The RED HORSE rides

I’m not sure there are the superlatives to describe how pleased I am to be able to introduce to you Castalia’s new anthology of military science fiction and military fact, RIDING THE RED HORSE. Tom and I have been working on this all year, and between us, we somehow managed to recruit a very strong roster of contributors on both the fiction and non-fiction sides. It’s now available from Amazon as well as from Castalia House.

As the editing was a collaborative effort, so too was the cover. JartStar was unhappy with his initial attempt, but he liked the concept, so he brought in Jeremiah, who did the covers for The Altar of Hate and The Book of Feasts & Seasons, and together they managed to bring it to life. Historically keen eyes will probably recognize the cover to which it is a thematic homage of sorts.  But as much as I enjoy working on covers, let’s face it, it’s really what is inside the book that matters. The contributors, and the pieces they contributed, are as follows, in the order they appear in the book. Many, if not most, of these names will be readily recognizable.

  • Eric S. Raymond: “Sucker Punch” and “Battlefield Lasers”
  • William S. Lind: “Understanding 4th Generation Warfare”
  • Chris Kennedy: “Thieves in the Night”
  • Vox Day: “A Reliable Source”
  • James F. Dunnigan: “Murphy’s Law” and “Red Waves in the South China Sea”
  • Jerry Pournelle: “His Truth Goes Marching On” and “Simulating the Art of War”
  • Ken Burnside: “The Hot Equations: Thermodynamics and Military SF”
  • Christopher G. Nuttall: “A Piece of Cake”
  • Rolf Nelson: “Shakedown Cruise”
  • Steve Rzasa and Vox Day: “Tell it to the Dead”
  • Harry Kitchener: “The Limits of Intelligence”
  • Giuseppe Filotto: “Red Space”
  • John F. Carr and Wolfgang Diehr: “Galzar’s Hall”
  • Thomas Mays: “Within This Horizon”
  • Benjamin Chea: “War Crimes”
  • James Perry: “Make the Tigers Fight”
  • Brad Torgersen: “The General’s Guard”
  • Tedd Roberts: “They Also Serve”
  • Tom Kratman: “Learning to Ride the Red Horse: The Principles of War”
  • Steve Rzasa: Turncoat

I should probably go ahead and point out that both “Tell it to the Dead” and “Turncoat” are set in the Quantum Mortis universe. And despite being one of the editors, as a longtime fan of military science fiction and a lifelong student of the art of war, I won’t hesitate to tell you that this collection is one that you simply will not want to miss if you are even remotely interested in either. I hope you will find RIDING THE RED HORSE to be a worthy successor to the excellent anthology series that inspired it, THERE WILL BE WAR.

The initial reviews are in. Some selections:

  • RIDING THE RED HORSE features both military sci-fi short stories and nonfiction articles regarding the future or history of warfare. For those readers that don’t recognize it; the title is a reference to the second horseman of the apocalypse from the Bible’s Book of Revelation; the Horseman of War who rides a red horse. Some of the stories, “Sucker Punch”, “Thieves in the Night” and “A Reliable Source”, “Red Space”’ for example, are more Tom Clancy-ish techno-thrillers than outright military sci-fi. Others are more traditional military sci-fi, like “A Piece of Cake”, “Shakedown Cruise” and “Turncoat”, to name just three stories that feature high-tech space battles in the middle distant future. Other stories are more Earthbound, but just as high tech, or discuss war against highly modified “trans-humans, to name just two examples. The story quality is uniformly very good; two outstanding examples are “Shakedown Cruise” and “Turncoat”…. RIDING THE RED HORSE is a well done military sci-fi and military studies anthology, and frankly at $4.99 it is a helluva good value for your entertainment (and education) dollar.
  • Easy 5 stars on this one. An impressive collection of fun and
    well-written military fiction interposed with essays by military
    thinkers/historians. I was both entertained and informed throughout…. The essays are not navel-gazing; when their writers challenge
    conventional thinking on various topics, they do so with the voice of
    insight and experience. Their credentials are helpfully explained by an
    editor’s introduction at the beginning of each entry, for both the
    essays and the fiction. That was helpful both to establish the authority
    of the essay writers to speak on their subjects, and also in helping me
    to become aware of some newer authors I hadn’t heard of but whose work I
    enjoyed in this collection. The fiction entries are mostly
    military sci-fi to varying degrees of “hardness,” with a couple
    Roman/Medieval fantasy type stories thrown in as well, but all deal with
    questions of tactics, strategy, and the human element in combat…. Highly recommended.
  • This is a first-rate collection, but more for the non-fiction than the
    fiction. The non-fiction essays by practitioners of various kinds can
    range from enlightening to quite frightening. ESR and Pournelle are
    excellent technically and Kitchener on the limits of intelligence was a
    masterly summary. For the non-fiction alone, I would recommend the book
    as a buy. However little you may agree with them, they will provoke real
    thought in you. On the fiction side, the stories are consistently serviceable, and occasionally exceptional.

RIDING THE RED HORSE is 443 pages and retails for $4.99. It is available in DRM-free EPUB and MOBI for Kindle format from the Castalia Store and from Amazon.

Hostages (13) taken in Sydney

Zerohedge: Only weeks after Australia broke up a plan by ISIS to publicly behead a member of public, reports suggest 2 gunmen are holding 13 hostages at a Lindt coffee-shop in Sydney, Australia. The terrorists have shown a black jihadist flag – which is not an IS flag – and has paraded the hostages at the windows. The coffee shop is directly across the street from the Reserve Bank of Australia.

    *LINDT AUSTRALIA CEO STEVE LOANE SPOKE BY PHONE
    *LINDT AUSTRALIA: PROBABLY ABOUT 30 CUSTOMERS IN SYDNEY CAFE
    *LINDT AUSTRALIA: ABOUT 10 STAFF WORKING IN SYDNEY CAFE TODAY

So, how about those hard-working Muslim immigrants, doing the jobs Australians won’t do!

Rhetorical discourse with an SJW

A dialogue on Twitter, prompted by my tweeting a paraphrase of a quote from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, specifically her explanation of how destroying men’s values is the first step in exerting control over them:

Vox Day ‏@voxday
Build up John Scalzi and you’ve destroyed SF. Hail Anita S. and you’ve destroyed game review. Glorify Lena Dunham and you’ve destroyed TV.

Sam Fredericks ‏@Wyldawen
How are any of these things destroyed by differing perspectives? Are they that fragile?

Vox Day ‏@voxday
Yes, that difficult and fragile. Kill Man’s sense of values and you kill his capacity to recognize greatness or to achieve it.

Sam Fredericks ‏@Wyldawen
If a man’s sense of values of killed by a single differing opinion, either his values or weak or the man who holds them is.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
You’re totally missing the point. It’s about the STANDARDS. Fuzz the definition of “inch” and no one knows how tall anything is.

Sam Fredericks ‏@Wyldawen
That sounds very rigid and a self-defeating philosophy if one is interested in expanding knowledge.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
You don’t seek to expand knowledge. You’re just a deceiver who seeks to tear down and DISQUALIFY. You’re not fooling anyone.

Sam Fredericks ‏@Wyldawen
You clutch your brittle twig and I’ll ride the waves lifting us higher.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
Look at how many lies you’ve tried already. 1) false dichotomy, 2) “single opinion”, 3) “self-defeating”, 4) “expanding knowledge”

Vox Day ‏@voxday
And wrapping it all up with a false accusation and an appeal to progress. You are classic SJW scum.

Sam Fredericks ‏@Wyldawen
Do you love life?

Vox Day ‏@voxday
Don’t try to retreat to false dialectic after that racist rhetorical performance. It doesn’t suit you.

Sam Fredericks ‏@Wyldawen
racist?

Vox Day ‏@voxday
Yes, obviously.

Sam Fredericks ‏@Wyldawen
How?

Vox Day ‏@voxday
First you’ll have to explain how completely redefining standards and awarding mediocrity is “a single differing opinion”.

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that Mr. Fredericks promptly disappeared after that. You can learn a lot from this dialogue, a lot that is useful for future engagements with SJWs and other rhetorically minded individuals.

First, notice how he begins with a question, and a dishonest, passive-aggressive question at that. That is how I immediately knew he was not an honest interlocutor, even though I answered his question in the same manner as if assuming he was. You always want to draw the SJW in deeper and force him to commit, even when you know, beyond any shadow of a reasonable doubt, what he is.

Second, he tries another passive-aggressive dig, this time in falsely characterizing the subject and setting up a false dichotomy. Remember, SJWs always attack; they don’t know how to defend their own positions due to the contradictory and oft indefensible nature of them. They HAVE to stay on the attack if they are going to come out on top and they know it.

Third, after I point out how he has failed to understand the point, he doesn’t back off, but immediately switches to another attack, this time one that involves him claiming the philosophically superior position. What he wants is for me to defend myself, instead I point out, for the first time, that he is lying. Notice how he doesn’t even defend himself against his lack of interest in “expanding knowledge”, which is a non sequitur anyhow, but doubles-down, this time implicitly appealing to a nebulous, yet inevitable progress that is superior to the “brittle twig” of having traditional standards.

Observe that at no point has he made any attempt to actually make a coherent, rational case. It’s all pure rhetoric, all meant to put him on a higher plane that permits him to pronounce judgment on me.

After I openly call him out, he suddenly retreats, realizing that I am aware of his game. He tries another approach, this one prosecutorial, despite it being a non sequitur even more egregious than the first. Then, I drop the r-bomb on him. Notice that he can’t ignore this one. He doesn’t mind being called a liar, he doesn’t mind being called out as SJW scum, he doesn’t even mind it being pointed out that his argument is incoherent rhetoric, but he can’t ignore the r-word. It’s magic, you see. Magic rhetoric.

Suddenly, for the first time, he needs to ask questions and have things defined. And that’s when I kick him in the teeth, pointing out that he’ll have to start defining all of his many rhetorical claims before I define my single rhetorical claim. There was no need for me to define any of the other assertions I made, because they are all coherent and explicable. But the racist charge makes no sense, which tells him that I not only recognize the game he is playing, but understand it and can play it better than him.

Which is why he throws in the towel and vanishes. After which, Aquila Aquilonis ‏comments in his stead: And that is how a Native American takes a scalp on Twitter. #DreadIlk

VPFL Week 14

114 Gilbert Gamma Rays (8-6-0)
93 Bane Cornshuckers (9-5-0)

91 Boot Hill Bogs (3-10-1)
49 Greenfield Grizzlies (9-5-0)

73 Texas Chili Eaters (8-5-1)
54 Mounds View Meerkats (8-6-0)

62 RR Redbeards (9-5-0)
57 Clerical Errs (2-12-0)

57 King (7-7-0)
46 Favre Dollar Footlongs (6-8-0)

One game out of first, 14 points from scoring the most points, and I miss the playoffs. Well, I can’t complain. It was a MAJOR choke job by D. Thomas, G. Bernard, and A. Morris, who scored 0 points, 24 less than estimated and 20 less than I needed.

It rather reminds me of the playoff game the year I had both Daunte Culpepper and Jeff Garcia, obliterated the regular season, and agonized over which one of them to start. I don’t remember with whom I went, because it turned out it didn’t matter, both of them scored next to nothing and I went one-and-done.

In the 2014 VPFL playoffs, the Chili Eaters are favored by a single point over the regular season champion Cornshuckers, and the Redbeards are favored over the defending champion Grizzlies.

Ladies and gentlemen, JOHNNY FOOTBALL! This is not a quarterback who is ready for the NFL. His second (third) interception was one of the worst I’ve seen in a long time.

John C. Wright explains the gatekeepers

It probably didn’t surprise you to see that the SJWs at Amazon claimed the best books of 2014 included an incestuous child molester’s chronicle of a nonexistent rape and a biography of a celebrity that contained no reference to the biggest scandal of the celebrity’s life, or that their list was topped by a derivative, paint-by-numbers, race-based lamentation of life in America by a female minority. (The irony involved in calling a member of the most populous race and nationality on the planet a “minority” does not escape me, but this is the parlous state to which our language has been reduced in 2014.)

John C. Wright explains this bizarre inverting of literary quality, where excellent books are ignored and the literary equivalent of finger-painting with one’s urine, excrement, and menstrual blood is praised as being not only exceptional, but the very best on offer:

Democracy also has a drawback: our liberty allows for such license, that no accomplishment is needed ere one is called accomplished. Eve our elitism is democratic: Anyone can be a snob!

All you have to do to achieve the paramount of the modern Decalogue is dishonor your father and mother; to be the modern version Horatio, all you need do is betray the ashes of your fathers and the altars of your gods. Hegelian evolution says that whatever comes later is better, right? Well, you come after your forefathers, and you are younger than your teachers, so you must know more.

To be a snob in the Old World you had to be born to a high family, or in the New, to earn a high place. But all you have to do to be a snob in the world of no-fault modern snobbery is look down on the giants who founded and fought for this nation.

The only way to look down on a giant is to turn your soul upside down, can call evil a type of good (tolerance, diversity, choice) and good a type of evil (intolerance, divisiveness, bigotry). And all you need to do to switch the labels on things, change the definitions so that the north arrow of the moral compass reads south, is to be a damned liar.

Yes, I do mean damned. So picture the modern Progressive as a dwarfish figure, head firmly wedged into a chamber pot, who looks down (what we call up) sees the clouds and stars underfoot, and sun and moon, and proudly imagines he is trampling heaven. And when he seeks to soar to higher places, overhead is a blank and cold earth, merely a roof of matter, impenetrable to his wit; and when he dreams of spiritual things his thoughts ascend to hell. The harder he tries to live up to what he thinks are higher ideals, the lower toward the central fire he sinks.

The short answer is that the elite of our culture are not a high elite at all, but the low dregs.

They do not sneer at us as their inferiors despite their embarrassing retardation in experiential, intellectual, philosophical and theological matters, not to mention their bad manners and sexual perversions: they sneer at us as their inferiors BECAUSE of their retardation.

Instead of the books recommended by Amazon, let me recommend a very good and seasonal book you may wish to consider in their stead, indeed, one by the very critic cited. But don’t take my word for it, consider what some of the readers of Mr. Wright’s The Book of Feasts & Seasons have had to say about it.

  •  There is really no way to rate this book with Amazon stars; Amazon does
    not have a way to indicate books which point to eternal truths and
    transcendent beauty. Speaking solely in terms of composition, the book
    has its flaws; shifting from more or less pure sci-fi with wit and much
    satire at the beginning to a conclusion full of sacred and solemn joy – while leaving in the sci-fi elements – and successfully carrying off
    each step without occasionally having your normally divergent themes try
    to separate like oil and water might be impossible anyway. That Mr.
    Wright on the whole pulls off this balancing act is a testament to his
    skill as a writer. I am giving it 5 stars because most of the stories within deserve 5
    stars, because several of them are the closest thing I have ever read to
    a 21st century G.K.Chesterton, and also because that is the most
    emphatic way I can recommend this volume to your attention.
  •  I have read many of Mr. Wright’s other works and in many of them, he hides his Christianity in parable. A parable is a tale that tells of Truth, but is veiled in a way that only those who know the author’s intent can discern its deeper meaning. In THE BOOK OF FEASTS & SEASONS, Mr. Wright alternately dons and throws off the disguising cloak of parable and allegory, writing as plainly as an honest man is able and with an elegance that only a master of prose can manage.
  • This is a marvelous collection of John C. Wright’s seasonal short
    fiction. Especially notable stories are “Pale Realms of Shade,” a ghost
    story with a noir sensibility and a very satisfying twist (for Easter),
    “The Ideal Machine” for the Ascension, “Eve of All Saints’ Day”
    for–well, you know what holiday that one is for! Finally, the two
    Christmas-themed stories, “Nativity” and “Yes, Virginia, There Is a
    Santa Claus,” are also especially good. At their best, these stories
    remind me of G. K. Chesterton.
  • A brilliant collection of mind-bending short stories. I liked all of
    them, loved three of them, and one of the three I loved stands as one of
    the best short stories I think the esteemed Mr. Wright has written
    (That’s “Pale Realms of Shade”, by the way). “The Meaning of Life” was
    hysterical. “The Parliament of Beasts and Birds” was an extremely clever
    parable story, something I very rarely see

I feel, on the other hand, that “The Parliament of Beasts and Birds” is the best short story that Mr. Wright has yet written, although there is one story that will be published in a collection next year that may surpass it. For me, it is a remarkable tale that combines the very best of Tanith Lee with CS Lewis in his Narnia mode. 

The making of Kingmaker

This is a fascinating glimpse into the making of one of my favorite games, Avalon Hill’s classic game of the Wars of the Roses, Kingmaker:

KINGMAKER, the board game for adults based on the political and military activity of the English Wars of the Roses, comes on the market in the autumn of 1974. Copies of the game reach the United States by the end of the year, and by the following summer, with the first edition of the rulebook and a bad review in Games & Puzzles behind it, the game s becoming a cult in some circles. Sufficient numbers of the game appear at Origins 1, America’s leading wargame convention, to prompt SPI, America’s leading wargame publishers, to start importing the game in quantity. Now Avalon Hill steps in. British manufacturers Philmar receive a characteristically scruffy letter from Baltimore. But the content is what counts. Avalon Hill like Kingmaker, they want to manufacture it under licence… now read on…

The Avalon Hill Company has a 20-year old reputation in Britain for producing wargames of quality. (Afrika Korps, Battle of the Bulge, Anzio). The enthusiastic offer from the American company to produce Kingmaker was a dream come true – like rolling a double six on the first throw! Not only did their interest assure a far wider audience for the game, but because they were manufacturing from scratch there was an immediate opportunity to put into effect the main rule changes and modifications which had either been suggested or had made themselves apparent in the first year of the game’s existence. Furthermore, these changes could be made with the help of a game design team whose experience and reputation could justifiably be regarded as among the best in the world.

So began four to five months of transatlantic correspondence in which the game was pulled apart and rebuilt – a process which is worth describing in some detail for the light it throws both on Kingmaker, for those who are familiar with the game, and on the ‘playtesting’ side of the game design in general, for those who may be developing their own games.

I had been fortunate in making contact with Don Turnbull at the time he was running the first postal Kingmaker game. It is a measure of Don’s ability and perception that he had started postal Kingmaker, something I had thought impossible, on the basis of the first rulebook. He was the ideal person to work with on the UK end of the game’s redevelopment.

The Avalon Hill developer was to be Mick Uhl, who we supposed would be overseen by veteran AH designer Don Greenwood. In earlier correspondence, and more recent meetings, Don and I discussed those ambiguities which still remained after the reworking of the rulebook. We had also examined every suggestion which had come from other players in the course of the previous 18 months. Most important of these was undoubtedly the rule on Parliament suggested by Charles Vasey, who is now the editor of the successful fanzine Perfidious Albion.

In basic Kingmaker, Parliament is the means by which a player who controls the King consolidates and strengthens his faction. The player summoning Parliament may dispose of titles and offices which have become available through the death of nobles in the preceding rounds, or which were above the permitted holding of living nobles. Since the titles and offices convey extra strength in troops, ships and castles, a Parliament held after a large number of eventful rounds of play could drastically alter the balance of play. A weak king could become strong immediately. Furthermore, since Parliament could only, under normal conditions, be held when there was only one crowned claimant to the throne, they tended to be rare, twice-a-game events.

Vasey wanted to make Parliament a chance for diplomacy and hard bargaining. Each noble was given a number of votes (seats) in both the Lords and the Commons. Then the proposed allocation of each title or office was voted on, first by the Commons and then by the Lords. The bargaining and diplomacy came in because few players were likely to be strong in both Houses. So players with minimal troop strength could hold the balance in Parliament, benefiting as they received a title or office as the price of their support.

Other refinements were added. The award of Bishops can only be voted on in the Lords, the secular Commons doesn’t get a look in. Charles Vasey’s Parliament suggestion highlights an important aspect of game design in general – the work contribution’ of a game’s units – or how much a unit puts into a game. In basic Kingmaker, towns and bishops didn’t seem to “work” very hard. A player might use a town he held as refuge once or twice in a game. It might serve to block road movement. A bishop might never be used as refuge. Vasey’s Parliament maximised the contribution of both towns and bishops by giving them another level to function on. Parliament itself was also “working harder”.

Fascinated by the value of the ‘work test’, I began to apply it to other units and areas in the game.

It also serves to illuminate the process by which Avalon Hill games came to enter their catalog; there wasn’t actually a small office of supergeniuses designing all of these games from scratch, as I had sort of imagined as a boy. Trivia question: what is the direct connection between the book published by the youngest male published author in the world and Kingmaker?

“Women have no idea”

And here I thought we’d be more productive with women in the workforce. Tapping into that vast pool of hitherto untapped talent and all. And yet, Dr. Helen is unimpressed with her sex, nominally at work:

Apparently, rather than focusing on their own jobs, men are supposed to spend their time playing therapist to how women think and feel. And of course the author has no understanding of how hard it is for men to even interact with women at work, given all the rules and regulations. One “tip” in the article tells men not to be afraid of tears:

    When Paul Gotti of Cardinal Health gave performance reviews, he says that, without even realizing it, he was easier on female directors: “I didn’t want them to cry, to feel bad.” He recognizes now that this was no favor. They should have the feedback “so that they can grow too.”

    Ms. Flynn of Flynn Heath Holt says that her firm has found that men aren’t only afraid of tears but of getting in trouble with “the diversity police” for speaking harshly, or of women being “too high maintenance, or [that] she’ll ask a million questions.” As a result, “men are scared to death to give us feedback…. They’ll let women run astray and off course and be fired before they’ll take the chance to give them feedback.”

    Her advice: Be honest. That doesn’t mean you have to be blunt, adds Mr. Schwartz of the Energy Project, which is more than 60% female: “I’ve learned it’s a balance between honesty and empathy. Honesty without empathy is cruelty.”

Women have no idea what men in the workplace are dealing with when they
work with women. And men, despite what the author thinks, are not there
to babysit women by telling them to ask for raises, brushing away tears
and “twisting” women’s arms to ask for her own promotion.

I suggest learning to refer to “equality” and to say “look, you’re a strong, independent woman who doesn’t need any help from a man to do her job” will be vital for many men in the corporate environment. Black knighting and ruthless compliance with all workplace regulations is the optimal way to circumvent the lunacy.

SJWs at Amazon

This is the description of the Amazon editors’ choice for the best book of 2014:

Lydia is dead. From the first sentence of Celeste Ng’s stunning debut, we know that the oldest daughter of the Chinese-American Lee family has died. What follows is a novel that explores alienation, achievement, race, gender, family….

Do you even need to read Everything I Never Told You: A Novel to know how the book is likely to proceed? Notice how the battle we observe in Pink SF/F vs Blue SF/F is playing out in mainstream literature too. This is not merely the best novel of the year, it is supposedly the VERY BEST BOOK of 2014, yet at 4.2, it has a lower average rating than most of my books, let alone John C. Wright’s.

Why? One guess. Style and SJW politics over story, of course. Compare the two most helpful reviews, one complimentary from a guy who got the book free, and one critical from a woman who actually paid money for it. Exhibit A:

How is it possible that this is a first novel? It is so exquisite, so marvelously perfect, so regally quiet and elegant that surely, it must come from the hands of a old soul author. But no. This is Celeste Ng’s first novel, and in it, she has painted such a deeply felt, original story. This book shall remain with me for the rest of my days.

Everything I Never Told You is a story of secrets, of love, of longing, of lies, of race, of identity, and knowledge. The story begins with the death of Lydia, daughter of Marilyn and James, which is told in the first sentence and slowly revealed through the book. Why she did it drives the narrative, and yet, this story is bigger, grander than this central mystery. Marilyn wanted to defy society’s narrow vision of her life and become a doctor, while James is trying to overcome humble beginnings and a society judging him based on his race. Together, they conventions, marry and create a family. Nathan, oldest son on his way to Harvard, Lydia, the middle sister and favorite one, and Hannah, truly growing up invisible. Together, Ng has created a complex, complicated family that rings so true on every page. There isn’t a false note in the story.

Classic. Pretentious language. Overpraise for a debut – you know there is a non-zero chance we’ll never hear about this writer again – defying society, ringing true, overwrought claims about how the book will live on in his heart forever and ever after, and to top it all off, the literary SJWs favorite praise: “There isn’t a false note in the story.”

Translation: this book is utter SJW bullshit and is full of false notes from start to finish, without ceasing. Remember, SJWs always lie.

And now, exhibit B:

Celeste Ng seems like a talented writer. Her style of writing is fluid and lyrical. For that reason, I really wanted to like this book. Unfortunately, I just couldn’t, primarily because nearly all the characters are so overwhelmingly awful.

I know characters don’t need to be good or even likeable to be compelling, but there has to be something to draw you in and make you care about them. That wasn’t the case here for me at all. In fact, the adult protagonists are so awful I almost wanted to stop reading at times. The main couple comprises the most self-absorbed, selfish, emotionally abusive parents I’ve ever encountered. Before the death of beloved Lydia, they turn her into a proxy of themselves and basically ignore their other children. Post-mortem, they become even more entrenched in themselves and their needs and issues and continue their neglect of their children or even take their anger out on them. Toward the end, which hints at happier times for the parents, I didn’t even care anymore. They didn’t deserve anything better.

My other issue with this novel was its treatment of race. I understand that Ng wanted this to be a treatise on racial differences and the impact prejudice can have on people, but the way she chose to do this was not effective. She was both heavy-handed and uninspiring. She made it seem as if every single person this family encountered had never seen a Chinese person and was prejudiced against them. I find this hard to believe even back in the 1970’s.

As I said, lies from start to finish. Not merely lies, but blatant and unconvincing lies. SJWs not only swim in shit, they want you to swim in it too, which is why they incessantly try to convince you that it’s the purest, cleanest water you’ll ever taste.

To conclude my case against buying into the ludicrous propaganda of Amazon’s SJWs, note that two of the other 100 best books of the year are: Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned” by the Dunham Horror and Cosby: His Life and Times by Mark Whitaker, who somehow managed to avoid discovering anything about Mr. Cosby’s reported pasttime of drugging and raping women in the process of writing his biography.

Honor the martyrs

Christianity is being eradicated in the Middle East by the religion of the sword:

Four young Christians were brutally beheaded by ISIS in Iraq for refusing to convert to Islam, according to a British reverend forced to flee the country. Canon Andrew White, known as the Vicar of Baghdad, told the horrifying story how of the youths, all under 15, were murdered for standing up to the jihadists.

The vicar of the city’s St George’s Church, the only Anglican church in the whole of Iraq, has had to leave the country for Israel amid constant threats on his life by Islamic State. In a harrowing interview with the Orthodox Christian Network, he said ISIS had killed ‘huge numbers’ of believers in Jesus.

‘Islamic State turned up and said to the children, “you say the words that you will follow Mohammad”’, he said, his voice cracking with emotion.

‘The children, all under 15, four of them, said “no, we love Yesua; we have always loved Yesua; we have always followed Yesua; Yesua has always been with us”.

‘They [ISIS] said, “Say the words.” They [the children] said, “No, we can’t”.

‘They chopped all their heads off. How do you respond to that? You just cry. They are my children. That is what we have been going through and that is what we are going through.’

Honor the faith of the four young martyrs by reaffirming your own. And note this: “Iraq had 1.5 million Christians before the US-led invasion in 2003, but now all that are left are 250,000 who have been displaced from their homes in the north of the country by the advance of ISIS.”

Eventually, there will be those who can do more than cry. I suspect it will not be more than 20 years before the new Martel appears and the Reconquista 2.0 begins. The Tenth Crusade will be fought in the West, in both Europe and America, and it will last decades.

The Norwegians are already taking action. The Swedes are waking up. The French are actively voting. And the Germans are rising. Slowly but surely, they are waking up. “The latest PEGIDA march on Monday drew up to 10,000 people.”  PEGIDA stands for Patriotische Europäer Gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes. Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamicization of the West.

And soon the Saxon will begin to hate. That is when the anti-Western politicians will be removed from power. That is when the Western nations will rise. And that is when Enoch Powell’s long-predicted Rivers of Blood will begin to flow.

The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature.

One is that by the very order of things such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred: at each stage in their onset there is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing: whence the besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future.

Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles…. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood.”
That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with
horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven
with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us
here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but
come.

Now it has come. The statesmen of the West have failed. The preventable evils were not prevented. Now they must play out, as history shows that they have always played out.

#GamerGate crushed Gawker

Nero reports on the costs to Gawker of attacking #GamerGate:

The cost to Gawker Media of its ridicule and viciousness toward video gamers was “seven figures” in lost advertising revenue, according to the company’s head of advertising, Andrew Gorenstein. In addition, founder Nick Denton has stepped down as president and editorial director Joel Johnson has been removed from his post and will probably leave the company, reports Capital New York….

And now here is a chance to kick the SJW while he’s down. An Ilk suggests action:
A few of us were inspired by that stupid Change.org petition that got GTA5 banned to try to use the same tactic against Gawker’s biggest revenue sources. I figure it may be especially effective to kick them when they’re already reeling from the previous damage we’ve done, while Hulk Hogan’s suit and their insurance company threaten to bleed them further. The petition is here: Get Google and Amazon to stop advertising on Gawker Media.

We’d
like to spread this around and get the signature count up before
posting it in the usual GamerGate avenues (ie our Twitter accounts,
8chan, KotakuInAction), so that anti-GamerGate won’t know it’s happening,
and won’t realize that it’s coming from us or be able to respond to it until it’s too late for them to do anything about it.

They’re down. Kick them hard and keep them there.