A letter to Hachette’s CEO

Our friends at Amazon requested that those readers and writers who support them write an email to Hachette CEO Michael Pietsch. Amazon has been very good to me over the past few years, both an author and a customer, so I was happy to oblige.

Dear Mr. Pietsch,

As a Hugo-nominated author, a Pocket Books author, and an editor
for an independent publishing house in Finland, I would like to
encourage you to rethink your position regarding Amazon. I understand
that the rapid changes in the industry are affecting your company, often
in a negative manner. I also realize that your overhead and your
contracts tend to reflect standard industry practices that are no longer
in line with the new world of digital publishing.

The fact is, Mr. Pietsch, that the world is changing and Hachette has to
change with it. Ebook prices are coming down as per the technology curve.
When have you ever known a new technology to come out and gradually
become more expensive over time? I don’t wish to criticize you or your
organization for various attempts to keep the new world at bay, as the
important point is not that colluding with other mainstream publishers,
trying to protect higher book prices, or using authors as leverage is
wrong, or even bad PR, but that such actions are ultimately futile.

The ebook genie will never go back into the bottle. Therefore, the sooner you
restructure Hachette to reflect the new realities, which include coming
to a reasonable accomodation with Amazon, the more likely it is
that your organization will survive these changes.

With regards,

Vox Day

Hachette’s position isn’t merely economically illiterate, observably hypocritical, and morally wrong, it is untenable. At the moment, Hachette obviously needs Amazon more than Amazon needs Hachette. As for its supporters among the scribbling classes, I think Amazon would do well to teach the authors who are publicly opposed to them a Very Important Lesson by refusing to sell any of their books for six months.

After the initial screeches of outrage died down, I suspect they would all fall in line very quickly. One of the things I like about Amazon is that it is the sort of thing they might actually do; I don’t think they’d be afraid to demonstrate to those various loud-mouthed authors just how unimportant they truly are. It’s amazing how many writers not only excuse their mainstream publishers for actions that Amazon has not even committed, but fail to realize that selling books is only a small part of Amazon’s business these days.

Amazon isn’t perfect. What corporation is? But they have been the best thing for authors and the reading public since Mr. Gutenberg first assembled his printing press. And the fact that the dinosaur gatekeepers and their pet authors hate and fear it is a feature, not a bug.

One of the Mad Geniuses, Amanda, adds her two cents on the subject:

[A]ll Amazon did was take a page out of Hatchette’s book and ask its authors to take a stand. Oh the cries of foul that suddenly rose from the interwebs. Within
half a hour of reading the email, I was seeing accusations of Amazon
acting like a stalker in sending the email to the usual AHDers (Amazon
Hater Disorder sufferers) about how evil Amazon was to ask its authors
to contact poor, innocent Hatchette. There was even one author claiming
that Amazon is not and never will be a friend to authors. All of those
had me shaking my head and wondering if these folks had ever really read
their contracts with their traditional publisher — several of whom are
signed with Hatchette — as well as if they actually knew the meaning of
the terms “contract”, “negotiation” and “irony”.

What pushed me over the edge was a post by another author who
admitted to not having received or read the email but, based on what
they were seeing form their author friends, Amazon was once again
resorting to dirty pool and must be stopped because, duh, Amazon is
evil.

They really are proper little Manicheans, aren’t they.

93 percent more

Obviously Larry Correia is GREAT FOR SCIENCE FICTION:

Loncon 3 announces record participation in the 2014 Hugo Awards!

London, 7 August 2014 – Loncon 3, the 72nd World Science Fiction Convention being held at London ExCeL from 14-18 August, is proud to announce that it received 3,587 valid ballots for the 2014 Hugo Awards. 3,571 ballots were submitted online through the Loncon 3 website and 16 paper ballots were received. This total eclipses the previous record participation of 2,100 ballots (set by Renovation in 2011) by over 50%.

That’s 1,723 votes more than last year’s 1,848. There is a very good chance that whether he wins or loses, Larry Correia’s WARBOUND will get more votes than the 407/827 that last year’s winner did. It also indicates that he raised nearly $70,000 for the World Fantasy Convention. If nothing else, they should be giving him a Service to WorldCon award.

Personally, I think it would be hilarious to see NO AWARD win a category or two, especially after the way the pinkshirts talked it up after the nominations were announced. It’s always amusing how they never seem to grasp that a sword cuts both ways.

That being said, I very much doubt that increase is entirely, or even largely, down to the involvement of those loyal to the Evil League of Evil. I suspect we have succeeded in energizing the pinkshirts, who are bound and determined to protect what they consider to be their turf. The first sign we’ll see concerning how this will play out is when the 1939 Awards are announced on Thursday. If CS Lewis and Ayn Rand make a strong showing, we can tentatively conclude that there are decent prospects for good humor on Sunday.

What West?

With Easterners murdering Easterners again, the cry rises once more: the West must act!

  • The West must face the evil that has revealed itself in the Iraq genocide – Michael Nazir-Ali
  • The West must intervene in Iraq – Lord Dannatt
  • The decision to intervene is almost certainly the right call – Ross Douthat

Why? What possible interest does the West have in keeping Easterners from killing each other? France imported tens of thousands of pro-French Algerians to keep them from being murdered by other Algerians, now their police don’t dare to enter the slums inhabited by the grandchildren of those Algerians. The USA has been importing people from every single one of its post-WWI foreign engagements of the previous century, what benefit has that been to Americans beyond nearly exposing the people of Coon Rapids, Minnesota, to Ebola?

Did Rome concern itself when one Chinese king was slaughtering other Chinese? Did Imperial Japan intervene in the Dutch-Spanish war?

The West is in no position to help anyone now that it has been invaded by more than 30 million Muslims and Africans and 50 million Hispanics. With the center of gravity under assault, nothing at all will be accomplished elsewhere. Considering that the present debacle is the direct result of the last two failed Western interventions, why does anyone believe that a third one will improve anything, rather than make it worse?

Besides, the “West” is already involved. There are presently more than 500 “Britons” fighting with ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Which means the West shouldn’t concern itself with the wars over there, it should be preparing to fight the inevitable one over here.

The death of the White Democrat

From the frozen lakes of Minnesota to the sunny beaches of Hawaii, the non-white populace has finally realized that they have no need to play second fiddle to their white left-liberal masters any longer:

Mr.
Abercrombie, a Democrat, was defeated by David Ige, who began the
campaign as a little-known state senator but capitalized on the
governor’s sinking popularity to win the nomination. The
defeat of Mr. Abercrombie, at age 76, probably marks an ignominious end
to his long political career. He had collected only 31 percent of the
vote, compared with 67 percent for Mr. Ige, by the time he conceded the
race on Saturday night.

Mr. Ige hardly seemed able to believe how easily he ultimately attained the nomination, after overcoming enormous disadvantages in fund-raising and name recognition.

“When we started this 13 months ago, I had people tell me I was crazy,” he said. “No one thought we would be anywhere close to where we are today.”

Another high-profile Democratic incumbent was also in danger Saturday night, in a Senate primary race that remained too close to call. In that contest, Senator Brian Schatz faced a challenge from Colleen Hanabusa, a congresswoman.

It’s not dissimilar to the Minnesota House election where a Somali immigrant is likely to unseat Phyllis Kahn, a longtime carpetbagger from New York City. The amusing thing is that there isn’t a peep about race in the NYT article, even though the two incumbents, Ige and Abercrombie, are whites and Ige and Hanabusa are both Asian.

The lesson here is that the Republican Party should embrace its identity as the white party and stop wasting any energy trying to appeal to other minorities such as Hispanics, blacks, Asians, Jews, and Arabs. All multi-ethnic empires throughout history have been divided by ethnicity, not ideology, and now that the USA is no longer a White Christian Anglo-Saxon nation, the old political rules no longer apply.

Besides accepting the new racial realities, the main challenge for Republicans will be preventing the white activists fleeing the Democratic party due to their lack of opportunity there from claiming leadership positions in the Republican Party.

Fabled “Roots”

I’d heard that a fair amount of Alex Haley’s Pulitzer-prize winning “Roots” was fictitious, but I didn’t know that a considerable amount of the book was plagiarized, or that the entire thing is about as historically legitimate as “Star Wars”.

Unfortunately, the general public is largely unaware of how Haley’s monumental family autobiography, stretching back to 18th-century Africa, has been discredited. Indeed, a 1997 BBC documentary expose of Haley’s work has been banned by U.S. television networks – especially PBS, which would normally welcome such a program.

Coincidentally, the “Roots” anniversary comes amid the growing scandal over disclosures of historian Stephen Ambrose’s multiple incidents of plagiarism. Because as Haley himself was forced to acknowledge, a large section of his book – including the plot, main character and scores of whole passages – was lifted from “The African,” a 1967 novel by white author Hal Courlander.

But plagiarism is the least of the problems in “Roots.” And they would likely have remained largely unknown, had journalist Philip Nobile not undertaken a remarkable study of Haley’s private papers shortly before they were auctioned off.

The result was featured in a devastating 1993 cover piece in the Village Voice. It confirmed – from Haley’s own notes – earlier claims that the alleged history of the book was a near-total invention…. Historical experts who checked Haley’s genealogical research discovered that, as one put it, “Haley got everything wrong in his pre-Civil War lineage and none of his plantation ancestors existed; 182 pages have no basis in fact.”

Given this damning evidence, you’d think Haley’s halo would long ago have vanished. But – given this week’s TV tribute – he remains a literary icon. Publicly, at least. The judge who presided over Haley’s plagiarism case admitted that “I did not want to destroy him” and so allowed him to settle quietly – even though, he acknowledged, Haley had repeatedly perjured himself in court.

The Pulitzer Prize board has refused to reconsider Haley’s prize, awarded in 1977 – in what former Columbia President William McGill, then a board member, has acknowledged was an example of “inverse racism” by a bunch of white liberals “embarrassed by our makeup.”

To paraphrase Rush Limbaugh, the left-wing literary establishment is desirous of the perceived success of black authors. The science fiction community is literally decades behind in handing out affirmative action awards to inept and derivative authors of diversity.

Quarantine the continent

Did the USA learn nothing from the AIDS epidemic? Why is a single flight from Africa being permitted to land anywhere in the USA or Europe? Do people not realize that were it not for the fact that he didn’t live long enough to board his flight to MSP, the eight hospital workers that Patrick Sawyer infected in Nigeria might well have been in St. Paul, Minnesota?

Ken Isaacs of Samaritan’s Purse told a Congressional Hearing that the WHO is underreporting the Ebola epidemic. “Ken Isaacs, a vice president with Samaritan’s Purse, a North Carolina-based Christian humanitarian organization, also said the number of Ebola cases and deaths reported by the World Health Organization are probably 25 percent to 50 percent below actual levels.”

Isaacs told of a prominent Liberian doctor who “openly mocked the existence of Ebola” by trying to enter a hospital isolation ward with no gloves or protective clothing. He and another man who accompanied him to the hospital both died within five days, Isaacs said. At one point, Isaacs even disputed the earlier testimony of a physician from the U.S. Agency for International Development, who said his agency had provided 35,000 protective suits for health care workers in West Africa. Isaacs told lawmakers he had received an email in the last 90 minutes from a hospital in Liberia “asking us for more personal protection gear. This a problem everywhere,” he said.

Equipment might not be a problem for much longer. Finding people to wear them will. Ebola is rapidly killing off the medical personnel and shutting down the hospitals. The dead are being left to die in the street, where with a last effort, some of them crawl out to expire.

How many millions are going to have to die in the name of multiculturalism and insanity before we end it as the madness that it has always been? Africa is hapless and hopeless and it is not America’s or Europe’s job to save it. And neither America nor Europe will even be able to help it if we import its cultural dysfunctionalities and turn all of our cities into Detroits.

Perhaps we’ll be fortunate this time and the Ebola epidemic will remain
in Africa despite the medical community’s apparent determination to
spread it around the world… this time. And why are these infected Western health workers being back to their home countries? Salute their efforts to save others elsewhere, by all means, but they have no right, none at all, to put their home nations at risk.

UPDATE: “On Saturday, Guinea announced that it had closed its borders with Sierra Leone and Liberia in a bid to halt the virus’s spread.”

So, if Guinea has done it, why don’t we? What can possibly be worth taking the chance of having it spread via air travel?

Control your damn cats

An Englishman’s home is not subject to invasion by felines intent on avicide:

An Oxford University educated research chemist has issued his cat-owning
neighbours with leaflets warning them of “drastic action” if they
continue to let their animals roam free and kill the birds in his garden.
Neighbours living in the street said they are concerned for their cats’ safety and have been upset by the leaflet.

“In the last week alone, cats have killed a jackdaw, a blackbird and a house sparrow,” said Dr Mowforth. “I was watching the sparrow whilst eating my dinner. She was sat quietly enjoying the food in the evening sun when a cat leapt right onto the shoulder-height table, grabbed the bird and ran off. This was the final straw.”

The 57-year-old said he has spent more than 10 years converting the garden at his Gloucestershire home into a “paradise for birds” and set up video surveillance when he noticed how numbers had fallen and how many were being killed. He has sent local households in the village of Dursley pictures from video footage of the worst offenders and said he has identified 10 ‘killer cats’ in the area.

Dr Mowforth claimed complaints had been made to the police and RSPCA about him, adding “the extreme elements within the pro-cat brigade have threatened arson.”

If I had cats repeatedly invading my yard and murdering our little friends like Fred the woodpecker and Jeremy the kestrel, I’d simply shoot them. Even if proper guns aren’t available in the UK, surely air pistols are. I don’t understand people who think their cats should be permitted to roam freely outside the house and onto other people’s property.

Of course, the gentleman is Oxford-educated, so he should be smart enough to figure out the obvious solution. Shoot the cat, toss it into the street, then run over it with your car. Problem solved.

Community cohesion and its foes

Apparently the new term for freedom of association is “community cohesion”:

A nun in east London climbed to the top of a local building and ripped down a flag similar to the one flown by Jihadist militants in Syria and Iraq.

IB Times reported Friday that the flag was being flown alongside Palestinian flags and slogans in support of Gaza. Community members issued complaints over the flag with local council members, claiming that it was causing tension within the community. When council members went to take the flag down, they were surprised to find, someone had beat them to it.

“The council can confirm that following reports this morning of a
flag erected on the Will Crooks Estate, council officials took steps to
remove it but found it had already been taken down by Sister Christine
Frost, a well-known local activist and promoter of community cohesion,” a
council spokesman said.

Some argued that the black flag with
arabic writing resembling the flags flown by ISIL, also known as ISIS,
was only a symbol of Muslim faith and was not flown in support of
militant groups.

Don’t listen to the taqiyyah. The black flag is a symbol of Islamic supremacy. It is a sad testament to the spineless men of the West that a woman has to act in their stead.

Never forget what ISIS stands for: murdered men, raped women, beheaded children, and the extermination of Christianity.

The cost of conflict avoidance

Sarah Hoyt explains why the cult of non-violence is bound to have negative consequences:

Violence isn’t – by itself – bad but – more importantly – you can’t eradicate it from a human society, and we’re going about the problem of keeping the savage part of man controlled upside down and sideways, when we KNOW the solution. What we’re doing deliberately ignores hundreds of years of experience and we’re going to pay for this. We’re going to pay for this in awful ways. In fact, we’re going to pay for this in a lot of violence that will be targeted mostly at the defenseless….

Take away physical weapons, and people will use the authorities as physical weapons. (And psychological ones too, which is worse.)

Now, the weasels we shall always have with us (I think that’s in the Bible, somewhere.) And the wicked flourish like the green bay tree.

But when you take from society the manly weapons of open and clean, minor and non-lethal violence, what you’re left with are the female weapons: the denunciation, the stab in the back, the laughter, the snark, the reputation-destroying rumor. And the advantage is not just to women (the wrong kind of women) but also to entirely the wrong kind of man. Some men are very good at it indeed.

And what results is what we’re seeing in certain professional organizations: bullying of the ones perceived as weak. Hounding of those who don’t think with the group. Abuse of elders. In fact, the full panoply of the crab bucket.

This is because people have been taught violence that’s not physical is okay, and because they’re human and violence, group fighting and group protecting has to go somewhere.

And the advocates of non-violence can wipe their hands to the wall. I hope to heaven I’m wrong, but I predict that in less than a decade, those will be very bloody fingerprints.

The problem with the feminized interpretation of civilization that is presently dominant is that it eliminates the social mechanisms of violence that have kept men reasonably in line for thousands of years. Because women are direct-conflict avoidant, their form of conflict non-resolution prevents matters from ever being resolved. For example, look at how McRapey is STILL snarking about me nine years after first attacking me; in a more civilized society, I’d simply have punched him in the face two or three times and the matter would have been forgotten about years ago.

Instead, there is no resolution and conflicts continue ad infinitum. The gamma males emulate the mean girls and embrace private politics to manipulate authority and establish a legal regime to leash the strong they fear. There is no tactical difference between what Scalzi, Nielsen-Hayden, and Gould did with the SFWA Board and what Obama, Holder, and thousands of activist groups are presently doing with the IRS and many other government agencies. In the absence of a one-on-one circuit breaker, everything becomes a manipulative appeal to authority.

Which gradually leads to inevitable disrespect for the legitimacy of that authority – who here has any respect for the moral authority of either SFWA or Obama’s Department of Justice – and an eventual return to the use of violence, only far more indiscriminate and opportunistic than in its previously limited form with its code that spared the weak and defenseless.

People tend to behave very badly when they believe they are safe from consequences. I suspect that the woman who is murdered by her divorce-raped ex-husband is extremely startled to discover that the Marriage 2.0 regime may have been able to award her cash and prizes, but is not actually capable of keeping her physically safe.

What we now have is legalistic barbarism wearing the sheepskin of civilization. But it is not civilization, as will become increasingly clear over the next few years. The descent into barbarism will not be easy for anyone, but the silver lining is that open barbarism is considerably more satisfying for the strong than pseudo-civilization. There is a reason, after all, that Man likes to read stories about heroes and killers and soldiers, not lawyers and bureaucrats and lobbyists.

Idaho

I have a job opening for an engineer or CompSci in Idaho and am hoping
you will pass it along to the Dread Ilk.  The job involves analyzing the
strengths and weaknesses of patents, technical papers, and the like.  

If you are interested and would like to be contacted regarding this job, send me an email with IDAHO in the subject and I will pass it along to the relevant member of the Dread Ilk.