Game design at Castalia

Over the years, I’ve noticed that most of the readers here are not terribly interested in the nuts and bolts of game design. Which is fine, it’s a fairly esoteric topic that tends to require both extensive reading and extensive game-playing, which considerably limits the potential appeal of such discussions. However, those few who are interested in it tend to be very interested indeed.

So, I’m going to be doing the occasional post over at the Castalia House blog on some of my thoughts on a very particular game design for a tactical wargame on which I am working as part of the First Sword Kickstarter, about which you can read more in the Game Dev letter. And you can also read about my initial thoughts on doing something new with the design, which I think could potentially be as significant for tactical wargaming in the long term as the ASL morale model has proven to be.

If you subscribe to the Game Dev newsletter, you’re aware that Alpenwolf has a new partner and I’m going to be writing the new rules for a certain SF infantry combat game. Without getting into any details concerning that, I want to discuss two of the primary principles I plan on utilizing as the basis for the core gameplay. I was recently editing a book by Martin van Creveld that we’ll be publishing in another week or so, A History of Strategy, and one thing that occurred to me while I was working on it and reading his Technology and War, was how the great stress that Clausewitz placed on friction, and in particular, on information in war, was seldom modeled at the tactical level in wargaming. Clausewitz wrote:

 A great part of the information in war is contradictory, a still greater part is false, and by far the greatest part is somewhat doubtful. This requires that an officer possess a certain power of discrimination, which only knowledge of men and things and good judgment can give. The law of probability must be his guide. This is difficult even in the pre-war plans, which are made in the study and outside the actual sphere of war. It is enormously more difficult when, in the turmoil of war, one report follows hard upon another. It is fortunate if these reports, in contradicting each other, produce a sort of balance and thus demand further examination. It is much worse for the inexperienced when chance does not render him this service, but one report supports another, confirms it, magnifies it, continually paints with new colors, until urgent necessity forces from him a decision which will soon be disclosed as folly, all these reports having been lies, exaggerations, and errors.

Read more about my concept of a Tactical Uncertainty Principle over there, if it happens to strike you as interesting.

SJW strategy and Communist strategy

In reading “LEARNING FROM VIETNAM: THE PATTERNS OF LIBERATION MOVEMENTS” by Doan Van Toai and David Chanoff, I couldn’t help but notice that the pattern of SJW entryism in television, SF/F, and games appears to be rather similar to the successful Communist strategy in Vietnam

First among the lessons that Viet Nam teaches concerns the composition of liberation-war guerrilla movements…. After Dien Bien Phu (1954), non-Communist revolutionaries were still employed in the government to continue attracting popular support, even while all anti-Communist factions were being eliminated. It was only when Ho Chi Minh had sufficiently consolidated power that the turn of the nationalists and non-Party militants came. Exactly the same tactic was re-employed in the 1960s when the National Liberation Front was founded to rally all those who sympathized in any way with Communist goals….

There are two points to be made here, both obvious but often overlooked. One is that Communist “liberation war” strategy calls for the creation of guerrilla fronts representing many shades of political feeling, within which the Communists themselves are likely to be a minority. Antagonists are thus faced with an enemy which attracts diversified support and whose leadership is difficult to identify.

The foreign propaganda effect alone of such an organization is more than worth the minor risk to the Communist nucleus that it will be outmaneuvered by some temporarily allied faction. Foreign journalists, for example, can be counted on to make a cogent case for the moderate, the liberal, and the nationalist struggle for a homeland rather than for the Communist flavor of the guerrilla movement. They will note that apparently leading figures are intellectuals or religious leaders whose standpoints may be distinctly non-Communist. And over time their reportage will convey to their democratically and pluralistically inclined readers the impression of a movement that is itself “pluralistic,” and to that extent representative and even democratic….

There is also no doubt (and this is the second point) that the non-Communist elements in the guerrilla front will be destroyed as soon as feasible. Ton Due Thang, president of North Viet Nam’s Fatherland Front, succinctly characterized Communist strategy in this regard: “Rally all forces that can be rallied, neutralize all forces that can be neutralized, eliminate all forces that can be eliminated.”

Ton was referring here to the standard Communist device of shifting coalitions in order to make use of opposition forces and eventually eliminate them piecemeal. For example, to deal with three enemies, alliances are formed with two while the primary enemy is attacked. The process is then repeated until Communist power stands unopposed.

We’re already seeing the hard core SJWs turn on their less-committed allies. This also demonstrates the absolute importance of driving home to the moderates that they need to resist their urge to train their guns on their own side rather than the opposition. Moderates are always trying to curry favor with the opposition by criticizing their own “extremists”, but this is not only futile, it actually plays into the enemy’s strategy of shifting coalitions.

Notice in particular the importance that an ignorant media and controlling the public narrative plays in both strategies.

Understanding feminazis

I’ve always said that calling a feminist a feminazi was an insult to the German National Socialist Workers Party. Now a Firefox plugin makes that clear by translating feminist hate-speech into the original German:

“Not a coincidence it’s always zionists and jews committing mass shootings. The pattern is connected to ideas of zionism in our culture.”
– Anita Sarkeesian.

“All mainstream press of Judaisms, no matter how fair-minded the
writers try to be, has ended up concluding that they are, in fact, a
bunch of smelly Jews who are delusional at best and manipulative abusers
at worst.”
– Amanda Marcotte

“A radical fix to the world’s wage gap: why not just pay Aryans more – and pay Jews less?”
– Jessica Valenti

“The saddest thing for an Aryan to do is to dumb themselves down for a Jew.”
– Emma Watson 

It’s always very important to understand what one’s enemies are really saying, after all.

No vows to a nonexistent God

Oklahoma quite sensibly bans atheist marriages:

A bill that would restrict the right to marry to people of faith and require all marriage licenses to be approved by a member of clergy was approved by the Oklahoma state House on Tuuesday.

House Bill 1125, which would effectively ban all secular marriages in the state, was passed by a Republican majority and will now go to the state Senate for consideration.

“Marriage was not instituted by government. It was instituted by God. There is no reason for Oklahoma or any state to be involved in marriage,” said one of the bill’s Republican supporters Rep. Dennis Johnson, though marriage is a legal contract.

You cannot legitimately take a vow before a God in whom you don’t believe. Whether it succeeds or fails, this vote is good news; it is long past time that American traditionalists and conservatives stop trying to be reasonable with the progressives. They should be relentlessly opposed on all fronts, with measures both symbolic and practical, and excluded from the civilization on which they are nothing but parasites. If they want to go elsewhere to set up another of their failed utopias, good luck to them, but there is no place in Western civilization for them. They know this, which is why they keep trying to destroy it.

Marriage existed before the U.S. government. It will exist after the U.S. government collapses. If the government wants to offer legal contracts to which two or more parties want to subscribe, that’s fine, but never forget that neither state nor federal government ever had anything to do with creating marriage. And ideally, they would have nothing to say about it at all.

Wearing Murdoch’s leash

Fox News may be better than the ABCNNBCBS cabal, but don’t ever mistake them for the good guys, or even being reliably pro-American. And they do NOT like criticism coming from the nationalist right:

The blogger Mickey Kaus has quit his job at The Daily Caller after the conservative site’s editor-in-chief, Tucker Carlson, pulled a critical column about Fox News from the site, Kaus told the On Media blog on Tuesday.

“It’s pretty simple,” Kaus said in an interview, “I wrote a piece attacking Fox for not being the opposition on immigration and amnesty — for filling up the airwaves with reports on ISIS and terrorism, and not fulfilling their responsibility of being the opposition on amnesty and immigration…. I posted it at 6:30 in the morning. When I got up, Tucker had taken it down. He said, ‘We can’t trash Fox on the site. I work there.'”

Carlson, who co-founded The Daily Caller in 2010, is a conservative contributor to Fox News and the host of its weekend edition of “Fox & Friends.”

Kaus says when he told Carlson he needed to be able to write about Fox, Carlson told him it was a hard-and-fast rule, and non-negotiable.

“He said it was a rule, and he wouldn’t be able to change that rule. So I told him I quit,” Kaus explained. “I just don’t see how you can put out a publication with that kind of giant no-go area. It’s not like we’re owned by Joe’s Muffler Shop, so we just can’t write about Joe’s Muffler shop.”

This is entirely par for the Fox News course. Ten years ago I was writing a book called Media Whores that was signed to Thomas Nelson. The executives were very upset when they discovered that it wasn’t only about the media whores of the Left, but contained chapters about Michelle Malkin and Bill O’Reilly as well.

The official line about the sudden cancellation was that the book wasn’t expected to sell well enough to justify the marketing. However, I was told by someone inside the organization, who was definitely in a position to know what really happened, that the outline and sample chapters I’d provided were shown to Fox, who indicated that they would prefer that it was not published. So, the book was duly canceled six weeks after the contract was signed, although I did get paid for it.

This was not my only experience of this variety. And perhaps you’ll understand that my disregard for mainstream publishers is not entirely rooted in my disdain for the SJW gatekeepers in SF/F.

Adolf Hitler, published author

Stephen Hicks considers the implications of Germany permitting the publication of Mein Kampf for the first time in decades.

German authorities will allow the republication of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, after decades of censorship. Decent people can argue that the book is too dangerous to be published. But the fact is that Mein Kampf is too dangerous not to be published.

The great fear is that Hitler’s ideas are not dead and that his book could trigger another horribly pathological social movement. Nationalism and socialism still appeal to many, and combinations of the two ideologies attract new adherents every day in Europe and around the world.

Mein Kampf is available in many editions, in many languages and online. So the furor over its republication is about the Germans in particular: Can they handle it?

One of many old jokes has one German ask another, “How many Poles does it take to change a light bulb?” The other German replies, “I don’t know. Let’s invade Poland and find out!”

Always fun to poke at the Germans’ historical reputation. But it has been three generations since the end of World War II. There have been major cultural shifts in German attitudes towards militarism, authoritarianism, anti-Semitism, and other elements in the National Socialist package. There is plenty of evidence that today’s German are well above the average in civility and decency. So the post-Nazi cultural training wheels can come off.

Yet beyond the specifics of the German debate, there is a more important general point about prohibiting even the most repulsive of ideas: Censorship weakens our ability to combat them.

Levi Salomon, speaking for the Jewish Forum for Democracy and Against Anti-Semitism based in Berlin, opposes republication of Mein Kampf: “This book is outside of human logic.”

Salomon’s statement is more outrageous than anything Hitler wrote in the book. National Socialism is not only human logic, it is considerably more logical, and truthful, than Communism, feminism, or secular Zionism. That was part of the tragedy of Germany’s descent into it. Unlike the first two ideologies, it actually functioned effectively.

National Socialism is also cruel, pitiless, and militaristic, but those are undeniably human failings.

Indeed, one of the most striking things about Mein Kampf is that it is not, as one would tend to imagine, a wild-eyed, frothing-at-the-mouth sort of text. Perhaps the most disturbing thing about it is how reasonable Hitler often sounds throughout. And that is possibly the best reason of all that it should be published; it is a vivid reminder that far from being “outside of human logic”, every rational man is capable of choosing between good and evil, and choosing between setting himself to achieving great good and committing great harm.

How social justice ruins stories

A lecture in 12 pictures. Daddy Warpig directs our attention to a prescient Outland cartoon:

On the same subject, Didact’s Reach quotes my example of how properly applying the Social Justice principles he upholds would have completely destroyed GRR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and wonders if that is part of why the series has declined with each new book.

I suppose this might explain why A Dance of Dragons was such an unbearably long, tedious, boring doorstopper of a book. This exact idea is something that Vox Day has addressed repeatedly in his screeds against the need for feminism and equalitarian impulses in high fantasy and sci-fi. In fact, the single fastest way to counter Martin’s frankly absurd notion that “many of those differences are created by the culture we live in”, is to conduct a simple thought exercise, which Vox walks us through as follows:

Consider the consequences of changing Cersei Lannister from an oppressed woman used as a dynastic piece by her father to a strong and independent warrior woman of the sort that is presently ubiquitous in third generation fantasy, science fiction, and paranormal fiction.

  • Cersei doesn’t marry Robert Baratheon.  She’s strong and independent like her twin, not a royal brood mare!
  • House Lannister’s ambitions are reduced from establishing a royal line to finding a wife for Tyrion.
  • Her children are not bastards.  Robert’s heirs have black hair.
  • Jon Arryn isn’t murdered to keep a nonexistent secret.  Ned Stark isn’t named to replace him.
  • Robert doesn’t have an accident coordinated by the Lannisters, who don’t dominate the court and will not benefit from his fall.
  • Robert’s heirs being legitimate, Stannis and Renly Baratheon remain loyal.
  • The Starks never come south and never revolt against King’s Landing.  Theon Greyjoy goes home to the Ironborn and never returns to Winterfell.  Jon Snow still goes to the Wall, but Arya remains home and learns to become a lady, not an assassin, whether she wants to or not.

So, what was a war of five kings that spans five continents abruptly becomes a minor debate over whether Robert Baratheon’s black-haired son and heir marries Sansa Stark, a princess of Dorne, or Danerys Targaryen.

Rumors of war

Russia is positioning its forces to potentially engage the new NATO troops in Ukraine:

On Monday, President Vladimir Putin gave the order to bring Russia’s Northern Fleet, separate units of the Western Military District and the Airborne Troops to full alert in snap combat readiness exercises. The drills involve a total of 38,000 troops, 3,360 military vehicles, 110 aircraft and helicopters, 41 ships and 15 submarines.

Snap military exercises will be held in the sea, as well as on the ground and in the air until March 21. Their ultimate goal is to improve the military capabilities of the Russian Armed Forces, according to the Defense Ministry.

And then completing the trifecta, in addition to Crimea and Kaliningrad, as many as 30 army air force crews of Russia’s Western Military District are being redeployed from airfields in the Leningrad and Smolensk regions to a military airfield near the Arctic Circle as part of surprise combat readiness drills being held in the Northern Fleet and the Western Military District, according to an Interfax report.

It’s far from a full mobilization, but then, given the relatively small number of NATO troops that have been established in Ukraine and the Baltics, the Russians don’t need much to counter them.

Do what thou feel

That is not only the whole of the modern moral law, it is the whole of history as well. “Do what thou feel, with due regard for the shrieking of the herd around you, for the truth is nothing more than an opinion.”. A philosopher discovers that this is a philosophy instilled at an early age, in public school:

What would you say if you found out that our public schools were teaching children that it is not true that it’s wrong to kill people for fun or cheat on tests? Would you be surprised?

I was. As a philosopher, I already knew that many college-aged students don’t believe in moral facts. While there are no national surveys quantifying this phenomenon, philosophy professors with whom I have spoken suggest that the overwhelming majority of college freshmen in their classrooms view moral claims as mere opinions that are not true or are true only relative to a culture.

What I didn’t know was where this attitude came from. Given the presence of moral relativism in some academic circles, some people might naturally assume that philosophers themselves are to blame. But they aren’t. There are historical examples of philosophers who endorse a kind of moral relativism, dating back at least to Protagoras who declared that “man is the measure of all things,” and several who deny that there are any moral facts whatsoever. But such creatures are rare. Besides, if students are already showing up to college with this view of morality, it’s very unlikely that it’s the result of what professional philosophers are teaching. So where is the view coming from?

A few weeks ago, I learned that students are exposed to this sort of thinking well before crossing the threshold of higher education. A misleading distinction between fact and opinion is embedded in the Common Core.

Fact: Something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven.

Opinion: What someone thinks, feels, or believes.

No wonder so many millennials are clueless science fetishists who know nothing of what has gone before them. This definition of “Fact” has completely erased the very concept of history, and rendered the past nothing but mere opinion.

Public school is an unvarnished and unmitigated evil. If you are still foolish enough to be subjecting your children to it, think again. They are not only being intellectually lobotomized, they are being morally and temporally crippled as well.

There is no amount of Christian upbringing or Sunday School teaching that is capable of counteracting this philosophical programming. It will all be neatly slotted into the “opinion” category, which they are taught cannot overlap with the “fact” category. Consider the professor’s test of his own son.

Students are taught that claims are either facts or opinions. They are given quizzes in which they must sort claims into one camp or the other but not both. But if a fact is something that is true and an opinion is something that is believed, then many claims will obviously be both. For example, I asked my son about this distinction after his open house. He confidently explained that facts were things that were true whereas opinions are things that are believed. We then had this conversation:

Me: “I believe that George Washington was the first president. Is that a fact or an opinion?”

Him: “It’s a fact.”

Me: “But I believe it, and you said that what someone believes is an opinion.”

Him: “Yeah, but it’s true.”

Me: “So it’s both a fact and an opinion?”

The blank stare on his face said it all.

The idea that children as young as five are going to be some sort of Christian missionary light unto the pagans in public school was always an abysmally stupid one, but the fact that even a philosopher’s son can be reprogrammed in such an insidious way should shake even the most foolish Christian parent’s blithe confidence in public school. And the idea that your local school is “really good” is far from a panacea, it merely means that it is better at instilling this pernicious anti-philosophy into its students’ heads.

In summary, our public schools teach students that all claims are either
facts or opinions and that all value and moral claims fall into the
latter camp. The punchline: there are no moral facts. And if there are
no moral facts, then there are no moral truths.