SF/F before the coup

Daniel wrote an interesting post about the pre-pinkshirt state of science fiction at Castalia:

By 1995 or so, it had become fairly evident that the science fiction market had begun to experience a significant shift, one that I have been struggling to put my finger on for quite some time now.

The genre, of course, has always been one for whom change at a certain level should be something of a constant. The Romance genre (not the chivalric or ancient. I mean the “girl picks one of two boys” sort.) has remained the same since 1921’s The Black Moth, but Science Fiction (not the current “girl picks one of two boys” sort, but the traditional “having something to do with phenomena”) necessarily must adapt to any new knowledge….

In October of 1991, SF editor and reviewer, and senior editor at Omni, Robert J. Kilheffer did the world a favor by attempting a fairly comprehensive “State of the Genre” report in Publisher’s Weekly, titled Science Fiction: Expanding, Experimenting.

It’s interesting to see some of the comments from familiar names that we now know to have been responsible, in part, for the ongoing decline into necrobestiality and wereseal romance. I didn’t consciously notice the change until the award of the 2002 Nebula to Catharine Asaro’s ridiculous The Quantum Rose made me notice it, but looking back at the old Nebula winners, there is a definite point in 1988, when a nobody with a nothing novel that no one remembers beat Greg Bear, Gene Wolfe, David Brin, Avram Davidson, and George Alec Effinger, followed by Lois McMaster Bujold beating Gibson, Card, and Wolfe in 1989 (a less ludicrous result, but unjustifiable nevertheless), shows that the rot had set in.

Just for amusement’s sake, here is the description of the 1988 Nebula Award winner for Best Novel.

Elizabeth Butler is an archaeologist, and the author of several popular books that challenge her colleagues’ ideas about Mayan civilization. Elizabeth has a strange gift, connected to a suicide attempt as a young woman, which allows her to see the spirits of ancient people while she walks at dusk and dawn. The story opens with Elizabeth in the middle of an eight-week field study at Dzibilchaltún. Her team hopes to find dramatic artifacts that will spark interest and increased funding for future field studies at the site.

In the middle of the field study, Elizabeth’s estranged adult daughter Diane arrives unannounced. After the death of her father, Elizabeth’s ex-husband, Diane suddenly abandoned her life in the United States, and flew to Mexico to see her mother. It’s revealed that Diane has seen Elizabeth for only a few brief visits since Elizabeth left her as a young child to be raised by her father. Neither is sure what Diane wants from Elizabeth.

As the two struggle to connect, Elizabeth has a new experience: one of her spirit visions, a Mayan priestess named Zuhuy-kak, can see and speak with Elizabeth. Zuhuy-kak provides unprecedented knowledge about the Mayans’ departure from Dzibilchaltún, and leads Elizabeth to the major archaeological find her team needs, but demands a sacrifice to the goddess Ix Chebel Yax. As the dig progresses, haunted by bad luck and tragedy, Zuhuy-kak makes it clear that Elizabeth must sacrifice her daughter.

Of course, were this novel written today, Elizabeth would sacrifice her daughter without thinking twice about it and the plot would instead revolve around which of her two lesbian lovers Elizabeth would choose to marry in a civil ceremony in Mexico City, Zuhuy-kak or Ix Chebel Yax. It is perhaps worth observing that this “fantasy masterwork”, published in 1986,  presently has 28 reviews averaging 4.0, is out of print, and is ranked 1,640,443 on Amazon.

Interestingly enough, one reviewer observed back in 2005: “This Novel is NOT Science Fiction and is a mundane novel as well. This novel should NOT have won the award for what was called the best science fiction novel. 1987, the year of this novel, is thus the start of the Feminist takeover of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA), now called the Science fiction and FANTASY Writers of America.”

Kissinger on the EU and Islam

I’ve been reading Henry Kissinger’s new book, World Order, and it is a very informative book about grand strategic world history as seen through the eyes of one of the global elite’s better-known servitors. It’s interesting how regardless of whether one looks at the world through the 4GW lens or through the NWO lens, the same diagnosis appears: the modern Westphalian state is endangered:

German unification altered the equilibrium of Europe because no constitutional arrangement could change the reality that Germany alone was again the strongest European state. The single currency produced a degree of unity that had not been seen in Europe since the Holy Roman Empire. Would the EU achieve the global role its charter proclaimed, or would it, like Charles V’s empire, prove incapable of holding itself together?

The new structure represented in some sense a renunciation of Westphalia. Yet the EU can also be interpreted as Europe’s return to the Westphalian international state system that it created, spread across the globe, defended, and exemplified through much of the modern age—this time as a regional, not a national, power, as a new unit in a now global version of the Westphalian system. The outcome has combined aspects of both the national and the regional approaches without, as yet, securing the full benefits of either.

He also, in passing, explains something that I mentioned yesterday, which is how the West planted the seeds for the third great wave of Islamic expansion that we now know as ISIS and the global jihad.

In the spring of 1947, Hassan al-Banna, an Egyptian watchmaker, schoolteacher, and widely read self-taught religious activist, addressed a critique of Egyptian institutions to Egypt’s King Farouk titled “Toward the Light.” It offered an Islamic alternative to the secular national state. In studiedly polite yet sweeping language, al-Banna outlined the principles and aspirations of the Egyptian Society of Muslim Brothers (known colloquially as the Muslim Brotherhood), the organization he had founded in 1928 to combat what he saw as the degrading effects of foreign influence and secular ways of life….

The West, al-Banna asserted, “which was brilliant by virtue of its scientific perfection for a long time … is now bankrupt and in decline. Its foundations are crumbling, and its institutions and guiding principles are falling apart.” The Western powers had lost control of their own world order: “Their congresses are failures, their treaties are broken, and their covenants torn to pieces.” The League of Nations, intended to keep the peace, was “a phantasm.” Though he did not use the terms, al-Banna was arguing that the Westphalian world order had lost both its legitimacy and its power. And he was explicitly announcing that the opportunity to create a new world order based on Islam had arrived. “The Islamic way has been tried before,” he argued, and “history has testified as to its soundness.” If a society were to dedicate itself to a “complete and all-encompassing” course of restoring the original principles of Islam and building the social order the Quran prescribes, the “Islamic nation in its entirety”—that is, all Muslims globally—“will support us”; “Arab unity” and eventually “Islamic unity” would result.

How would a restored Islamic world order relate to the modern international system, built around states? A true Muslim’s loyalty, al-Banna argued, was to multiple, overlapping spheres, at the apex of which stood a unified Islamic system whose purview would eventually embrace the entire world. His homeland was first a “particular country”; “then it extends to the other Islamic countries, for all of them are a fatherland and an abode for the Muslim”; then it proceeds to an “Islamic Empire” on the model of that erected by the pious ancestors, for “the Muslim will be asked before God” what he had done “to restore it.” The final circle was global: “Then the fatherland of the Muslim expands to encompass the entire world. 

Through its attempts to impose a Westphalian order on the dar al-Islam and its development of the concept of world revolution, the secular West inadvertently created a rival it cannot possibly defeat on its own. The secular West’s advantages – science and technology – are readily utilized by the jihad, while its weaknesses of demoralization, apathy, multiculturalism, and demographic decline are both readily exploited and easily avoided.

To paraphrase the immortal words of LTC Tom Kratman, if you’re going to wage a religious war, you damn well better bring a religion. And as one reader noted: “In 100 years, either Norway will be an Islamic republic or there will be statues of Anders Breivik in every Norwegian town.”

Ferguson

I tend to doubt things are going to get too out of control given the heavy police and federal presence, but this is a post for folks to post news and thoughts over night assuming it is announced that Officer Wilson will not be charged for the lethal shooting of Michael Brown.

4GW in Middle America

This looks rather like a prelude of one of the signs I predicted would be among the harbingers of the civil war that will bring about the end of the USA:

Police families in Ferguson fear for their safety and many have gone into hiding or left town after receiving assault and death threats.

Spouses and children of cops in Ferguson, Missouri, have received assault and death threats after the shooting of Michael Brown. Tensions continue to rise in Ferguson as a grand jury nears its decision on whether to indict Officer Darren Wilson in Brown’s shooting

‘It’s very frightening,’ said the police wife, who asked to not be identified. ‘Most people who have a family member who’s a police officer are very proud of what they do.This is real and people actually do know how to find us and they do want to harm us.’

I doubt it is anything more than threats at this point, though. If people were planning to act, they wouldn’t be warning police families ahead of time. We will know that 4GW has come to America in earnest when police and federal agents are leaving their jobs for fear of harm coming to their families.

Which, you may recall, is one reason I theorized that the notorious FEMA camps are not actually intended for enemies of the state, but rather, for the families of its servants.

The moral imperative of international law

I wonder if the Supreme Court will cite this new Gambian law when it finally gets around to considering the legality of the gay parody of marriage:

The president of Gambia has signed a bill into law that calls for life imprisonment for some homosexual acts, the latest African country to codify harsh penalties for the gay community…. Lawmakers approved the legislation in August, prompting an outcry from organizations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. The law contains language identical to an anti-gay bill signed into law in Uganda earlier this year but later overturned by a court on procedural grounds.

It criminalizes “aggravated homosexuality,” which targets “serial offenders” and people living with HIV or AIDS. Suspects can also be charged with aggravated homosexuality for engaging in homosexual acts with someone who is under 18, disabled or who has been drugged. The term also applies when the suspect is the parent or guardian of the other person or is “in authority over” him or her.

People found guilty of aggravated homosexuality can be sentenced to life in prison.

All these new laws sweeping the international scene are obviously a sign of inevitable progress. It is pointless to resist it, after all, are we not reliably informed that Africans are magic and our moral superiors? It would be racist to refrain from the fierce moral imperative of following their example.

The Saxon stirs

You know what they say: Vote UKIP, get UKIP. This by-election result is huge, because it is presenting the English with a genuine and popular alternative to the single pro-European party and its three factions, Tory, Labour, and Liberal Democrat.

As last night’s executive action showed, what Americans need is a genuine American Independence Party.

Isolati!

Several people asked me to address what superficially looks like yet another SJW isolation attempt, as Vunderguy asked John C. Wright for his “take” on me:

I’ll just up and say it then. He seems to me to be something of a white supremacist, even though he’s about as white as I am, or at least, draw those kinds of people towards him.

Now, I like Vox in a lot of ways. He’s even more non-PC than Matt Stone, Trey Parker’s, Larry Correra’s, and Andrew Klavan’s gay managa-whatever-the-frenchy-word-for-four-is’ love child and the ways he can get under the enemy’s skin is admirable… but he seems to have trouble separating the culture a people group has from the people group themselves and seems to equate the genetics of that people group too closely with the behaviors of that people group… even though, as an admitted minority, he’s one pretty smart cookie. I mean, you’d have to be to be able to be such an isolationist that you give up on America and move to Italy with a family to support… even though that’s even closer to where the first bangs of destruction will begin, but whatever.

To top it all off, like I said, a lot of the people that tend to comment on his site are nowhere near as awesome as the people that comment on yours, and by that I mean that a lot of the commenters on his site seem to be what Alfonzo Rachel would call, ‘Noe-Confederate Libertarians’ and/or the kind of people who believe we had no good reasons to intervene in Vietnam, Iraq, and probably WW II (I.E., the kind of absolutist pacifists that find no use for Just War Theory).

Furthermore, Vox supported Ted Cruz’s plan to get a bill passed that would enable congress to strip the citizenship of people who went to go join ISIS… even though anyone with any knowledge of history, like he’s SUPPOSED TO BE, would know that such a bill would just erode our republic faster like the laws put in place by ‘that RINO Neo-Con George W’ that every self-professed Libertarian likes to bash, and enhanced by Obama.

Furthermore, Vox supports #NotYourShield for the whole gamergate thing, and that hashtag is pretty darned racist, and I mean LEGITIMATELY racist, and not in the faux-racism that Vox’s ‘Magic Negro’ statements about Obama and Ben Carson were.

He also thinks that the west started the current crises in the Middle-East, even though he admits that it was Muslim aggression that started started the crises on a more macrocosmic scale in the middle-ages, which strikes me as double-think despite any empty rhetoric of, ‘War is Peace,’ that might be hurled at me.

First, let me point out that my opinion of Mr. Wright as a science fiction writer may be high, but it is an informed and soundly grounded one. Second, I am not a “white supremacist”, I am a civilizationist. Many people seem to forget that in addition to my BS in economics I also picked up a BA in East Asian Studies, studied in Japan, and in fact still speak some Japanese. I am a fan of higher civilization in its various forms, but the fact is that European civilization was, and is, the height of Man’s accomplishment. The main reason I live in Europe and not Japan is the timing of the post-Heisei boom bust.

The reason I “have trouble separating the culture a people group has from the people group themselves” is because the two cannot be separated. They are not the same, but they are intertwined. Americans often find this difficult to understand because their culture is very young and shallow, and because they ceased to be a people, to the extent they ever were, over a century ago. Genetics affects culture, which in turn affects genetics, in an ongoing process that no one is even close to being able to successfully divide and analyze. One of the benefits of being multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, and familiar with multiple cultures is the ability to see what aspects are easily transmitted and which are not. There are still aspects of Japanese culture, hell, there are still aspects of Italian culture which I do not grasp despite my intimate familiarity with them.

As for anyone still trying to defend the failed military interventions in Vietnam and Iraq, well, that speaks for itself. Whether one looks at them from a moral or a military perspective, they were catastrophes.

I do support Ted Cruz’s plan to strip citizenship of ISIS members, just as I will support the eventual plans to strip citizenship from those who hold other citizenships. Such acts will not “destroy the Republic”, to the contrary, they will make the possibility of an undivided nation possible. The Republic was destroyed when it became an occupying Empire established by force under Lincoln; the South was, and is, a conquered nation which is no more a voluntary part of the Union than the West Bank is a voluntary part of Israel.

#NotYourShield is not the least bit “racist”, but is rather the refusal of Native Americans like me or other ethnic minorities, to permit SJW white people to speak for us using our name. We will speak for ourselves, they do not speak for us. The only thing that is racist is the SJW’s attempts to silence us and turn us into ventriloquist puppets. I am astonished at Vunderguy’s implicit assertion that white SJWs have any right to tell Native Americans what their permitted opinions are and at what they are to take offense or not.

There is no question that Western interference in the Middle East sparked this third great wave of Islamic expansion. Vunderguy earlier tried to question my knowledge of history, and yet here shows his own. There is absolutely no double-think here, merely observable cause and effect. Just as Islamic aggression sparked the Crusades, Western interference sparked the current global jihad. The expansionary jihadist spirit was always there, but it was quiescent until it was disturbed by the West.

People are often trying to get Larry and John to disown me in much the same way they have tried to get me to disown Roosh and Roissy. One might ask oneself the important question: why? It is, I think, a testimony to our collective effectiveness and impact we have on how people are thinking that so many attempts are repeatedly made to isolate and DISQUALIFY us.

But why do I so often, as another commenter observed, “get singled out”? I suspect that is because unlike Larry and to a lesser extent John, I annoy and embarrass the conventional Right almost as much as I infuriate the Left. I simply have no loyalty to any ideology except the truth as I perceive it to be and I don’t respect the Right’s pieties on race and other controversies any more than I respect the Left’s. But you don’t have to like the truth in order to accept it is legitimate when presented with correct logic and relevant science.

The Obama Amnesty

The plan is not quite as disastrous as I was expecting. But it’s bad, and you can be certain it is going to get even worse in the implementation:

The biggest change to the immigration system will be a new program that allows the parents of U.S. citizens and permanent residents to apply for work permits and deferred deportation. An estimated 4 million parents will be eligible for the initiative. They are people who have been in the United States for at least five years and have no felony convictions but are currently in the country illegally.

The program is modeled on a similar initiative — known as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA — that Obama launched in 2012 for immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children.

The administration is also expanding eligibility for the current deferred action program. Previously, those brought to the United States as children needed to have come to the United States before 2007, and to still be under 31 years of age, to apply for the new status. Now, any qualifying immigrant brought to the United States before 2010 as a child is eligible, opening the program up for at least a quarter-million more people….

The Obama administration is also finalizing new rules that would allow the spouses of H-1B visa recipients to receive visas without being counted against the overall cap for high-tech skilled workers. And the administration will begin developing a new program for foreign entrepreneurs, who currently face tough restrictions immigrating to the United States unless they have a guaranteed income.

This is going to put more negative pressure on wages, especially in technology, which shouldn’t be surprising since that’s precisely why Zuckerberg and company were pushing for it.

Overrated and underbrained

I always thought LeGuin was considerably overrated, but I didn’t think she was actually stupid until now:

“We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa,” LeGuin said. “And I see a lot of us, the producers, accepting this — letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant!”

She was referring to the recent dispute between Amazon and the publisher Hachette over e-book pricing. The power of capitalism can seem inescapable, LeGuin said, but resistance and change begin in art. And writers should demand their fair share of the proceeds from their work. “The name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.”

Really? I always thought profit was the central point. I stand corrected. Let there be freedom! And I have to say, the cognitive dissonance inherent in simultaneously a) defending a mainstream publisher and b) demanding a fair share of the proceeds is impressive.

Although if Amazon were to actually adopt a policy of putting out fatwas on SFWA members, I suspect that’s something a lot of people could get behind.

Why Obama is pushing amnesty through

This not-entirely-coincidental article in the New York Times is so timely that one has to suspect it was published yesterday in order to try to mollify Democrats who are little more enthusiastic than Republicans about the prospect of Obama magically converting millions of illegal aliens into citizens with the same rights and privileges they possess through unConstitutional executive action.

This region has become so solidly Republican, particularly since President Obama was elected, that there isn’t much left there for the Democratic Party to defend or salvage. For instance, prior to the 2010 midterms there were 54 Blue Dog Democrats in Congress. In the outgoing Congress, there are only 19 left, including eight from the South.

And Republican gerrymandering has further weakened Democratic power, even when Democrats vote in high numbers. As Lee Fang wrote this month at Republic Report, “Republican gerrymandering means Democratic voters are packed tightly into single districts, while Republicans are spread out in such a way to translate into the most congressional seats for the G.O.P.”

After the midterms, The Associated Press provided this tally:

“In January, the G.O.P. will control every governor’s office, two U.S. Senate seats, nearly every majority-white congressional district and both state legislative chambers in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas and Texas.”

It is important and relevant that The Associated Press pointed out the racial dichotomy because, in the South, ideology and racial identity are nearly inseparable.

Obama and the Democratic Party leadership are desperate to boost the non-white portion of the population because they understand that what has happened in the South, where there is a White Party and an Anti-White Party, is going to gradually spread to the West, East, and Mid-West. That division will probably occur last in the Mid-West for the counterintuitive reason that there are more whites there, so they will be the last to abandon multicultural ideology for pure racial power politics.

But this amnesty is about nothing but trying to create more Anti-White voters. The problem the Anti-White party faces, of course, is that La Raza hates blacks far more than whites do and considerably more than they hate whites. And while La Raza is socialist and likes big government as well as the largesse it produces, they aren’t particularly keen on most Democratic social causes. Still, what choice do the Democrats have? The only non-whites to whom they can turn are the very people who are in the process of ethnically cleansing southern California.

As I’ve previously noted, we will know that the transformation of America from a freedom-oriented white Christian European representative democracy to a conventional post-ideological ethnically divided state where rival groups scrabble for power is complete when SJWs like John Scalzi turn in their SJW cards and flee for the perceived safety of the White Party they have excoriated for years.