It has come to my attention that the World Fantasy Convention has decided to replace the bust of H. P. Lovecraft that constitutes the World Fantasy Award with some other figure. Evidently this move was meant to placate the shrill whining of a handful of social justice warriors who believe that a “vicious racist” like Lovecraft has no business being honoured by such an award. (Let it pass that analogous accusations could be made about Bram Stoker and John W. Campbell, Jr., who also have awards named after them. These figures do not seem to elicit the outrage of the SJWs.) Accordingly, I have returned my two World Fantasy Awards to the co-chairman of the WFC board, David G. Hartwell. Here is my letter to him: Mr. David G. Hartwell Tor Books 175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010
Dear Mr. Hartwell:
I was deeply disappointed with the decision of the World Fantasy Convention to discard the bust of H. P. Lovecraft as the emblem of the World Fantasy Award. The decision seems to me a craven yielding to the worst sort of political correctness and an explicit acceptance of the crude, ignorant, and tendentious slanders against Lovecraft propagated by a small but noisy band of agitators.
I feel I have no alternative but to return my two World Fantasy Awards, as they now strike me as irremediably tainted. Please find them enclosed. You can dispose of them as you see fit.
Please make sure that I am not nominated for any future World Fantasy Award. I will not accept the award if it is bestowed upon me.
I will never attend another World Fantasy Convention as long as I live. And I will do everything in my power to urge a boycott of the World Fantasy Convention among my many friends and colleagues.
Yours, S. T. Joshi
And that is all I will have to say on this ridiculous matter. If anyone feels that Lovecraft’s perennially ascending celebrity, reputation, and influence will suffer the slightest diminution as a result of this silly kerfuffle, they are very much mistaken.
No respect. No contact. No validation. No mercy. No quarter. Those who have read SJWAL have seen that their very worst vituperation is best taken as praise, and their nominal praise is worth less than nothing. I received the following email this morning:
I just got your book in the mail today and am into the prologue and I had to put it down to email you to just plain thank you for writing it. I wish I could hear my enemies sing my praises the way your enemies sing yours.
A man is defined by his enemies as well as by his friends. S.T. Joshi, although a Man of the Left, has done very well indeed to refuse to accept the accolades of the SJWs. And note that, once more, it is TOR BOOKS that is right at the heart of the SJW infestation in science fiction and fantasy.
We find that our democratic theories and forms of government were fashioned by but one of the many races and peoples which have come within their practical operation, and that that race, the so-called Anglo-Saxon, developed them out of its own insular experience unhampered by inroads of alien stock. When once thus established in England and further developed in America we find that other races and peoples, accustomed to despotism and even savagery, and wholly unused to self-government, have been thrust into the delicate fabric. Like a practical people as we pride ourselves, we have begun actually to despotize our institutions in order to control these dissident elements, though still optimistically holding that we retain the original democracy.
Of course, economist John R. Commons was far from the first to observe the obvious:
“Another cause of revolution is difference of races which do not at once acquire a common spirit; for a state is not the growth of a day, any more than it grows out of a multitude brought together by accident. Hence the reception of strangers in colonies, either at the time of their foundation or afterwards, has generally produced revolution; for example, the Achaeans who joined the Troezenians in the foundation of Sybaris, becoming later the more numerous, expelled them; hence the curse fell upon Sybaris. At Thurii the Sybarites quarrelled with their fellow-colonists; thinking that the land belonged to them, they wanted too much of it and were driven out. At Byzantium the new colonists were detected in a conspiracy, and were expelled by force of arms; the people of Antissa, who had received the Chian exiles, fought with them, and drove them out; and the Zancleans, after having received the Samians, were driven by them out of their own city. The citizens of Apollonia on the Euxine, after the introduction of a fresh body of colonists, had a revolution; the Syracusans, after the expulsion of their tyrants, having admitted strangers and mercenaries to the rights of citizenship, quarrelled and came to blows; the people of Amphipolis, having received Chalcidian colonists, were nearly all expelled by them.”
And yes, that would be Aristotle, from the Politics
Written by the author of the landmark Maneuver Warfare Handbook and an active-duty USMC officer with experience in Iraq, 4th Generation Warfare Handbook is the doctrine for a new generation of war. Over the last 40 years, the world has gradually entered into a post-Clausewitzian state where the wars are undeclared, the battlefields can be anywhere, the uniforms are optional, and the combatants as well as the targets are often “civilian”. Conventional militaries have repeatedly attempted to utilize technology to meet the new challenges posed, but even the most advanced technology has provided little more than meaningless short-term victories rendered futile in months, if not weeks.
This inability of Western governments and militaries to come to terms with the changing nature of modern warfare has led to failed interventions, failed occupations, and now even failed states everywhere from Eastern Europe to Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. And with the recent mass movement of peoples around the world, 4th Generation Warfare can be safely expected to appear in Western Europe and the United States before long.
Drawing on their decades of experience with military history and military action, the authors have distilled 4GW theory into a short, concise, easily accessible handbook that provides the soldier, the military analyst, and the civilian observer with a guide to understanding and responding to the changing realities of this challenging new form of war.
4th Generation Warfare Handbook is now available on Amazon for $6.99. If you preordered, you are eligible for a special Brainstorm event featuring the authors. Please send me an email with PREORDER in the subject if you wish to attend; the event has not yet been scheduled.
In an interesting juxtaposition, last night I finished putting the accepted submissions to There Will Be War Vol X in order. What was interesting was that the other non-fiction submissions tended to underline the importance of this handbook, as they both a) appealed to the use of new technology or a combination of 2nd and 3rd Generation tactics, and, b) indicated the need for the very sort of 4GW counterforce that Lind and LtCol Thiele describe in detail in 4th Generation Warfare Handbook. If you’re interested in reading more about 4GW theory, you’ll definitely want to read On War, which is now available on Kindle Unlimited, in which you can see how Lind gradually refined his thinking on the subject.
It will be interesting to see if this handbook eventually becomes officially adopted in the way its predecessor did in the 1980s. In any event, a belated Happy Birthday, Marines. Hope you like your new doctrine!
The SJWs are not bad people. Not at first. Even Lucifer was not totally wretched and evil at first.
That is the important thing to remember.
They are good people with a bad theory who are addicted, like a cocaine addict, to the rush of ego-gratification that comes from self-righteousness.
The Morlocks once were human, once dwelt on the surface, under the sun, and once ate wholesome meats, and did not feast on human flesh. It takes several steps pf evolution to go from being a good man to being a subhuman troglodyte cannibal. Not all have taken all the steps
It is a three stage trap into which they fall, and at each stage, for the best of reasons.
The first stage is an appeal to their sense of fairplay not to make a decision until all the facts are in, not to condemn the wicked until they are proved wicked, and to question everything, to question authority.
But this first stage trap closes when their sense of fairplay comes to the conclusion that no authority, not the authority of morality, not the authority of reason, not the authority of logic, can sit in judgment on any matter. They become so open minded that their brains fall out. They cease to reason in the name of fairplay.
Call this the Appeal to Equality. If all men are equal, no man’s opinion is better than any others’, and so there is no such thing as a right man and the wrong man, a right answer and a wrong answer, a civilized culture or barbaric one. The Appeal to Equality says that to think one answer correct and the other wrong, one behavior a vice and another a virtue, is a hasty judgment, even bigotry.
Reasoning becomes a hate crime.
Once they cease to reason, that is, cease to look at facts for answers, they are thrown back on their emotions and nothing else for a standard of judgment by which to organized their lives, and to build their model of the universe.
At this point, have lost the civilized gift of reason, they are barbarians.
As I said in SJWAL, it was not my purpose to explain the existence of SJWs or attempt to understand them in any way, but merely to describe and anticipate their actions. John Wright has proceeded with the obvious next steps in the process, which is to understand how this intellectual descent of Man takes place, and as always, his perspective is both informative and entertaining.
The New York Times missed the real story when it wrote about a nonexistent decline in ebook sales. Unsurprisingly, Fortune manages to do rather better in observing that the decline is limited to the traditional publishers, who are losing out to their smaller rivals:
A recent piece in the New York Times about a decline in e-book sales had more than a whiff of anti-digital Schadenfreude about it. The story, which was based on sales figures from the Association of American Publishers, implied that much of the hype around e-books had evaporated — with sales falling by 10% in the first half of this year — while good old printed books were doing better than everyone expected.
This was celebrated by many as evidence that e-books aren’t all they are cracked up to be, and that consumers are swinging back to printed books. But is that an accurate reflection of what’s actually taking place in the book-publishing or book-buying market? Not really, as it turns out.
When I first saw the story, I thought it raised two important questions, neither of which was really answered conclusively in the piece (although the second was hinted at). Namely: 1) Are e-book sales as a whole dropping, or just the sales of the publishers who are members of the AAP? And 2) Isn’t a drop in sales just a natural outcome of the publishers’ move to keep e-book prices high?
Data from the site Author Earnings, which tracks a broad spectrum of information related to digital publishing, suggests that both of those things are true. In other words, a decline in market share on the part of established publishers is being taken as evidence of a drop in e-book sales overall, and at least some of the falloff in market share that publishers have seen is likely the result of high e-book prices.
What’s really happening is that overall sales are remaining close to flat, but the mainstream publishers are rapidly losing out to small and independent publishers. I jazzed up Hugh Howey’s Author Earnings report to make it more obvious what has been happening over the last 15 months, which just happens to coincide with the birth of Castalia House.
In other words, the share of ebook sales that belong to the major publishers have plunged from 39 percent down 26 percent due to the rise in ebooks published by Independents and Amazon itself. This is due to several factors, ranging from increasingly mediocre authors being signed by the editorial staffs to foolish pricing decisions by the business people.
I suspect the decline in the self-published category was initially due to Amazon skimming off the best of them, followed by the change in Kindle Unlimited rules that deter the publication of very short ebooks. The KU change probably also explains why Indie growth has leveled off since May.
To put it into more personal terms, and to explain why Tor will continue to have John Scalzi running himself ragged on non-stop book tours until his contract is eventually canceled prior to its completion, consider the following comparison between several recently published books. All the numbers were current as of 6:30 AM EST.
END OF ALL THINGS 190 reviews Publisher: Tor (August 13, 2015) Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #342,147 Paid in Kindle Store
Paperback Publisher: Tor Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #218,704 in Books
Hardcover: 384 pages Publisher: Tor Books; 1st Ed edition (August 11, 2015) Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,935 in Books
LOCK IN 497 reviews Publisher: Tor Books (August 26, 2014) Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #24,214 Paid in Kindle Store
Mass Market Paperback: 336 pages Publisher: Tor Science Fiction (August 4, 2015) Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #24,372 in Books
Hardcover: 336 pages Publisher: Tor Books; 1 edition (August 26, 2014) Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #61,079 in Books
SJWS ALWAYS LIE 301 reviews Publisher: Castalia House (August 25, 2015) Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,359 Paid in Kindle Store
Paperback: 236 pages Publisher: Castalia House Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #11,250 in Books
GORILLA MINDSET 181 reviews Publication Date: June 27, 2015 Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,674 Paid in Kindle Store
Paperback: 212 pages Publisher: CreateSpace (June 28, 2015) Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,792 in Books
This is interesting because what it tells us is that the only people interested in reading Scalzi’s latest are his longtime fans who are completing the series. They’re buying the hardcover to round out their collections, but the casual readers aren’t even bothering to read it. Lock In, on the other hand has shown more appeal to casual readers, but it’s not particularly popular, especially for one of Tor’s top authors. Scalzi is far from a failure; he’s #54 in Kindle eBooks > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction by virtue of all his books selling reasonably well. I am merely #329.
But then look at how well other indie authors (and RTRH contributors) such as B.V. Larson (#13 in SF), Christopher Nuttall (#25 in SF), and David van Dyke (#99 in SF) are doing without the support of the largest publisher in science fiction.
This is a serious problem for the major publishers because ebook sales are a literally less-than-zero-sum game at this point in time. Regardless, it’s not so much the direct competition that threatens to do the big publishers in as it is the new X-factor in ebook sales, which is Kindle Unlimited. Notice which two types of publishers have been doing well since the KU change: Amazon and Small to Medium Publishers.
For an explanation, consider this book, which competes directly with Scalzi’s “military science fiction”, Back From the Dead by Rolf Nelson.
Publisher: Castalia House (September 22, 2015) Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,794 Paid in Kindle Store
What is astonishing about the moderate success of the Nelson book is that it has “sold” 4x more books via Kindle Unlimited than it has through conventional book sales. Keep in mind these aren’t just “paid” sales, they are books that have been downloaded and read.
KU works very well for longer, inexpensive indie books; with his book’s KNPC, Rolf makes more money from a KU read than he does from an Amazon sale at $4.99. (NB: This isn’t confidential information, it’s all right there on Amazon for those who comprehend the system.) But more importantly, most of those KU readers are not Castalia fans, they are mostly new to Rolf’s work.
(By way of testing this hypothesis, I’ve added a page to Back From the Dead letting readers know about other Castalia books available on KU. If I’m correct, this should have the result of increasing the average Kpages read for the other books listed.)
KU is Amazon’s real challenge to the mainstream publishers. It was bad enough for them competing on a level playing field with ebooks that cost one-half to one-fourth the price of their own ebooks. But how can they possibly compete with all-you-can read for $10, especially when Amazon is going out of its way to promote those books? For the price of one-third of a new Tor ebook, you can read literally dozens of KU books such as Riding the Red Horse, A Throne of Bones, On War, and Back From the Dead, many of which are objectively better than the Tor books, at least as far as the Amazon ratings and reviews are concerned. And the problem for the major publishers is only going to get worse as the KU readers discover new favorite authors, and new publishers, and begin to read their way through their non-mainstream catalogs.
Ebooks were disruptive, but KU is going to cause several of the major publishers to go out of business. The Big Five will be the Big Three inside three years.
That being said, there is observably a distinct type of KU reader. They clearly prefer lighter, faster-reading fiction fare; while SJWAL has sold 5x more copies so far this month than Back From the Dead, the latter has 3.7x more KU pages read.
Remember when the idea was that offshoring all the manufacturing jobs would lead to better, higher-paying jobs in technology? Yeah, about that….
The IT workers at Cengage Learning in the company’s Mason, Ohio offices learned of their fates game-show style. First, they were told to gather in a large conference room. There were vague remarks from an IT executive about a “transition.” Slides were shown that listed employee names, directing them to one of three rooms where they would be told specifically what was happening to them. Some employees were cold with worry.
The biggest group, those getting pink slips, were told to remain in the large conference room. Workers directed to go through what we’ll call Door No. 2, were offered employment with IT offshore outsourcing firm Cognizant. That was the smallest group. And those sent through Door No. 3 remained employed in Cengage’s IT department. This happened in mid-October.
“I was so furious,” said one of the IT workers over what happened. It seemed “surreal,” said another. There was disbelief, but little surprise. Cengage, a major producer of educational content and services, had outsourced accounting services earlier in the year. The IT workers rightly believed they were next.
The employees were warned that speaking to the news media meant loss of severance. Despite their fears, they want their story told. They want people to know what’s happening to IT jobs in the heartland. They don’t want the offshoring of their livelihoods to pass in silence.
The Web-based workers that the Cengage employees are training to take over their jobs are believed to be in India. Cognizant applies for thousands of H-1B visas annually, and is one of the top three users of the visa, according to government data. Cengage employees reached for comment didn’t know what visa, if any, the contract workers in their offices were using.
There are four things you need to keep in mind if you are an ardent free trader:
The arguments justifying free trade have always been entirely theoretical, not empirical. In this way, they are no different than the incorrect pre-scientific logical conclusions that were subsequently proven to be false by modern science. At the time they were formulated, inexpensive shipping, the free movement of capital, and the mass movement of labor were unknown.
The USA historically enjoyed its fastest periods of economic growth under protectionist, restricted-immigration periods.
The post-WWII growth was not the result of any trade or economic policies, but a positive application of Broken Window theory. Every other industrial nation had its industrial capacity smashed, so the US benefited from an intrinsic infrastructural advantage for around 25 years.
Free trade levels all prices throughout the market. That’s why a cashier in Miami gets paid about the same amount as a cashier in Portland. Even if free trade increases the overall amount of global economic growth, in doing so, it necessarily reduces wages and standards of living in the wealthier nations to bring them more in line with the wages and standards of living in the poorest nations.
Look, I was an ardent theoretical free trader for decades. I know the pro-free trade arguments better than you do; my father gave me Free to Choose to read when I was ten years old. But the fact is, the theoretical arguments are incorrect; the conclusions their logic predicted have turned out to be observably wrong.
And perhaps you remember what I wrote about how half of all young Americans will have to leave the country in order to find work under a true global free trade regime? The stage for that is already being set.
Offshore outsourcing is having “a fairly strong impact” on IT employment, said Janulaitis. Students coming out of college are facing trouble starting a career “and a lot of that is driven by jobs that are taken by non-U.S. nationals in our economy, and a lot of that is H-1B [visa holders],” he said.
I realize that most of you who are already interested in the course have already signed up, but I thought you might be interested in seeing this anyhow. And if you haven’t signed up yet, you can do so here. As those who were at the most recent Brainstorm can testify, it will be substantive and you will learn a lot about the game industry.
Students of history will notice an alarming similarity in the video above to the “struggle sessions” of Maoist China, a form of public shaming in which perceived enemies of the Party would be surrounded in a public place by Red Guards, Mao’s most zealous supporters. The Red Guards would hurl abuse at their target until they confessed to their crimes.
Uninformed critics might argue that the Red Guards were a weapon of the Communist state, and not a genuine grassroots movement, but they’d be wrong: the Red Guards started out as a student movement, on Chinese campuses. Afraid yet?
College staff finally are. Earlier this year, Vox published an essay from a liberal professor who confessed that the zealotry of his own students frightened him. Earlier this month, Salon published an article from a black feminist film studies lecturer, describing her “disastrous” attempt to accommodate her students’ strangely aggressive emotional fragility. It seems the left, and especially the academic left, has finally woken up to the Frankenstein’s monster that they’ve constructed.
You’ll forgive me if I lack sympathy. Conservatives have warned for decades that the proliferation of women’s studies, colonial studies, gay studies, and an assortment of other oppression-studies courses would end in tears. We also warned you that campus speech codes were a bad idea.
And when conservatives and critics of Islam started being banned on campuses up and down the country, we warned you that a tidal wave of zealotry, intolerance, and even totalitarianism was coming. Now it’s here. As a famous internet meme goes, you only had to listen. Now it’s too late.
No, we should not be saving them. We need to build alternative institutions and keep the SJWs out. One infected and infested, the only solution is to burn it to the ground. If they want to start the cleansing fires, let them.
Ironically, this Washington war of ideas has pitted against each other two brainy career Army officers who fought together in one of the most famous battles of modern times.
On one side is Macgregor, an outspoken and controversial advocate for reform of the Army — whose weapons he describes as “obsolescent,” its senior leaders as “self-interested,” and its spending as “wasteful.” Viewed by many of his colleagues as one of the most innovative Army officers of his generation, Macgregor, a West Point graduate with a Ph.D. in international relations (“he can be pretty gruff,” a fellow West Point graduate says, “but he’s brilliant”), led the 2nd Cav’s “Cougar Squadron” in the best-known battle of Operation Desert Storm in February 1991. In 23 minutes, Macgregor’s force destroyed an entire Iraqi Armored Brigade (including nearly 70 Iraqi armored vehicles), while suffering a single American casualty. Speaking at a military “lessons learned” conference one year later, Air Force General Jack Welsh described the Battle of 73 Easting (named for a map coordinate) as “a stunning, overwhelming victory.”
In the wake of the battle, however, Macgregor calculated that if his unit had fought a highly trained and better armed enemy, like the Russians, the outcome would have been different. So, four years later, he published a book called Breaking The Phalanx, recommending that his service “restructure itself into modularly organized, highly mobile, self-contained combined arms teams.” The advice received the endorsement of then-Army Chief of Staff Dennis Reimer, who ordered that copies of Macgregor’s book be provided to every Army general.
But Macgregor is still fighting that battle. In early September he circulated a PowerPoint presentation showing that in a head-to-head confrontation pitting the equivalent of a U.S. armored division against a likely Russian adversary, the U.S. division would be defeated. “Defeated isn’t the right word,” Macgregor told me last week. “The right word is annihilated.” The 21-slide presentation features four battle scenarios, all of them against a Russian adversary in the Baltics — what one currently serving war planner on the Joint Chiefs staff calls “the most likely warfighting scenario we will face outside of the Middle East.”
In two of the scenarios, where the U.S. deploys its current basic formation, called brigade combat teams (BCTs), the U.S. is defeated. In two other scenarios, where Macgregor deploys what he calls Reconnaissance Strike Groups, the U.S. wins. And that’s the crux of Macgregor’s argument: Today the U.S. Army is comprised of BCTs rather than Reconnaissance Strike Groups, or RSGs, which is Macgregor’s innovation. Macgregor’s RSG shears away what he describes as “the top-heavy Army command structure” that would come with any deployment in favor of units that generate more combat power. “Every time we deploy a division we deploy a division headquarters of 1,000 soldiers and officers,” Macgregor explains. “What a waste; those guys will be dead within 72 hours.” Macgregor’s RSG, what he calls “an alternative force design,” does away with this Army command echelon, reporting to a joint force commander — who might or might not be an Army officer. An RSG, Macgregor says, does not need the long supply tail that is required of Brigade Combat Teams — it can be sustained with what it carries from ten days to two weeks without having to be resupplied.
Though it may sound to outsiders like a disagreement over crossed t’s and dotted i’s, the dispute is fundamental–focusing on whether, in a future conflict, the U.S. military can actually win. Even inside the Pentagon, that is very much in doubt. A recent article by defense writer Julia Ioffe reported the “dispiriting” results of a Pentagon “thought exercise” between a red team (Russia) and a blue team, NATO. The “table top” exercise stipulated a Russian invasion of the Baltics, the same scenario proposed by Macgregor. “After eight hours of gaming out various scenarios,” Ioffe wrote, a blue team member concluded that NATO “would lose.”
What I find more worrisome is the possibility that the U.S. government will decide to throw its weight against the nationalists who have overthrown, either electorally or by other means, a European government, as they did in the case of Serbia. I can envision a situation where U.S. forces step in to create a Ukraine-style puppet government in defense of the poor Muslim refugees, in which case they’ll be faced with European 4GW opponents far more lethal than anything they have seen in the Middle East or in Asia.
It may seem unthinkable, but there are already serious tensions inside the German government, where the Interior Minister is accused of having mounted a semi-coup against the Chancellor, and his new stricter policy was overruled, not by the Prime Minister, but by her Chief of Staff. It would be surprising, but not entirely unexpected, for Merkel’s government to collapse before the end of the year. And there are tens of thousands of American troops still stationed in Germany; the temptation to use them to dictate German government policy on the migration crisis will be difficult for any U.S. president to resist.
Whatever happens, there can be little doubt that the rising European nationalist forces will have the backing of Russia, and probably China as well, as both of those countries clearly recognize the threat the globalist U.S. now poses to world order.
