Out of the frying pan

The Learned Elders of Wye have suggested China as a possible destination for the Jews once a sufficient number of Americans realize what has been done to their country by Emanuel Celler and a number of his elite co-religionists. Contra to Spengler’s insistence that common traits bind the Chinese and Jewish people and his claims that the Chinese deeply admire and respect the Jews, it would appear that China is not a particularly viable option:

A 2013 Pew poll found vastly more unfavorable feelings toward Israel outside than within the United States, which registered a 27 percent unfavorable view of Israel and a 57 percent favorable view. In contrast, 44 percent of people in Britain had an unfavorable view of Israel. Unfavorable views of Israel were held by 62 percent in Germany, 65 percent in France, 66 percent in China and in the 80 percent to 90 percent range in Arab and Muslim countries.

If one considers the anti-Israel demonstrations in Paris and the fact that the Israeli Ambassador to Germany said last week: “They pursue the Jews in the streets of Berlin… as if we were in 1938”, it is remarkable to see that the Chinese view of Israel is even less favorable.

Lest one conclude that my view of vastly growing anti-semitism on the US horizon is some form of wishful thinking rather than a warning from a friendly acquaintance, it may be helpful to note that I am hardly the first to make the observation.

The fear expressed that “a real decline of the West, particularly the United States, would have dramatic consequences for the Jewish people,” also led to controversy. Brandeis University president Jehuda Reinharz agreed that this type of decline can be expected “in the coming two decades”.

As I have been predicting a catastrophic decline of the USA by 2033 for ten years, it should hardly be surprising that I don’t believe it will be a neutral event where American Jews are concerned. The Jews at the central bank, the Jews at the heart of the financial system, and the Jews whose literally usurious economic theories were used as a justification for constructing the $60 trillion credit ponzi will rightly be blamed when it collapses. The Jews who battled to change the USA’s demographics by opening its borders will rightly be blamed for the ethnic strife dividing the country.

And it is their blameless coreligionists who will likely bear the brunt of the public’s fury at the all-too-predictable consequences of those actions, as has repeatedly been the case in the past.

The British Foreign Minister said yesterday: “As this campaign goes on and the civilian casualties in Gaza mount, western opinion is becoming more and more concerned and less and less sympathetic to Israel. That’s simply a fact and I have to tell that to my Israeli counterparts.”

To put another simple fact in terms they should be able to understand, destroying a country’s demographics and denigrating its dominant religion while securing highly visible statistical overepresentations in various areas of wealth and power is not good for the Jews. And no amount of appeals to genetic or cultural superiority, or to the Holocaust, will obviate that fact.

Wishful thinking

To say nothing of projection. It’s always interesting to see how people who write about me, of whom I’ve only heard because they are writing about me, almost invariably claim that if I respond to them in any way, this indicates I am obsessed with them. It’s less interesting how they frequently imagine that I must be sock-puppeting in order to pretend that fewer people visit here than, in fact, do read the blog.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
Gorblimey guv’, the sad old men who read Vox Day’s blog are literally obsessed with me. It’s like every day is Damofest over there.

Michael Grey ‏@Mikes005
@damiengwalter Not to rain on your parade, but I’m pretty certain it’s just Beale posting under aliases. Too much syntax repetition.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
@Mikes005 That’s a waaaay less creepy thought! I think about 50% of the comments are Beale, and they’re obvious, yes.

As it happens, I post under two, and only two names. VD in black text most of the time, Vox in blue text when I am logged in and forget to use Name/URL. But most critics like this don’t genuinely believe what they’re saying; they’re not so stupid that they can’t click on Sitemeter and see the panoply of different IP addresses from all over the world appearing seconds apart. For example, in the same minute there were visitors from: New York (USA), Bourgogne (France), Trabzon (Turkey), Reading (UK), Oregon (USA), Washington (USA), and Israel, in addition to the majority of IP addresses that were not location marked.

This is just the usual left-wing performance art, where one person publicly strikes a pose and the others pretend to believe what he’s saying. The purpose seems to be an attempt to render small a prospective threat to the warren. However, it appears some of them are either stupid or self-absorbed to such an extent that they truly  have no idea about the reality of the situation. Being able to tweet this in response to one clueless wonder’s tweet rather amused me:

“Who listens to Vox Day? I mean – is there any real following?” That same day: 52,447 Google pageviews.

Keep in mind that is someone from the very community that believed John Scalzi was one of the most significant figures in SF because he was claiming UP TO 45,000 daily readers per day at a time when he was actually averaging 13,604 Google pageviews per day. Set aside VP. Alpha Game alone is now averaging more daily pageviews than that: 15,179 every day this week.

I realize I am extremely fortunate to have such an enthusiastic and high-quality readership. Just this morning, I received a Chinese translation of QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted from Tiger. Last week, Emilio sent me Spanish translations of that and of QUANTUM MORTIS Gravity Kills, which will be forthcoming as soon as I finish the corrections to two other books. Two brave souls are even taking on the translation of the 850-page A Throne of Bones. Very few authors are so fortunate to have readers who are willing to do so much, and I am deeply appreciative of the community here for its ongoing support and active involvement.

And do you know, it occurs to me that my writing has now been translated into nine languages. Do they also feign to think I’m doing all of that myself when I’m not busy sock-puppeting my own blog? Anyhow, it’s nothing new. People have been trying the same thing since my WND column first began attracting attention back in 2001. It didn’t matter then. It doesn’t matter now. As for the “sad old men” comment, I don’t think they have any idea how many younger readers there are. For example, I received this email from a college student yesterday:

My philosophy professor wrote your blog down as one of the four blogs we
need to pay attention to, and I’ve been reading regularly for a couple
of years now.

I emailed him back to learn the names of the other blogs, and was rather pleased that my surmise concerning one of them was correct: Edward Feser.

All you can read

People have been asking me for my take on Amazon’s new digital subscription service, Kindle Unlimited:

After months of speculation, Amazon on Friday introduced a digital subscription service that allows subscribers unlimited access to a library of e-books and audiobooks for $10 a month.

The service, Kindle Unlimited, offers a Netflix-style, all-you-can-read approach to more than 600,000 e-books, including blockbuster series like “The Hunger Games” and “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” nonfiction titles like “Flash Boys” by Michael Lewis, as well as literary fiction and classics.

So far, however, none of the five biggest publishers appear to be making their books available through the service. HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster, for example, are not participating, representatives from the three companies confirmed. Penguin Random House and Macmillan declined to comment, but a search on Amazon suggests that they are not making their books available….

In offering the service, Amazon is entering an increasingly crowded marketplace. It will be competing with publishing start-ups offering similar services, like Scribd and Oyster, which charge a comparable subscription fee and have comparable digital libraries.

My initial impression is that this is excellent for serious readers. At $120 per year, and an average price per ebook of around $7, one only has to read 17 books per year to make it worth one’s while. Books are considerably more fungible than the average writer or publisher would like to admit, but at the end of the day, it is the act of reading that the reader enjoys more than the average title he reads. And the sort of people who will benefit most from the subscription model are the sort of readers who will make do with reading the back of a cereal box if nothing else is available.

Casual readers, book collectors, and fans of particular authors aren’t likely to be too fussed about it. The casual readers don’t read enough to spend the money subscribing, collectors don’t want to borrow books (the subscription model is more akin to paying for the loan of a library book than purchasing a book), and fans of particular authors are going to buy the author’s book whether it is available through Kindle Unlimited or not.

How will it effect writers and publishers? It depends. It is horrific for the Big Five publishers and their writers, as their unwillingness to participate indicates. The Big Five’s model depends upon the fungibility of authors within their ecosystem, and is increasingly dysfunctional as yet another channel outside their quasi-monopoly over the bookstores drains more book buyers from that ecosystem. As with the coming in-game retail channel I’ve spoken about for the past year, Kindle Unlimited is just one more way to free additional readers from the traditional publishing channel. Marketing and branding, two things that the Big Five have shown themselves to be remarkably incompetent at, are of increasing importance as the ability to buy shelf space becomes unimportant.

It’s neutral to modestly positive for independent publishers, their writers, and self-publishers. Neutral because they’re essentially already operating in the system via Kindle Select; this month Castalia’s books that are participating in the Select program vary from 5 percent to 30 percent loans as a percentage of their sales. Modestly positive because that drainage from the Big Five ecosystem will be flowing disproportionately to the indies and the selfies to whom that new channel is flowing. The challenge facing them remains exactly the same as before, namely, how to get people to notice they exist. It’s not going to get any easier for them, but unlike the Big Five, it’s not getting any harder either.

The reason the big authorial names are screeching is because they know that their predominance is, at least in part, the result of their favored position in the ecosystem. And, unlike the first step in the digital revolution which was within the traditional ecosystem, this second one will tend to lock them out to the extent they are contractually trapped by their publishers.

I expect the Big Five to eventually offer a competing subscription service, as that would be much easier than a joint bookstore. I also expect it to be clunky, poorly designed, and destined for a more complete failure than Nook. If they’re smart, they’ll simply buy Oyster and rebrand it. But I think events have proven that they are not particularly smart.

Sabotaging marriage

Male white knights and feminists should think twice before defending Spreadsheet Wife, as Troy Francis observes at The Return of Kings that her actions are nothing less than a public advertisement for anti-marriage:

The best creative agency in the world would have been hard-pressed to come up with a more effective advertisement against marriage. Rollo points out that getting hitched is no insulation from the sexual marketplace, and it is a common trope that men need to game their wives. But that’s a hell of a lot of work, and with the sexual rewards potentially so low, and with women being a depreciating asset over time, many guys could be forgiven for choosing not to bother and to remain single, learn game and spin plates instead.

You can read my take on it at Alpha Game:

The first thing is that this spreadsheet didn’t come out of the blue. It is almost surely a quintessential male response to a very typical female tactic: the demand for proof. Women often try to put men in a false “heads I win, tails you lose” position, in which they demand proof of the assertion, but if called on this demand, then try to argue that the anticipation of the need for proof somehow disqualifies its relevance. That is exactly what the wife is attempting to do here. She’s trying to use that the fact he made the spreadsheet and sent it to her on the road to retroactively justify her previous actions.

The worst response is arguably that of self-admitted white knight Dave Swindle, who is adroitly taken apart by Dr. Helen:

This response is classic white knighting where the spreadsheet guy is a
failure and this is why he can’t get sex. Note the word loser that is
used in Dave’s first paragraph. Of course it’s important to white knight
and call the guy a loser because that means that a man that doesn’t get
upset if his wife won’t have sex with him is a winner! A convenient
excuse to tell oneself on yet another sexless night. And of course, as
Dave notes, it is always up to the man to take responsibility for any
problems in the couple’s sex life. Wife doesn’t put out? It’s your
fault, man. You lack self-control.

The similarity between the normal female response and the gamma male’s does border on the creepy at times, doesn’t it? Anyhow, this should demonstrate how the instinctive and/or solipsistic reflex to defend Team Woman at all costs is observably detrimental to female interests in the long-term.

Next year in Jerusalem

It’s interesting to observe how this Jew living in England is so terrified to be living amongst the Gentiles, and yet she refuses to go to Zion:

The truth is that up and down this island, Jews are arguing, debating, crying and worrying about what’s going on in an even smaller country across the ocean. Some British Jews are fasting for peace; some are angry at one or both sides; but many are just scared – scared not just about events in Gaza, but events in Europe. These include reports about gangs of Muslims chanting “death to Jews” on the streets of France, and attacking synagogues and setting fire to Jewish-owned stores. Eighteen people were subsequently arrested in the suburb of Sarcelles, just outside Paris, where this particular outpouring of violence happened. The stunned local mayor says the Jewish community is now living in fear.

Anti-Semitism is on the rise in Germany, too. In Essen, 14 people have just been arrested, accused of plotting an attack on a synagogue. Protesters at a rally in Berlin turned on two Israeli tourists (identifiable by the man’s skull-cap) so viciously that they had to be protected by the police. The city’s authorities have also had to ban pro-Gaza protesters from chanting anti-Semitic slogans and are investigating a sermon last week by Abu Bilal Ismail calling on worshippers at Berlin’s Al-Nur mosque to murder Jews. Jews, not Israelis.

The situation is so bad that the foreign ministers of Germany, France and Italy have issued a joint statement condemning the rise in anti-Semitic protests and violence in response to the Gaza conflict – and saying they will do everything possible to combat it. “Anti-Semitic rhetoric and hostility against Jews, attacks on people of Jewish belief and synagogues have no place in our societies,” they felt compelled publicly to state.

Yet since the start of the latest conflict between Hamas and Israel, protesters marching in anti-Israel demonstrations have regularly held up anti-Semitic slogans, shouting for Jews to be gassed, invoking the Holocaust’s chambers of doom. The situation in Britain hasn’t been much better. Last week’s major pro-Palestine rally, which stopped London’s traffic, was littered with placards comparing Israel’s – and Jews’ – actions to the Nazis (“Well done Israel – Hitler would be proud”, read one such sign, accompanied by a swastika). This casual interchange of “Israel” for “Jews” is not just ignorant but often terrifying, especially when linked to references to past atrocities. Indeed, what other group of people get the worst experience in their – or anyone’s – history launched at them like a hand grenade? 

So stop living in fear. England is not the Jewish homeland. It is the English homeland. France is not the Jewish homeland. It is the French homeland. Germany is not the Jewish homeland. It is the German homeland. Israel is the Jewish homeland and it is where the Jewish people belong. The Jewish people have a right to their homeland… and so does everyone else. Dispute the latter and lose your claim on the former.

I staunchly support Israel, both in terms of its existence and its right to wipe out Hamas and colonize Gaza under the legitimate casus belli of having been repeatedly attacked by rockets after generously permitting a thrice-conquered people the opportunity to be left in peace in their reservations. And I have zero sympathy for Jews living in Europe who are afraid of the hatred of Europeans and other immigrants to Europe; everyone has an absolute right to hate whomever they please. Die Gedanken sind frei.

There are no shortage of people who hate me, and yet if I tearfully insisted that laws should be passed banning anti-Vox rhetoric by science fiction writers, and pointed to the thousands of tweets and blog posts aimed at me over the years, people would rightly consider me to be mad. The futile Jewish insistence on trying to outlaw anti-Semitic rhetoric is every bit as insane.

People have a free speech right to anti-Semitic rhetoric, they have a right to be hostile if that is how they feel, and if any Jew seriously wants to try to play thought and speech police in someone else’s country, then he fully merits all the hatred his people have subsequently engendered. When you are a guest in someone else’s home, you don’t make the rules. Either you abide by their rules – such as the ban on circumcision in some European countries, for example – or you leave. You don’t cry Holocaust and then claim that the homeowner doesn’t have the right to make his own rules in his own house.

It’s rather funny to see a Jew complaining about having the worst experience in Jewish history (and their history alone, not everyone’s history, as the Amalekites and the Canaanites, both wiped out by the Israelites, would point out if they were still around to do so) thrown in her face when Jews have been crying Holocaust as long as I can remember. As any child being teased knows, expose a vulnerability to your enemies and that’s precisely the point they will pick at. And the interchange of “Jew” for “Israeli” is hardly ignorant: why are British Jews “arguing, debating, crying and worrying about what’s going on in an even smaller country across the ocean”? The British Scots aren’t. The British Swiss aren’t. The British Russians aren’t. The British Nigerians aren’t. Whatever could the mysterious reason to explain this difference be?

The IDF doesn’t cry Holocaust. It has moved on and become the proud and militarily effective defenders of the Jewish homeland. The remaining Jews of Europe should move on too, because the politicians proclaiming that there is “no place in their societies” for anti-Semitism are soon going to find out that there is “no elected office in their societies” for them. And I don’t know how much longer it is going to be better in the USA; I don’t blame American Jews for the actions of Emanuel Cellar and Arthur Sulzberger and Paul Samuelson and Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke and Jane Yellen and Eric Cantor that have decimated American demographics and the American economy alike. But historically, an angry public has tended to prove unable to make such fine distinctions between the culpable and the innocent.

More and more Americans are becoming aware of the destruction of their national demographics, and when they learn that this destruction was the direct and intentional result of a small group of immigrants who openly sought to weaken the American people’s sense of being a European nation, they are not going to be happy about it. If you read the history of how the Holocaust came to be, it is not at all difficult to understand why the German people so loathed the Jews. That doesn’t justify the Endlosung, but it’s impossible for any sufficiently intelligent and informed individual to fail to recognize that a very similar pattern has developed over the last sixty years in the USA.

History is a harsh and unforgiving bitch and one ignores her lessons at one’s peril. The economy is not going to improve. The demographic time-bomb is not going to self-defuse. Gen X and the Millennials are impervious, at best, to crying Holocaust. There are now more Muslims than Jews in Europe and the USA. Nationalism is growing rapidly in reaction to the abuses and injustices of globalization and transnationalism. The debt limits are being stretched perilously thin everywhere from the USA to China.

I strongly suspect Israel’s chief strategists already know what Israel will eventually be forced to do with regards to Gaza, the West Bank, and the remaining Jews of Europe. They really don’t want to bite the bullet, understandably enough, considering the gargantuan hailstorm of outrage it will provoke. The current invasion of Gaza is nothing more than a delaying measure. And yet, the sooner they address the Gordian Knot, the sooner they will be in a position to deal with the potentially bigger US problem.

There are several Jews who are regular readers here who have moved to Israel, and others who have not. It might be informative to get their perspective on events in Gaza and Europe as well as their reasons for moving or not moving.

Running the literary Internet

A list of 35 writers of whom (with the exception of Neil Gaiman and William Gibson) neither you nor I have ever heard, are supposedly the Internet’s Most Influential Writers. Amusingly enough, one of them isn’t even a writer and another admittedly has no Internet presence at all.

The debate as to whether the Internet is good or bad for literature doesn’t seem any closer to resolution now than when it began, years ago, but the fact remains that some people in the literary world are excellent at using Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and even Instagram or Pinterest to communicate with readers and get people interested in what they’re writing…. Whatever it is they do on the Internet, these 35 people do it better than anybody else in the book world, and that’s why they help steer literary conversations and tastes.

This comment following the piece was funny, if not entirely accurate. “haha i just checked vox day has more followers than any of these. larry coriea gets more hits with one post than the plonkers.”

The list also made Cedar Sanderson scratch her head:

Someone put together a list of the 35 Writers who Run the Internet that had a bunch of us scratching our heads in puzzlement. We’d collectively heard of two or three of them, and most of us are very well read online, keeping up with the changes in the industry. So I challenged several disparate groups of people to nominate influential voices in literature. Who do we listen to?

  1. Larry Correia
  2. Hugh Howey
  3. Sarah A. Hoyt
  4. JA Konrath
  5. John C. Wright
  6. Jerry Pournelle
  7. Brad Torgerson
  8. Kris Rusch
  9. Neil Gaiman
  10. Vox Day
  11. Mike Resnick
  12. Cory Doctorow
  13. Dean Wesley Smith
  14. Kevin J Anderson
  15. Laura Resnick

This isn’t her exact list; I omitted the group blogs for what should be the obvious reason that this was being compared to a list of writers, not blogs. And who is missing?

In my opinion, Instapundit is the most egregious exception, closely followed by John Scalzi, who still merits a significant place on the list even though no one on the Right reads his blog anymore since he outed himself as a rabid Left Democrat. Whatever has lost nearly two-thirds of its former audience, but that still puts him well above the average and he’s mostly active on Twitter these days anyhow. These days, I’d put Instapundit at #2 behind Howey and Scalzi around #6 or #7. Charles Stross should be in the top 25. There are probably two or three at Tor.com that would bear mention, but I wouldn’t know who they are. And John O’Neill of Black Gate absolutely merits top ten status in my book; don’t forget he also launched the SF Site.

I’m surprised to see Mr. Correia at the top; he’s certainly number one where book sales, displacement, and sheer awesomeness are concerned, but let’s face it, for all that he’s been driving the Hugo discourse for two years there aren’t THAT many writers interested in painting miniatures. Hugh Howey would be my personal top pick; what he’s doing with Amazon analysis is both groundbreaking and important. I’m both surprised and delighted to see John C. Wright so well-regarded; his blog is always my first stop every morning as it is always a pleasure to read anything the man has to write, and even when I disagree with him I know there will be substantive food for thought on offer. Kris Rusch, like Howey, does a great job of sharing her wealth of knowledge with the writerly world.

Sadly missing is Our Friend Damien, who will probably be weeping and cutting himself upon learning that not even a platform on a major international newspaper was enough to help him make either list. Which is somewhat of a pity, because for all that he’s a suicidal leftie on anti-depressants who views me as the very evilist of the Evil League of Evil, his views on the changes taking place in the publishing world are far more relevant and sane than Scalzi’s or those of the people running SFWA.

One more thing. Don’t be surprised if in a year or two, you see Jeffro and/or Daniel from the Castalia blog making such lists. Their literary posts are among the most substantive I’ve seen that are not written by Matthew David Surridge.

Last call for charity

As I mentioned when we announced the book, a substantial portion of the first month’s sales revenues (approximately half), will be donated to Stillbrave, the children’s cancer charity. An estimated $1,350+ has been raised for Stillbrave to date. Today is the final day of the release month, so if you are interested in supporting either Mr. Wright or Stillbrave, I encourage you to buy it now, either from the Castalia House store (EPUB format) or from Amazon (Kindle format).

If you have not read the reviews, of which there are now 22 averaging a 4.7 rating, I hope you will not mind if I happen to share a few of the newer ones with you. And to those of you who have already purchased the book, thank you very much for all your support.

Review 1: I, or my other timeline self, really enjoyed this. I have to admit, I like this better than Awake in the Night Land. I mean, it has a time travelling gumshoe, who can’t like that? The twists and turns of chrono-based events was fun. If I ever ran into anything that was even remotely difficult to understand, I just went with it, knowing that my other self on a different timeline would understand it. Or maybe I didn’t. Well, never mind…. Good book. Go with it. You or your other timeline self will enjoy it.

Review 2: Time travel has been a staple of science fiction for decades, as has the
usual paradoxes. But Wright has tried a new twist – the morality of
time travel. What is right and wrong when you can go back in time,
rerun the past, and create the future? And what horrors can you
conceal? Wright tells these stories with an elegant phrasing rarely
seen today. Highly recommended.

Review 3: This is the third book of John C. Wright I have read this year. I was introduced to Wright’s writing with his book “Awake in the Nightland,” published by Castalia House. The second was “Count to a Trillion,” published by Tor. This third book, “City Beyond Time,” is published by Castalia House. “City Beyond Time” is alongs the same vein as “Awake in the Nightland.” Both are a collection of short stories within the same setting…. I would recommend this book to anyone who loves time travel science fiction. It is better then most time travel books that are linear in style and movement. It is by no means predictable and keeps you reading for more. I hope Wright writes more stories about Mr. Fontino in the future, perhaps even give him his own novel series.

A negative indicator

Some of you may recall my observations concerning the worsening Spanish economy after seeing attractive girls who looked like normal college students working the streets in Spain. That indicator is why this story about a petty prostitution arrest made me even more suspicious about the state of the US economy than the recent GDP surprise to the downside. While this pair of North Carolina twins do have more than a hint of the methhead about them, they are also rather more attractive than one would normally expect to see in the employ of a black hustler. Fortunately, they are enough of a news item that it would appear they are not yet the norm, although it could be the twin aspect that caused them to make the national media.

Regardless, if we see more prostitution arrests being made of younger, whiter, more slender, and more attractive women, this will be a reliable indicator that a new level of economic depression has been reached. Just in case any was needed, in light of this unemployment chart from Zerohedge.

The Facets of False Rhetoric

Something I’ve noticed over nearly 15 years of being involved in polemics on various subjects is that a certain rhetorical pattern reliably emerges on the side that has the weaker case, especially when it has the benefit of mainstream endorsement. I’ve named the elements of this pattern the Facets of False Rhetoric.

  1. It tends to refrain from specifically mentioning the advocates, adherents, and works of the other side.
  2. When it does mention them, it is primarily in an effort to disqualify them in some way rather than substantively addressing them.
  3. It fails to directly address the relevant points raised, and instead tends to mischaracterize them.
  4. It regularly sets up straw men and attacks them in lieu of the actual arguments presented. It often resorts to bait-and-switches and hides behind ambiguity.
  5. It falsely claims the other side is ignorant or misguided on the basis of petty irrelevancies and ignores the fact that the other side is discussing substantive matters in sufficient detail to belie any such charges.
  6. The other side is declared to be “dangerous” for reasons that are seldom specified or substantiated.

I’ve seen this pattern at work in the American political discourse. I’ve seen it in the atheism discourse. I’ve seen it in the Theorum of Evolution by Natural Selection and Various Other Means discourse. I’ve seen it in the global warming discourse. I’ve seen it in the economic discourse. I’ve seen it in the EU discourse. I’ve even seen it in what passes for the science fiction and fantasy discourse.

And every single time, it has been the behavior exhibited by the side that I consider to have the observably inferior case. In fact, it has reached the point that when I witness such behavior on the part of an advocate, I now consider it a reliable indicator of being fundamentally wrong even when I don’t know the subject.

For reasons that will eventually become clear, I have been reading up on what is known among military theorists as 4th Generation War. This is a highly relevant topic these days, as both the undeclared wars in Ukraine and Gaza are direct examples of 4th Generation asymmetric wars between a state actor and a non-state actor. Even the media headlines appear to be ripped out of articles on 4th Gen theory, such as the New York Times piece today: “Israel Is Facing Difficult Choice in Gaza Conflict”.

So, it was with some initial puzzlement, followed by a growing sense of recognition, that I read Antulio Echevarria’s Fourth-Generation Warfare and Other Myths, published by the Strategic Studies Institute at the U.S. Army War College.  Consider the boxes checked.

1. There are eleven references in 17 pages to mysterious “proponents”. Not until we get to the footnotes at the end is there a mention of William S. Lind, the most well-known proponent of 4GW, or of Keith Nightengale, John F. Schmitt, Joseph W. Sutton, and Gary I. Wilson, his co-authors of the seminal 1989 article in the Marine Corps Gazette. Col Thomas Hammes merits a pair of mentions in a single paragraph, only to set up checkbox number two.

2. From the Foreword: “He argues that the proponents of 4GW undermine their own credibility by subscribing to this bankrupt theory.”

“However, the tool that [Hammes] employs undermines his credibility. In fact, the theory of 4GW only undermines the credibility of anyone who employs it….”

“The proponents of 4GW failed to perceive this particular flaw in their reasoning because they did not review their theory critically….”

“this new incarnation repeats many of the theory’s old errors, some of which we have not yet discussed.”

“it is rather curious that the history and analyses that 4GW theorists hang on current insurgencies should be so deeply flawed.”

3. The author goes on at length about the nonexistence of nontrinitarian warfare and what he calls “the myth of Westphalia”, neither of which have anything substantive to do with 4GW theory. Westphalia merely serves as a useful starting point from which the state began claiming a monopoly on warfare, it’s completely irrelevant otherwise. I was astonished to observe that the author never even mentions what the four generations of 4GW are, let alone attempts to explain why they are a myth.

4. The fact that the Germans never formally incorporated the blitzkrieg
concept into their military doctrine doesn’t change the observable fact
that the Germans did, in fact, adopt a maneuver-and-initiative based
model to replace the centralized steel-on-target, command-and-control
French model to which the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force still
subscribe.

5.  “The fact that 4GW theorists are not aware of this work, or at least do not acknowledge it, should give us pause indeed. They have not kept up with the scholarship on unconventional wars, nor with changes in the historical interpretations of conventional wars. Their logic is too narrowly focused and irredeemably flawed. In any case, the wheel they have been reinventing will never turn.”

6.  “the theory has several fundamental flaws that need to be exposed before they
can cause harm to U.S. operational and strategic thinking.”

“despite a number of profound and incurable flaws, the theory’s proponents continue to push it, an activity that only saps intellectual energy badly needed
elsewhere.”

I am not a military expert, but one doesn’t have to be one to recognize the way in which this critic is setting off a smokescreen rather than engaging in a substantive critique, let alone presenting a conclusive rebuttal.

(NB: for future reference, the first cretin to say “Link?” is going in the spam file. If you can’t figure out how to use bloody Google, then immediately stop reading this blog and never, ever attempt to comment here again. Google or don’t Google for confirmation as you see fit, believe that I am accurately quoting the subject matter or not as you like, but do not EVER ask me for a “Link?” It’s obnoxious and the answer is always “No”.)

That being said, William S. Lind wrote a response to Echevarria’s article, which I did not read until after writing this post above. Compare the checkboxes ticked in the article compared to Lind’s response. From literally the first paragraph, the differences are observable.

Dr. Antulio J. Echevarria, II is a Director at the
Strategic Studies Institute, the U.S. Army War College’s think tank,
and the author of an excellent book, After Clausewitz: German Military
Thinkers before the Great War. It was therefore both a surprise
and a disappointment to find that his recent paper, Fourth-Generation
War and Other Myths, is really, really ugly. Far from being a sober,
scholarly appraisal, it is a rant, a screed, a red herring seemingly
written to convince people not to think about 4GW at all. It is built
from a series of straw men, so many that in the end it amounts to a
straw giant.

I suspect it would be useful to further develop this pattern of critical observation, add additional checkboxes, and see how reliable it is across disciplines and subject matters. If anyone has any insights into this, I’d be interested in hearing them. I feel this may be Vox’s Third Law of Critical Dynamics taking shape, but I have not yet articulated it in a form I find both succinct and satisfying.

First Law: Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from insanity.
Second Law: If I can imagine it, it must be assumed
true. If you can’t conclusively prove it, it must be assumed false.
Third Law (first draft): The probability of a position’s falsehood increases with the number of applicable facets of false rhetoric.

What was he waiting for?

Texas governor Rick Perry finally deploys the Texas National Guard:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry is expected Monday to announce the deployment of up to 1,000 National Guard troops to the border following an incident in which members of Mexican drug cartels allegedly fired shots from a .50-caliber machine gun from the Mexican side of the border into Texas, sending U.S. Border Patrol guards scurrying for cover.

Following the shooting incident Friday night, Texas state Rep. Terry Canales, a Democrat, told the Associated Press he was briefed by his staff on Sunday after a conference call with the governor’s office, Texas National Guard and the state Department of Public Safety. Perry is scheduled to make the announcement Monday at 2 p.m. Central Time.

More than 3,000 Border Patrol agents now work in South Texas, and Perry has repeatedly asked President Obama to send the National Guard to the border. At the same time, Perry has come under growing pressure from the conservative wing of his own party to act on his own under Article 1, Section 10, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution. This clause gives states the right to declare an ‘imminent danger’…and to call up the National Guard.

Conservative politicians don’t seem to understand that the days of “calling for” this and “fighting for” that are over. Do something or shut up. Why was Perry asking Obama to do his job for him? It’s this sort of political tone-deafness that allowed a very vulnerable Romney to steamroll him during the 2012 nomination.

And why only 1,000 National Guardsmen? That’s not enough to control the border. It looks as if Perry is only acting in order to appear he is doing something.