Focusing on the real enemy

I fail to see why anyone is even remotely surprised that the US intelligence apparatus missed the biggest international developments of the year:

United States intelligence agencies were caught by surprise when fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) seized two major Iraqi cities this week and sent Iraqi defense forces fleeing, current and former U.S. officials said Thursday. With U.S. troops long gone from the country, Washington didn’t have the spies on the ground or the surveillance gear in the skies necessary to predict when and where the jihadist group would strike.

The speed and ease with which well-armed and highly trained ISIS fighters took over Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, and Tikrit, the birthplace of former Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein, have raised significant doubts about the ability of American intelligence agencies to know when ISIS might strike next, a troubling sign as the Islamist group advances steadily closer to Baghdad. And it harkened back to another recent intelligence miscue, in February, when U.S. spy agencies failed to predict the Russian invasion of Crimea. Both events are likely to raise questions about whether the tens of billions of dollars spent every year on monitoring the world’s hot spots is paying off — and what else the spies might be missing.

U.S. intelligence isn’t focused on external events or the activities of foreigners, it is focused on American citizens. They’re much more concerned about what people like you and me are writing on this blog than they are with whatever the jihadists and Russians are doing. Given that the well-armed and highly trained ISIS fighters were probably armed and trained by the U.S. military, the fact that U.S. intelligence had no idea what they were doing can only indicate a complete lack of interest.

After all, there are millions of Christians and gun owners and military veterans who need to be spied upon and federal intelligence resources are not unlimited. And it’s not like U.S. intelligence saw the fall of the Soviet Union coming either.

World Cup kickoff

Brazil vs Croatia. The World Cup. The Groups. Discuss freely amongst yourselves.

UPDATE: Severely underwhelmed by Brazil. Croatia was the better team, and indeed, probably should have won 2-1 rather than losing 3-1. Instead, Brazil was gifted a penalty on a dive, then Croatia was robbed of a goal on a nonexistent foul before Oscar scored the finishing goal in injury time.

I did think Oscar’s kiddie-style toe-kick from outside the box was clever, though, as it caught the goalie completely off-guard. But it was surprising to see the that it was the Croatian midfield successfully playing keepaway, and not the Brazilians.

Tikrit and Kirkuk fall

The Battle for Baghdad is about to begin:

Iraqi Kurdish forces took control of the northern oil city of Kirkuk on
Thursday, after government troops abandoned their posts in the face
of a triumphant Sunni Islamist rebel march towards Baghdad that
threatens Iraq’s future as a unified state.

In
Mosul, Sunni militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant
(ISIL) staged a parade of American Humvees seized from the collapsing
Iraqi army in the two days since the fighters drove out of the desert
and overran Iraq’s second biggest city. Two
helicopters, also seized by the militants, flew overhead, witnesses
said, apparently the first time the militant group has obtained
aircraft in years of waging insurgency on both sides of the
Iraqi-Syrian frontier.

State television showed
what it said was aerial footage of Iraqi aircraft firing missiles at
insurgent targets in Mosul. The targets could be seen exploding in
black clouds. Further south, the fighters
extended their lightning advance to towns only about an hour’s drive
from the capital Baghdad, where Shi’ite militia are mobilizing for a
potential replay of the ethnic and sectarian bloodbath of 2006-2007.

Three of Iraq’s four major cities are under control of one of the rebel forces. This is the natural consequence of the USA foolishly failing to partition Iraq into its three obvious parts, Kurdistan, Shiastan and Sunnistan. It’s also informative to see how quickly the Iraqi government has been forced to stop relying upon its professional army; it has adopted a militia system to reinforce the regular soldiers and is arming volunteers in order to defend Baghdad.

That is a compelling rebuttal to the modern notion that militia forces are outdated, when the fact is that while smaller, well-trained professional forces are useful for offensive actions, they are considerably less effective in defensive ones.

What is Pink SF/F?

Since some people, most of them of the binary-thinking variety, appear to be somewhat confused by what is meant by Pink SF/F, it may be be helpful to provide a concise definition of it. Let’s begin by listing its attributes:

  1. It is written in conscious reaction to, and rejection of, the classic genre canon.
  2. It is politically correct.
  3. It consciously elevates current progressive ideology above story, plot, and characterization. The personal is the political and the propaganda is the plot.
  4. It rejects Christianity and traditional Western morality.
  5. It subscribes to the anti-scientific myth of human equality.
  6. It exhibits a superficial multiculturalism.
  7. It utilizes racial and sexual checkboxes.
  8. It inclines heavily to the political Left.
  9. It celebrates and normalizes sexual deviancy.
  10. It is structured in the conventional form of a romance novel rather than a science fiction or fantasy novel.

From these observable characteristics, we can derive a useful definition: Pink SF/F is a Left-wing literary subgenre written as racial, sexual, and ideological propaganda in order to subvert traditional literature, religion, and society.

This should make it easier to see why David Weber and Jim Butcher, for all their risible gamma male socio-sexuality, are not writing Pink SF/F, whereas Arthur C. Clarke and Marion Zimmer Bradley observably were. Any work of fiction that checks five or more of the ten attributes listed above can be safely designated and dismissed as Pink SF/F.

What could go wrong?

Steve Sailer contemplates a possible reason for the rigorous Islamic patriarchy:

“I’ve often wondered if the reactionary strictness of Islamic family
morals that irritates us sophisticated Westerners so much has something
to do with Islam originating just north of the edge of the black world,
with its high levels of familial chaos so evident on this graph. For
example, Amman, Jordan has had its own black slum for a long time. The
Arab slave trade introduced lots of blacks into Middle East (although
the black population didn’t grow quickly like it did in the American
South because Arab slaveowners tended to castrate the men and generally
work slaves to death).

“If you are from Sweden, the ideas of women working outside the house,
divorce, non-marital childbearing, etc. doesn’t seem too threatening to
Swedish culture’s stability and efficiency. You look around and ask,
“What could possibly go wrong?” On the other hand, in the Islamic countries of North Africa and the
Middle East, if you ask what could possibly go wrong if we loosen up our
family mores, you look to the south and and say, “Oh, yeah, a lot …””

This consideration of the discivic implications of single motherhood is rather timely, as over at Alpha Game, I was observing that when successful men are asked about what lessons they learned from their fathers, the lessons appear to be much the same whether the father is a wealthy corporate magnate or a postman. But it should be alarming to see that the USA’s percentage of children being raised by one or fewer parents (and by parents, that generally means mothers), is already worse than Ethiopia, Mexico, and Nigeria.

Big in Lisbon

QUANTUM MORTIS Gravidade Mortal is free today:

#1  Kindle > Literature & Fiction > Foreign Language Fiction > Portuguese
#1  Foreign Languages > Portuguese > Crime, Thriller & Mystery
#1  Foreign Languages > Portuguese > Fantasy, Horror & Science Fiction


And so is Uma Magia Perdida.


#2 Kindle > Literature & Fiction > Foreign Language Fiction > Portuguese
#2 Foreign Languages > Portuguese > Fantasy, Horror & Science Fiction

In other news, BS wants to know precisely who I mean when I talk about Pink SF/F:

I started reading your blog after finding you on a link from Instapundit. I don’t particularly like SF but do like fantasy of the sort Patricia McKillip writes (as an example). I also love Tolkein (again as an example). I read your story you had for free (now vanished from my Kindle app) and enjoyed it very much. I bought your Irrational Atheist. I think I might like Sarah Hoyt. I see you have some recommendations on your website. I don’t want to wind up with books by authors you refer to as “pink SF/F. Is there a list of what authors to either avoid or to look for?

Marion “the child molester” Zimmer Bradley and Samuel “NAMBLA” Delaney clearly top the Pink list. They are among the worst of the freak show. Off the top of my head there is Jim Hines, Mary Kowal, Rachel Swirsky, Marko Kloos, John Scalzi, Sheri Tepper, and Mercedes Lackey. But you can find a longer list here comprised of self-identified equalitarians.

We probably should see about putting a comprehensive Pink SF/F list together as a service to those who wish to avoid it. So, if you have a candidate, provide their name and make the case for inclusion in the comments. But they should be clear-cut candidates, not merely authors who are influenced by the gatekeepers. For example, I would not consider Jim Butcher to be a Pink SF/F writer, he is merely a gamma male who can’t bear to imagine a man making a move on an attractive woman.

Pink SF/F is worse than you think

By way of example, consider that one of the foremost heroines of Pink SF/F turns out to have been the very sort of monstrous sexual freak the pinkshirts so love to write about in their inclusive, people of colorful, sexually deviant fiction. This is a letter from the daughter of Marion Zimmer Bradley, one of SF/F’s most influential feminists, who was nominated for Hugo Awards in 1963 and 1978, for a Nebula Award in 1976, and given a World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement. A short story published in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine was also nominated for a Nebula Award in 1990.

Hello Deirdre.

It is a lot worse than that. The first time she molested me, I was three. The last time, I was twelve, and able to walk away.  I put Walter in jail for molesting one boy. I had tried to
intervene when I was 13 by telling Mother and Lisa, and they just moved
him into his own apartment.

I had been living partially on couches since I was ten years old
because of the out of control drugs, orgies, and constant flow of people
in and out of our family “home.”

None of this should be news. Walter was a serial rapist with many,
many, many victims (I named 22 to the cops) but Marion was far, far
worse. She was cruel and violent, as well as completely out of her mind
sexually. I am not her only victim, nor were her only victims girls.

I wish I had better news.

Moira Greyland

This is the true heart of Pink SF/F. This is the twisted moral perspective they have been trying to push on science fiction readers as being imperative for more than three decades. This is the shamelessly hedonistic worldview they have been trying to assert as the pinnacle of the literary subgenres with their odes to dinoporn revenge and necrobestial multicultic rape fantasies.

Keep this in mind when the social justice warriors wag their fingers and lecture society on the burning need for tolerance and acceptance. This is what they seek to tolerate and accept. One wonders how many SFWA members not only knew about Ms Bradley’s behavior, but were part of that “constant flow of people” mentioned by Miss Greyland. Pink SF/F is the literary end product of sick, damaged, and twisted minds. It is not a coincidence that reading it so often feels like immersing oneself in a never-ending flow of sewage.

Lest you think I am exaggerating, have a look at who Tor.com was celebrating just last week. Tor attempted to bury the piece after being criticized for whitewashing Bradley’s personal history, but it can be found on Google web cache in its entirety.

On This Day   
Marion Zimmer Bradley Gave us New Perspectives
Leah Schnelbach, June 3, 2014

Marion Zimmer Bradley

For someone who considered herself more of an editor than a writer, Marion Zimmer Bradley managed to write an absurd number of books, and create a whole world that fellow writers have returned to for the last forty years.

Born in 1930, Bradley grew up in rural New York during the Great Depression, and became an enthusiastic member of SFF fandom that exploded just after World War II, beginning by writing letters to Amazing Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories, and then writing, editing, and publishing fanzines, including Astra’s Tower, Day*Star and Anything Box.

She was married to Robert Alden Bradley from 1949 until 1964, and had one son. She married Walter Breen in 1964, and the couple had a son and a daughter. She earned a B.A. from Hardin-Simmons University in Texas the following year, and then took graduate courses at UC Berkeley from 1965 until 1967. Throughout this time she continued her work in fandom, and also became involved in a groundbreaking lesbian-rights group, the Daughters of Bilitis.

Bradley’s early professional work came in two areas. In 1958 her novel The Planet Savers was published, introducing audiences to the world of Darkover. Darkover proved to have a life of its own: she continued writing stories set in that world until her death, and her fans have kept it alive ever since; the most recent fan novel was published in 2013, and the Friends of Darkover still hold conventions each year.

Bradley also began writing lesbian erotica for pulp publishers in the 1950s, including the novels I Am a Lesbian and My Sister, My Love, under various pseudonyms. However, despite her involvement in the Daughters of Bilitis (and the scholarly work published under her own name, “Feminine Equivalents of Greek Love in Modern Fiction”) she didn’t acknowledge these books during her later career.

In 1983, Bradley published what would become her most famous work, a reworking of the Arthurian legends told from the perspective of Arthur’s half-sister, Morgaine (Morgana le Fay) who fights to keep Avalon and Mother-Goddess-centered paganism alive in the face of Christianity’s rise in England. Rather than just writing a black-and-white story, Bradley delves into the complexities: Guinevere loves Arthur and Lancelot, and dedicates herself to a fanatical Christianity because of her guilt over this triangle. Arthur knows about their affair, and hates that his best friend and wife are in constant emotional pain, but has to ignore it for the health of the realm. Mordred admires Arthur, but also feels that he’s unfit to rule. The various priestesses of Avalon can be just as cold and unfeeling as the male rulers, and the male rulers can be compassionate toward their subjects. The Mists of Avalon is not simply a feminist statement: it is also a powerful work of storytelling. But it also isn’t just a story, it is an attempt to wrest control of history from the winners. Bradley returned to this methodology with her 1987 work The Firebrand, which sang the Trojan War’s classic song of ‘arms and a man,’ but this time with attention paid to a woman, Cassandra.

Likewise, the Darkover books took fantasy tropes and complicated them. Darkover is founded by stranded colonists from Earth. The Earthlings intermarry with each other and with the natives of the planet, giving birth to a population with psychic and psionic abilities, called laran. Because the original colonists were Scottish, Irish, and Basque, the idea that second sight was a possibility is passed down through the generations, making laran a prized gift, and keeping the Darkovans open to it. One of the most notable things about Darkover is that Bradley (who seemingly enjoyed playing Civilization on the highest difficulty setting) hemmed herself in with an extremely difficult geography, and then set her characters against it. Darkover is primarily an ice planet, with only a small equatorial pocket of habitable land. However, even this region is subject to extreme temperature, evergreen forests that produce a flammable resin, resulting in forest fires, and several different sentient native species that complicate life for her Terran survivors. Among the natives, the most notable group were the Chieri, long lived, six-fingered, hermaphroditic, and psychic.

Bradley used her fantasy to deal with gender roles and sexuality. One book, The Winds of Darkover, is explicitly about the aftermath of rapes, one physical, one psychic. With the extremely popular Renunciates, she created women who opted out of Darkover’s gender roles to instead form female guilds. Even within the guild Bradley plays with traditional roles, showing some members who are tough mercenaries and some who are healers. These characters inspired people in both the literary world (Free Amazons of Darkover is an anthology of all-Renunciate stories, written mostly by women and edited by Bradley) and in the more prosaic world, where women tried living in communes and occasionally changed their names to emulate those of the Renunciates, who go by a first, given name, and then use their mother’s given name as a surname, to remove themselves from a patriarchal line while honoring their mothers. Bradley started the Sword and Sorceress series of anthologies to encourage people to write more active heroines. Beginning in 1984, the 28th volume was released last year. And obviously her stories in Mists of Avalon and Firebrand rewrite popular Western mythology from the points of view of the women who are often sidelined in the traditional tellings.

For much of her career she was dedicated to promoting new writers, encouraging people to write in the Darkover world, and editing anthologies, particularly for female authors, to help new writers gain an introduction to the SFF world. One of her protégés, Mercedes Lackey, published early work in Sword and Sorceress, and co-wrote Tiger Burning Bright and Rediscovery with her.

She also helped found the Society for Creative Anachronism in 1966, and is credited with naming it. After she moved to Staten Island from Berkeley she founded The Kingdom of the East, which currently rules over Pennsylvania, eastern New York, Delaware, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Quebec, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland. So she didn’t just give us books. She didn’t just give us a world that encouraged other writers to play. She gave us a literal kingdom. Or perhaps it would be better, in light of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s work in promoting equality in science fiction and fantasy, to call it a queendom?

It is now more than obvious that science fiction’s equalitarian queendom is the evil product of an evil, abusive, and morally depraved woman. It is “is an attempt to wrest control of history from the winners”. Opposing these monsters and rejecting their deviant, corrupting creations is the moral imperative. It should be fascinating to see if the pinkshirts who have been so eager to read out HP Lovecraft, RE Howard, and Orson Scott Card from the genre will be as ready to eliminate the bisexual, child-molesting neo-pagan Marion Zimmer Bradley from it as well.

Notice that John Scalzi has never once condemned Marion Zimmer Bradley despite repeatedly attacking me and threatening to quit SFWA if I was not purged. And notice that the Tor.com publisher, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who also threatened to quit SFWA if I was not purged, is the individual responsible for publishing the Schnelbach piece. It is extremely informative to observe what the champions of Pink SF/F consider acceptable and what they do not.

UPDATE: Kate Elliott tweets: “And we know more about other people that no one wants to say out loud.”

A grand strategic failure

Back in 2004, I pointed out that there was no possibility of long-term success for the neocons in Iraq. Now, with the fall of Iraq’s second largest city, it is only a matter of time before Baghdad is taken and the utter failure of the entire neocon grand strategy is apparent to everyone.

Sunni militants spilling over the border from Syria on Tuesday seized control of the northern city of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest, in the most stunning success yet in a rapidly widening insurgency that threatens to drag the region into war.

Having consolidated control over Sunni-dominated Nineveh Province, armed gunmen were heading on the main road to Baghdad, Iraqi officials said, and had already taken over parts of Salahuddin Province. Thousands of civilians fled south toward Baghdad and east toward the autonomous region of Kurdistan, where security is maintained by a fiercely loyal army, the pesh merga.

The Iraqi Army apparently crumbled in the face of the militant assault, as soldiers dropped their weapons, shed their uniforms for civilian clothes and blended in with the fleeing masses. The militants freed thousands of prisoners and took over military bases, police stations, banks and provincial headquarters, before raising the black flag of the jihadi group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria over public buildings. The bodies of soldiers, police officers and civilians lay scattered in the streets….

The swift capture of large areas of the city by militants aligned with
the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria represented a climactic moment on a
long trajectory of Iraq’s unraveling since the withdrawal of American
forces at the end of 2011.

As the Romans knew, if you’re not going to colonize a conquered territory, the correct strategy is to go in hard, break things and kill people, then immediately leave. Repeat as needed.

Ten years ago, I was correct about this. Ten years from now, it will be seen that those who demanded Reconquista 2.0 in the West were correct too. Unlike the tango, wars and invasions only require the participation of a single party.

The fall of Mosul also shows the Potemkin nature of the government authorities. As soon as a few committed militants with guns appear on the scene, the facade of omnipotent government power promptly collapses. In recent weeks, we’ve seen this everywhere from the USA to Ukraine and Iraq. The ironic thing is that what is being described as “a foreign invasion of Iraq” is a considerably smaller-scale invasion than the one taking place in the southern USA right now.

Republican sellout bites the dust

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s political career was just ended over his traitorous love of immigration:

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was defeated Tuesday by a little-known economics professor in Virginia’s Republican primary, a stunning upset and major victory for the tea party. Cantor is the second-most powerful member of the U.S. House and was seen by some as a possible successor to the House speaker. His loss to Dave Brat, a political novice with little money marks a huge victory for the tea party movement, which supported Cantor just a few years ago.

Perhaps the idiot Republicans will rethink their decision to serve as Obama’s vanguard on the invasion amnesty. Opposing immigration, opposing amnesty, and opposing the ongoing foreign invasion is the winning issue in American politics, just as it is in European politics. As more immigrants migrate, the more blacks and whites of every ideological stripe will turn against immigration and the politicians who support it.

It’s not about legal or illegal, it’s about the numbers.

How is that militarization working out?

US police love to dress up and play soldier, but apparently they have forgotten that an important aspect of being a soldier concerns the other side shooting back:

Sunday’s slaying of two Las Vegas policemen raises to 23 the number of law enforcement officers killed by gunfire this year, a 53 percent increase over the tally at this time last year, which is spurring concern about the influence of radical groups…. The slayings of officers Alyn Beck, 41, and Igor Soldo, 31, who were gunned down while having lunch at a pizza buffet, add to a trend that has law enforcers worried that they are becoming the targets of crime.

“We are seeing more direct violence as a result of radical groups, and that does concern us,” said Rich Roberts, a spokesman for the International Union of Police Associations. “There seems to be more people out there who are blatantly anti-cop, and heavy exposure through the Internet and other propaganda seems to make people with these violent views feed off each other.”

Perhaps the International Union of Police Associations should stop and think about why there are now more people out there who are blatantly anti-cop. Perhaps it just might have a little something to do with all the people being murdered by police, from military veterans to old women and infants, without any legal repercussions.

It’s amusing to see Mark Pitcavage popping up again and babbling about militias and white supremacists. He’s an ASL player and statist whore who has been going on and on about the terrible danger from militia groups since the Clinton years. In addition to being an ADL researcher, he’s been a longtime campaigner against the pure evil of printing black cardboard counters to represent German forces in World War II games.

Anyhow, while it is true that “over the last 25 years or so there’s been a gradual erosion toward authority figures and of respect for police officers”, but it is no longer true that the “vast majority of people respect police officers”. And it is completely the fault of the police forces, who have set themselves up as a paramilitary law enforcement soldiers rather than officers of the peace. But as the recent Las Vegas shootings prove, they simply are not prepared for any war in which the shooting isn’t all one-sided.

The Las Vegas lunatics weren’t militants. They were suicidal lunatics. Think about how many more police they could have killed if they had simply performed a few citizen’s no-knock raids during the night.