Registration required

I’m sorry, but it looks like Sunday’s Open Brainstorm event with Martin van Creveld is not going to be as open as I planned. Thanks to corporate bureaucracy, it appears that we’re not going to be able to increase our current limit of 100 participants to 500 until sometime next week.

Emails have been sent out to a) the Annual Brainstorm members and b) the May Brainstorm members. Members have 24 hours to register for the event. If you haven’t received an email – and please check your spam filters – email me tonight and let me know if you would like to attend. On Saturday morning I’ll post how many open spots remain. Those remaining spots can be claimed by those signing up for c) the June Brainstorm or an Annual membership.

If there are any spots left after that, they’ll be first come, first serve after I post the link on the blog about 15 minutes before the event. I’m sorry that it’s not possible to provide for any more seats, but we’ve been trying to order the upgrade for over a week now and it simply could not be done. We will keep trying, but at this point, we have to assume it won’t happen before Sunday.

Transcripts from the May session will go out to May and Annual members late tonight; I’m still cleaning it up. A transcript from the open event will be sent free to all May/June/Annual members, and since there will be people who won’t be able to attend who were planning to do so, we’ll make it free for a week for everyone else on the Castalia store.

George Martin really really likes rape

Like the worm, the SJW always turns on his own:

Rape acts in Game of Thrones the TV series (to date): 50
Rape victims in Game of Thrones (to date): 29

Rape acts in ASOIAF the book series (to date): 214
Rape victims in ASOIAF (to date): 117

The books contain over 4 times as much rape as the show (and probably even more; the method of analysis likely underestimates the rape in the books – see below).

Before the barrage of anon hate mail floods in: that’s not to say the show’s not problematic. It’s to say that the books are problematic. ETA: Please see A Song of Ice and Fire Has a Rape Problem for a detailed discussion on why the rapes in the books aren’t any better than those in the show. Spoiler: the only women who get vengeance on their rapists are villains.

Those 214 rape acts are particularly astonishing if you compare them to the number of times a married couple has sex. Which, if my memory serves correctly, happens about twice in five books.

Nor are the various defenses of Martin that have been offered valid. As Tafkar notes: “the only thing that protects a woman from rape is being one of Martin’s POV characters.” 

More damning is this conclusion: “The stories of rapists are important to George R. R. Martin. Those are
the stories he tells. Our point of view characters are the rapists, not
the victims.” 

George R.R. Martin well merits his fate. 

There is no solution

It has largely ceased to be funny to see the demography ostriches burying their heads in the sand about the total failure of Melting Pot America, even as it rapidly disappears like a timer that’s been turned over.

YANKEE: VD thinks non westerners are too Dunb
to maintain a Republic like the U.S. When they are a majority.”

DAVID: And
non-Westerners continue to steadfastly prove him right. Look, it’s
really just this simple: if they were capable of doing so they would
have done so in their own countries. They have not, ergo, they can’t.

YANKEE: “Fine!
What’s the solution, VD? Furthermore, what’s your solution to America
housing all these blacks that you also believe Are incapable of
maintaining the U.S,?”

There is no solution. There is no shiny secular science fiction “It’s a Small World” societies in the making. There are only the inevitable historical consequences of the demographic destruction of Anglo-Saxon America, which will likely follow one of the usual paths: a) subjection and eventual elimination of minorities, b) subjection and eventual elimination of the majority, c) partition, d) ethnic subsumption. For various reasons, I expect (c) to be the most likely in the USA and (a) to be the most likely in Europe.

Before you stick your head back in the sand, keep in mind that I am a Native American, an American Indian. Some of my relatives live on a small reservation of worthless land their conquerors have permitted them to keep, with a handful of people who know how to speak a language that is now almost entirely extinct. So, don’t tell me that the survival of your people, of your traditions, or of your way of life is a given. Because I can assure you, they most certainly are not.

The future belongs to those who show up for it. The future belongs to those who are determined to survive and are willing to defend their culture, their language, their genetics, and their traditions. Those who aren’t, won’t.

SCIENCE is not science

Whatever happened to the idea that science is self-correcting?

Over the past few days a scandal has begun to plague political science. A UCLA graduate student, Michael LaCour, appears to have faked a data set that was the basis for an article that he published in the highly prestigious journal Science. I have examined a second paper by LaCour. As I’ll explain, I’m convinced that it also is the product of faked results.

The Science article purportedly showed that personalized, door-to-door canvassing is effective at changing political views. LaCour and his co-author, Don Green of Columbia University, enlisted members of an LGBT organization at UCLA to contact voters who had earlier indicated on a survey that they opposed gay marriage. The article shows, based on follow-up surveys, that the LGBT door-to-door canvassing had a significant effect in shifting voters toward pro-gay-marriage views.

Two graduate students at UC Berkeley, however, had significant difficulties in replicating the study. They called the private firm that LaCour had supposedly enlisted to conduct his survey. The firm, however, said that it did not conduct such a survey. LaCour had also reported to the grad students the name of an employee of the survey firm with whom he worked. The firm, however, said that it had no records of such an employee ever working at the firm.

After confronting his coauthor, Green requested that Science retract the article. LaCour still stands by his results. Science, faced with this dilemma, has not (yet) retracted the paper.

That pretty much settles the question of whether Science concerns scientody – the scientific method – or scientistry – the scientific profession. An “editorial expression of concern” is not sufficient. The study could not be replicated and there is evidence that the first study was not legitimate. Therefore, a reputable publication that was actually dedicated to scientody would retract the study immediately pending further evidence of its replicability. Science is observably not such a publication.

Especially when the man who developed the method that researcher utilized has come out very strongly against the legitimacy of LaCour’s work:

I think the bulk of the evidence suggests that LaCour faked at least some of the results of this second paper. Not only would I be willing to bet on this conclusion, I would be willing to give 10:1 odds on it. Still, I’m not certain, and I would be hesitant to give 100:1 odds. And I would refuse to give 1,000:1 odds.

Regardless, I am certain that LaCour faked the results of the original paper—the one published in Science. I predict that UCLA will refuse to award him a PhD, and I predict that Princeton will retract the assistant professorship that it offered him. I predict that UCLA or Princeton or both will conduct an investigation. I suspect that they will find that LaCour faked results in a few papers, not just one.

But the most damning thing, as far as the credibility of Science goes, is this observation, “It is very rare for political scientists to have our results mentioned alongside results from the “hard” sciences.” So why, then, was this apparently fraudulent paper selected for such unusual publication in the first place?

America’s Ethnic Achilles Heel

By Yuji Aida
Volume 6, Number 2 (Winter 1995-1996)

[The editors of the San Francisco Examiner gave this brief preface to the article which we second This article is indicative of an influential minority viewpoint in Japan which some people may find offensive. We publish it to illustrate what is being said there.]

TOKYO – Americans are proud of their melting-pot heritage. But as blacks, Hispanics and Asians gradually come to outnumber whites, that ideal will fade. Like the Soviet Union today the United States will have to deal with contentious ethnic groups demanding greater autonomy and even political independence. That could prove to be industrial America’s undoing.

Many Americans, however, feign ignorance of the problem, partly because of the official ideology. The United States sees itself as a pluralistic, multiethnic society with a single national identity based on the principles of freedom and democracy. In fact, discrimination is rampant, but the illusion of equality is vital to maintain a sense of unity.

Nonetheless, it is only a matter of time before U.S. minority groups espouse self-determination in some form. When that happens, the country may become ungovernable…. Do blacks and Hispanics, for instance, have the skills and knowledge to run an advanced industrial economy? If the answer is yes, America will maintain its vitality through the next century and beyond. But I’m skeptical.

As am I, and I am part-Hispanic. It’s because I know my Hispanic Catholic relatives that I am extremely dubious they are capable of serving as an adequate replacement for the Anglo-Saxon Protestants that they will eventually replace as the USA’s dominant ethnic group. The ironic thing is that even though we are 20 years deeper into the experiment of ethnic America and Mr. Aida’s case looks stronger than ever, his article would probably not be publishable today; it might even be deemed criminal in some places.

But no amount of pretense, thought policing, and determined belief in the magically transformative powers of geographic translocation are going to make any difference in the future. Either the replacement population will be capable of maintaining a First World European-style society or it will not be capable and that society will see its living standards degraded.

And then, of course, there is the entirely separate problem of those non-European groups rejecting the very European, indeed, very Anglo-Saxon concepts such as the Common Law and the Rights of Englishmen. Which happen to include a few minor things such as limited government and so forth. I think a very good case can be made for Continental immigrants never quite grasping these concepts in their entirety. It does not appear subsequent waves of immigrants are doing any better in this regard.

Now, I realize that millions of people very genuinely believe that the ethnic demographics of a society are totally irrelevant. I understand that millions of people genuinely believe that IQ does not measure intelligence and that every human sub-species is equally capable of all things. Of course, I also recognize that most people are idiots.

So here is the question I have for those people who firmly believe that the ethnic composition of a society is not a controlling factor in what that society will be like. Have you ever stopped to consider what is going to happen if you are wrong? Have you ever wondered how future generations are going to regard you and the fate you inflicted upon them with your fervent dedication to diversity, equality, and inclusivity? Aren’t you not only betting the house, but Western civilization, on an untested and unproven idea?

What if you are wrong?

GGinParis

Mike Cernovich, Milo Yiannopoulos, and I will be at GGinParis on Saturday, July 11 at 8 PM. If you’re in Europe, or if you’re going to be in Europe this summer, and intend to come, please shoot me an email with GGinParis in the subject.

Hugo Awards 2015: Best Novella

This is how I am voting in the
Best Novella category. Of course, I merely offer this information
regarding my individual ballot for no particular reason at all, and the
fact that I have done so should not be confused in any way, shape, or
form with a slate or a bloc vote, much less a direct order by the
Supreme Dark Lord of the Evil Legion of Evil to his 367 Vile Faceless
Minions or anyone else.

  1. “One Bright Star to Guide Them”
  2. “Big Boys Don’t Cry”
  3. “The Plural of Helen of Troy”
  4. “Pale Realms of Shade”
  5. “Flow”

In the relatively near future, I will be debating the merits and demerits of John C. Wright’s “One Bright Star to Guide Them” versus those of The Wasp Factory by Iain M. Banks with Phil Sandifier. It should be an interesting discussion, as the two works in some ways represent the two poles of the Blue SF/Pink SF divide, even if few would consider the Banks novel to be science fiction or fantasy.

Other categories:


Good riddance

The death of the print media in America. It’s pretty astonishing, but having grown up reading the Star Tribune, aka “the Red Star”, it’s good to see them collapsing in such a dramatic manner. At this rate, many of them should be gone altogether by 2023.

And it is a very healthy sign, I think, for a one-way monopolistic medium to be replaced by a two-way medium with literally thousands of options. I expect the conventional publishing world to follow suit in reasonably short order once Barnes & Noble goes out of business.

Paul Gottfried reviews VICTORIA

I don’t think anyone with any grasp of history doubts that the USA is in the process of going the way of the Byzantine Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union at this point. It is a now a centralized multi-ethnic empire held together by the threat of military force, after all, and such empires always fracture sooner or later. And for all the various unpleasantries it recounts, VICTORIA: A Novel of 4th Generation War represents one of the more rosy-hued outcomes possible. Paul Gottfried reviewed it on VDARE.

William Lind’s VICTORIA Heralds Coming America Breakup
By Paul Gottfried

William S. Lind is a man of many talents. He’s an institution of the American conservative movement, formerly the Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism of the Free Congress Foundation (under the late Paul Weyrich), a regular contributor to The American Conservative, and a noted military theorist. And now, with the publication of Victoria he is a novelist, putting forward a highly readable vision of the breakup of the United States and a traditionalist restoration. It’s a sign of the times that we can no longer regard such a story as implausible.

Victoria is subtitled “A Novel of Fourth Generation Warfare,” and Lind’s writings on warfare bleed (perhaps too much) into his storytelling. His theory of Fourth Generation Warfare contends that warfare has ceased between states with standing armies and operative governments. Instead, it is decentralized, on at least one side, lacking a regular command structure and no longer identified with an established state or regular army. Countries like the U.S. find themselves in partisan struggles around the world that violate the “rules of war” built up under the old European state system.

Bill’s ideas about changing forms of warfare may have been influenced by the German political-legal theorist Carl Schmitt, who wrote on partisan warfare after the Second World War. His novel is written under the nom de plume “Thomas Hobbes,” so even in this he reveals his connection to Schmitt, as the German jurist profoundly admired the seventeenth-century Englishman who wrote about the rise of the state [The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, by Carl Schmitt] (I wrote an intellectual biography of Schmitt and also deeply respect the philosopher who wished to protect us against “the war of all against all.”)

In Victoria, all Hell breaks loose in a way that Hobbes might have understood. Yet it is only the Time of Tribulations before the golden age of social restoration that ends the novel. Indeed, we are told the ending in advance in the opening scene when we learn “The triumph of the Recovery was marked most clearly by the burning of the Episcopal bishop of Maine.”

The revival of witch-burning in New England was certainly an eye-opener, but I’d have to say that my favorite scene was the rather egregious violation of academic freedom at Dartmouth. It’s kind of funny to imagine what the reaction would have been if I’d recommended VICTORIA for a Hugo instead of THE CHAPLAIN’S WAR. But it’s not science fiction, it’s political fiction, so that wouldn’t have been proper and neither Mr. Hobbes, nor his agent, Mr. Lind, would have approved.

In any event, VICTORIA is now available as a 592-page paperback. And speaking of Mr. Lind, I should also mention that Martin van Creveld’s A HISTORY OF STRATEGY: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind is now available in hardcover.

Vox’s First Law at work

Vox’s First Law: Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from insanity. Or, in this case, autism:

State therapy specialists claimed Jacob
Barnett would never tie his shoes, read or function normally in society.
But the boy’s mother realized when Jacob was not in therapy, he was
doing “spectacular things” completely on his own.
She decided to trust her instinct and
disregard the advice of the professionals. Instead of following a
standardized special needs educational protocol, she surrounded Jacob
with all the things that inspired passion for him – and was astonished
at the transformation that took place.

Following a diagnosis of autism at age
two, Jacob was subjected to a cookie cutter special education system
that focused on correcting what he couldn’t do compared to normal
children. For years, teachers attempted to convince Kristine Barnett
that her son would only be able to learn the most basic of life skills….

By the time Jacob reached the age of 11, he entered college and is currently studying condensed matter physics at Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis. According to an email Professor Scott Tremaine wrote to Jacob’s family:
“The theory that he’s working on
involves several of the toughest problems in astrophysics and
theoretical physics … Anyone who solves these will be in line for a
Nobel Prize.”

Jacob also has an IQ of 170 — higher than that of Einstein.

This is an object lesson in what we discussed at the May Brainstorm. Never, ever, blindly trust the so-called experts. Respect, but verify.