Riding this way

Still keeping fingers crossed concerning one more potential contributor, but this is what looks like the final list of contributors to the first volume of Castalia’s new annual mil-SF anthology. We are expecting to make it available to newsletter subscribers next weekend assuming everything comes together as it should. The cover is, well, you’re just going to have to see it. If it’s not quite a murderer’s row of contributors, it is a strong one from start to finish and a variety of national militaries and service branches are represented.

And if you’re a military historian or an established writer of mil-SF and are interested in contributing to volume two, get in touch. We’ve already got two excellent new contributors lined up for volume two.

You got your gay technoculture in my propaganda!

The displacement of liberal New York Jews by liberal Silicon Valley gays is probably a positive sign if it truly indicates that the post-WWII left-wing Jewish establishment is on the decline.

The majority of The New Republic’s masthead resigned en masse on Friday following the owner’s decision to force out the editorial leadership, move the magazine to New York, and rebrand the venerable, century-old publication as a “digital media company.”

Nine of the magazine’s twelve senior editors submitted letters of resignation to owner Chris Hughes and chief executive Guy Vidra, as did two executive editors, the digital media editor, the legislative affairs editor, and two arts editors. At least twenty of the magazine’s contributing editors also requested that their names be removed from the magazine’s masthead.

The mass departure came one day after a shakeup that saw the resignation of top editor Franklin Foer and veteran literary editor Leon Wieseltier, both of whom resigned due to differences of vision with Hughes, a 31-year-old Facebook co-founder who bought the magazine in 2012. Foer announced his resignation on Thursday after discovering that Hughes had already hired his replacement, Gabriel Snyder, a Bloomberg Media editor who formerly ran The Atlantic Wire blog….

Those who resigned are senior editors Jonathan Cohn, Isaac Chotiner, Julia Ioffe, John Judis, Adam Kirsch, Alec MacGillis, Noam Scheiber, Judith Shulevitz and Jason Zengerle; executive editors Rachel Morris and Greg Veis; digital media editor Hillary Kelly (who resigned from her honeymoon in Africa); legal affairs editor Jeffrey Rosen; and poetry editor Henri Cole and dance editor Jennifer Homans. Contributing editors Anne Applebaum, Paul Berman, Christopher Benfey, Jonathan Chait, William Deresiewicz, Justin Driver, TA Frank, Ruth Franklin, Jack Goldsmith, Anthony Grafton, David Grann, David Greenberg, Robert Kagan, Enrique Krauze, Damon Linker, Ryan Lizza, John McWhorter, Sacha Z. Scoblic, Cass Sunstein, Alan Taylor, Helen Vendler and Sean Wilentz.

Many of those who resigned on Friday believe that Hughes and Vidra now intend to turn TNR into a click-focused digital media company, at the expense of the magazine’s strong editorial traditions and venerable brand, according to sources who attended the gathering at Foer’s house.

Whatever will Americans do without this landmark of the neocon establishment telling them what to think and which wars to wage? And wherever will we go for our poetry and dance criticism? It’s good to see some of these old propaganda centers being disrupted and demolished; it’s absolutely ridiculous how much political influence The New Republic had considering that it only had 50,000 subscribers.

The antiwar site Mondoweiss notes: “This is a landmark in the era of the Jewish establishment. It’s petering out in an elite generation of far greater diversity.” Given that Holocaustianity and Hollywood are much more influential in the USA than in Europe, my guess is that it will take at least one more generation before America’s Jews begin following the lead of French Jewry, of whom more than one percent of the total population are expected to have moved to Israel by the end of 2014. What is interesting is the way these developmens indicate that six decades of diligent work to break down European and American homogenuity has gone somewhat agley; it appears that a constant power struggle of all against all may not actually be safer than a single well-disposed majority ruling over diverse minorities with benign disregard.

Having recently read Martin van Creveld’s The Land of Blood and Honey, I suspect there will be some fairly serious cultural clashes in the future between American Jews, who believe they are the center of the Jewish world, and the Israelis, who understandably feel very differently. Those who see “Israeli” and “Jew” as being entirely synonymous really don’t know what they’re talking about; the amusing thing is that Israelis tend to speak more dismissively of American Jews than most Americans would dare.

One important difference that I see is that Israelis are heading rapidly towards a homogenous ethno-cultural state, while American Jews are terrified of Israeli people’s “heartbreaking” embrace of nationalism because they know they are no more a part of the American ethno-cultural state than Israel’s Arab citizens are part of Israel’s, and they have no more desire to move to Israel than the average Israeli Arab has in moving to Egypt or Syria. But their “national homogeneity for me, but not for thee” argument is unlikely to hold water with anyone.

Destroying the community to diversify it

There is no Paradox of Diverse Communities; one horn of the dilemma is simply false. So, the answer to his question is, yes,  we shouldn’t fight against self-segregation, because divisiveness and a lack of community cohesion are intrinsically dyscivic. In fact, we should actively promote racial, cutural, linguistic, religious segregation in the interest of long term peace and harmonious civil relations across various human differences:

Urbanists and planners like to imagine and design for a world of diversity. Diversity, we like to think, is both a social good and, as I’ve argued, a spur to innovation and economic growth.

But to what degree is this goal of diverse, cohesive community attainable, even in theory?

That’s the key question behind an intriguing new study, “The (In)compatibility of Diversity and Sense of Community,” published in the November edition of the American Journal of Community Psychology. The study, by sociologist Zachary Neal and psychologist Jennifer Watling Neal, both of Michigan State University (full disclosure: I was an external member of the former’s dissertation committee), develops a nifty agent-based computer model to test this question.

Their simulations of more than 20 million virtual “neighborhoods” demonstrate a troubling paradox: that community and diversity may be fundamentally incompatible goals. As the authors explain, integration “provides opportunities for intergroup contact that are necessary to promote respect for diversity, but may prevent the formation of dense interpersonal networks that are necessary to promote sense of community.”

They are correct to point to the “federation” concept as a possible solution, but they are thinking on too small a scale. Neighborwide segregation is not enough. It should be state-wide. People like to point to the Swiss model as being an example of successful integration, what they don’t realize is that religious, linguistic, and ethnic cleansing were utilized in establishing the Swiss cantons; that is why the cantons are still identified as “Protestant” or “Catholic” cantons as well as being on one side or the other of the Franco-German divide.

But more importantly, the federation concept cannot work without decentralized government. There is no point in encouraging Somalis or Nigerians to live in segregated neighborhoods if they are legally held to German or Japanese standards by a higher-level government.

The fact is that diversity is a social ill and it exacerbates rather than reduces racial tensions. I can attest that no one in Minnesota had an opinion about Somalis or Liberians 20 years ago. In only two decades, diversity has caused tens of thousands of formerly indifferent people to actively despise them. It would be interesting to test this hypothesis by using contributions to African-related charities as a metric. I surmise that there is a lower percentage of White Minneapolis residents donating to charities that aid Africa now that diversity and immigration have given them some first-hand experience of actual Africans.

Diversity destroys communities. That is the observable fact. Diversity destroys the common interest. To be pro-diversity is necessarily to be anti-communitarian and against the common interest. There is the real paradox: the progressive who claims to be a pro-diversity communitarian.

The Top Gaming Blogs

As one of their Game and Book experts, one of the things Recommend has asked me to do is to identify and vett various other experts, particularly in fields I am qualified to do so. One of the first experts I recruited was the indefatigable Jeffro Johnson of Jeffro’s Space Gaming Blog, who is also one of the two star bloggers at Castalia House, because there are very, very few people who know as much about role-playing games as he does.

Jeffro immediately grasped the utility of the Recommend system, so much so that I have already had to urge him to slow down and pace himself. But among the score of recos he has already posted, he has created an interesting list entitled The Top Gaming Blogs of 2014, which is well worth reading for anyone with an interest in games. Lewis Pulsipher is on there, of course, but there are a number of other sites with which I was previously unfamiliar.

The other new Recommend expert is less known for his excellent game design than for the fact that he is Archon of The Escapist, but regardless, he qualifies as a Game Expert twice over. He’s got his first reco up and it’s a good one on the classic X-Com: UFO Defense.

If you’re not on Recommend yet, or if you’re on it but haven’t really started using it yet, I’d encourage you to give it a go. They haven’t even officially “come to America” yet; but have already achieved pretty solid penetration in their native France. I don’t know if it is going to grow into something Twitter-big once they enter the US next year, but it is going to be significant. They’ve now got the five-rating system in place, which was a needed improvement, and they’ll have the Android app out in the near future. And, in due time, a proper game-style Achievements and Leveling system.

They’re also working on the expansion of the categories; there will be gun categories, among others, and I will be looking for experts in a variety of new categories soon. But we’re only looking for serious and proven expertise, not merely serious interest. For example, Jeffro, Archon, and I are all able to rapidly post recos because we have large quantities of our own previous writings on the subject from which we can draw. But that’s merely an indicator, it’s not an absolute requirement. In any case, if you think you’ve got that kind of expertise in something, then by all means, make your case in the comments here.

Jeffro demonstrates his depth of knowledge in this post, in which he wonders why so many of today’s gamers and game designers are not merely ignorant, but don’t even know they’re ignorant:

Why is it that Gygax had a diet of fiction that spanned more than half a century, but the designers that followed him and the younger generation of gamers that played his stuff did not for the most part? What kinds of things do we fail to see simply because we’ve never bothered to survey the past…? And what the heck happened during the seventies to turn everything upside down? Something happened. The fact of it doesn’t require a conspiracy theory to explain it, but it does make me wonder about what all’s gone on since.

Remember: people that haven’t read from the Appendix N list tend to assume that Gary Gygax was a weirdo for using the term “Fighting-Men” instead of something like “Warrior.” They will even go so far as to say that the reasons for his word choice there are unknowable. It’s a small thing, sure… but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. These people are not only ignorant, but they don’t even know they are ignorant. They are simply not equipped to make an intelligent critique of classic D&D, much less assess Gygax’s contribution to gaming.

That “Wisconsin Shoe Salesmen” precipitated a watershed moment in gaming history. His influence is not confined to tabletop games, but spills over into computer gaming and fantasy in general. While many tropes of classic D&D have by now become ubiquitous, the literature that inspired them has since dropped into obscurity. This is interesting and bears further investigation. 

The deadly danger of the law

Stephen Carter points out how America’s legalistic culture is intrinsically dangerous:

On the opening day of law school, I always counsel my first-year students never to support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce. Usually they greet this advice with something between skepticism and puzzlement, until I remind them that the police go armed to enforce the will of the state, and if you resist, they might kill you.

I wish this caution were only theoretical. It isn’t. Whatever your view on the refusal of a New York City grand jury to indict the police officer whose chokehold apparently led to the death of Eric Garner, it’s useful to remember the crime that Garner is alleged to have committed: He was selling individual cigarettes, or loosies, in violation of New York law.

The obvious racial dynamics of the case — the police officer, Daniel Pantaleo, is white; Garner was black — have sparked understandable outrage. But, at least among libertarians, so has the law that was being enforced. Wrote Nick Gillespie in the Daily Beast, “Clearly something has gone horribly wrong when a man lies dead after being confronted for selling cigarettes to willing buyers.” Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, appearing on MSNBC, also blamed the statute: “Some politician put a tax of $5.85 on a pack of cigarettes, so they’ve driven cigarettes underground by making them so expensive.”

The problem is actually broader. It’s not just cigarette tax laws that can lead to the death of those the police seek to arrest. It’s every law.

This is an aspect of “there oughtta be a law” that is seldom considered. The police can, and will, kill anyone in pursuit of their law enforcement orders. And, as is now eminently clear, it doesn’t matter what that law is. It can be anything from jaywalking to selling Beanie Babies without the proper license.

The law, and law enforcement, are a very blunt hammer, and it’s simply not possible for either to be utilized in the delicately fine-tuned, precision manner that most people envision when they suggest using them for the purposes of petty behavioral modification.

The mainstream discovers MGTOW

A very good article by Milo on the increasing male distrust for and disinterest in the opposite sex:

Never before in history have relations between the sexes been so fraught with anxiety, animosity and misunderstanding. To radical feminists, who have been the driving force behind many tectonic societal shifts in recent decades, that’s a sign of success: they want to tear down the institutions and power structures that underpin society, never mind the fall-out. Nihilistic destruction is part of their road map.

But, for the rest of us, the sight of society breaking down, and ordinary men and women being driven into separate but equal misery, thanks to a small but highly organised group of agitators, is distressing. Particularly because, as increasing numbers of social observers are noticing, an entire generation of young people—mostly men—are being left behind in the wreckage of this social engineering project.

Social commentators, journalists, academics, scientists and young men themselves have all spotted the trend: among men of about 15 to 30 years old, ever-increasing numbers are checking out of society altogether, giving up on women, sex and relationships and retreating into pornography, sexual fetishes, chemical addictions, video games and, in some cases, boorish lad culture, all of which insulate them from a hostile, debilitating social environment created, some argue, by the modern feminist movement.

You can hardly blame them. Cruelly derided as man-children and crybabies for objecting to absurdly unfair conditions in college, bars, clubs and beyond, men are damned if they do and damned if they don’t: ridiculed as basement-dwellers for avoiding aggressive, demanding women with unrealistic expectations, or called rapists and misogynists merely for expressing sexual interest. 

The readily observable fact is that the majority of women do not give a damn about men. They are so locked into their vision of intrinsic female inferiority that they assume their actions will have absolutely no effect on how men think and behave. This is profoundly dyscivilizational, which means that men are going to need to install an overt patriarchy, as the Romans eventually saw the need to do, if civilized society is to survive.

There is nothing fair or equal about feminists. Words are, for the most part, meaningless weapons to them; they would just as soon appeal to “purple” or “Kardashian” if they thought it would be useful. Men need to stop buying into those false appeals for the same reason everyone needs to stop giving ground to the SJWs.

A society of Gamma males will not survive for long. We need to get the Deltas to stop white knighting for women or the cruelest, coldest Alphas will soon rule over all. The reality is that a female-dominated society is not one that any self-respecting man is willing to maintain or live in.

No wonder young men are checking out. Consider this ridiculous, anti-male article:

They started in 2007 by forming a girls-only team. The girls started working with a robot that the boys had initially built. Almost immediately, they solved problems that the boys couldn’t. They developed competition strategies without loud-mouthed boys and repaired the robot on the fly without having to defer to the strongly held opinions of the male members of the team.

Lesson: don’t lift a finger to help women in science, tech, or games. They ask, you ignore. If they’re so damned superior, they can certainly figure it out for themselves. There is no need to discourage them, just leave them to their own devices and go your own way.

Kinetic cards and verse music

Per my recent suggestion, various Ilk have been getting in touch with me about their projects. If you’re interested in helping out with any of these, don’t hesitate to contact the relevant individuals. One is what looks like a pretty interesting game project:

Legion 13 Games (L13G) is a small independent game design studio in Austin, TX, looking for 8 volunteer players to help us demo our new game product, NetWar: The First Connection. NetWar is a hybrid between a card game and a board game — what we at the studio call a Kinetic Card Game — and is making its first public appearance in December.

The first demo games will happen on Saturday, December 20, 2014, from noon to 4:00 PM at the Dragon’s Lair in Austin, TX. During the demo we will also have a Q&A with anyone who is not playing but interested in the game.

If you want to volunteer for one of the 8 spots, please send your name, age, and a short gamer bio to support(at)legion13games.com. Players age 13+ are preferred. Spots will be filled on a first-come-first-served basis. Volunteers will receive a more detailed description of the game, the demo event, and the game manual in a PDF format ahead of time. L13G appreciates your time and interest, and will provide a special freebie to all volunteer players.

To get involved as a non-player, just show up at the event, watch the games in action, and ask a lot of questions. For more information about L13G and NetWar, visit our website: legion13games.com/

The Responsible Puppet alerts us to the fact that the new Fighter Verse is out:

This CD contains 39 helpful and encouraging songs – passages from fourteen books of the Bible.
Featuring the talents of 35 musicians (adults and children), the musical styles are varied, including folk, jazz, pop, blue grass, doo-wop, string quartet and even Gregorian chant. The arrangements are designed so that you will enjoy listening to them and will learn the songs quickly and easily.

Here are some of the familiar passages on this CD: “I am the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6) — The wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23) — Unless the Lord builds the house those who build it labor in vein (Psalm 127:1) — “I am the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25-26) — Fear not, for I am with you (Isaiah 41:10) — “My Sheep hear my voice and I know them” (John 10:27-30).

Click on the link above to find links to iTunes, Amazon, and a bluegrass video. I like the logo; it reminds me a little of the Eternal Warriors logo, sans sword and angel.

I haven’t forgotten about the Life Design stuff, but with everything that’s been going on with regards to the books, games, and other work, I’ve had to push that back to January. So, enjoy the holidays and we’ll delve into that in the new year.

Something is wrong with these people

VERY wrong. PZ celebrates the decision of a publisher to stop marketing books to boys, as are his few remaining readers:

  • Holy crap. Somebody did the right thing for a change. I am blown away.
  • What do I think Lego should do? I think they should make half of all
    their future minifigs women. Construction set? Half the construction
    workers are women. Airplane set? Make one of the pilots a woman and one
    of the flight attendants a man. Police set? Not just a token woman, half
    women. Half the crooks, half the cops, half the bystanders. How hard is
    that?
  • Best news I’ve read all week.
  • This was enough to draw tears from me today.
  • My hubby the engineer bought electronics kits for our kids, and it was the oldest daughter who loved them. She happily joined him on any science project while her siblings ran off to do other things. She’s 37 now, and holds degrees in engineering, computational neuroscience and neurobiology. She’s been working for the NSF on a project to interest more women and minorities in STEM.

That last comment is my favorite. She has three degrees, but instead of actually doing any science, engineering, or biology, she’s using them to work in marketing. And what do you bet she hasn’t given her parents any grandchildren?

SJWs are much worse than useless. They are active participants in the ongoing implosion of civilization.

No one raped the Dunham Horror

As I expected, the feminists’ favorite self-admitted child molester is found to have been lying about being raped in college:

After a month-long investigation that included more than a dozen interviews, a trip to the Oberlin campus, and hours spent poring through the Oberlin College archives, her description of the campus remains the only detail Breitbart News was able to verify in Dunham’s story of being raped by a campus Republican named Barry….

To be sure we weren’t overlooking anything, Breitbart News then took the added step of visiting the Oberlin campus in Ohio during the very cold week just before Thanksgiving. Here we interviewed a number of Oberlin staffers and students. Most were pleasant and helpful. Some less so. One adamantly refused access to documents and told us outright that it didn’t matter if Dunham was telling the truth.

In the end Breitbart News could not find a Republican named Barry who attended Oberlin during Dunham’s time there who came anywhere close to matching her description of him. In fact, we could not find anyone who remembered any Oberlin Republican who matched Dunham’s colorful description.

Under scrutiny, Dunham’s rape story didn’t just fall apart, it evaporated into pixie dust and blew away.

Women may not always lie about rape, but female celebrities do. Of course, they lie about everything. One thing you always have to keep in mind about celebrities both male and female: they are fame whores. The moment they see anyone getting attention for anything, be it rape, adopting an African, or alien abduction, you can be certain that they’re going to start crying about how it happened to them too.

I expect Dunham is lying by omission by significantly playing down the extent to which she molested her now-lesbian younger sister too.

The economic imperative of Asteroid Wars

This sudden push for asteroid defenses seems a little out of left field:

Asteroids could wipe out humanity unless more effort is made to track and destroy them, a leading body of scientists and astronauts has warned. Lord Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, Brian Cox, and Richard Dawkins are among more than 100 experts calling for the creation of a huge asteroid detection system to prevent a doomsday scenario.

At an event at London’s science museum on Wednesday night, Lord Rees read out a declaration resolving to “solve humanity’s greatest challenges to safeguard our families and quality of life on Earth in the future.”

The dire threat of asteroids producing an urgent need for space-based defense systems. Now, where have I heard something like that before? As it happens, in the testimony of a woman who was an associate of Werner von Braun back in the 1970s, which dates back 14 years.

He said the strategy that was being used to educate the public and decision makers was to use scare tactics. That was how we identify an enemy. The strategy that Werner Von Braun taught me was that first the Russians are going to be considered the enemy. In fact, in 1974, they were the enemy, the identified enemy. We were told that they had “killer satellites”. We were told that they were coming to get us and control us—that they were the “Commies”.

Then terrorists would be identified, and that was soon to follow. We heard a lot about terrorism. Then we were going to identify third-world country “crazies”. We now call them Nations of Concern. But he said that would be the third enemy against whom we would build space-based weapons.

The next enemy was asteroids. Now, at this point he kind of chuckled the first time he said it, “Asteroids—against asteroids, we are going to build space-based weapons.”

And the funniest one of all was what he called aliens, extraterrestrials. That would be the final scare. And over and over during the four years that I knew him and was giving speeches for him, he would bring up that last card: “And remember Carol, the last card is the alien card. We are going to have to build space-based weapons against aliens, and all of it is a lie.”

I think I was too naïve at that time to know the seriousness of the nature of the spin that was being put on the system. And now, the pieces are starting to fall into place. We are building a space-based weapons system on a premise that is a lie, a spin. Wernher Von Braun was trying to hint that to me back in the early 70’s and right up until the moment when he died in 1977.

Of course, since we know the military-industrial complex is going to manufacture wars in order to keep its system of income distribution running smoothly, I would think it is eminently desirable for the wars to be waged against space rocks and entirely imaginary. It makes for an interesting investment plan, anyhow.

And is there not an even darker possibility? What if the whistleblower who is warning about these manufactured wars is actually an agent for the aliens who wants to see Earth disarmed? Wheels within wheels, my friends. Wheels within wheels.

Anyhow, it’s nice to see that the AGW/CC alarmists have a new toy with which to play.