owners, photographers, and florists that Jesus would be totally down with making same-sex nuptials fabulous (and presumably, with paying the $135,000 fine for those who felt differently).

Then, in the wake of June’s gay “marriage” decision at the Supreme Court, we got an earful about how mean and un-Christian it would be not to attend same-sex “weddings.” (Wouldn’t you know it, we’ve been reading the Bible wrong all these centuries!) Then the Kim-pocalypse struck, and we were treated to smug editorials on how the Kentucky clerk’s faith represents the dark side of Christianity, while those who ignore tertiary topics like—say—God’s design for human sexuality in favor of social justice issues, are the good Christians. (I once was blind, but now I see!)

Sci-fi writers are nearly as bad. The one thing – the ONE thing – they know about Christian theology is John 8:1-10. Of course, apparently they never proceed to verse 11, which states: “go forth and sin no more.”

Immigration destroys culture

It’s fascinating to see that so many people still stubbornly clinging to outmoded concepts like Magic Dirt, Melting Pot, and Propositional Nation when all three ideas have been thoroughly rendered null and void by the ongoing mass movement of peoples and the dyscivic behavior of the invaders:

An immigrant group based in Bern has called for the emblematic white cross to be removed from the Swiss national flag because as a Christian symbol it “no longer corresponds to today’s multicultural Switzerland.”

Ivica Petrusic, the vice president of Second@s Plus, a lobbying group that represents mostly Muslim second-generation foreigners in Switzerland (who colloquially are known as secondos) says the group will launch a nationwide campaign in October to ask Swiss citizens to consider adopting a flag that is less offensive to Muslim immigrants.

In a September 18 interview with the Swiss newspaper Aargauer Zeitung, Petrusic said the cross has a Christian background and while the Christian roots of Switzerland should be respected, “it is necessary to separate church and state” because “Switzerland today has a great religious and cultural diversity. One has to ask if the State wants to continue building up a symbol in which many people no longer believe.”

In the interview, Petrusic said Switzerland needs new symbols with which everyone, including non-Christians, can identify. As an alternative to the current Swiss flag, Petrusic proposed the former flag of the Helvetic Republic (see image here) which was officially introduced in 1799 and consisted of green, red and yellow colors. “Those colors are similar to the current flags of Bolivia and Ghana and would represent a more progressive and open-minded Switzerland,” Petrusic said.

The proposal to change the Swiss flag has been met with outrage across the political spectrum and is sure to fuel anti-immigrant sentiments in Switzerland.

I tend to doubt this unexpected public statement by the senior commander of the Swiss Armed Forces is entirely unrelated to those sentiments.

Swiss army chief André Blattmann warned, in a Swiss newspaper article on Sunday, the risks of social unrest in Europe are soaring. Recalling the experience of 1939/1945, Blattman fears the increasing aggression in public discourse is an explosively hazardous situation, and advises the Swiss people to arm themselves and warns that the basis for Swiss prosperity is “being called into question.”

When even military commanders are telling the people to gun up, war is on the way.

2015 Book of the Year

Fourmilab selected SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police as the Book of the Year for 2015:

Nonfiction:
    Winner:
        SJWs Always Lie by Vox Day

    Runners up:
        Concrete Planet by Robert Courland
        What If? by Randall Munroe
        GPS Declassified by Richard D. Easton and Eric F. Frazier
        Rocket Ranch by Jonathan H. Ward

It has been very gratifying to see how well SJWAL has been received across the political spectrum. SJWs are not merely dangerous to those of us on the Alt-Right, they are a very real problem for conservatives and liberals and those who are entirely apolitical as well.

In other news, Castalia House’s new Audio Editor is on a roll.  The audiobook for Cuckservative is now available on Audible for $19.95. I believe it is also available to Audible members for free in some capacity, although I’m not familiar with the system.

Written by: Vox Day, John Red Eagle
Narrated by: Thomas Landon
Length: 5 hrs and 4 mins

The audiobook for A History of Strategy by Martin van Creveld is also complete and will be available soon.

Science SJWs always lie

Orac Knows is always looking for a chance to take a shot at me because I spank him every time he tries to attack  my vaccine skepticism or whatever. He’s a typical scientist, educated, but not very smart, and totally unable to grasp the fact that his science degree doesn’t make him a match for an opponent with a significant advantage in intelligence.

He tried to leap on the fact that, according to him, the study cited by the New York Times in the story I linked to yesterday was flawed, and thereby claim that I don’t know what I am talking about.

There was just one little problem with that. I never read the study. I never pretended to read the study. I neither linked to nor cited the study.

From @oracknows: Quoth Vox Day: Antivaxers are more educated. Quoth the study Vox cites: Not exactly…

Vox Day @voxday 
You’re dishonest, Orac. More educated does not mean more intelligent. Look at us. You have more education. I’m smarter.

Orac ‏@oracknows
Of course, it amuses me that someone who is so “smart” didn’t seem to understand what the study he touts actually says. 🙂

Vox Day @voxday
You prove my point. I never read any study. I merely linked to the New York Times. You’re not amused, you’re dishonest.

Orac ‏@oracknows
In other words, to borrow a phrase from @WilliamShatner, I’m laughing at the superior intellect.

Vox Day @voxday 
My intellect is observably superior to yours. And you’re not laughing. You’re posturing.

Orac ‏@oracknows
Nope. I’m mocking you for being so lazy and anxious to believe the NYT version that you didn’t bother to check!

Vox Day @voxday
Why would I check it? I don’t check most news sources I link. The only
person leaping at anything is you. Why attack me, not NYT?

Vox Day ‏@voxday
And you also claimed I cited the study. I didn’t. You even knew I didn’t. You lied. See, YOU, I would check. Because you lie.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
Proof @oracknows lied:

1. “Quoth the study Vox cites”
2. “it’s obvious that he just read the news…but didn’t actually look up the paper”

Notice how as soon as he’s busted on his two bait-and-switches – he tries to substitute “more intelligent” for “more educated” and “Vox is stupid because he got it wrong” for “I think the New York Times got it wrong”, he tries to back up and say that he’s just mocking me for excessive credulity in citing the New York Times.

You know, the leading American liberal news standard. Someone had better alert Wikipedia! The New York Times is no longer a reliable source!

This is like me claiming someone doesn’t understand economics because they cited GDP or inflation figures reported in the Wall Street Journal. It’s just ludicrously dishonest. But then, Orac isn’t actually interested in correcting the science or he would have focused on the New York Times and not me. He’s just another SJW with such short-term time preferences that he’s willing to throw his own reputation as well as the reputation of a liberal newspaper and a science reporter under the bus just to take an ill-advised shot at me.

The funny thing is that Spacebunny can land a killshot 100x more effective than all the SJWs desperately flailing about, and she can do it with considerably less effort.

UberFacts @UberFacts
A study found that astronauts had more difficulty doing things that required spacial reasoning and motor skills after 6 months in space.

Space Bunny ‏@Spacebunnyday
@voxday would come back a vegetable…..

As in Europe, so in America

Patrick Buchanan sees a similar future to the one John Red Eagle and I predicted in Cuckservative: How “Conservatives” Betrayed America:

What was predicted, 14 years ago, has come to pass.

Migrants into Germany from the Middle and Near East reached 1 million in 2015. EU bribes to the Turks to keep Muslim migrants from crossing over to the Greek islands, thence into the Balkans and Central Europe, are unlikely to stop the flood.

My prediction that European “patriots will recapture control of their national destinies,” looks even more probable today.

Prime Minister David Cameron, who almost lost a referendum on Scottish secession, is demanding a return of British sovereignty from the EU sufficient to satisfy his countrymen, who have been promised a vote on whether to abandon the European Union altogether.

Marine Le Pen’s anti-EU National Front ran first in the first round of the 2015 French elections. Many Europeans believe she will make it into the final round of the next presidential election in 2017.

Anti-immigrant, right-wing parties are making strides all across Europe, as the EU is bedeviled by a host of crises.

Europe’s open borders that facilitate free trade also assure freedom of travel to homegrown terrorists.

Mass migration into the EU is causing member nations to put up checkpoints and close borders. The Schengen Agreement on the free movement of goods and people is being ignored or openly violated.

The economic and cultural clash between a rich northern Europe and a less affluent south — Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal — manifest in the bad blood between Athens and Berlin, endures.

Northern Europeans grow weary of repeated bailouts of a south that chafes at constant northern demands for greater austerity.

Then there is the surge of sub-nationalism, as in Scotland, Catalonia, Flanders, and Veneto, where peoples seek to disconnect from distant capitals that no longer speak for them, and reconnect with languages, traditions and cultures that give more meaning to their lives than the economics-uber-alles ideology of Frau Angela Merkel.

Moreover, the migrants entering Europe, predominantly Islamic and Third World, are not assimilating as did the European and largely Christian immigrants to America of a century ago.

The enclaves of Asians in Britain, Africans and Arabs around Paris, and Turks in and around Berlin seem to be British, French and German in name only. And some of their children are now heeding the call to jihad against the Crusaders invading Muslim lands.

The movement toward deeper European integration appears to have halted, and gone into reverse, as the EU seems to be unraveling along ideological, national, tribal and historic lines.

If these trends continue, and they seem to have accelerated in 2015, the idea of a United States of Europe dies, and with it the EU.

And this raises a question about the most successful economic and political union in history – the USA.

How does an increasingly multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual, multicultural United States avoid the fate to which Europe appears to be headed, when there is no identifiable racial or ethnic majority here in 2042?

The USA cannot survive in its current form because an idea is not a nation.