Two failed wars

A lieutenant general regrets the wasted lives of his soldiers, thrown away for nothing in Iraq and Afghanistan:

As a senior commander in Iraq and Afghanistan, I lost 80 soldiers.
Despite their sacrifices, and those of thousands more, all we have to
show for it are two failed wars. This fact eats at me every day, and Veterans Day is tougher than most…. We can convince ourselves that we did our part, and a few more diplomats or civilian leaders should have done theirs. Similar myths no doubt comforted Americans who fought under the command of Robert E. Lee in the Civil War or William C. Westmoreland in Vietnam. But as a three-star general who spent four years trying to win this thing — and failing — I now know better.

We did not understand the enemy, a guerrilla network embedded in a quarrelsome, suspicious civilian population. We didn’t understand our own forces, which are built for rapid, decisive conventional operations, not lingering, ill-defined counterinsurgencies. We’re made for Desert Storm, not Vietnam. As a general, I got it wrong. Like my peers, I argued to stay the course, to persist and persist, to “clear/hold/build” even as the “hold” stage stretched for months, and then years, with decades beckoning. We backed ourselves season by season into a long-term counterinsurgency in Iraq, then compounded it by doing likewise in Afghanistan.

What went wrong in Iraq and in Afghanistan isn’t the stuff of legend. It won’t bring people into the recruiting office, or make for good speeches on Veterans Day. Reserve those honors for the brave men and women who bear the burdens of combat.

That said, those who served deserve an accounting from the generals. What happened? How? And, especially, why? It has to be a public assessment, nonpartisan and not left to the military. (We tend to grade ourselves on the curve.) Something along the lines of the 9/11 Commission is in order. We owe that to our veterans and our fellow citizens.

Such an accounting couldn’t be more timely. Today we are hearing some, including those in uniform, argue for a robust ground offensive against the Islamic State in Iraq. Air attacks aren’t enough, we’re told. Our Kurdish and Iraqi Army allies are weak and incompetent. Only another surge can win the fight against this dire threat. Really? If insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, I think we’re there.

As a veteran, and a general who learned hard lessons in two lost campaigns, I’d like to suggest an alternative. Maybe an incomplete and imperfect effort to contain the Islamic State is as good as it gets. Perhaps the best we can or should do is to keep it busy, “degrade” its forces, harry them or kill them, and seek the long game at the lowest possible cost. It’s not a solution that is likely to spawn a legend. But in the real world, it just may well give us something better than another defeat.

Clearly the general should have read ON WAR. William S. Lind could have told him – in fact, did tell him – that the US military could not defeat the Pashtun in Afghanistan or rebuild the state it shattered in Iraq.

SJWs are Gramscian culture warriors

In which esr points out that SJW tactics are the same as those utilized by the Nazis and the Communists before them:

Americans have never really understood ideological warfare. Our gut-level assumption is that everybody in the world really wants the same comfortable material success we have. We use “extremist” as a negative epithet. Even the few fanatics and revolutionary idealists we have, whatever their political flavor, expect everybody else to behave like a bourgeois.

We don’t expect ideas to matter — or, when they do, we expect them to matter only because people have been flipped into a vulnerable mode by repression or poverty. Thus all our divagation about the “root causes” of Islamic terrorism, as if the terrorists’ very clear and very ideological account of their own theory and motivations is somehow not to be believed.

By contrast, ideological and memetic warfare has been a favored tactic for all of America’s three great adversaries of the last hundred years — Nazis, Communists, and Islamists….

I think there is still an excellent chance that the West can recover
from suicidalism without going through a fevered fascist episode and
waging a genocidal war. But to do so, we have to do more than recognize
Stalin’s memes; we have to reject them. We have to eject postmodern
leftism from our universities, transnational progressivism from our
politics, and volk-Marxism from our media.

The process won’t be pretty. But I fear that if the rest of us don’t
hound the po-mo Left and its useful idiots out of public life with
attack and ridicule and shunning, the hard Right will sooner or later
get the power to do it by means that include a lot of killing. I don’t
want to live in that future, and I don’t think any of my readers do,
either. If we want to save a liberal, tolerant civilization for our
children, we’d better get to work.

Esr is addressing the danger posed by Islam here, not SJWs, and he’s talking about the entire West rather than the assault on the game industry but he’s describing the same tactics derived from the same playbook as part of the same anti-Western cultural war.

I have little doubt that he is right. Many, if not most, #GamerGaters would rather drink the blood of every single SJW than submit to them. In the same vein, many Americans would rather see a ruthless pro-white, pro-Western government led by the hard-eyed likes of Vladimir Putin than watch their nation continue to vanish in a swarm of third world immigration. The Left, for all their drama queen antics, doesn’t realize how many Men of the West are never, ever going to submit to them.

And if the sweet reason of the esr’s prove impotent, the Breiviks will rise. Esr thought, back in 2006, that there was an excellent chance the West can recover from the intellectual disease without violence. Eight years later, in 2014, I am considerably less sanguine about those odds.

What you can do, part 2

This is the second part of my response to someone who asked what they could do to help fight the SJWs. A few days ago, a #GamerGater named @Ignideus with less than 500 followers came up with the idea for #OpSkyNet as a prospective solution for the tendency of e-celebs to dominate the public discourse on Twitter. Today, it is the #3-trending hashtag on Twitter and #GamerGate has been re-energized as the leaderless, decentralized force that it is.

Larry Correia did little more than mention a few SF/F writers he felt had produced work that merited award consideration, and in the process, exposed the corruption and hyperpoliticization of the SF Awards process.

Yesterday, a non-gamer named RooshV announced the creation of Reaxxion, a pro-#GamerGate game review site for men. He writes:

My younger brother, who considers himself a gamer, gave me the
definitive push into starting Reaxxion. He plays Xbox, PC games on
Steam, and also some mobile games. He particularly likes games with long
and intricate story lines, telling me that gaming is just not about
pushing buttons to advance a level but to be affected on some level by a
compelling story, but now those stories are being perverted by people
who truly believe that men are evil and holding women down just because
they may want to enjoy a traditional story line with attractive women.

The infiltration of SJW’s into gaming may mean that my brother will
have to put up with their narrative in his games. It may mean that his
entertainment options become more limited because a developer was subtly
threatened unless he inserted another “empowered female” in a game
where such a character simply doesn’t fit. I’ve learned that unless you
fight back against these people, unless you spread awareness and develop
a megaphone as big as them, they will surely get what they want and
impact the culture in a way that hurts normal men who don’t subscribe to
their strange worldview.

Roosh isn’t a gamer, but he understands the importance of #GamerGate as the current Schwerpunkt, or focal point, of the SJWs. That’s why he’s stepped in with the sort of material assistance that only someone of his stature on the Internet can; the very name of the new game site is a gesture of contempt for those who consider themselves progressives.

Ingnideus was an unknown. Larry is a New York Times bestselling author. Roosh is Internet-famous, or if you prefer, infamous. But all three of them are taking what action they can take and all three of them are having a real impact.  What you can do entirely depends upon your capabilities, resources, and inclinations, but all of it is, at the very least, capable of mattering.

Most people who want to get involved are more akin to Ingnideus than Roosh. What that means is finding someone who is already leading the way by doing something and lending support to their efforts. Find a Schwerpunkt of interest to you and throw your weigh behind it. Many of you are already doing this with Castalia House, by buying our books, subscribing to our New Release newsletter, or in some cases, proofreading, formatting, narrating, and slush-reading. A few are assisting Alpenwolf, Joe and Kirk have been helping with the First Sword art. But we can always use more and we are far from the only independent writer, developer, publisher, site or blog that can use the help.

General

  • Support the good. Don’t support the SJWs in any of their flavors.
  • Get on Twitter. Tweet once with #OpSkyNet. Retweet and favorite one #GamerGate tweet per day.
  • Email one Gawker (or other #GamerGate target) advertiser per week.
  • Join Recommend. Write one Game- or Book-related reco, good or bad, per week and I’ll add it to the appropriate list. Be sure to follow me first so I will see it.
  • Try an indy game from a #GamerGate developer.
  • Submit an article to Reaxxion. 
  • Speak out. Do a blog post. Tell a friend.
  • Stand by those under attack, especially if you don’t agree with them. The primary SJW tactic is 3rd Generation. They cut off, isolate, then swarm. They can’t do that if you refuse to permit them to separate you from their target.

Castalia House

  • I’m ridiculously behind on submissions. We need new slushreaders and probably someone to manage the process.
  • PR. We haven’t sent out a single press release to anyone yet even though we have a pretty good story to tell. We’re too busy producing to talk about it.
  • Bloggers for Castalia House. Mascaro is too busy now and Jeffro has needed to take a few weeks off due to burnout. It’s difficult doing one quality blog post per week; many people can manage one or two, but consistency is the key.
  • PDF Layout. LL is getting up to speed on this, but we have a pretty big backlog already and we are contractually obligated to get some of our newly signed books out in print.

Alpenwolf

  •  Art. We’re doing all right for code, I think. (Markku, correct me if I’m wrong) but we could use additional art help. 
  • PR. We don’t need it yet, but we will.
  • There is probably something else I’m missing.

Why bother? Who cares about random guys living in their mother’s basements fighting for large pixellated breasts sporting chainmail bikinis in their games? Nero explains why he, a non-gamer, is following the battle:

GamerGate is remarkable—and attracts the interest of people like me—because it represents perhaps the first time in the last decade or more that a significant incursion has been made in the culture wars against guilt-mongerers, nannies, authoritarians and far-Left agitators.

Games are merely the current battleground. TV is already lost to the SJWs. Movies are lost. Literature is largely lost. Genre literature is all but lost. Remember, this is the mentality we’re up against:

Humphrey, the former Subway worker, had been living with her uncle before she lost her job. She now bounces from couch to couch in her circle of protester friends — a sacrifice she said is worthwhile, because what is the point of working when she says she could be killed any day because of the color of her skin? Now, she said, standing at the Rowan Community Center on a run-down block in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood of St. Louis, “I sleep, eat and breathe this.”

Sure, that sort of commitment easy for someone with no talent, job, or responsibilities, who has literally nothing else to do to throw themselves into something 24-7. But we’re not talking about that level of commitment, but rather a small and spare-time, but persistent one. My perception, and I could be wrong, is that far too many people on the Right are overly concerned that someone, somewhere, might profit from their assistance whereas there are no shortage of volunteers on the Left who don’t care at all about that. (This may, admittedly, be due to their general failure to grasp the concept in the first place.) Did Joe Farah benefit from my contribution of more than 500 columns to WND? I should bloody well hope so! What would be the point if he didn’t? I didn’t give him money, I gave him 30 minutes per week, and I remain pleased to see what effective use he made of it.

The Catch-22 is that there is never any money involved in getting something started from nothing, which is why it is hard to start anything without the approval of the SJW gatekeepers who have successfully infiltrated the foundations and the large corporations. There is only one way around this, which is for the talent of the right to be willing to follow the example provided by the Free and Open Source crowd.

This sort of thing should never be seen as a job, but a contribution to the cause given out of a positive spirit. It might turn into a job one day, but it probably won’t. And if you’re worried that Castalia, or Roosh, or the guys at Recommend, or might one day end up making a buck due in part to some of the time you’ve put in, consider this: Would you be here in the first place, reading this, if I has been unwilling to write columns or blog posts without being paid for my time?

Anyhow, those are my thoughts. Some of you will have additional ideas, and feel free to throw them out here. This is an open discussion, so brainstorm, don’t critique. And above all, one thing is clear. Don’t wait for permission. Don’t expect direction and management. Adopt a Fourth Generation mentality. Ignideus is the Leader of #GamerGate, Roosh is the Leader of #GamerGate, I am the Leader of #GamerGate, and so can you.

Two-Hand Monte

The central bank giveth, the government taketh away:

Five of the world’s biggest banks have today been handed fines totalling more than £2billion for rigging the £3.5trillion-a-day foreign exchange market. British, US and Swiss authorities all launched an onslaught after an 18-month investigation as regulators today revealed the latest scandal to rock the industry. 

State-owned Royal Bank of Scotland has been fined £217million ($344million) by the London-based Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) as well as £182million ($290million) by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The others involved in the settlement are Citibank, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase and UBS, who will also pay up to £500million each. Barclays said it continues to hold discussions with regulators.

More than 30 traders have been fired, suspended, put on leave, or resigned since the probes started, and the Serious Fraud Office has launched a criminal investigation – but there have been no arrests.

The lesson is: if you’re going to make a career of theft, better do it as a bankster. It’s remarkable to observe how no matter what law is broken as an employee of an international bank, the only penalty will is a relatively small financial one directed at the artificial person of the banking corporation.

The RBS CEO said: “‘We had people working at this bank who did not know the difference between right and wrong, or worse, didn’t care about the distinction.'”

You don’t say. It’s cute that he uses the past tense there.

Snow day!

I don’t often miss Minnesota. But I have to admit, I did enjoy the excitement of looking outside, seeing a field of white where there used to be a street, and turning on the radio, listening to hear that school had been canceled that day. As a kid, there isn’t much better than an unexpected snow day.

Prophecy has its privileges

I have to admit, I didn’t even know this was an issue:

The Mormon founder Joseph Smith married as many as 40 women, including a
14-year-old girl, church leaders have acknowledged for the first time in a
surprising revelation about their most important prophet. Although the Mormon church was closely associated with polygamy during its
first decades, its teachings had previously portrayed Smith as happily
married to one woman. The reality was apparently very different from that monogamous picture. And
with increasing speculation circulating on the internet about his marital
history, the Church hierarchy has revealed Smith as a prolific polygamist
via an essay posted on its website.

Anyhow, congratulations to the church hierarchy for deciding that truth is better than falsehoods and propaganda. Better late than never.

What we can do

That’s what I was asked in the comments yesterday. I came up with one solution, which I’m pleased to see that about 100 of you implemented right away. But that’s just a start. First, I think it is important to take Cailcorishev’s observation into account of why the SJWs are so often successful with their entryist tactics and how they so regularly obtain positions of power in an organization or an industry.

They’re able to take over the things they do because normal people just don’t care that much. It’s how they run all the committees in a school: no one else wants to. People who create games and play games don’t care much about the incidental stuff like reviewing. We don’t need that to exist at all, so when someone emerges to do that, we figure “Better her than me.” Most of us don’t realize until too late how much power that concedes to them, because what they do looks so irrelevant from our ends.

This is true. I know the power of what he’s saying, because I entered into the industry via reviewing games myself. I started out as a contributor to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, then was syndicated by Chronicle Features, and before long was appearing in papers from the North Bay Nugget to the Boston Globe and the Atlanta Journal/Constitution. Within 18 months, I was personally acquainted many of the major game developers, guys like John Carmack, Richard Garriott, and Chris Roberts, as well as important media and publishing figures like Johnny Wilson and Scott Shannon.

How? It was easy. No one at the Pioneer Press seriously played computer games. They didn’t have anyone to do it, and they even started to rely upon me to do things like analyze the Unabomber’s manifesto for the editorial page. Of course, the Left polices itself much more carefully than the Right. When there was a vacancy on the op/ed page, I asked for the spot. The editor met with me – I was only the sixth columnist in the paper’s history to be nationally syndicated, so he couldn’t just blow me off – and politely made it clear there wasn’t a chance in hell he was going to put a libertarian extremist on the page every week. But the tactic works.

Now, I have to go for the time being. Work takes priority over the Cause. It might, however, be worthwhile to consider this until I’m able to finish this post and provide some concrete suggestions. Everyone knows that I don’t get paid for blogging. But what many people don’t know is that I never took any money to write eleven years worth of columns on WND. (Hence my amusement when people talk about Daddy getting me the “job”.) They couldn’t afford it when I first started, but I supported the alternative media that the Farahs were attempting to build.

That’s why the Left is progressing. Because they are willing to invest the time.

What created the Fourth Generation?

The Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld has an interesting hypothesis concerning where the seeds of the Fourth Generation’s military bypass of the state were planted:

Many of the distinctions between army and people which had been established by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century international law also broke down. Armed violence, far from being limited to combatants, escaped its bounds. Terrible atrocities, including even the planned starvation of tens of millions, were carried out against the inhabitants of occupied countries both in Europe and in Asia. The populations themselves did not acquiesce with their lot. Occupation per se was now regarded as a monstrous injustice and resisted. In places such as Yugoslavia, Tito’s partisans, though comprising neither government nor army, came close to waging full-scale conventional conflict; and indeed in retrospect this may have been the most important of all the changes which the War brought about. Meanwhile the sky was filled with mighty fleets of heavy bombers—later, flying bombs and ballistic missiles—headed in both directions. They deliberately set out to kill civilians, women and children not excluded. Entire cities were destroyed by firestorms in a manner not seen in Europe for three centuries. A climax of violence was reached in 1945 when two nuclear bombs were dropped on Japan, killing 150,000 people in flat disregard of the fact that peace negotiations were already going on in Moscow at the time. Officially the destruction of enemy civilians was justified by their wickedness. In practice, often they had to be declared wicked so that they could be destroyed by the indiscriminate weapons available….

Metternich, looking back from the eve of his resignation in 1848, might have felt satisfied with the results of the Congress of Vienna despite several limited revolutionary outbreaks that had taken place in the meantime. Similarly, a backward glance from the perspective of 1990 makes the attempt to put the genie back into the bottle appear successful up to a point; those who set out to establish a new world order after World War II did their work reasonably well. The principal reasons for this outcome were the ever-present fear of nuclear Armageddon and, of course, sheer war-weariness. At any rate, to date there has been no repetition of “total” conflict on the model established by both World Wars. When the principal military powers went to war—always excepting the “low-intensity conflicts” which, though they formed a large majority, hardly counted as a war—they usually abided by the rules. Whatever may be said about the Falkland War, it did not witness either the breakdown of distinctions between the military and civilians or, consequently, large-scale atrocities. The same is true about the Arab-Israeli Wars, except perhaps for the first; though in this case things might have looked different had victory gone to the other side.

The point, however, had been made and would not be forgotten. Whatever else total war may have done, it put an end to any idea that armed conflict, including specifically the largest ever fought, is necessarily governed by the Clausewitzian Universe. Historically speaking, in fact, trinitarian war—in other words, a war of state against state and army against army—is a comparatively recent phenomenon; hence, the things that the future has in store for humanity may also be very different indeed.

The interesting thing here is that he presented this idea that war had moved beyond the state and trinitarian war in his book The Transformation of War, which was published in 1991. After all, if since the people have become the targets of total war, they have been made participants whether they will or no. And so, as Lind told a group of Marines at Quantico in his Four Generations of Modern War lecture: “[4GW doesn’t want to fight you, it wants to bypass you and go straight after the society you are supposed to be defending.”

Never rely on a moderate

@totalbiscuit is one of the #GamerGate guys whose heart is more or less in the right place, but has never grasped the underlying issue. He released a joint statement with some other guy with whom he has been sparring. Most of the points are banal enough, but two require comment:

Diversity is important among game creators, players, and characters, and this is an important conversation that must be encouraged, not punished. Diversity leads to better stories, better stories lead to better games. If someone posts an article or video that you disagree with, the correct response is to write a comment, write to the editor, or create your own opposing article or video. It is not appropriate to threaten his or her safety, family, or anything else along those lines.

No. Diversity is not even remotely important among any of these people. Nor is it an important conversation that must be encouraged. It is simple SJW entryism and Totalbiscuit has fallen for it. If Diversity led to better stories, then SF/F would be better than the SF/F of 30 years ago. It’s not. It is considerably worse, by virtually every standard.

But yes, it is not appropriate to threaten people simply because you disagree with them. Or to spend hundreds of hours trying to hack their server; we are still seeing the hacker bounce off our security.

Gamers have endured attacks from the mainstream media for decades and we should be doing everything we can to bring that ignorance to an end, not further fuel it with incendiary rhetoric.

Again, @totalbiscuit is wrong. Only rhetoric can fight rhetoric. I cite Aristotle: “Before some audiences not even the possession of the exactest
knowledge will make it easy for what we say to produce conviction. For
argument based on knowledge implies instruction, and there are people
one cannot instruct.”

In other words, you cannot use dialectic to convince anyone who cannot be instructed of anything. It will not work. Only rhetoric will suffice.

PS: Do to some various distractions, I will be posting my answer to “what can I do” tomorrow. In the meantime: join Twitter, follow, 1 #GamerGate retweet, 1 #GamerGate favorite. That’s a 10-second daily commitment. If you can’t do that, you can’t do anything.

SJWs devour themselves

Larry Correia is vastly amused by the spectacle of SFWA turning on an Campbell Award-nominated Asian lesbian:

Apparently a member of the literati SJW army—and super prestigious Campbell nominee for BEST NEW WRITER—has turned out to be a huge internet troll, with a bunch of aliases, attacking and tormenting people. Of course, those of you who read this blog or followed Sad Puppies are like, duh… They attack and torment Larry, and anybody who agrees with him nonstop, but not my friends… Benjanun Sriduangkaew did the unthinkable and used their regular SJW tactics of threats, insults, intimidation, and career sabotage against fellow SJWs, and that is super badthink!

Now, when you threaten, intimidate, troll, and try to sabotage the career of anybody who disagrees with the Social Justice narrative, then that is doubleplus good!

The SJWs are perfectly aware of their hypocrisy. They talk about how
Sriduangkaew was praised for “punching up”, meaning that it was okay for
her to use these tactics against non-members. Threaten somebody of the
correct sex and race, cool. Threaten somebody of the wrong sex and race,
bad. If you have a brain, you will find that sexist or racist, but you
are not thinking like a proper SJW. Anything they say isn’t sexist or
racist, but anything we do is. Simple.

As I’ve repeatedly warned, pointing out SJW hypocrisy is meaningless to any SJW. They aren’t dialectic. They aren’t rational or coherent. And deprived of any non-rabbits to attack, they naturally turn on each other. The funniest thing is, of course, that Benjanun Sriduangkaew was entirely correct to be cruelly dismissive of the likes of Jemisin and Rothfuss. At her best, Jemisin is mediocre; Rothfuss is painfully unreadable. He’s the Britney Spears of SF/F. I tried reading The Name of My Rose-Scented Wind or whatever it is called once when I was on the road and found myself turning to an Avalon Hill rulebook I’d previously read because it was more interesting. Rothfuss’s achievement is creating the only protagonist you would murder if forced to choose between him and Rand al’Thor. Larry also addressed #GamerGate:

This is one reason I’ve been enjoying the hell out of GamerGate. First,
it has been awesome having a great big group of people witness the same
bullshit that my industry has been dealing with for years. Second, SF/F
people tend to be squishy and polite, with a handful of outspoken
outliers like me and the rest of the Evil League of Evil, so SJWs have
run roughshod over my industry… But gamers? Holy shit. You really think
you can pick a fight with people whose brains are programmed to win?
Gamers will outlast, outthink, and outfight the SJWs. Tell a Gamer that
there is loot or XP in it, and he’ll grind SJWs to the grave.

That’s what SFWA never understood about me when they couldn’t figure out why I didn’t humbly lower my head and slink off the way a good rabbit who has been rejected by the warren is supposed to vanish. I’ve always been a gamer and a game developer first and foremost. It was more likely that I would go methodically through the entire SFWA directory like Michael Myers with literary taste than to even think about submitting to those ghastly little creatures. The thought literally never crossed my mind. The anti-GamerGate SJWs are making exactly the same mistake.