The true culprits

As I predicted when the issue first went public, Brandon Eich was not saved by his desperate supplication to his critics. But as awful as those critics are, they are not the real culprits in L’affaire d’Eich:

Brendan Eich, the well-known techie who has gotten swept up in a controversy about his support of California’s anti-gay marriage law Proposition 8, is resigning as CEO of for-profit Mozilla Corporation and also from the board of the nonprofit foundation which wholly owns it.

Mozilla confirmed the change in a blog post.

“Mozilla prides itself on being held to a different standard and, this past week, we didn’t live up to it. We know why people are hurt and angry, and they are right: it’s because we haven’t stayed true to ourselves,” read the post, in part. “We didn’t act like you’d expect Mozilla to act. We didn’t move fast enough to engage with people once the controversy started. We’re sorry. We must do better.”

In several interviews this week, Eich had insisted that he would not step down from the job he was only recently appointed to, due to the intense backlash over a $1,000 donation he made in 2008 in support of the ballot measure to ban gay marriage.

“So I don’t want to talk about my personal beliefs because I kept them out of Mozilla all these 15 years we’ve been going,” he said to the Guardian, for example, yesterday. “I don’t believe they’re relevant.”

Not so, of course. In an interview this morning, Mozilla Executive Chairwoman Mitchell Baker said that Eich’s ability to lead the company that makes the Firefox Web browser had been badly damaged by the continued scrutiny over the hot-button issue, which had actually been known since 2012 inside the Mozilla community.

“It’s clear that Brendan cannot lead Mozilla in this setting,” said Baker, who added that she would not and could not speak for Eich. “The ability to lead — particularly for the CEO — is fundamental to the role and that is not possible here.”

Now, while it was both wrong and dangerous for the gay fascists to go after Eich, I’m not interested in that aspect of the case here. What is more informative is Eich’s hapless response to the attacks. As I said at the time, Eich’s immediate response should have been to fire his internal critics for insubordination and to attack his external critics through the media. That’s what an effective leader like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates would have done; a leader never backs down from a defensive fight.

I suspect his critics knew that Eich was weak, both in terms of the lukewarm support he enjoyed from the Mozilla board as well as his personal character. All one had to do was look at his face to see that he is a pleaser, and pleasers tend to handle conflict by immediately resorting to submission. When attacked, they grovel and plead, they don’t fight back.

The fact is that most people focus on attacking soft targets they believe to be safe and weak. Look at how few bloggers openly criticize me anymore, or even dare to mention my name. Where are all the World o’Craps and Dark Windows and Amandas and PZ Myers and Scienceblogs and Electrolytes and Hayden Nielsens and John Scalzis now? Are we to believe I am simply beneath notice? That seems unlikely given that they were all attacking me directly, by name and with links, when my blog readership was ONE-SIXTH what it is now. The primary difference is that it is now generally appreciated that I am a hard target, and what is more, a hard target that doesn’t hesitate to shoot back.

Eich was a safe and soft target. He made it clear that he wouldn’t return fire despite his position of power, which emboldened all the critics who might have otherwise feared his potential power, influence, and ability to fire them. So, they promptly piled on, Eich couldn’t take the heat, and promptly resigned. Eich was doomed from the moment of that first inept response because you cannot win a battle when you refuse to take the field.

The irony is that although they have damaged American corporate culture by sowing seeds that will bear destructive fruit for years and decades to come, Eich’s critics did Mozilla a genuine service by exposing the mistake that was made in promoting a man who had been a very effective technology innovator to the CEO position. Eich was less a victim of the point-and-shriek crowd than the Peter Principle, which states: “in a hierarchy every employee tends to
rise to their level of incompetence”.

And now Mozilla is out a perfectly good CTO, Eich has been humiliated and is unemployed, the left-wing lunatics have been encouraged by successfully taking a scalp, and every Christian and conservative in corporate America now knows that it is purge or be purged time. (Don’t forget, small business owners, it is legal under federal law to fire an employee for his Democratic Party affiliations.) All because the Mozilla board did not know its internal candidate well enough to realize that he lacked the backbone to be a CEO-caliber leader. 

That is why the true culprits here are the board members. First they picked the wrong man, then they failed to have his back when he came under fire. This does not bode well for Mozilla.

Spelling it out

This is for the benefit of all the logical slowpokes. It is logic so basic that even those who are intellectually limited to the rhetorical level should be able to follow it:

  • If you have the right to demand that I bake you a cake, then I have the right to force you to attend church, mosque, or synagogue.
  • If you have the right to fire me because you don’t like my political position on the legality of homogamy, I have the right to fire you because I don’t like your political position on the legality of homosexuality.
  • If you have the right to deny me access to the news media because I don’t believe in climate change, I have the right to deny you access to the media because you don’t believe in God.

If atheists truly want a power struggle for the right to be intolerant, Christians will eventually engage and win. Because we will die before we will give up our beliefs and you will not. We invented the Crusade and the Inquisition, two institutions so historically intimidating that atheists still shiver and tell each other scary stories about them centuries after the event.

We will revive them before we will abandon our faith. And while we would prefer to live with both Christian and traditional Constitutional values, if we are forced to choose between the two, we will choose the former without even thinking twice.

England wants independence

They didn’t fight wars with Napoleon and Adolf Hitler just to surrender to a bunch of third-rate eurofascists:

Nigel Farage accused Nick Clegg of “wilfully lying to the British people” and warned that the European project could end in bloodshed during the pair’s second debate on Wednesday night.

In a heated and confrontational televised debate the leader of the UK Independence Party warned that extremists would resort to “violence” unless the European Union “ends democratically”.

Early polls showed that Mr Farage won the debate comfortably, securing 68 per cent of public support in a YouGov poll and 69 per cent according to ICM.

Following the debate, Mr Farage said: “I’m very pleased with the result and surprised about how dishonest Nick Clegg’s argument was. I didn’t think I’d have to get personal, but he is trying to lie and deceive the British people and after 40 years we have had enough.

The British people have been lied to and deceived for 40 years. The Tories and Labourites and Lib Dems will be lucky to escape being tried for treason. Farage is doing very well to focus on the fundamental and intrinsic dishonesty of those who are trying to conquer the continent with nothing more than a currency and a web of lies.

Atheists are terrorists

It’s true, it’s the law:

Saudi Arabia has introduced a series of new laws which define atheists as terrorists, according to a report from Human Rights Watch…. Article one of the new provisions defines terrorism as “calling for atheist thought in any form, or calling into question the fundamentals of the Islamic religion on which this country is based”.

Now that we understand that the Left has absolutely no regard for the freedom of thought or the freedom of expression, what reason can be given for why the West should not follow the lead of Africa and the Middle East in criminalizing both homosexuality and atheism? The Left has often lectured us on the moral superiority of those cultures, have they not?

Such actions can be fully justified on traditional grounds, historical grounds, moral grounds, and perhaps most importantly, pragmatic grounds. The reason past laws were relaxed was in the name of secular tolerance, but as has now been amply demonstrated, atheists and homosexuals are not at all willing to be tolerant of those who disagree with them. So why should anyone else be tolerant of them?

In the long term, it doesn’t really matter. Either circumstances will force the West to put its house in order, or it will be overrun by those less progressive societies which refuse to tolerate its self-destructive elements.

Kratman auf Deutsch

Große Jungs weinen nicht ist eine Novelle des Militär-Sci-Fi-Autors
Tom Kratman, der für „A Desert Called Peace“ und seine „Carrera“-Serie
bekannt ist. Die Novelle folgt dem Leben eines Rathas, ein
empfindungsfähiger Superpanzer der Zukunft, der pflichtbewusst die
Schlachten der Menschen auf fremden Welten austrägt. Doch wird die
Kreatur seinen Erschaffern noch immer dankbar sein, wenn sie ihr eigenes
Gewissen entdeckt? Und wie lange gibt sich eine intelligente
Kriegsmaschine, die mit Leichtigkeit eine Stadt dem Erdboden gleich
machen kann, damit zufrieden, dem Menschen ein unterwürfiger Sklave zu
sein?

Has there ever been a better marriage of Author Name and Translation Language than Tom Kratman and die Muttersprache? Ilona Meier has done a fine job translating Big Boys Don’t Cry into German and it was a pleasure to work with her. In a few hours, we’ll also be able to announce the availability of QUANTUM MORTIS Der programmierte Verstand, which was translated into German by the fortuitously named Dr. G, (seriously), who will also be translating John C. Wright’s forthcoming AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND.

Plötzlich findet sich die Größere Terranische Herrschaft in einer historischen Krise, als der Raumkreuzer der Shiva-Klasse ATSV Rigel während einer Routinepatrouille durch den Kantillon-Sektor verlorengeht. Zum Glück für das große sternenumfassende Terranische Imperium ist die Topgeheimdienstagentin des Herrschaftlichen Geheimdienst-Direktorats, Daniela York, mit von der Partie. Wird sie jedoch in der Lage sein, die tödliche Verschwörung, die von den gewissenlosen Attentätern des Hauses Dai Zhans eingefädelt wurde, im Schatten des drohenden galaktischen Krieges zu durchdringen, ganz besonders, nachdem das Direktorat herausfand, dass wahrscheinlich auch noch die Cyborgs der Integration Mensch-Maschine beteiligt sind? 

In other Castalia House-related news, the well-known Pulp Writer, Jonathan Moeller, has reviewed my recently published story collection, THE ALTAR OF HATE. He writes in his review:

There are some weaker stories in the collection, and oddly enough they are mostly in the front half, like the banquet master of Cana serving the poorer vintages before the choice wines. That said, there were some excellent and interesting stories in the collection, which we’ll examine now:

-“The Lesser Evil” is an interesting combination of historical fiction and time-traveling sorcery. An evil wizard travels back in time to use the dark power released by one of the great slaughters of history (specifically, Genghis Khan’s conquests) to fuel his power, and an organization of good wizards travels back to stop him. The interaction of the wizards with the historical figures was interesting, as was the eventual resolution and twist at the end….

-“The Logfile” was the standout story of the collection, charting an
artificial intelligence’s slow descent into madness. The AI wants to be
helpful and efficient, and starts testing new ways to become even more
helpful and efficient. Then it flies off the rails. Bad things ensue, as
the AI logically and meticulously reasons itself out of morality
entirely.

Read the whole review there, and if you’re a writer, don’t forget to click on the link to his Iron Laws of Storytelling. Or, if you are the sort of individual who finds either a) statistical probability or b) Candy Crush to be amusing, you could simply entertain yourself by playing Kratman Bingo, and seeing how often the covers for all three Kratman editions appear simultaneously on the blog.

UPDATE: Der programmierte Verstand is now live on Amazon.

Italy arrests Venetian secessionists

ROMA – Blitz dei carabinieri del Ros contro un gruppo secessionista accusato di aver messo in atto “varie iniziative, anche violente”, per ottenere l’indipendenza del Veneto, e non solo. L’accusa mossa dalla Procura di Brescia è quella di terrorismo (270 bis c.p.): 24 i provvedimenti restrittivi, 51 indagati in totale e 33 le perquisizioni ordinate dalla procura della Repubblica di Brescia e che hanno interessato il Veneto. Tra gli indagati nell’operazione anche un leader del movimento dei Forconi e un ex deputato, Franco Rocchetta, già sottosegretario di Stato agli Affari esteri tra il 1994 e il 1995.

ROME – A raid by the military police was conducted against a group of secessionists accused of having put into action “various initiatives, some of them violent” to obtain the independence the region of the Veneto. And in addition, the accusation of terrorism was made by the District Attorney of Brescia: of 51 that were investigated in total, 24 were taken into custody of and 33 were ordered to be searched…. Among those arrested in the operation included a leader of the  Sicilian-based “Pitchfork Movement” and a former member of the Chamber of Deputies, (the Italian House of Representatives), Franco Rocchetta, former undersecretary of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs from 1994 to 1995.

I realize that many Americans will find it difficult to credit, but secessionist movements are literally sweeping the entire range of Europe, from the Crimea in the east to Scotland in the West. It is only a matter of time before the economic contraction and increasing social turmoil lead to similar political developments in the USA, especially as the Obama administration and the Congress exhibit increasing political tone-deafness.

Free trade reduces US income

As I have repeatedly shown, the Rising Tide school of economic thought always leaves out the fact that the rising tide must inevitably come at the expense of workers in the wealthier societies:

Branko Milanovic, a visiting professor at CUNY who once served as a senior economist at the World Bank, has tracked worldwide changes in income growth from 1998 to 2008. Milanovic calculates that the middle class in China and India experienced 60 to 70 percent income growth from 1998 to 2008, while growth stalled for the middle and working classes in the United States.

The question then becomes, in Milanovic’s words, “Does the growth of China and India take place on the back of the middle class in rich countries,” especially the United States? Milanovic does not claim a direct causal relationship, but contends that the two “may not be unrelated.”…

Entering the fray, three economists – David Autor of M.I.T., David Dorn of the Center for Monetary and Financial Studies in Spain, and Gordon Hanson of the University of California, San Diego – have analyzed the employment consequences of globalized trade and technological advance.

In a series of papers they wrote together – “Trade Adjustment: Worker Level Evidence,” “The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market Effects of Import Competition in the United States,” and “Untangling Trade and Technology: Evidence from Local Labor Markets” — Autor, Dorn and Hanson find that in the case of trade with China, there are very painful consequences for specific categories of American workers.

Their findings show why voters are wary of free trade agreements.

Relative to the average employee in manufacturing, workers in industries that face stronger competition from imports “garner lower cumulative earnings and are at elevated risk of exiting the labor force and obtaining public disability benefits,” Autor, Dorn and Hanson write.
Continue reading the main story

And if manufacturers are ranked on a scale of 1 to 100 for exposure to import competition from China, between 1992 and 2007, workers in firms high on the exposure scale lost nearly half a year’s pay, compared to workers in firms at the low end of the scale.

And this doesn’t even begin to get into the fact that the expansion of domestic free trade into the international arena would INEVITABLY RESULT in the same sort of labor movement that one sees in the USA. Don’t like the fact that your kids live in a different state? Well, in a true free trade regime, they might have to go to Bangladesh or Peru to find employment.

Free trade is logically incompatible with national sovereignty, the Constitution, and the maximization of human liberty. This should be obvious, as it is an aspect of globalism and a major objective of those who advocate global government.

Mailvox: the disqualification game

Stuck in the 1990s, Truth seems to think that successfully tarring someone with “raciss” is still a form of effective disqualification as he attempts to convince Tom Kratman to denounce me for my crimes of BadThink:

And how about if the claim of “ignorant half-savage” is based on
Vox’s tribe-to-society ratio or whatever it is he calls it? Would you
consider that genetic and therefore racist? Because as I recall, he
professes that blacks haven’t had enough time to adapt from savage to
social, generationally speaking. Which, is to say, he believes savagery
runs too thick in their genes. Would you consider that racist Mr.
Kratman?

I feel like your character is a higher quality than that. Of course, I have only the slightest evidence for that feeling. But I’d like it to be true. I’d love to be able to read a local sci-fi author who’s published through a major outlet. The only other I know of in this area code is Rod Belcher and I enjoyed his work. I’d probably enjoy yours. I’m just not one of those folks who can separate art and artist.

Disqualify… disqualify… disqualify. I find it amusing that Truth appears to think Tom
is sufficiently naive to fall for the rabbiting. But neither Tom nor I care what a Random Internet Rabbit defines as “racist”. By Truth’s lights, Tom is already disqualified because he admitted to being scientifically literate about genetic science.

Truth then addressed me:

I notice Mr. Kratman didn’t include, “calling black people ignorant half-savages is not racist.” What say you, Vox? Cultural or genetic marker? In the past you’ve said genetic. If not, correct me.

I will first ask a question of my own, which Truth will answer if he wishes to participate in the discussion: Truth, do you assert that there is not a single black individual in the U.S.A. who is an ignorant half-savage?

Now, in answer to Truth’s question, and contra Tom’s position, my observation is that you cannot possibly separate culture and genetics. It is logical to conclude, and it has been repeatedly observed, that cultural differences are derived from genetics. A society with an average 85 IQ will inevitably feature a very different culture than a society with an average 115 IQ. Among other things, the lower IQ culture will have shorter time preferences and its social mores will feature less consideration of the logical consequences of an individual’s actions. This is why secular progressives tend to equate intelligence with higher forms of civilization.

But it is also logical to conclude, and it has been also been observed, that genetic differences are derived from culture. A society where women have children at an average age of 18 will have genetically superior children to those produced in a society in which women have children at an average age of 35. Even something as purely cultural as the average number of children a woman bears will have tremendous genetic implications; there is reason to believe that some of the differences between r/selected and K/selected are genetic, and those genetic differences are, in part, derived from the culture that produces them.

(It must be made clear that this is NOT related to TENS in any way. We’re not dealing with the differences between species here, but intra-species differences for the most part and partial sub-species differences at most. Nor is most of the selection naturally imposed.)

In any event, the trivial thinkers who look at my time-to-civilization hypothesis and focus on its racial implications aren’t seeing its true scope, much less grasping the potential horror of it. The much more serious aspect of the hypothesis is its implication that civilization is the consequence of a centuries-long eugenic program that eventually, and inevitably, transforms itself into a dysgenic program. If the hypothesis holds, this would not only explode, once and for all, the secular conceit of linear progress, but would provide an elegant explanation for the cyclical rise and fall of civilizations as well as the observed inability of Africans to collectively reach a self-sustainable civilized standard despite the best efforts of well-intentioned individuals of various races for more than 150 years.

And if the fact that I occasionally contemplate such things offends you to the point that you don’t wish to read anything that I write or edit or publish, well, that leads to the obvious question: what in the name of the 1,200 sister-wives of Shaka Zulu are you doing here? Especially in light of Truth’s self-admitted anti-intellectual outlook:

I can deal with the economics, military policies, and other right wing stuff, but dismissing an entire race of humans as ignorant half-savages is beyond my threshold. The history of such thought has given rise to countless atrocities.

First, Truth’s personal thresholds do not dictate objective reality. The only thing that matters is if the observation is true or not. In this particular case, there is a considerable quantity of evidence supporting both the singular example provided, as well as the current state of civilizational progress of the human sub-species concerned. Second, we are discussing the collective mean here. In any group with more than two individuals there will obviously be those who exceed the mean, but that is totally irrelevant in this context.

As for the appeal to historical atrocity, has it never occurred to Truth that it is reality that dictated those atrocities and not the mere observation of the reality? He is assigning causal value to a consequence. If the savage behavior of a group of savages leads another group to wipe them out, it is not the second group’s belief that the first group was savage that was the causal factor, but rather, the fact that first group was a) savage, and b) aggressive.

To give one example, Julius Caesar would never have killed one million Gauls and enslaved another million had Gaius Marius not been forced to defend Rome from repeated invasions from the north 50 years prior.

The easiest boycott

It would be hard to recommend a boycott of OK Cupid given that I have no need of it an I don’t know anyone who is so unfortunate as to require using:

Hello there, Mozilla Firefox user. Pardon this interruption of your OkCupid experience.

Mozilla’s new CEO, Brendan Eich, is an opponent of equal rights for gay couples. We would therefore prefer that our users not use Mozilla software to access OkCupid.

Politics is normally not the business of a website, and we all know there’s a lot more wrong with the world than misguided CEOs. So you might wonder why we’re asserting ourselves today. This is why: we’ve devoted the last ten years to bringing people—all people—together. If individuals like Mr. Eich had their way, then roughly 8% of the relationships we’ve worked so hard to bring about would be illegal. Equality for gay relationships is personally important to many of us here at OkCupid. But it’s professionally important to the entire company. OkCupid is for creating love. Those who seek to deny love and instead enforce misery, shame, and frustration are our enemies, and we wish them nothing but failure.

If you want to keep using Firefox, the link at the bottom will take you through to the site.

However, we urge you to consider different software for accessing OkCupid:

This is possibly one of the dumbest business stunts that I have seen in a long time. But, on the off chance that you are a Christian or even a secular person who doesn’t believe in the politicization of business, I would encourage you to consider using a different web site for the purposes of meeting members of the opposite sex.

An appeal to false consciousness

Such is Naomi Wolf’s dedication to the Unreality Principle that she can’t even consider the possibility that the increasing appeal of traditional nationalism and to women in the West is neither fascist nor false.

Many lower-income women in Western Europe today – often single parents working pink-collar ghetto jobs that leave them exhausted and without realistic hope of advancement – can reasonably enough feel a sense of nostalgia for past values and certainties. For them, the idealized vision of an earlier age, one in which social roles were intact and women’s traditional contribution supposedly valued, can be highly compelling.

And, of course, parties that promote such a vision promise women – including those habituated to second-class status at work and the bulk of the labor at home – that they are not just faceless atoms in the postmodern mass. Rather, you, the lowly clerical worker, are a “true” Danish, Norwegian, or French woman. You are an heiress to a noble heritage, and thus not only better than the mass of immigrants, but also part of something larger and more compelling than is implied by the cog status that a multiracial, secular society offers you.

The attraction of right-wing parties to women should be examined, not merely condemned. If a society does not offer individuals a community life that takes them beyond themselves, values only production and the bottom line, and opens itself to immigrants without asserting and cherishing what is special and valuable about Danish, Norwegian, or French culture, it is asking for trouble. For example, upholding the heritage of the Enlightenment and progressive social ideals does not require racism or pejorative treatment of other cultures; but politically correct curricula no longer even make the attempt to do so.

There are numerous errors in her essay. The first, and most important, is her failure to recognize that it is the multiculturalists who are both anti-democratic and fascist. It is the eurofascists of the EU and their corporatist allies in the USA who forcibly installed unelected governments in Greece and Italy, who attempted to deny the Russian nationalists in the Crimea their right to self-determination and they are now turning against the Ukrainian nationalists who supported their anti-democratic coup in Ukraine.

The second is her denial of the fact that there are, materially, true Danes, Norwegians, and French. She obviously subscribes to the bureaucratic myth of geographic relocation, where the simple act of traveling by plane magically transforms an individual into something he is not. As an expat myself, I continually find it amazing that people who would absolutely insist that I am an American will turn around and claim that Moroccans who happen to be in Holland or Turks who happen to be in Germany are actually Dutch or German simply because they have a piece of paper granting them state citizenship.

But the nation is not the state. In fact, the nation-state is generally considered to date back to about 1700 and the Treaty of Westphalia, so it should be obvious that making a national the citizen of a state belonging to a different nation does not change anything intrinsic about the national.

The third is that it is objectively obvious that the nationals of a state being invaded by hordes of immigrants are heirs to a materially better heritage than the invaders. The invaders want to live in the society created by that heritage; the national does not want to go and live in society created by the invaders’ heritage.

The fourth error is the failure to grasp that mass immigration will end. It is mathematically doomed. The secular advocates of The Invaded Society don’t seem to grasp that all of these various nations did not come into existence ex nihilo. They were created by the same force of natural human preferences that will soon bring a violent end to The Invaded Society.

It’s all very simple. British people want to remain British. They don’t want to be African, or Pakistani, or some sort of Afro-Britistani melange. The Dutch want to remain Dutch, they don’t want to become Moroccan. And neither black nor white Americans want to become Mexican. And they will not, even if that means wars will be fought and national borders will be redrawn.