ON WAR by William S. Lind

ON WAR The collected columns of William S. Lind 2003-2009 is a seven-year collection of columns written by the father of 4th Generation War theory while observing the U.S. invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. It is an intriguing account of a war in progress, as seen through the eyes of a military theorist able to anticipate events with an almost prophetic degree of accuracy. Throughout the book, 4GW theory is defined, described, and refined as events in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places demonstrate the theory’s utility in making sense of current events and predicting future ones. The inevitable failure of the New Iraqi Army and the U.S.-installed al-Maliki government is explained years in advance, as is the rise of the Islamic State and other 4th Generation forces presently battling for power in post-occupation Iraq.

Lind also makes an ominous, but compelling case for the gradual spread of 4th Generation chaos and the decline of the state throughout the world, including in the United States of America. Featuring a Foreword by the brilliant Israeli military theorist Martin van Creveld, On War is a fascinating book that is a must-read for every military professional, wargamer, and amateur student of the art of war.

In one of the key passages of the book, Lind writes: “4th Generation war is the greatest change since the Peace of Westphalia, because it marks the end of the state’s monopoly on war. All over the world, state militaries are fighting non-state opponents, and almost always, the state is losing.”

William S. Lind is one of the most significant and influential military theorists on the planet. The author of the Maneuver Warfare Handbook and a founder of 4th Generation War theory, Mr. Lind is known and respected by military personnel around the world. One of our newsletter subscribers, who tore through the book in record time, sent me the following note:

“Thank you for putting this together.  Reading it has been an
intensely humbling experience; I considered myself fairly knowledgeable
about history and current affairs, and this book has shown me that
there’s an incredible amount of things I have no idea about…. And as a computer
professional, the German general’s comment that “If we’d had computers,
we’d never have been able to (be successful),” is simply shocking to me.
I understand exactly what they meant, and it’s something I’ve never
considered before…. It’s been a fascinating read.”

The 807-page book is available at Castalia House in both EPUB and MOBI (Kindle) formats as well as from Amazon and Amazon UK.  If you are a New Release subscriber who has already purchased and read the book, we would appreciate it if you would consider posting your reviews on Amazon.

What “Cultural Marxism” is and isn’t

This is very relevant today, since it is not only an excerpt from William S. Lind’s ON WAR, which is being officially released later today by Castalia House, but a topic that has been the subject of some debate among GamerGaters opposed to the pinkshirts’ attempts to transform the game industry in a conventionally cultural marxist manner.

Most people wrongly understand cultural Marxism to mean: “cultural efforts to establish an actual global Marxist
system”. This is not correct. Marxism is a political and economic system that has been repeatedly refined since Karl Marx laid down his pen. It might be a little less confusing to describe it as “cultural Marxianism”, but that’s being excessively pedantic. The matter is readily clarified by the essay entitled “What is Political Correctness”, as the father of 4th Generation War theory explains the historical roots of political correctness in cultural Marxism:

Political Correctness is cultural Marxism, Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. Its history goes back not to the 1960s but to World War I. Before 1914, Marxist theory said that if a major war broke out in Europe, the workers of every country would join together in a revolution to overthrow capitalism and replace it with international socialism. But when war came, that did not happen. What had gone wrong?

Two Marxist theorists, Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary, independently came up with the same answer. They said that Western culture and the Christian religion had so blinded the working class to its true Marxian class interests that Communism was impossible in the West until traditional culture and Christianity were destroyed. When Lukacs became Deputy Commissar for Culture in the short-lived Bela Kun Bolshevik government in Hungary in 1919, one of his first acts was introducing sex education into the Hungarian schools. He knew that destroying traditional sexual morals would be a major step toward destroying Western culture itself.

Lukacs became a major influence on a Marxist think tank established in 1923 at Frankfurt University in Germany, the Institute for Social Research, commonly known as the Frankfurt School. When Max Horkheimer took over as director of the Frankfurt School in 1930, he set about in earnest to do Lukacs’ bidding by translating Marxism from economic into cultural terms. Other Frankfurt School members devoted to this intellectually difficult task were Theodor Adorno, Eric Fromm, Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse. Theirs was not the Marxism of the Soviet Union—Moscow considered them heretics—but it was Marxism nonetheless.

The Frankfurt School’s key to success was crossing Marx with Freud. They argued that just as under capitalism everyone lived in a state of economic oppression, so under Western culture people lived under psychological repression. From psychology they also drew the technique of psychological conditioning. Want to “normalize” homosexuality? Just show television program after television program where the only normal-seeming white male is homosexual.

In 1933 the Frankfurt School moved from Germany to New York City. There, its products included “critical theory,” which demands constant, destructive criticism of every traditional social institution, starting with the family. It also created a series of “studies in prejudice,” culminating in Adorno’s immensely influential book, The Authoritarian Personality, which argued that anyone who defends traditional culture is a “fascist” and also mentally ill. That is why anyone who now dares defy PC gets sent to sensitivity training, which is psychological conditioning designed to produce submission.

In other words, it is not a tool used to establish Marxism, but rather a perversion of Marxism aimed at the culture rather than the political economy. Anyone attempting to understand the pinkshirts of #GamerHate must first understand that cultural Marxism is real and that it is the underlying basis for the SJWs’ current attack on the game industry. And it is worth pointing out that any #GamerGaters attempting to defeat them would do very well to understand that they are presently engaging in a 4GW struggle, and that in that struggle, they are the insurgents.

4GW and failed narratives

#GamerHate is just chock full of “gamers”. A bunch of anti-GamerGater’s predictably responded poorly to this assertion:
If you are anti-#GamerGate, you are no longer a gamer. You may play games, but you are not a part of gaming culture. You have rejected it.

Zaid Jilani ‏@ZaidJilani
@voxday i will 1v1 u in any game of your choosing while quoting statistics on the dwindling white population of america

Vox Day ‏@voxday 9m9 minutes ago
ASL live on VASL. We can record it for posterity. You choose scenario, I choose side.

Zaid Jilani ‏@ZaidJilani
wtf is asl and vasl

Vox Day ‏@voxday
ASL = Advanced Squad Leader. VASL = Virtual Advanced Squad Leader. So, what scenario shall we play?

Zaid Jilani ‏@ZaidJilani
what the f is this crap you dont have starcraft?

Yeah, those #GamerHate guys are simply hardcore gamers-4-life. The same assertion prompted Chris Kluwe aka @chriswarcraft aka Sparklepunter to decide that it would be a good idea to attempt to DISQUALIFY me.

ChrisKluwe @ChrisWarcraft
Hey #Gamergate’rs, you cool with letting a self admitted white supremacist speak for your movement? Just curious.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
@ChrisWarcraft I’m an Indian, Sparklepunter. Feather, not dot, complete with tribe. With one-quarter Mexican heritage to boot.

I do find it amusing how the pinkshirts just can’t stop walking right into their own racist assumptions. Especially how they will deny the undeniable rather than question their own belief that the magic red people can’t possibly disagree with their petty white fascism. They’re not only attempting to deny my Native American heritage, some are even trying to deny my Mexican heritage, which would certainly surprise my great-grandfather, the Mexican revolutionary, and my great-uncle, the well-known Mexican-American artist.

It is also interesting to observe Kluwe’s foolish resort to the self-admitted lie. I’ve never admitted any such thing. NK Jemisin told precisely the same sort of lie, although she lied about me being a “a self-described
misogynist, racist, anti-Semite, and a few other flavors of asshole” rather than being “a self admitted white supremacist”. Again, I have never described myself as any of those things. Of course, if we know one thing about the pinkshirts, it is that they have a problematic relationship with the truth.

In any event, what Sparklepunter is trying to do is to “fix-and-freeze” the opposition, in order to DISQUALIFY me, and through me, #GamerGate. But not only is his attempt to do so inept, but the very fact that he made it at all demonstrates how the gamerhating pinkshirts are overmatched. It’s an intrinsically 2GW way of thinking, to make contact, then call in for fire support. But even if he did manage to somehow completely disqualify me – a dubious proposition in light of more than 10 years of failed attempts that have only seen my site numbers grow – it wouldn’t matter any more than a USAF drone strike killing yet another “al-Qaeda Number Two”.

In this regard, #GamerGate and the response to it has been a fascinating illustration of 2GW vs 4GW. And it is an illuminating lesson concerning the truth of William S. Lind’s statement, “almost always, the state is losing.” In this case, applied 4GW marks the end of the media’s ability to control the narrative.

Vietnam vs America: round 2

Vietnam appears to be coming out ahead again:

According to the Pew Global Poll, 95% of people in Vietnam agree that most people are better off under capitalism, even if there is inequality. By contrast, only 70% of Americans believe the same thing…. But the Vietnamese advantage may boil down to this: Free markets are new there, whereas America has had them for a long time. Scientist Thomas Ray once said that every successful system accumulates parasites, and the free market in America has been successful for a very long time. Established businesses get tied down with regulations that keep out new innovations — like Michigan’s GM-backed anti-Tesla law that bars carmakers from selling directly to the public — while politicians line up to line their pockets with taxes and fees and campaign contributions.

This phenomenon probably explains why most of the growth and innovation in the U.S. economy has been in the Internet or Internet-enabled sectors where regulation has been light, though even there the politicians are cracking down. Ultimately, the political system doesn’t like anything to go on unless it has control — and a chance for politicians to wet their beaks and look after their own.

I expect Glen’s explanation is correct. All things are corrupted in time, all empires, even the mightiest, fall. Glen quite rightly doesn’t want a war or revolution, but that is what the USA is likely to eventually see at least one of those things as it inevitably fragments, as all force-imposed empires do in time. The UK very nearly broke apart earlier this year, and the Catalan-Spain union will likely do so within ten years.

Both of those unions were voluntary, so how can anyone possibly assume that the USA, which is a union imposed by military force and the will of a conqueror rather than the people, will not do so as well? It’s simply not a credible position, and demonstrates both the lack of the imagination and historical ignorance of anyone who holds it.

NB: I’m sorry about the comment captchas, but I’ve already got word verification turned off and I can’t seem to do anything about it. The way to avoid it is to be logged into Google; you can still use Name/URL and you won’t be forced to deal with the captchas. I suspect it is because I use an old template, but I don’t actually know why Blogger is suddenly ignoring the Word Verification setting.

VPFL Week 7

89 Mounds View Meerkats (5-2)
74 RR Redbeards (5-2)

76 Greenfield Grizzlies (6-1)
70 Gilbert Gamma Rays (4-3)

76 King (3-4)
71 Texas Chili Eaters (4-3)

79 Favre Dollar Footlongs (4-3)
56 Boot Hill Bogs (1-6)

62 Bane Cornshuckers (3-4)
33 Clerical Errs (0-7)

Quite the old school finish from the Vikings today. I really like Barr, the rookie linebacker who, with the help of a timely hit from Chad Greenway, stripped the ball and ran it back for the winning touchdown.

The vanishing borders

Post-WWI borders are dissolving, and not in the way that the globalists were anticipating:

Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon gave a wide-ranging and
provocative interview to NPR earlier this week. Of particular interest
was his recognition that the national borders that were created after
World War I are dissolving:


The borders of many Arab states were drawn up by Westerners a century ago, and wars in recent years show that a number of them are doomed to break apart, according to Ya’alon, a career soldier who became Israel’s defense minister last year. “We have to distinguish between countries like Egypt, with their history. Egypt will stay Egypt,” Ya’alon, who is on a visit to Washington, tells Morning Edition’s Steve Inskeep.
In contrast, Ya’alon says, “Libya was a new creation, a Western creation as a result of World War I. Syria, Iraq, the same — artificial nation-states — and what we see now is a collapse of this Western idea.” Asked if Middle Eastern borders are likely to change in the coming years, Ya’alon says: “Yes, absolutely. It has been changed already. Can you unify Syria? [President] Bashar al-Assad is controlling only 25 percent of the Syrian territory. We have to deal with it.”

Ya’alon is right. As our own Adam Garfinkle concluded in June about
Iraq: “The Iraqi state in its historic territorial configuration is
gone—solid gone, and it ain’t coming back.” The region’s other
“artificial nation-states” aren’t going to return to the status quo ante
bellum either. Whatever comes out of the current war, it won’t look
like the old landscape, and we shouldn’t imagine that there are natural
nations waiting to be created out of the ethno-tribal-religious anarchy
that the Middle East is witnessing.

However, it isn’t merely in the Middle East that the dissolving borders issue can be observed, as anyone who lives in the southwestern United States will know. As William Lind, author of the Castalia House book ON WAR (which will be officially released tomorrow) pointed out in “The Canon and the Four Generations”:

4th Generation war is the greatest change since the Peace of Westphalia, because it marks the end of the state’s monopoly on war. Once again, as before 1648, many different entities, not states, are fighting war. They use many different means, including terrorism and immigration, not just formal armies. Differences between cultures, not just states, become paramount,and other cultures will not fight the way we fight. All over the world, state militaries are fighting non-state opponents, and almost always, the state is losing. State militaries were designed to fight other state militaries like themselves, and against nonstate enemies most of their equipment, tactics and training are useless or counterproductive.

The effects of 4GW can already be seen in the Middle East. But the same forces are actively at work right here in the United States, and, to a lesser extent, in Europe as well.

The impotence of the mind police

Sparklepunter (Chris Kluwe) and McRapey (John Scalzi) were chortling on Twitter the other day about how the “idiots” of #GamerGate had “no clue” what they were in for. And then, the pinkshirts pulled out the most fearsome artillery in the mainstream media….

That’s right! A NEW YORK TIMES article! So what do you think about THAT, bitches?
(Um, wait, isn’t that sexist?)
(SHIT! DELETE TWEET, DELETE TWEET DAMMIT!”)
What do you think about that, evil gamerhate death threaters!
(That’s better.)
That’s right, a NEW YORK TIMES article entitled “Can Video Games Survive? The Disheartening GamerGate Campaign”:

FOR
more than five years, almost every word that I’ve written
professionally has been about video games. I used to cover things like
presidential campaigns and prison reform. But at some point, video games
began to seem as consequential as those subjects, if not more so.
As
they became more popular, more profitable and, most important, more
powerful as a means of creative expression, video games started to feel
to me like the Internet had in 1999: a technology on the verge of
washing over our culture and reshaping it wholesale. Millions of people
of all ages were playing games. These were boom times, and thanks not
just to the mega-studios that produce things like the Call of Duty
series, but to countless small, independent developers as well. Game
design began to be taught in art schools alongside theater and
sculpture. The interactive age had arrived, and video games were its
most promising entertainment.

Translation: newbie journalist discovers games market, reviews some games, and now thinks he’s an expert. Also believes that all the johnny-come-latelies attempting to make a buck off the huge and growing gamer population are indicative of more than trivial parasitism. Speaking as someone who has professionally lectured on game development and game design at a technical institute in Europe, those game design degrees from art schools are completely worthless. (Something I point out in my lectures, by the way.) They are almost always taught by people with virtually no experience in the industry and none professionally designing games.

And then came GamerGate. Over the past few weeks, as this inchoate but
effective online movement has gathered momentum, I’ve begun to wonder if
I’ve made a horrible mistake.

He did. He chose… poorly. He lined up with the pinkshirts against the players. If you are anti-GamerGate, you are no longer a gamer. Period. You may play games, but you are not a part of gaming culture. You have rejected it.

It’s the players who enjoy this culture, even as they distinguish themselves from the worst of the GamerGate trolls, who truly worry me. If all the recent experimentation and progress in video games — they’re in the permanent collection at MoMA now — turns out to be just a plaster on an ugly sore, then the medium’s long journey into the mainstream could be halted or even reversed.

Given what the mainstream presently represents – ideological domination by SJWs, thought-policing by pinkshirts, kowtowing before feminists and sexual freaks, and relentless parasitism – that sounds like a very desirable result indeed. Who gives the smallest fleck of a fly’s shit about video games being “in the permanent collection at MoMA”. So fucking what?

Other game designers, journalists and cultural critics have been threatened, or have faced hacking attempts on their online accounts, from email to social media to banking. Video games are unquestionably poorer than they were two months ago when this strange and disheartening series of events began. Talented people are quitting. If this continues, the medium I love could go backward into its roots as a pastime for children.

The game industry didn’t need those no-talent ideological parasites before. It doesn’t need them now. And the game industry could do a lot worse than go back to its roots, which happened to produce some of the legendary classic games that are just as fun to play today as they were two decades ago.

To me, these anti-intellectual players, who want games to be “just games” and want criticism of them to be devoid of things like political and social context, are almost as worrisome as the horrifying, and criminal, actions of the harassers.

Of course it is worrisome to him. Games that are just games have no need of parasites like him trying to make a living about talking about them. Given his endorsement of inept pinkshirt-games, he’s clearly incapable of expressing an opinion about gameplay that any gamer will feel any burning need to know.

She’s [Leigh Alexander] more discouraged by her peers at websites that took two months to denounce GamerGate. Others have yet to make a statement at all. Some of the participants in the community of intelligent writers and designers who think and talk about video games in print and online, on websites and social media networks and podcasts, are being cowed into silence. In particular, if the large companies that make video games remain quiet, they risk allowing GamerGate to win the debate over whether diversity — of people, of ideas, of games themselves — has a place in their culture.

If the large companies that make video games are dumb enough to attack their core market, they will die. Intel and other companies are withdrawing their money from anti-GamerGate media companies like Gawker because they would like to continue selling their products to gamers. This is all the more true for the big game companies, which would also face an internal rebellion because many, if not most, of their employees are GamerGaters or at least sympathetic towards GamerGate.

(Let’s not forget, Leigh Alexander is not only the person who declared games to be dead, but also told an indie game developer: “Be careful with me. I am a megaphone, I am much less kind than Rami and I won’t mind making an example out of you.” For the record.)

@Nero commented that the people at one big company are “split right down the middle” on the issue. I’ve spoken to a few high-level people in the industry myself, including two “name-on-the-box” designers and one CEO, and they are definitely NOT anti-GamerGate. I would say that the most common opinion is one of indifference, mostly because the mainstream media’s opinion is totally irrelevant to them. But they do recognize one thing. #GamerGate is the gamers. Anti-#GamerGate is not. And at the end of the day, If you are anti-#GamerGate, you are no longer a gamer. You may play games, but you are not a part of gaming culture. You have rejected it and you are no longer a part of it.

Anti-#GamerGate is #GamerHate.

Pinkshirts at play

Now, recall that we’re supposed to be concerned that the mainstream media is against #GamerGate. John Scalzi was crowing to Sparklepunter that. But do they seriously think we don’t notice when the greater portion of the media establishment is simply pinkshirts doing exactly what Clark described at Popehat: “using these pink resources to promote, give good reviews to, and bestow awards on pink developers and pink games….” In this vein, consider the New York Times review of science fiction and fantasy today:

“Ancillary Justice,” the first novel in Ann Leckie’s far-future posthuman space opera series, recently became the first novel to win the “triple crown” of the genre (the Hugo, Nebula and Arthur C. Clarke awards), but not without controversy. The central question is whether the story’s structural gimmick — the protagonist’s tendency to refer to all people as “she” regardless of actual gender or even humanity — is sufficiently mind-blowing as to merit all the accolades. It isn’t a gimmick, though; it’s a coup. Rather than seriously entertain the endless, if stupid, debate on whether women have a place in stories of the future, Leckie’s book does the literary equivalent of rolling its eyes and walking out of the room. Her refusal to waste energy on stupidity forces her audience to do the same: A few pages into the first novel, the reader gives up trying to guess each character’s actual gender, and just accepts that this will be a story full of interesting women doing awesome things.

Notice that the reviewer dismisses the controversy around whether an eminently forgettable debut novel truly merits being the most highly-awarded SF/F novel of all time. As if there was every any doubt that a book written by a female pinkshirt was going to be full of women doing things. Prediction: the recently-released sequel to this vaunted SF novel ever is going to fall considerably short of expectations. Now, care to guess who wrote the review?

Why, none other than the educated, but ignorant half-savage herself, NK Jemisin! But we’re supposed to be duly impressed by the fact that the supposedly objective mainstream media praises “a story full of interesting women doing awesome things”, which I note could be used to describe practically any female-written novel from The Pillow Book to 50 Shades of Grey.

Like most pinkshirt victories, this one is hollow and bordering on pyrrhic, because the primary accomplishment is to cause the reader to realize that there is no point reading the NYT’s book reviews anymore. Assuming, of course, that one didn’t already figure that out about 20 years ago. Either way, it represents a once-formidable gatekeeper continuing its spiral downward into irrelevance.

20 years later

Charles Murray reflects on The Bell Curve:

American political and social life today is pretty much one great big “Q.E.D.” for the two main theses of “The Bell Curve.” Those theses were, first, that changes in the economy over the course of the 20th century had made brains much more valuable in the job market; second, that from the 1950s onward, colleges had become much more efficient in finding cognitive talent wherever it was and shipping that talent off to the best colleges. We then documented all the ways in which cognitive ability is associated with important outcomes in life — everything from employment to crime to family structure to parenting styles. Put those all together, we said, and we’re looking at some serious problems down the road. Let me give you a passage to quote directly from the close of the book:

    Predicting the course of society is chancy, but certain tendencies seem strong enough to worry about:

        An increasingly isolated cognitive elite.
        A merging of the cognitive elite with the affluent.
        A deteriorating quality of life for people at the bottom end of the cognitive distribution.

    Unchecked, these trends will lead the U.S. toward something resembling a caste society, with the underclass mired ever more firmly at the bottom and the cognitive elite ever more firmly anchored at the top, restructuring the rules of society so that it becomes harder and harder for them to lose. (p. 509)

Remind you of anything you’ve noticed about the US recently? If you look at the first three chapters of the book I published in 2012, “Coming Apart,” you’ll find that they amount to an update of “The Bell Curve,” showing how the trends that we wrote about in the early 1990s had continued and in some cases intensified since 1994. I immodestly suggest that “The Bell Curve” was about as prescient as social science gets.

The Bell Curve was an early example of the media pinkshirts attacking reality. And it is a good lesson for how retaining a firm grasp on truth will always outlast whatever the various political pressures du jour happen to be. As with The Irrational Atheist, if the ideas a book contains are in harmony with reality, they will penetrate the collective consciousness eventually even if the pinkshirts are successful in preventing people from reading a book or even hearing about it.

The truth always wins out in the end, not due to its own virtues, but because lies always eventually collapse under their own accumulating weight. One of the reasons the equalitarians are becoming increasingly vicious is that their vision has completely failed to deliver on any of the promises that the naive and the clueless found so compelling.

Choose this day

To paraphrase Joshua, choose this day with whom you will stand. Clark at PopeHat has an intelligent and analytical piece that contains an important section on the way pinkshirts invade and take over organizations and institutions, but I can’t agree with his quasi-neutral position. In any case, consider this very good description of what he calls entryism:

The entryism is of the usual type: people with blue/pink ideals join red / gray groups and try to achieve social status with in those groups, then use that social status to push for the admission of – and promotion of – more blue/pink members. Once the blue/pink members achieve a majority they then change the rules of admission to create a lock on their new conquest (in the case of academia, for example, even blue researchers in the Netherlands of all places, were shocked by how blatant the process was).

The status shaming is also of the usual type: high status blue / pinks follow Alinksy’s battle plan.

First, they pick a low-status target (rule 12). This target is usually a pale, bespectacled Aspergers-ish nerd) for a transgression against the norms they wish to universalize. The high social status pinks paint themselves as victims of a power imbalance, then they use their superior popularity to out-speak the target and push their version of the narrative. Pink allies in the media join in to keep the pressure on (rule 8). This is easy to do, because the act of social shaming is not only fun, but it’s click-bait, so everyone involved not only has lolz, they has cheeseburger (rule 6). The toxic nature of the allegations is usually sufficient to make sure that the target of the attack does not get much, if any, sympathetic press (rule 12, again: “Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions”.)

In computer gaming the attempt at entry came by first establishing a few pinks inside the community (not a problem, because the world of gamer development did not think of itself as politicized), and then using these pink resources to promote, give good reviews to, and bestow awards on pink developers and pink games, even when the games in question are not “games” by the normal definition.

Excellent observations. I would add that what I call Blues (and Clark calls red/gray) do not join Pink organizations, both because they have no desire to do so and because pink groups actively police their ranks at all times. Look at how rapidly I was purged from SFWA, in a clear violation of  by people who did not even qualify to join it for years after I became a member. The old school writers, who made a living publishing science fiction, didn’t care what anyone else thought about anything. The new school pretenders, many of whom are primarily activists of one sort or another and have not even published a single novel, care about little else.

That is why it is so difficult for organizations to recover once penetrated by entryist pinkshirts. The result is no more surprising than when one country invades another that has not bothered to field an army. Once the organization is occupied, it is easier to simply leave than to organize resistance among the stunned and demoralized membership. And those who don’t leave of their own volition will be pushed out, even for so small an “infraction” as referring to someone as “li’l girl”. Notice that the PGA President was fired in the name of the same “inclusivity” that the pinkshirts are now attempting to force on the gaming industry. “Inclusivity” must be rejected as strongly and as firmly as “equality”, “fairness”, and ever other pinkshirt slogan.

What Clark’s analysis unfortunately leaves out of the equation is that pinkshirts are intrinsically parasitical. For all that they preen about being “creative”, they do not create anything and they are incapable of building anything that is not political in nature. They are, for the most part, women and feminized men; it is not an accident that many of the “women” who are actually doing something in the game industry – for all his flaws and histrionics, Brianna Wu is a legitimate game developer – are actually men.

It’s important to remember that the pinks are not the political Left per se. They are a radical subset of it. There are certainly genuine left-wing creators, but the fact that they are genuine creators means that they have no need to interfere with other creators in any way. The more you see someone aggressively speaking out about the need to interfere with the creations of others, the more you can be certain that they have no ability to create anything themselves.

The single biggest problem that the Blue side has is the stubborn determination of many who do not sign onto the Pink program to remain on the fence until something affects them personally. I remember the cynical laughter of my father when a longtime friend, who had scoffed at my father’s concerns about the growing anti-business bureaucracy in Minnesota for more than 15 years, was suddenly galvanized into political action when the grasping tentacles finally reached into his own medical practice. It was, of course, far too late at that point.

That’s why it is important for those who don’t sign onto the pinkshirts’ program to actively oppose it. Yes, they will call you names. Yes, they will actively attempt to harm you and your career. But here is the secret: they are going to do it anyhow and buying time is only going to ensure that you will face them when they are stronger and more able to harm you.

What #GamerGate has shown is that we have the ability to strike back. We have the ability to harm them the way they are constantly seeking to harm us. Standing up to them works. Look at how their attempt to isolate me completely imploded; not only has this blog now reliably seeing nearly 3x the daily traffic as the one-time leading blog in SF/F, but Thursday marked its single most-trafficked day ever without any media coverage or even any links from a bigger site like Instapundit.

And speaking of Instapundit, look at the way more and more people have no tolerance for the pinkshirts. The mere polite mention of receiving a Scalzi book in the mail was enough to provoke anger; the most liked comment was this one from David in Virginia: “Not one penny to Scalzi from me. You can pump his stuff till hell
freezes over, Professor, and he still won’t get one red cent from me.”

I’m not addressing the Dread Ilk here. You guys have been PHENOMENAL. I can’t even thank you when you get my back from time to time because you guys always there. You’ve made Castalia House, which originally was just supposed to be a way of getting my books out there after Marcher Lord was bought, a going concern in which my books are practically a minor afterthought, so much so that successful, mainstream-published authors have been contacting us to discuss the possibility of working with us. I may not be the sort to need emotional support, (as Jonah Goldberg once said, I feed on the Dark Side of the Force) but it’s good to know that it is there nevertheless.

No, I’m addressing the Grays, the fence-sitters, the people who are hoping against hope that this will pass them by and the situation will magically improve. It won’t, so long as you and others like you are afraid. But I’m telling you, as someone who has been targeted unmercilessly by everyone from CAIR to the SFWA, there is no reason for fear. Standing up to them won’t kill you and it will make you stronger, more confident, and more capable. You’ll lose battles, sure, but you will win the war.

So get off the fence. Choose your side. Do something. Support the Blues. Stand with them instead of distancing yourself from them as if it will save you. (It won’t.) Attack the pinkshirts at their various points of weakness. Here is my pledge to you. If you do something, whether it is starting a game journo site, developing a card game, making a VASSAL module, reviewing books, or launching an email campaign against SyFy, I will support it somehow. Maybe via a personal endorsement (or a timely critique, if that would be more helpful), maybe a blog post, most often just a tweet. I simply can’t do much more than I’m already doing; as it stands, I’m already up until close to dawn working on my various game, book, and technology projects. But I can, and will, support you in yours.