Hail to the victors

Contra SEC loyalist Nate’s assertion, they’re chanting it now. B1G! B1G!

I’m not what you’d call a fan per se of THE Ohio State University, in fact, I think Michigan has better colors as well as the best uniforms and fight song in college football. But back in the day, when there were only two teams playing for the Big 10 title, I tended to favor Woody Hayes, Art Schlichter, and Archie Griffin over Bo Schembechler and the Maize-and-Blue. I have no idea why, but it still astonishes me that Griffin was not a star in the NFL. It didn’t surprise me that Rashan Salaam failed in the pros; all he ever did at Colorado was take a pitchout, beat an undersized cornerback around the corner, and run 80 yards for a touchdown. But Griffin was the real deal in college. Was he simply too slow? I have no idea.

Anyhow, with Harbaugh back at Michigan, Meyer leading a resurgent Ohio State, and both Penn State and Nebraska rebuilding their programs, it should be interesting to see if a rivalry between the SEC and the Big 10 develops. It’s enough to get this NFL fan paying a modicum of attention, anyhow.

Those anti-semitic Israelis

Is it not remarkable how, when the Israeli Prime Minister said Jews living in Europe should move to Israel, he was not attacked as being anti-semitic in the way everyone else who wishes the Jews well and advises precisely the same thing is?

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has invited Jews from France and the rest of Europe to immigrate to the state of Israel, referring to what he sees as a “rising tide of anti-Semitism” there. The statement comes in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

“To all the Jews of France, all the Jews of Europe, I would like to say that Israel is not just the place in whose direction you pray, the state of Israel is your home,” Prime Minister Netanyahu said in a televised statement on Saturday, referencing the Jewish tradition of facing Jerusalem when praying.

Netanyahu called on lawmakers to alter the existing immigration laws to make it easier for Jews to permanently move to Israel.

So, what do we conclude from this, that Benjamin Netanyahu hates the Jews? I note that absolutely none of my previous critics have remarked upon the fact that I was absolutely correct to have warned the Jews of the changing mood in Europe, and to have urged them leave Europe and emigrate to their homeland. Had the Jews in Paris done so sooner, they would not have been murdered by Muslims as they were in Granada and eventually in every Muslim-controlled city in Spain and the Maghreb.

Reports from the period describe that, after an initial 7-month grace period, the Almohads killed or forcefully converted Jewish communities in each new city they conquered until “there was no Jew left from Silves to Mahdia”

A man cannot have two masters, and the French Prime Minister Valls (who is a Spaniard) was absolutely incorrect to claim that France requires Jews any more than it requires Spaniards, Germans, Russians, or Turks. France without Jews is France. It is the Israeli Prime Minister who is correct. Israel is their home. The various nations of Europe are not, and it is time for everyone to stop pretending that they are. The diversity concept is dead. It has failed, and failed spectacularly.

It is not necessary to love or hate anyone to recognize that a group of people whose foremost concern is “is it good for the Jews” is never going to be entirely acceptable to those whose primary concern is “is it good for the French”. That is straightforward logic, it is simple set theory, and in a time of rising nationalism around the world, from the Islamic State to Germany, non-nationals everywhere would do well to either a) fully convert or b) return to their home nations.

Especially when one of the historical lessons of al-Andalus is that when Muslim and Western cultures clash, the Jews tend to end up as collateral damage. For the European Jews, emigrating to America instead of Israel looks rather like the Medieval Jews fleeing from the Almohads to what eventually became the Spanish Inquisition. And given the economic trend of the last 60 years, I very much doubt it will take another 345 years for Americans to begin doubting the loyalties of the USA’s Jewish residents, as the Spanish Christians eventually came to do.

NB: When considering these large-scale movement of people, try to recall that the significant changes tend to take decades, even centuries, to play out, even though the obvious turning points can often be identified at specific moments in time. As Guy Gavriel Kay’s novel shows, we often tend to look at certain sections of history while ignoring the relevant sections that immediately preceded or followed it, and thereby reach erroneous conclusions.

Coaching craziness

Rex in with the Bills, Fox out with the Broncos, most open positions still unfilled… I wonder if Peyton Manning will retire as quarterback and take the OC position under Adam Gase as the Denver head coach?

Pegida rises

As expected, the Paris attacks have caused German nationalism to continue growing, from 500 marchers to 25,000 in only three months:

A record 25,000 people joined an anti-Islamic march in Germany on Monday, claiming their stance was vindicated by last week’s Paris jihadist attacks. However, the impressive turnout was dwarfed by 100,000 counter-demonstrators calling for tolerance nationwide.

Chancellor Angela Merkel earlier stressed that “Islam belongs to Germany” and announced she would on Tuesday join a Muslim community rally in Berlin against extremism, along with most of her cabinet ministers.

Undeterred, supporters of the self-styled Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident, or PEGIDA, gathered for their 12th rally since October in their birthplace of Dresden in former communist east Germany.

The marchers waved the German national flag and held up placards that read “Fight Islamisation, stop the flood of foreigners now” and “Stop multiculturalism. My homeland will stay German”.

The “counter-demonstrators” are irrelevant. They’re just the usual suspects who will turn out for any leftist cause. They won’t fight when the time comes; once the nationalists outnumber them they will disappear. What matters is the way Pegida is forcing the treasonous German elite to show its true anti-German colors.

Come election time, I imagine Merkel is going to be seeing a lot of pictures of herself in a burqah, talking about how “Islam belongs to Germany”. Germans can be so tone-deaf it is hysterical; imagine how that assertion is going to go down in Iraq, Pakistan, and Egypt. I don’t know enough about German politics to know if this will be enough to sink her yet, but it is clear that she’s determined to go down with the transnational ship. Furthermore, given the media’s obvious sympathies, it wouldn’t be at all surprising if there were already more Pegida marchers than tolerance losers.

Tolerance, multiculturalism, and diversity are all dead. They’ll twitch for a while, but no one with more than half a brain can still seriously claim to buy into the concepts. I note that Pegida is already spreading into Austria and Switzerland as well.

Mailvox: deportation is not war

Asked asked about the abandonment of multiculturalism:

Vox, your position seems to abandon multi-culturalism.. how do you envision this practically? France has 4-5 million Muslims, it’s not possible to deport them without a MAJOR war. The other alternative would be forceful conversions to Christianity/atheism… yeah.. be ready to strike France out of the map.

This is a false dichotomy. Of course it is possible to deport 5 million people. It’s neither difficult to accomplish nor likely to inspire war, let alone a MAJOR war. The oft-heard insistence that mass deportation is either a) impossible or b) necessarily violent is intrinsically ignorant. One has to literally know nothing about 20th century history in order to make the assertion, as one’s knowledge of the subject does not even rise to the level of Wikipedia.

  1. Eastern Europe, 1945: German Reichsdeutsche and citizens of other European states who claimed German ethnicity were forced out of many Eastern Europe countries to Germany and Austria, and to Australia or the United States from there for many, during the later stages of World War II and the post-war period. The areas of expulsion included former eastern territories of Germany, which were transferred to Poland and the Soviet Union after the war, as well as areas annexed or occupied by Nazi Germany in pre-war Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, northern Yugoslavia and other states of Central and Eastern Europe. By 1950, a total of approximately 12 million Germans had fled or been expelled from east-central Europe into the areas which would become post-war Germany and Allied-occupied Austria. Some sources put the total at 14 million, including migrants to Germany after 1950 and the children born to expelled parents. The largest numbers came from territories ultimately ceded to Poland and the Soviet Union (about 7 million), and from Czechoslovakia (about 3 million).
  2. Soviet Union, 1932: Population transfer in the Soviet Union may be classified into the following broad categories: deportations of “anti-Soviet” categories of population, often classified as “enemies of workers,” deportations of entire nationalities, labor force transfer, and organized migrations in opposite directions to fill the ethnically cleansed territories. In most cases their destinations were underpopulated remote areas (see Forced settlements in the Soviet Union). This includes deportations to the Soviet Union of non-Soviet citizens from countries outside the USSR. It has been estimated that, in their entirety, internal forced migrations affected some 6 million people.
  3. USA, 2011: Nearly 400,000 people were deported from the United States in the past
    fiscal year, the largest number in the history of the U.S. Immigration
    and Customs Enforcement agency, the government announced Tuesday. Overall in fiscal year 2011, immigration officials said, 396,906 individuals were removed.
  4. USA, 1954: Overall, there were 1,078,168 apprehensions made in the first year of
    Operation Wetback, with 170,000 being captured from May to July 1954.

It is simply false to claim that it is impossible to deport 5 million people from any country without a war. It can certainly be argued whether a mass repatriation policy is desirable or not, and it can be debated precisely how such a policy would be best and most civilly enacted, but it’s utterly ridiculous to claim that such a policy would necessarily lead to war when it has never before done so in all of military history. In general, mass deportations tend to be a postcursor to war rather than a precursor. Note that an immigration regime no stricter than that presently practiced by the current US ICE agency could send every Muslim in France back to the Dar al-Islam by 2025. That’s hardly a blueprint for Armageddon.

Of course, the first step in abandoning multiculturalism is to stop the bleeding. Which is to say, shut down all immigration immediately. Shut down all income redistribution from the native population to the non-native population. That alone will address one-third to one-half of the problem. Then the question of repatriation can be reasonably debated.

The alternative is not much of an option, as it should be abundantly clear by now that going further down the multiculturalism and diversity path will lead to civil war followed by vicious and violent ethnic cleansing. If you genuinely wish to avoid violence across the West, an approach that involves closing the borders, ending the income subsidies, and repatriation is the only civilized answer.

Posted without comment

Study: Men Who Post Selfies Show Psychopathic Tendencies

Men who regularly posted photos of themselves online scored higher on a measure for narcissism and psychopathy…. The study also found that men who edited their pictures before posting
also scored higher on the scales of narcissism and self-objectification.

For no particular reason, you understand. And in other SFWA-related news, it appears that the services of the Toad of Tor may no longer be required by Tor Books:

Teresa Nielsen Hayden, aka the repugnant and infamous cyberbully “Hapisofi” on Absolute Write, has been officially fired from the Tor staff. We received the following note from someone connected to the publisher (who must remain anonymous to prevent retaliation by Nielsen’s husband Patrick who is still a big shot at Tor Books and who has supported his wife regardless of her vitriolic and unprovoked assaults on writers, presses, and organizations using her anonymous ID on Absolute Write):

Teresa Nielsen Hayden is now officially off the Tor staff page. She has been removed permanently. A source close to the staff reports that the sheer amount of negative information about her on the web was the reason.

There is, however, some reason to doubt the accuracy of this report, given that the link is to the Tor.com staff page, not the Tor Books staff page. The two are related, but distinct corporate entities. I will update this once news of the Toad’s firing is either publicly confirmed or confirmed to be false.

The pride of the self-gelded

Guy Gavriel Kay is one of the better fantasy authors writing today. I posted a review of his The Lions of Al-Rassan, which is my favorite of his books, at Recommend. But it is a shame, bordering on a tragedy, that he doesn’t see how his inclination towards atheistic secularism will prevent him from ever approaching literary greatness:

The Canadian author Guy Gavriel Kay has explored the issues of faith and religious intolerance in several of his fantasy books, such as his duology “The Sarantine Mosaic,” set in a world modelled on Byzantium during the time of the Emperor Justinian. Kay’s stories echo the conflict that arose historically between such religions as paganism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

. . . there has been a natural progression from Fionavar, through Tigana and [A Song for] Arbonne, to The Lions of Al-Rassan, away from the mythic and the fantastical, and towards the human and the historical. The progression from myth to religion is another way to describe it, not that the books are religious, but that we move away from what, in Fionavar, I’ve sometimes called a Homeric world; the gods intervene in the affairs of men, they have their own squabbles and feuds amongst themselves, and yet they’re physically present, men can sleep with the goddess, men can battle with words with the gods – the gods are present. In Tigana, magic is still there, but, for the most part, magic and its use was employed as a sustained metaphor for the eradication of culture. The major use of magic in the novel Tigana is the elimination of the name of the country Tigana, which for me was very much metaphorical. In A Song for Arbonne, we’re into a story about how religion, the organized religion, the clergy, manipulates the people with their beliefs about gods and goddesses. By the time we get to The Lions of Al-Rassan, it’s mainly about how organized religion takes away the freedom and the breathing space of individuals. So there is a natural progression, which is not to say that I know where the next book is going, that that progression is necessarily continuing.

It certainly seems however that the religious dimension is not going to disappear; it’s been very strong in the last two books, and certainly The Fionavar Tapestry has, in a sense, a proto-religion at the heart of it. Can you conceive of writing a book which does not have religion as a factor?

Yes, I’m sure I can; I am not a religious man, what I think I am is a person keenly interested in history. When you talk about proto-religion, you’re talking about, as I said, the Homeric idea of gods and goddesses incarnate, and the progression in history away from that. I think that, if I would characterize my interest, it’s very much in the historical and mythical roots of what we have become as cultures. When I say “we”, I mean Western men and women, because that’s the culture that I feel most at home in, it’s the culture that most of us are, to some degree, shaped by. So, in that sense, the four books (treating Fionavar as one) have been incorporating that tension, but it’s not in any huge sense central to my thinking or my own work.

Does that mean you might write a novel about the Enlightenment, about skepticism coming to the fore?

I think skepticism comes to the fore in the last two books to a great degree. I think that it’s part of the movement from myth to religion. In The Lions of Al-Rassan, one of the reasons the book is a fantasy, rather than a story about medieval Spain, even though it’s very closely modelled on real history, is that I wanted to see what would happen to people’s preconceptions and prejudices about cultures: Christian, Moslem, Jewish, if the names were changed and if the religious beliefs were rendered virtually banal: one religion worships the Sun, another worships the Moon, and another worships the stars. And out of that relatively banal conflict of ideologies, you have crushingly brutal military and psychological conflict. When you speak of skepticism, it seems to me that The Lions of Al-Rassan should be very clear for the readers: the point that underlies the detaching of these religious conflicts from their real underpinnings is that, if we step back a bit, we can start to see how much violence, how much conflict is generated by something that may be no more complex than whether you worship the Sun rising in the morning or the stars beginning to shine at night.

It’s rather remarkable that such an intelligent and talented man can be so brutally foolish as a result of his anti-religious bias. The sad thing is that he transforms what could have been a great book into one that is merely good, and is dishonest to boot. The amusing thing is that he appears to think that his obvious biases are not readily apparent to the intelligent reader; faithless ecumenicism is the romantic ideal he portrays in the novel.

The mere fact that I could write the following while knowing nothing of the author’s religious faith, or lack there of, demonstrates the intrinsic problem of the irreligious attempting to meaningfully address religious themes.


This surfeit of excellence might have been excused as a stylistic
statement on medieval panegyrics were it not for the author’s
excessively modern take on religion. Despite the plot being dependent
upon the conflict between the star-worshipping Asherites (Muslims),
sun-worshipping Jaddites (Christians) and moon-worshipping Kindath
(Jews), the author’s own apparent lack of religious sensibility prevents
the book from being as rich and moving as it easily could have been. (A
moment’s research confirms that Kay is not, by his own statement, a
religious man; it definitely shows throughout.)

Note that the interview proves that Kay’s portrayal of religion in the book is intentionally false and shallow. He does not recognize that by rendering such a false account of religion, he has undermined his own attempt to make a case against it. By detaching the “religious conflicts” from their real underpinnings, what he proves is that religion doesn’t have much, if anything, to do with violent conflicts that arise from the normal historical reasons of ambition, pride, greed, and the desire for power.

Like most secular writers, Kay fails to grasp that if he wishes to successfully attack religion, he must portray it with absolutely rigorous honesty. Because, in The Lions of Al-Rassan, all he has managed to accomplish in this regard is to reduce the literary value of his own work in order to demolish a strawman of his own construction. In this way, he is the anti-Eco, as Eco, despite his own secular inclinations, does his fictional characters the courtesy of taking their beliefs seriously and at face value, which is why he is the better and more memorable writer.

I have never forgotten the genuine anger in Umberto Eco’s voice when he corrected me concerning a question I asked him about the “villain” of The Name of the Rose: “Jorge is not the villain, he is one of the heroes … He is expressing
certain attitudes of his time, but I don’t consider him a villain. It is
a confrontation between two worldviews, and a worldview is a system of
ideas.”

That is the difference between a great writer and one who is merely a fine literary technician with a bent for storytelling. The great writer is willing to permit his characters to speak for themselves, according to their worldviews. The technician, on the other hand, insists on reducing his characters to puppets intended to express his worldview.

It takes two to tango

But only one party to wage war. This is honest, but remarkably stupid commentary on the current European situation from the Mayor of London:

About 10 years ago, the whole Danish cartoon controversy blew up – and I remember distinctly concluding that I would never have published them in The Spectator, which I edited, not just because they were gratuitously inflammatory, but because I didn’t see how I could justify my decision to the widows and orphans of my staff, in the event of an attack on our offices (and I note that one of the German publications to use the Charlie Hebdo cartoons has just been fire-bombed).

It is essential to admit this element of fear (and several editors have been candid enough to do so), because fear is a very bad and corrosive thing. Fear leads to anger. Fear leads to mistrust. Fear can make you irrational, and in the case of Islamist terrorism, the resulting fear can obviously encourage prejudice and division. Fear leads to hatred – and that is exactly what those terrorists hope to provoke. They want to see anti-Muslim marches of the kind that are now appearing in Germany; they want an anti-Muslim backlash; they want war; and it would be absolutely fatal if we were to allow ourselves to fall for it.

Imagine if, instead of his famous call to “fight them on the beaches”, Winston Churchill had said something like this back in 1940. “Fear leads to hatred and that is exactly what the Nazis hope to provoke. They want to see us sending out warships to guard the Channel. They want an anti-German backlash; they want war and it would be absolutely fatal if we were to allow ourselves to fall for it.”

The astonishing thing is that Boris Johnson knows his history. He and other self-admitted cowards know that Chamberlain was wrong to attempt to appease Hitler, just as FDR was wrong to attempt to appease Stalin, and yet they are making precisely the same mistake by trying to pretend that Islam can be won over if they are sufficiently accommodating.

Everything about the multicultural status quo is a lie. The headline in the Telegraph says: “Paris march of unity: after a minute’s silence the crowd roared ‘We are not afraid!'”

They lie. They are most certainly afraid. They are afraid of the Muslims in their midst, and they are afraid of the nationalist forces that are rising. They are right to be afraid, because it is primarily their fault that the Reconquista 2.0 is now both necessary and inevitable.

Divisional playoffs, Day 2

The New England-Baltimore game was as good as the Seattle-Carolina game was bad. I turned the latter off after Seattle went up 7-0 as it was obvious that Carolina had no chance whatsoever. That pass from Edelman to Amendola was a fantastic call and executed almost flawlessly. John Harbaugh is a very good coach, but Belichick clearly outcoached him yesterday. The chess match was fun to watch; it was the exact opposite of watching a Denny Green-coached team in the playoffs.

Dallas-Green Bay should be a good game too, although I don’t think Green Bay will have too much trouble putting the Cowboys away on the frozen tundra unless Rodgers gets hurt. Dallas’s best option is to ride Demarco Murray hard.

The Denver-Indy game shouldn’t be as bad as Seattle-Carolina, but I can’t see the Colts hanging with the Broncos. The Broncos run better, pass better, have a better defense, and they’re playing at home.

More than books

We have some new offerings in the Castalia House store:

Castalia House is a publisher of books, but we are also a developer of games. So that is why we are pleased to be able to announce that the Castalia House bookstore will also be carrying digital versions of various games we consider to be of high quality and potential interest to our readers in the new Games section. The first games we are offering here are published by Castalia House author Ken Burnside of Ad Astra Games, who contributed “The Hot Equations: Thermodynamics and Military Science Fiction” to Riding the Red Horse. Ken is also Castalia’s newest blogger, where he’ll be focusing on various aspects of game development, from general analysis and history to in-depth design and mechanics.

Our long-term goal for Castalia House is to become a major destination site for all high-quality Blue SF/F-related activity, including books, boardgames, and electronic games. This is another small step towards that objective.