Our underoos are not magic!

This announcement betrays an almost shocking naivete concerning human nature:

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has declared that it is
offended by ridicule about the undergarments worn by its faithful and
references to them as “magical underwear”.

A video released by the church on YouTube compared the underwear, known as “temple
garments”, to nuns habits, priests’ cassocks, Jewish prayer shawls,
Muslim skull caps, and the robes of Buddhist monks.

It said: “Some people incorrectly refer to temple garments as magical, or
magic underwear. These words are not only inaccurate but offensive to
members of the church. There is nothing mystical or magical about temple garments and church
members ask for the same degree of respect and sensitivity that would be
afforded to any other faith by people of good will.”

Look, I have zero problem with Mormons. They are, by and large, good people. Numerous readers here are Mormon. Larry Correia, Brad Torgersen, and Orson Scott Card are all Mormons. They may harbor a few strange beliefs, but then, so do I. But look, you simply cannot wear special, funny-looking underwear and expect people to find no amusement in it. You just can’t! And then informing the pulic your underwear stirs “the deepest feelings of
the soul” is just asking, nay, demanding amusement at your expense.

The Church would do much better to grin and bear it than try to play the offense card on that basis. Because, like it or not, underwear is intrinsically funny to most people and “magic underwear” is downright off the charts.

UPDATE: Josh has a better solution:

Honestly…the best way for them to handle this would be to say: “Because of our masculinity and virility, we Mormons require undergarments that offer more support for our massive penises.”

A state of war

Dmitry Orlov considers the current state of US-Russia relations on Zerohedge:

So far, this all seems like typical economic warfare: the Americans want to get everything they want by printing money while bombing into submission or sanctioning anyone who disobeys them, while the rest of the world attempts to resist them. But early in 2014 the situation changed. There was a US-instigated coup in Kiev, and instead of rolling over and playing dead like they were supposed to, the Russians mounted a fast and brilliantly successful campaign to regain Crimea, then successfully checkmated the junta in Kiev, preventing it from consolidating control over the remaining former Ukrainian territory by letting volunteers, weapons, equipment and humanitarian aid enter—and hundreds of thousands of refugees exit—through the strictly notional Russian-Ukrainian border, all the while avoiding direct military confrontation with NATO. Seeing all of this happening on the nightly news has awakened the Russian population from its political slumber, making it sit up and pay attention, and sending Putin’s approval rating through the roof.

The “optics” of all this, as they like to say at the White House, are rather ominous. We are coming up on the 70th anniversary of victory in World War II—a momentous occasion for Russians, who pride themselves on defeating Hitler almost single-handedly. At the same time, the US (Russia’s self-appointed arch-enemy) has taken this opportunity to reawaken and feed the monster of Nazism right on Russia’s border (inside Russia’s borders, some Russians/Ukrainians would say). This, in turn, makes the Russians remember Russia’s unique historical mission is among the nations of the world: it is to thwart all other nations’ attempts at world domination, be it Napoleonic France or Hitleresque Germany or Obamaniac America. Every century or so some nation forgets its history lessons and attacks Russia. The result is always the same: lots of corpse-studded snowdrifts, and then Russian cavalry galloping into Paris, or Russian tanks rolling into Berlin….

[W]hy has war been declared now, and why was it declared by this social worker turned national misleader? Some keen observers mentioned his slogan “the audacity of hope,” and ventured to guess that this sort of “audaciousness” (which in Russian sounds a lot like “folly”) might be a key part of his character which makes him want to be the leader of the universe, like Napoleon or Hitler. Others looked up the campaign gibberish from his first presidential election (which got silly young Americans so fired up) and discovered that he had nice things to say about various cold warriors. Do you think Obama might perhaps be a scholar of history and a shrewd geopolitician in his own right? (That question usually gets a laugh, because most people know that he is just a chucklehead and repeats whatever his advisers tell him to say.) Hugo Chavez once called him “a hostage in the White House,” and he wasn’t too far off. So, why are his advisers so eager to go to war with Russia, right now, this year?

Is it because the US is collapsing more rapidly than most people can imagine? This line of reasoning goes like this: the American scheme of world domination through military aggression and unlimited money-printing is failing before our eyes. The public has no interest in any more “boots on the ground,” bombing campaigns do nothing to reign in militants that Americans themselves helped organize and equip, dollar hegemony is slipping away with each passing day, and the Federal Reserve is fresh out of magic bullets and faces a choice between crashing the stock market and crashing the bond market. In order to stop, or at least forestall this downward slide into financial/economic/political oblivion, the US must move quickly to undermine every competing economy in the world through whatever means it has left at its disposal, be it a bombing campaign, a revolution or a pandemic (although this last one can be a bit hard to keep under control). Russia is an obvious target, because it is the only country in the world that has had the gumption to actually show international leadership in confronting the US and wrestling it down; therefore, Russia must be punished first, to keep the others in line.

Empires always fall. The most powerful military is always eventually surpassed by its rivals. These are lessons of history that the average individual, especially the average American, never takes into account. And very, very few individuals in a society in decline ever recognize that it is in decline at the time. However, the USA is presently showing many signs of decline that have previously been observed in imperial societies of the past, including both democratic Athens and republican Rome.

Obama’s plan to open the immigration floodgates and give out 34 million green cards on top of the 60 million immigrants already in the country may mark the final nail in the coffin, but such things are merely consequences of the country abandoning its original identity as a white Christian Anglo-Saxon nation. There is no mechanical fix for that, and it should surprise absolutely no one that an empire that is no longer predominantly a white, Christian, Anglo-Saxon nation does not abide by either the traditions or the values of white, Christian, Anglo-Saxons.

The 18-year delta

Ender was excited last night because, with his B team season at an end, the first team had extended an open invitation to the B team players to practice with them. It’s a chance for the coaches to see which young men are ready to play with the men, and who the eventual up-and-comers are. The first team practices at the same time my veteran’s team does, so we drove over to the clubhouse together despite a howling wind and a black sky that threatened some serious rain.

It’s getting near the end of our season too, three-quarters of my teammates are banged up, and I discovered when I got there that a) the veteran’s practice had been canceled, and b) the first team was missing half its players due to vacations and whatnot. But I know several of the first team players and coaches fairly well because we’re permitted to field two players below 32, but over 25, and some of them play with us when they have an evening free. So, I asked one of the guys I know if they needed an extra player – thinking that they were just going to scrimmage – and he suggested that I stick around and join the practice. So, I changed, put on my cleats, and joined them in the middle of the field.

There were about eight of Ender’s teammates there, huddled together against the cold rain that had begun to fall and vaguely intimidated by the first team players. They know who I am, of course, and were visibly startled by my presence there – let’s face it, no one is more contemptuous of a middle-aged dad than an elite teenage athlete – and were further taken aback when the player-coach leading the practice greeted me with an enthusiastic handshake-hug. What they didn’t know is that I’ve played several games up front with Stefan and we are molto sympatico on the field despite him being much better than I am. We’ve both given assists on each other’s goals, and like most stellar strikers, he prefers having a strike partner who looks to feed him the ball rather than shoot.

However, Stefan had a full practice in mind, not a scrimmage. It wasn’t brutal, but it was strenuous, enough so that he came over twice during the repeated agility drills to make sure I wasn’t about to keel over. His concern wasn’t entirely unjustified, as I’m beyond old by first team standards; the oldest player on the team is 28. I would have been insulted, especially given the fact that I was pretty much keeping up with the tall B team defender in front of me in the line, were it not for the fact that I was fairly certain two more run-throughs would have resulted in vomiting. Ender and the midfielders were having no problem, but some of the defenders looked to be mildly in shock at doing 2.5x more repetitions, and doing them at faster speed, than they’d ever done before. Fortunately, we moved on to the team keep-away drill next, which is fast-paced, but gives you a chance to catch your breath if need be. Which was, in fact, the case.

The bad thing about being a sprinter is that you quickly run out of steam. The good thing about being a sprinter is that you bounce back just as fast. So, by the time we were doing the final drill, which involved a 20-meter sprint to a cone, turning around to receive the ball and firing a one-touch shot on goal, most of the B team kids had slowed to a jog, but I was still running. I even managed to put a few past Ender, who was alternating with the first team keeper in net. Ender acquitted himself well, making some diving saves and drawing praise from the first-team guys, which pleased him immensely.

I was more than a little pleased myself when, back in the clubhouse, Stefan clapped me on the shoulder and said, “hey, why don’t you come to the next one too?” Which, I have decided, I am absolutely going to do. It’s not that I will ever play for the first team, but I suspect he may find me to be useful in goading the younger players. None of them will have any excuse for falling behind, given that I’m literally three decades older than most of them. The best compliment, however, came from Ender, when I asked him if he’d found it embarrassing to have his old man running around the field.

“Actually, Dad, I didn’t even notice except for when you were the one shooting at me.”

I’ll take it. It’s a rare pleasure to be able to play sports with one’s son on an equal footing, so I will enjoy it, however long it lasts.

Debating Amazon

Joe Konrath hands Rob Spillman his head in a debate over Amazon:

“What I can’t understand is why you would cheer for Amazon in its fight against traditional publishers. Here comes one of my analogies that you love to pull apart – -it seems like rooting for the lions against the Roman prisoners in the Coliseum.”

I was a Roman prisoner in the Coliseum, being feasted on by lions. Those lions were big publishers. After 20 years, a million written words, and nine rejected novels, I finally landed a book contract. And I worked my ass off and published eight novels with legacy publishers, dozens of short stories with respected magazines, and went above and beyond everything that was required of me, in order to succeed.

And I got eaten. One-sided contracts, broken promises, lousy money. But it was the only game in town. If I wanted to make a living as a writer, I had no choice.

Then Amazon invented the Kindle.

I first self-pubbed in May of 2009. That first month I made $1,500, publishing books that New York rejected. Those same rejected books have earned me hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I cheer for Amazon because it saved me, and thousands of other authors, from the Coliseum. And I try to show others there is a way to make money from publishing where the terms are better, and the writer stays in control.

“My central argument is that if Amazon crushes us all, it will be able to dictate whatever terms to anyone using its massive platform. What if it suddenly decides to flip terms and only offer you 30 percent, or decide that your books really should be sold for 50 cents?”

Rob, that’s what the Big 5 already do. Except for an elite, tiny group of upper-tier authors, the Big 5 treat 99.9 percent of us badly. Keeping rights for term of copyright? Non-compete clauses? Twenty-five percent e-book royalty on net? I’ve had chapters cut by editors that I wanted to keep. I’ve had terrible cover art. I’ve had my titles forcibly changed. And my experience isn’t unique. I’m friends with hundreds of authors. A few were treated like kings. Most were screwed.

You worry that Amazon might someday offer 30 percent when publishers right now offer 17.5 percent? You must see how odd that is.

I was treated very well by Pocket Books. I have no complaints on that score. But my personal experience, which was mostly positive, doesn’t change the fact that mainstream publishing is extremely exploitative of authors; the feed-em-in-and-spit-em-out system is constantly churning and destroys the careers of the vast majority of authors who enter it.

And speaking of independent publishing, I’m pleased to say that we should be able to announce as many as FOUR new Castalia authors in the near future.

Accidents?

Zerohedge appears to be more than a little suspicious:

Three months ago, the CEO of Total, Christophe de Margerie, dared utter the phrase heard around the petrodollar world, “There is no reason to pay for oil in dollars,”  as we noted here. Today, RT reports the dreadful news that he was killed in a business jet crash at Vnukovo Airport in Moscow after the aircraft hit a snow-plough on take-off. The airport issued a statement confirming “a criminal investigation has been opened into the violation of safety regulations,” adding that along with 3 crewmembers on the plane, the snow-plough driver was also killed.

Total, in case you didn’t know, is “the world’s 13th biggest oil producer and Europe’s 2nd largest. It’s a little strange, however, that this accident would have occurred in Russia, as one would presume that de Margerie was there as some sort of business partner or even ally of Putin. There is, after all, a long history of Russo-French alliances contra Germany, England, and now, perhaps, the USA.

Did the defenders of the global dollar target him? Or did Putin make him an offer that he couldn’t refuse, which he neverthless refused?  Who knows? We’ll probably never know. Anyhow, it’s not for we minnows to overly concern ourselves with the struggles of the mighty sharks and whales and squids and krakens in the depths. They will sort themselves out in the end.

However, this was not the only fatal accident of late:

American journalist Serena Shim has been killed in a car crash in Turkey just days after Turkish intelligence services had accused her of spying. She was reporting on the siege involving ISIS in Kobani at Syria’s border. Shim was a US citizen though she worked for Iran’s state-owned Press TV as correspondent in Turkey and other regions. She was returning her hotel in the city of Suruç when her car crashed into a ‘heavy vehicle’. The Daily Mail reports the car collided with a cement truck.

I suppose the silver lining is that even if these are targeted hits, those responsible for them still feel the need to disguise their actions. Although I have to say that banker’s “nailgun suicide” still stretches credulity. Frankly, at this point, I’m surprised that any politician is still willing to travel by plane:

The campaign plane of Eduardo Campos, a Brazilian presidential candidate and scion of a resurgent political dynasty, crashed on Wednesday in the port city of Santos, killing him and six others and shaking up an increasingly competitive race in Latin America’s largest democracy.

ON WAR and the CH newsletter

We are on the verge of releasing ON WAR: The collected columns of William S. Lind 2003-2009. It is a 915-page monster that is not to be missed by anyone with an interest in military history, military theory, or current events. Featuring a Foreword by noted Israeli strategist Martin van Creveld, this insightful collection of columns reads very much like today’s news, only written ten years ago.

As Lind himself notes, the value of any theory is in its ability to correctly anticipate events. By this measure, Lind’s 4th Generation War theory is very valuable indeed. ON WAR will first be available in two ebook formats for three days, beginning Friday, on the Castalia House store, to newsletter subscribers, at a price of $6.99. It will be available on Amazon on Monday, October 26th. Subscribers who purchase the book from Castalia in the first three days will also receive their choice of a free book from five options that will be specified in the newsletter. To subscribe to the newsletter, simply leave a comment on the Castalia House blog and check the box that says “Add me to Castalia’s New Book Release mailing list”.

The importance of names

Daniel writes an extended review of A THRONE OF BONES on Recommend:

Names are important in A Throne of Bones, and I’ll highlight two: Selenoth, the continent upon which the action takes is, a nod, I believe, to the element selenium, which occurs naturally in volcanic areas. Considering the photosensitivity of the material, it seems natural that the land provides an elemental basis to the development of Selenoth’s primeval magic. Even more interesting, however is the name of the main country: Amorr. Yes, it is a play on the legendary “secret name” of Rome, which provides a clever signal that this strange society will in some way mirror the Roman republic.

However, more deeply, it is also a direct tip to the Latin word for “love” and this is where, if the magic of Selenoth draws the bow, the arrow of Amorr strikes the heart. Day is, after all, an incorrigible romantic, and not of the hopeless variety. The nostalgia, realism and richness of Selenoth is crystalized through the lens of Amorr, and, to put a fine point on it, love is all around.

Love in degraded, if happy, form in the camp followers and brothels among the soldiery. Love between sibling reavers on a mission to draw former victim states into an alliance against certain doom. In a scene stunning, dreadful, long-coming but still shocking scene, love grips in stoic, complex anguish.* The raw and needful love between man and wife. Long-distance love between the clever (yet earnest) and the cruel (yet sympathetic). Love of complex relational intrigues. Love of language. Love of order. Love of family, of honor, of duty. Love of dragons. Love of gold. Love of knowledge. Love of good men, of good life, of good death. A love of the hope that all things, not some or most, will pass away, and yet that all things, not some or most, will be restored by the hand of the Almighty.

Every page, for its grit and realism, its tragedy, folly and danger, the thwarted plans, curses, whoredom, brutality, the death of youth, the loss of ideals, the temporary victory of murder and evil, is an out and out love letter to the Immaculate. Death, in all its towering, all-consuming bleakness, is small, and soon to be swallowed by a love so great it lays its life down, and in defeat, quite literally overcomes all.

A Throne of Bones is doorstopping fantasy for far more than its physical dimensions. Metaphysically, it shuts the door to the world we know and provides an escape to a better reality, and one far more dangerous than the one in which we now dwell. It expresses longings (to master dragons, to find treasure, to save the world on a mission from God, to restore and enjoy the family, to live abundantly and in reality, enjoy and defend the relationships that matter, and many, many more) in such richness of detail.

One of the things I enjoy most about writing books is discovering, after the fact, what others perceive I put into it. Sometimes, absolutely no one recognizes it. Sometimes, I simply fail what I set out to do. And sometimes, people perceive more than I had originally thought. But that doesn’t mean they are necessarily wrong, because the truth is that the writer isn’t always aware of everything he is doing or what all of his intentions are.

Well, perhaps some writers are, but I’m not. I just sit down and do it, one chunk at a time, until the whole edifice is finally constructed and I’m hoping that the whole thing more or less holds together. And since I seldom go back and re-read anything, sometimes I don’t even know what it was that I wrote, especially in a book this size. Perhaps that is what John C. Wright is talking about when he discusses his Muse, I don’t know. We lesser writers are not touched by the Divine Fire; where they soar on the wings of their mighty inspirations, we trudge along, one step after another, until we suddenly realize that we have arrived at our destination.

Book II is coming along slowly, but surely, and I think it is a better book in some ways than its predecessor. But then, that isn’t for me to say.

A response to Brianna Wu

Brianna Wu, who may or may not be the former Bruce Freeman, has successfully sold his sob story to the Washington Post:

They’ve taken down women I care about one by one. Now, the vicious mob of the Gamergate movement is coming after me. They’ve threatened to rape me. They’ve threatened to make me choke to death on my husband’s severed genitals. They’ve threatened to murder any children I might have.

This angry horde has been allowed to wage its misogynistic war without penalty for too long. It’s time for the video game industry to stop them.

No. What part of this does he not understand. “You could say all gamers drink the blood of innocents under a full moon and I still wouldn’t give a fuck.” – Phasmal. That is exactly how the average gamer feels about this. Whether Wu ends up being ritually tortured and force-fed Ebola before being sacrificed to Cthulhu on an altar made of desert-aged E.T. cartridges or not, his fate is not going to alter any of our opinions on the matter in the slightest. We don’t care. People are dying of Ebola in Africa too. We are still going to design, develop, and play exactly the sort of games we want to design, develop, and play.

And as for those hypothetical children, well, to paraphrase the immortal Zaphod Beeblebrox, count the chromosomes.

Gamergate is ostensibly about journalistic ethics. Supporters say they want to address conflicts of interest between the people that make games and the people that support them. In reality, Gamergate is a group of gamers that are willing to destroy the women who have invaded their clubhouse.

No, #GamerGate is a broad spectrum of gamers who have no intention of permitting a small group of pinkshirted SJWs do to games what the pinkshirts have done to SF/F literature, namely, destroy it through hyperpoliticization. And we are well aware that the so-called “game journalists” are conspiring with those pinkshirts to do it.

The next day, my Twitter mentions were full of death threats so severe I had to flee my home. They have targeted the financial assets of my company by hacking. They have tried to impersonate me on Twitter. Even as we speak, they are spreading lies to journalists via burner e-mail accounts in an attempt to destroy me professionally.

Boo-freaking-hoo. Even if we assume those “death threats” are genuine, Wu destroyed himself professionally when he lined up with the pinkshirts in the media against the gamer community. No serious gamer will ever play one of his games, no matter how many ideological sympathetic game journalists write favorably about it.

We’ve lost too many women to this lunatic mob. Good women the industry was lucky to have, such as Jenn Frank, Mattie Bryce and my friend Samantha Allen, one of the most insightful critics in games media. They decided the personal cost was too high, and I don’t know who could blame them. Every women I know in the industry is terrified she will be next.

We don’t want them, and it is entirely obvious that we don’t need them either. There are more than a few real genuine women who are part of GamerGate. Obviously Wu doesn’t know any of them, because unlike him, they are not pinkshirt-wearing political activists who are more considerably interested in ideological propaganda and self-inflating genre than in electronic entertainment.

The culture in which women are treated this way by gamers didn’t happen in a vacuum. For 30 years, video games have been designed by men, marketed to men and sold to men. It’s obvious to anyone outside the industry that video games have serious issues with the portrayal of women. It’s not just oversexualized examples, such as Ivy of the Soul Caliber series. Games are still lazily falling on the same outdated tropes involving women. Princess Peach, of Nintendo’s Mario games, has been kidnapped in 12 separate games since 1985. Perhaps the most disturbing of all is the propensity of games to have women thoughtlessly murdered as a motivation for the male hero, such as Watch Dogs.

The consequence of this culture is male gamers have been trained to feel video games are their turf. In stopping Gamergate, the men who dominate it – not just women — must address the culture that created Gamergate.

No. In a word, no. We don’t have to do anything of the sort. Nor do we wish to do so. It is our culture. Also, I note that Wu is dismissing the work of very single genuine female in the industry over the last 30 years. Roberta Williams, Jane Jensen, Brenda Laurel, Scorpia and Charlotte Panther at CGW, just to name a few. (To say nothing of Dani Bunton.) As for the “women thoughtlessly murdered” in video games than the men, surely Wu doesn’t imagine that the virtual body count is even remotely close to being distributed equally on sex grounds.

Some have. But many more have been silent. In the male-dominated video game media, many have chosen to sit by and do nothing as Gamergate picks us off, one by one. IGN has not covered Gamergate. Game Informer has not covered Gamergate. Ironically, the people who most need to hear this message are not hearing it, because of an editorial choice to stay on the sidelines.

He spoke too soon; Andy caved earlier today. So, it is an absolutely ludicrous lie to claim that anyone in the game industry is not hearing the absurd message, especially when anti-gaming pinkshirts are openly bragging about how the media is in their back pocket.

There are many straightforward steps we can take to change this.

First, major institutions in video games, which happen to be dominated by men, need to speak up immediately and denounce Gamergate. The dam started to break this week as Patrick Klepek of Giant Bomb broke the silence at their publication on Monday. Last week, the industry’s top trade group, the Electronic Software Association spoke out against Gamergate, saying “Threats of violence and harassment have to stop. There is no place in the video game community for personal attacks and threats.”

No one, literally no one, cares what “the Electronic Software Association” has to say. Considering how successful they were attacking video game piracy, if they’re on the anti-gamers’ side, the pinkshirts ought to raise the white flag now.

Secondly, I call upon the entire industry to examine its hiring practices at all levels. Women make up half of all gamers, yet we make up only a fraction of this industry. While it’s possible to point to high profile women in the field, the fact remains. Women hold a shockingly disproportionate number of high level positions in game studios, game publishers and particularly in leadership roles. There are just 11 percent of game designers and 3 percent of programmers, according to The Boston Globe. Game journalism also plays a critical role. It doesn’t matter how many women we get into game production. If the only people evaluating the work we do continue to be men, women’s voices will never be heard.

Women no more “make up half of all gamers” than Brianna Wu has two X chromosomes. Playing Candy Crush Saga or Angry Birds or Kim Kardashian’s Mutant Butt Destroys the Sheboygan Mall doesn’t make one a gamer any more than playing Myst did. “Gamer” is derived from “wargamer” and it is shorthand for “core gamer” or “serious gamer”. It does not refer to anyone who happens to play an electronic game any more than it refers to someone who plays hopskotch. No one is stopping women from starting their own game reviews. That’s exactly what I did in 1991 when virtually no one was reviewing games in the mainstream media and that’s how I ended up being nationally syndicated, with a game review column running weekly everywhere from Boston to San Francisco.

My friend Quinn told me about a folder on her computer called, “The Ones We’ve Lost.” They are the letters she’s gotten from young girls who dream of being game developers, but are terrified of the environment they see. I nearly broke into tears as I told her I had a folder filled with the same. The truth is, even if we stopped Gamergate tomorrow, it will have already come at too high a cost.

To dream of “being game developers” is not at all the same thing as doing the hard work of developing games. Those young girls may desire the status, but they show  absolutely no sign of wanting to actually do the work involved. Anyone who really and truly wants to make games will do so, and will not permit anyone to dissuade them. You don’t need anyone’s permission to be a game developer. You don’t need anyone’s encouragement. You don’t need hugs and a welcome mat. Thanks to the panoply of great tools available, it has never been easier to develop games. Wu can cry if he likes, but the fact is that none of “The Ones We’ve Lost” were ever going to develop a single game. Ever. Not even if they were welcomed into the industry with pixies, unicorns, and rainbows.

An unmoored state

John C. Wright drops a daisycutter of law and logic on the celebrants of the ur-legalization of sodogamy:

The proponents of what is called (with unintentional hilarity) gay marriage express the gaiety for which they are named by crowing and gamboling with delight that the Supreme Court has declined to do its core Constitutional mission of interpreting the law, and chastise and check the abuses of activist judges overruling the sovereign votes of the decent and sober majority.

They should perhaps rein in their gay celebrations: gay marriage cannot be justified either in law or logic. This means the law has just departed from the environs of law and logic.

The gay partisans should instead recoil with dread, for the thing, by being given into their hands, is effectively destroyed. Whatever meaning or sanction the pairs of homosexuals are seeking out of the pretense of marriage is destroyed by the very fact that it is a pretense, not a marriage.

I am not speaking about an abstraction, but as a matter of law. The way law works, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the basic principle, is that once a precedent is established, until and unless it is definitively overruled, it has controlling authority over every case standing on similar facts, and the degree of similarity is the core of what all legal arguments are about.

This ruling, now left to stand, will and must create more havoc with family law, with testaments and estates, divorce laws, property laws, far more than if the government simply decreed marriage to be a private contract. No matter what the desires and tastes of the reformers, and no matter their promises, once set in motion, the law operates by a logic and by an inertia of its own.

I have been pointing out the increasing U.S. abandonment of law (and, for that matter Law) for nearly a decade now. I first noticed it back in the 1990s, when a petty legal case to which I was the only witness was settled, in the courtroom, by the judge literally flipping a coin. At the time, this was shocking to me. These days, I think the average man would consider himself lucky if he managed to get fifty-fifty odds of genuine justice being done.

What we are witnessing here in the Supreme Court’s cowardly decision to permit the widespread implementation of sodogamy through inaction is precisely what Wright describes, the abandonment of law and logic. I’m not even remotely surprised by the Court’s decision to punt; the reason they did so was expressly because they did NOT wish to set a precedent, any precedent, in either direction. On the one hand, they did not wish to “turn the clock back” in favor of traditional, actual marriage because they wish to curry favor with the global elite that are actively seeking to destroy marriage. On the other, they did not wish to set an actual legal precedent because there are no solid legal or logical grounds that would permit them to demolish the concept of marriage consisting of the union of one man with one woman that would be limited to only changing the “man/woman” element; every argument that can be made for sodogamy can also be made every bit as effectively for polygamy and for unions with non-human entities. Regardless of whether you are anti-sodogamy or pro-marriage equality, this abandonment of jurisprudence should not be celebrated.

The continued abandonment of law and morality is inevitable at this point, to the extent it hasn’t already happened. It is part and parcel of a civilization in the latter stages of decline, and our responsibility is not to try to prevent its fall, but rather, to continue to uphold each petty traditional schwerkpunkt represented by the families and institutions that have not succumbed to the cultural rot. Human societies are cyclical entities, and one can no more fight the cycle than gravity. This is not, however, a counsel of despair, but rather, one of hope. “Progress” is neither linear nor inevitable. What we are seeing has happened before, and will happen again. Our fathers and grandfathers may have failed to sustain the civilization they inherited, but we cannot be held responsible for that. What we can, and will be responsible, is if we fail to keep the seeds of that civilization alive to pass on to future generations.

We are the bases of tomorrow’s civilization. We are the foundation of tomorrow’s societies that will rise from the swirling barbarism. Don’t forget that.

We can do that

This guy quite clearly doesn’t understand how the game industry works and is attempting to put the media cart ahead of the millions of horses that are the gamers of the world.

I compiled a list of the news and opinion outlets that have published articles critical of #gamergate just in the last few days. They’re welcome to boycott these all, it’ll just hasten their increasing irrelevance.

And yet, none of this is having ANY effect whatsoever on the activity of game developers. Literally none. There are no AAA developers suddenly deciding that instead of a 3D shooter, they are going to develop Kim Kardashian’s Mutant Butt Goes to the Mall. Blizzard is not going to halt Warlords of Draenor in order to put more clothes on the girl-Dranei or ensure that they are sufficiently Strong and Independent for Literally Who’s liking. Matrix is not going to start publishing Fashion Quest: Kicky Heels instead of its 576th World War II wargame, Operation Johann: the Czechoslovakian Plan to Invade Lichtenstein. And as far as I am aware, no one is running out to hire Zoe Quinn as a design lead.

But #GamerGate is having a tangible effect on the media organizations. Intel and Mercedes have stopped advertising on Gamasutra and Gawker. Other advertisers will follow suit; I have heard of other publications discovering that their advertising revenues are imperiled. The pinkshirts of the games media are going to find out, over the next few months, just who is truly irrelevant, who is truly impotent. And it isn’t the gamers of #GamerGate.

#GamerGate ultimately comes down to one thing. We gamers like our core games the way they are, and we aren’t going to change them for anyone or for any reason except better gameplay. And we don’t give a quantum of a damn what any casual gamer who plays Myst/Cooking Mama/Farmville/Angry Birds does, thinks, wants, or says. All the theatrical handwringing rhetoric about misogyny and harassment and death threats means absolutely nothing to any of us. It doesn’t matter if Literally Who, Literally Who 2, and Literally Wu wind up being ritually tortured and force-fed Ebola before being sacrificed to Cthulhu on an altar made of desert-aged E.T. cartridges, that’s not going to alter any of our opinions on the matter in the slightest.

One gamer, by the name of Phasmal, speaks effectively for us all: “You could say all gamers drink the blood of innocents under a full moon and I still wouldn’t give a fuck.”

D’accordo. In the meantime, if you’re interested in either reading honest game reviews or writing a few yourself, check out Computer Game World. I’m in the process of adding many of my old reviews and others are adding new ones every day.