Announcing Castalia Associates

You may have noticed there is a change to the left sidebar. In the place of the RECOMMENDED books, there is now a selection of books that are self-published by authors acquainted with Castalia House who have made their books available through Castalia’s online store. We are listing these books on the store under the category CASTALIA ASSOCIATES.

We’re pleased to announce the first two Castalia Associates are Chris Kennedy, the bestselling author of the mil-SF series THE THEOGONY, and Christopher G. Nuttall, the bestselling author of ARK ROYAL and the mil-SF series THE EMPIRE’S CORPS. Their books are being sold in the same DRM-free EPUB format that Castalia House books are sold. Additional Castalia Associates will be announced in the weeks to come; please do not contact us to request participation at the moment as we have our hands full with getting our forthcoming works ready for publication.

We’re also very pleased to be able to say that both Chris Kennedy and Christopher G. Nuttall are contributing short stories to the first volume of the Tom Kratman-edited mil-SF anthology series, RIDING THE RED HORSE. And while we’re on the topic of Castalia House, you surely won’t want to miss the Appendix N retrospective that many of us have been anticipating, as Jeffro addresses the Zelazny classic, NINE PRINCES IN AMBER.

National spirit in Sweden

The rise of the Swedish Democrats echos that of the National Front in France, the People’s Party in Switzerland, UKIP in England, and other nationalist, anti-immigrant parties:

“The Sweden Democrats is the only political party that wants to stop immigration,” Anders Sannerstedt, a political scientist at Lund University, told the French news agency AFP. “All the other political parties have a united stance, a generous immigration policy.”

That pro-immigration stance was exemplified by Prime Minister Reinfeldt in an August 16 speech. “I’m now pleading with the Swedish people to have patience, to open your hearts, to see people in high distress whose lives are being threatened,” he said. “Show them that openness, show them tolerance.”

Reinfeldt’s immigration stance clearly cost his Moderate party votes this year. Its share of the vote fell from 30 percent in its successful reelection of 2010 down to just 22 percent this year. In contrast, the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats more than doubled their showing from 2010, becoming the third-largest party after the Social Democrats and the Moderates. A majority of Swedes voted for non-Left parties in Sunday’s election, but the absolute refusal of any of these parties to negotiate with Sweden Democrats dooms them to remain in the opposition.

There is absolutely no use supporting any “conservative” pro-immigration party anywhere in the West. They are all traitors to their nations and there is nothing conservative about supporting immigration; it is literally supporting the replacement of the native people. Notice how immigration is more important to the fake “conservatives” than every other aspect of the right-wing agenda. That’s because they aren’t conservatives, they are globalists in conservative clothing.

And when people are crying about how poor innocent immigrants are being deported en masse, remember who was responsible for the nightmare. Not the people doing the actual ethnic cleansing, but those who made it necessary in the first place. Because the eventual outcome is not only predictable, it is certain whether you think it is desirable or not. After all, where did all of these homogenous nations come from in the first place?

Those who think the short-term triumph of multiculturalism is inevitable because it has been dominant for 40 years should recall the Spanish Reconquista. 781 years of Ummayad rule wasn’t enough to quench the nationalistic spirit in Iberia, and every single Muslim was forcibly ejected from Spain in the end.

It will be no different in the Second Reconquista. Europe belongs to the Europeans.

In-freaking-sane

The UK police are ACTIVELY PROTECTING the Rotherham child abusers:

A damning report released last month detailed how 1,400 children were sexually exploited in the area over a 16-year period. The Times reported that a woman whose case is being investigated by authorities – but has not yet been interviewed – was arrested after tackling a man she says groomed her when she was 15. A witness accused the police of ‘acting like insensitive thugs’, telling the paper: ‘A police van came and six male officers piled out.

‘Two of them dragged her away, handcuffed her, put her against a wall and then shoved her into the back of the van.’

South Yorkshire Police told today how they had been hoping to interview the woman in the weeks before the arrest, after they were told of the historic allegations by another organisation. But they only realised that she was the woman they had been trying to speak to after her arrest, and have now released her on bail.

Every single police officer involved should be fired. Then whipped. And as for the Paki child rapists, it is to England’s eternal shame that any of them are still standing on English soil.

No doubt the UK media will soon be decrying “vigilante justice”, but vigilante justice is considerably better than no justice at all.

Into the blast furnace

The UK’s demographics are illustrating the truth of GK Chesterton’s observations concerning the human disinclination to believe in nothing:

In England’s second city of Birmingham, of 278,623 youngsters, 97,099 were registered as Muslim compared with 93,828 as Christian. The rest were of other faiths such as Hindu or Jewish, or none.

A similar trend has emerged in the cities of Bradford and Leicester, the towns of Luton, in Bedfordshire, and Slough in Berkshire, as well as the London boroughs Newham, Redbridge and Tower Hamlets, where nearly two-thirds of children are Islamic.

Last night experts said more must be done to ensure that society does not become polarised along religious lines.

I think it is fairly obvious that when people are being beheaded, it is a little late for that. To quote Jerry Pournell’s apt observation, there will be war.

Professor Ted Cantle, of the ICoCo Foundation, which promotes community cohesion, said: ‘What we are seeing are several trends running together. There is a long-term decline in support for the established religions, notably Christianity; continuing immigration from the Asian sub-continent; and higher fertility among the Muslim population, which has a considerably lower age profile.

‘There is also deepening segregation exacerbated by the loss of white population from cities and more intensive concentration of black and minority ethnic groups as a result of replacement.

‘This is the real problem, as residential segregation is generally compounded by school and social segregation.

If he thinks segregation is a problem, just try desegregating those communities. Because communities that can’t peacefully segregate will always eventually find another, less palatable means of doing so.

Well done, secular Britain. Out of its desire to weaken Christianity’s societal dominance, it imported Islam. That’s like leaping out of the frying pan and into the blast furnace.

Spinning the “bestseller” narrative

Once more, Johnny is counting on the fact that people don’t know the relevant facts in order to attempt to mislead them and spin the narrative in his favor. Notice, in particular, his blatant lie about my ignorance, when the fact is that just as when I caught him repeatedly lying about his traffic, I am the precise opposite of ignorant on the subject:

Vaguely related, not too long ago I noted with some amusement a perennial detractor of mine blathering ignorantly, as he nearly always does on any subject relating to me, about how it didn’t seem to him that Lock In was doing particularly well; this was almost immediately before the book hit the NYT Hardcover list and was Bookscan’s #1 top-selling front list science fiction novel. I considered sending him one of these cookies, so he could eat his words. But then I thought that giving a cookie to an asshole was a backwards way of doing things, at least from the point of view of the cookie. So, no cookies for him. He’ll just have to bask in the infinite pleasure of being wrong, so very wrong, yet again. He’s used to that, in any event.

Now, who was wrong about those “two million page views monthly” again? It’s so typical of SF/F’s Bernie Madoff that he claims I am “so very wrong” when events have gone EXACTLY as I predicted they would. It’s not that Lock In has been a massive failure; most, though not all, books by a reasonably known author that have been pushed as hard as Tor has pushed Lock In will be similarly successful in its first month. Initial “success” in the publishing industry is, to a great extent, predetermined by the publisher’s decisions concerning print runs and marketing budgets.

For example, Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons was such an initial failure for Pocket Books that they turned down its sequel. That’s why The Da Vinci Code has a different publisher than its predecessor. Pocket has since sold millions of copies, and they could have sold tens of millions of copies of Brown’s other books as well if they had simply given Angels and Demons a bigger print run and a marketing campaign. An executive at Random House once told me that Pocket’s mishandling of Dan Brown was the single biggest mistake he has personally observed in the industry.

So, it’s no surprise that Lock In is superficially successful, as Tor has invested a lot of money (relatively speaking) in the marketing of the book in both obvious ways, such as the author’s nationwide book tour and the reviews in various media outlets, and less obvious ways, such as buying the book onto the New York Times Bestseller list.  On Hugh Howey’s site, Tim Grahl explains how these lists work and why they are merely marketing vehicles as opposed to reliable indicators of how a book is selling vis-a-vis other books.

This is the specific “also selling” addendum to the Hardcover Fiction list of September 14th, to which McRapey is referring:

    17. THE HEIST, by Daniel Silva (Harper)
    18. THE SILKWORM, by Robert Galbraith (Mulholland/Little, Brown)
    19. THE MINIATURIST, by Jessie Burton (Ecco)
    20. LOCK IN, by John Scalzi (Tor)
    21. TOM CLANCY: SUPPORT AND DEFEND, by Mark Greaney (Putnam)
    22. LOVE LETTERS, by Debbie Macomber (Ballantine)
    23. CLOSE TO HOME, by Lisa Jackson (Kensington)
    24. INVISIBLE, by James Patterson and David Ellis (Little, Brown)
    25. HER LAST WHISPER, by Karen Robards (Ballantine)

A version of this list appears in the September 14, 2014 issue of The New York Times Book Review. Rankings reflect sales for the week ending August 30, 2014.

That’s great and all, but recall what I pointed out before Lock In reached the NYT bestseller list: “McRapey is getting annoyed that people keep pointing out that Larry
Correia sells more than he does, even though his publisher keeps buying
him a one-week spot on the NYT bestseller list each time he writes a
book.”  And also “Just keep an eye on the NYT list. If LOCK IN is only on it for one week,
it’s a paid marketing stunt. If it stays on it for several weeks, it’s
probably legitimate.”

And now the verdict is in, which is probably why McRapey is already out there frantically trying to spin the narrative again.  Here is the most recent New York Times Hardcover Fiction Bestseller list, including the “also selling” section, for the week of September 21st. Care to guess what book isn’t on it?

  1. PERSONAL, by Lee Child
  2. SOMEWHERE SAFE WITH SOMEBODY GOOD, by Jane Karon
  3. THE BONE CLOCKS, by David Mitchell
  4. THE SECRET PLACE, by Tana French
  5. THE EYE OF HEAVEN, by Clive Kussler
  6. COLORLESS TSUKURU TAZAKI, by Haruku Murakami
  7. THE LONG WAY HOME, by Louise Penny
  8. THE GOLDFINCH, by Donna Tartt
  9. BIG LITTLE LIES, by Liane Moriarty
  10. MEAN STREAK, by Sandra Brown
  11. ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE, by Anthony Doerr
  12. DARK BLOOD, by Christine Feehan
  13. SON OF NO ONE, by Sherrilyn Kenyon
  14. WE ARE NOT OURSELVES, by Matthew Thomas
  15. ADULTERY, by Paulo Coelho
  16. SHIFTING SHADOWS, by Patricia Briggs 
  17. MURDER 101, by Faye Kellerman
  18. ANGELS WALKING, by Karen Kingsbury 
  19. THE HUSBAND’S SECRET, by Liane Moriarty
  20. THE 6TH EXTINCTION, by James Rollins

What a complete surprise! With its one-week showing of #20, Lock In didn’t even do as well as his previous “New York Times bestseller” Redshirts (#15) although it did do better than that famously popular bestseller Fuzzy Nation (#23).  Recall what I wrote back in February 2013: “the fact is that most of Tor’s “New York Times bestsellers” observably
fit what we are informed is the profile of the fake bestseller. They
appear on the list for a single week, only to vanish the following week,
never to make another appearance there again.”

(Scalzi also claims The Lost Colony was a New York Times bestseller, although I was unable to find it on any of the 2007 lists. I suspect this is because the historical lists do not include the “also selling” section. Redshirts is his only book to appear on the actual list per se.)

Notice that the closest comparable, Paolo Coelho’s Adultery, which is presently at #15 in its third week on the list, has an Amazon rank of 292 overall and a Science Fiction and Fantasy rank of 71. That’s what a legitimate bestseller looks like. Lock In, by comparison, has an overall rank of 2,807 and isn’t even in the Science Fiction and Fantasy top 100. It falls an order of magnitude short. Haruki Murakami’s latest is on the top 100 list for some reason, which I find very strange since there is literally nothing science fictional or fantastic about it, although I suppose that won’t prevent it from winning a Hugo next year either.

Lock In does not appear on The Wall Street Journal’s bestseller list and is #107 on the USA Today list. Perhaps it will go up from there, but note that Redshirts never went higher than 55 on that list and Fuzzy Nation never appeared at all. In other words, the initial indications are that despite the massive marketing effort Tor Books put behind it, Lock In is not even doing as well as Scalzi’s award-winning Star Trek ripoff.

This is potentially significant due to what it may mean for Tor Books. I’ve heard, and seen, evidence that they are not doing very well over the last two or three years. I suspected that the otherwise inexplicable decision to push Lock In so hard was an indication of their urgent need for a quick revenue boost, and so I conclude that Lock In‘s failure to become a legitimate bestseller presages an eventual shake-up of some kind at the publisher. As always, the value of a predictive model is its ability to predict future events. It will be interesting to see if PNH is still at Tor Books proper one
year from now. If he is not, I suggest that will tend to support my
observations here.

In any event, Scalzi is spinning his “success” in the same way that an NFL running back’s agent spins it when he’s angling for a new contract. Sure, he gained a thousand yards and the team made the playoffs, but the problem is that it took him 305 attempts to gain those yards, he’s averaging 3.3 YPC , the team was a wild card that lost in the first round, and his salary is $8 million per year. The team can get similar results at considerably less cost from someone else. That’s the inevitable downside of the big splashy marketing campaign for every Big Five author. With great marketing expenditures come great expectations. Merely good results of the sort that observably could have been achieved without them is a failure.

UPDATE: McRapey is so busy with his book tour and NOT paying attention to anything that I say that he tweeted this response almost immediately:

Latest stupid from my detractors: “You were ONLY on the NYT list for a week! You’re not a real bestseller!” Shine on, you crazy diamonds!

Well, this is awkward. Ah, Johnny, look, it’s not a real bestseller. It’s a fake one that Tor Books bulk-bought for you, just like they did with The Last Colony and Fuzzy Nation and Redshirts. Some would call it fraud. Tor Books calls it “marketing”.

Chin up, Johnny! Oh, wait, you don’t have one. Um, well, stay strong, tiger!

Anti-distributionist racism

Gawker explains the correct way to respond to getting mugged by today’s vibrant youth is not to “have the kid arrested for stealing your phone”:

Now, granted, it’s not entirely Clara Vondrich’s fault that this 13-year-old boy was arrested by police for stealing her phone. But, she did, by her own admission, willingly cause the commotion that led up to police being summoned, and she did—as the photos show—keep the kid pinned to a car until police arrived despite already knowing that he didn’t posses her phone.

Vondrich says that she “felt sorry” for the kid, but not enough to not have him arrested and charged with grand larceny. The boy will now enter New York’s vaunted juvenile justice system, which will likely fuck up his life even further, simply because he snatched a white lady’s iPhone in Williamsburg.

If you are nonviolently mugged by a child, continue to let him run along with his friends. The world will be a better place.

There is literally no depth to which the Social Justice Warriors of the world will not descend in their interminable efforts to reduce Western civilization to barbarism. When theft is inevitable, relax and enjoy it.

I was a little surprised by what the picture represented, though. When I see a middle-aged white woman posing for a picture with her arms around a thuggish young African, I tend to assume it is a family portrait of a celebrity with her adopted child-substitute. I thought it was Sigourney Weaver.

VPFL Week 1

102 RR Redbeards
60 FavreDollarFootlongs

98 Greenfield Grizzlies
55 Mounds View Meerkats

74 Bane Cornshuckers
61 KING

69 Texas Chili Eaters
63 Clerical Errs

58 Gilbert Gamma Rays
36 Boot Hill Bogs

New England 30, Minnesota 7. Well, I imagine that settles the question about Adrian Peterson being reactivated next week.

The problem with STEM

What people fail to realize is that the problem in the tech industry isn’t that there aren’t enough women getting STEM degrees, the problem is that too many are doing so:

Research shows women share negative experiences far more widely than men. Does that have an impact on diversity? Do women start avoiding certain companies because they are well informed about the culture?

Barbara: Absolutely. There were two technology companies which had this enormous turnover, and we actually tracked where the women went. And again, these companies had this huge focus on recruiting women but the culture wasn’t inclusive or gender intelligent, and so the women would end up leaving.

We have these amazing women with STEM degrees, and they’re shelving that education and going off to do something else.

When we tracked down where they went, what we found is that they went to smaller or mid-sized companies, or some of them just left the sector. They would say, “I do not even want to be in technology anymore.” So here we have these amazing women with STEM degrees, and they’re shelving that education and going off to do something else.

What’s one of the most common frustrations you hear from women in the tech sector?

Barbara: One female engineer described it as a drip-drip-drip: it’s not just one thing that happens once. She calls it being “cleverly dismissed.” So, she’ll bring up a concern or something, and it gets cleverly dismissed. If you have these drip-drip experiences of feeling excluded and dismissed over years and years, this is where women don’t feel valued for their intellect, for their ideas, or for the different way of thinking they bring, which is so useful and so important.

That’s one aspect of the problem right there. The “different way of thinking they bring” is neither useful nor important. It’s irrelevant. All those clever dismissals are just the tech gammas being nice to their coworkers, because in most cases the correct response to the concerns being raised would be: “what on Earth does that have to do with our actual objectives and responsibilities?”

The main reason there are not more women actually doing technology-related work in the technology sector despite their expensive STEM degrees is a very simple one: all those amazing women don’t like the nature of the actual work itself. They’re not good at it, they don’t like it, and so they tend to gravitate towards tangentially related sectors, like marketing technology or selling it.

Which is fine, but it’s hardly an efficient use of resources or an indicator that forcing even less-interested women into the field is a good idea.

Peterson is not the problem

It’s remarkable that All Day is being lambasted by the very media that so often laments the fact that most black fathers pay no attention to their children, and in particular, their sons. Apparently it is much better for fathers to simply ignore their children and allow them to grow up feral than risk a single occasion of disciplining them too firmly.

Is this really the paternal incentive structure that makes any sense for society?

Peterson has been largely unapologetic and rightly so.  Yes, his four year old son was young, but he also has the same genetics that render his father an athletic freak of nature and it would not be at all surprising if the boy was similarly strong-minded as well. I tend to doubt that any son of Adrian Peterson is going to be much impressed by a single hand applied once or twice to his backside. Peterson may not the best father in the world, but he is clearly attempting to be a father to his various bastards and to raise them more or less correctly.

The problem America faces is not an excess of discipline, but rather, the exact opposite. It reminds me of the way in which the media obsessively worries about anorexia in a nation rife with obesity. Fathers like Peterson, who apply the rod more vigorously than some people would prefer, are part of the solution, not the problem, even if they go too far on occasion. Sparing the rod is straightforward parental negligence, far more damaging to a child in the end than any bruised backside.

If the NFL was genuinely concerned about the welfare of its players’ children, it would suspend the players who have no contact with their children, not those who discipline them harshly.

Systemic decay and the decline of democracy

Since History failed to end, Francis Fukuyama is writing new books. His latest one actually sounds pretty interesting:

Fukuyama’s most interesting section is his discussion of the United States, which is used to illustrate the interaction of democracy and state building. Up through the 19th century, he notes, the United States had a weak, corrupt and patrimonial state. From the end of the 19th to the middle of the 20th century, however, the American state was transformed into a strong and effective independent actor, first by the Progressives and then by the New Deal. This change was driven by “a social revolution brought about by industrialization, which mobilized a host of new political actors with no interest in the old clientelist system.” The American example shows that democracies can indeed build strong states, but that doing so, Fukuyama argues, requires a lot of effort over a long time by powerful players not tied to the older order.

Yet if the United States illustrates how democratic states can develop, it also illustrates how they can decline. Drawing on Huntington again, Fukuyama reminds us that “all political systems — past and present — are liable to decay,” as older institutional structures fail to evolve to meet the needs of a changing world. “The fact that a system once was a successful and stable liberal democracy does not mean that it will remain so in perpetuity,” and he warns that even the United States has no permanent immunity from institutional decline.

Over the past few decades, American political development has gone into reverse, Fukuyama says, as its state has become weaker, less efficient and more corrupt. One cause is growing economic inequality and concentration of wealth, which has allowed elites to purchase immense political power and manipulate the system to further their own interests. Another cause is the permeability of American political institutions to interest groups, allowing an array of factions that “are collectively unrepresentative of the public as a whole” to exercise disproportionate influence on government. The result is a vicious cycle in which the American state deals poorly with major challenges, which reinforces the public’s distrust of the state, which leads to the state’s being starved of resources and authority, which leads to even poorer performance.

Where this cycle leads even the vastly knowledgeable Fukuyama can’t predict, but suffice to say it is nowhere good. And he fears that America’s problems may increasingly come to characterize other liberal democracies as well, including those of Europe, where “the growth of the European Union and the shift of policy making away from national capitals to Brussels” has made “the European system as a whole . . . resemble that of the United States to an increasing degree.”

Fukuyama’s readers are thus left with a depressing paradox. Liberal democracy remains the best system for dealing with the challenges of modernity, and there is little reason to believe that Chinese, Russian or Islamist alternatives can provide the diverse range of economic, social and political goods that all humans crave. But unless liberal democracies can somehow manage to reform themselves and combat institutional decay, history will end not with a bang but with a resounding whimper.

The chart below may show the problem with Fukuyama’s thesis. Notice the big postwar spike in percentage of world GDP as measured in purchasing power from 1940 to 1950; that is the consequence of the USA having the only industrial base unharmed by WWII. Since then, it’s been all downhill, while China appears to be returning to its previous pre-18th century dominance. My sense is that by looking more at ideological systems than at the makeup of the people utilizing those systems, Fukuyama may be missing the more relevant points. But since I haven’t read his new book yet, I cannot say if that is actually the case or not.