Progess towards regress

James Taranto correctly points out that the solutions to past problems may turn out to be even more severe problems in their own right.

The decline of marriage among poor and working-class Americans is a result of a variety of social and economic changes. Among them, as Lowrey notes, are “tidal economic forces,” namely “globalization, the decline of labor unions [and] technological change.”

She ignores the tidal social changes that have also contributed, namely the sexual revolution and the expectation that women will spend most of their adult lives in the workforce, which, as we’ve argued, reduced the incentives for both men and women to marry. It is no more feasible to turn the clock back on globalization or automation than on contraception or female labor-force participation. All of these developments represent progress, in that they were solutions to the problems of the past. All of them contribute to the problems of the present.

This is an interesting point, especially in light of the fact that female labor-force participation has been dropping steadily ever since it peaked at 60.3 percent in 2000. It has dropped 6.4 percent to 56.9 percent, a level not seen since 1988.

Those who argue that the clock cannot be turned back are simply in denial. Not only can the clock be turned back, we can be certain that the clock will be turned back whenever the progressive developments lead to an unsustainable situation. Globalization will end as soon as people in the wealthier countries understand that free trade necessarily means impoverishment and a decline to global norms.

(Remember, we haven’t seen any changes in perceived wealth as yet because people have been spending through their savings and maximizing their debt in order to maintain their current levels of consumer spending. Once the consumer spending begins to contract, the credit disinflation will give way to full-fledged credit deflation.)

Contraception was outlawed before and it will be outlawed again in some countries once it becomes clear that not only is the societal price for replacing children with semi-civilized immigrants too high, but such replacement policies are correlated with net economic losses rather than the long-assumed gains. All actions and policies have unintended consequences, which is why the simplistic notion of progress as an inexorable clock is simply misguided.

Imaginary women in the military

It’s not the article at Tor that is of interest here, but rather the discussion between Tom Kratman and a small collection of Pink SF enthusiasts who do not permit their complete ignorance of all things military affect their ability to express some strong opinions on future war: 

“Sexual attraction may be innate, but it’s not universal. See asexual, people who identify as.”

Do you really think the occasional fluke has a whole lot to say about mass armies? If so, why?

How people act on sexual attraction is learned behaviour.

Only in minor details. The love, lust, favoritism, demoralization, and de facto prostitution are fairly universal within any armed force that sees integrated sexes or integrated sexually compatible people unless extraordinary structural provisions are made. Those structural provision include segregation. Here’s an interesting quote from very liberal, very politically correct Canada’s PPCLI battle school: “Male/female attraction will not go away because we tell it to; and soldiers will court considerable risk to pursue the obvious.”

What you really seem to be saying is we can control it. Forget it; we can’t.

What you should not forget is the ability of an army, any army, to make a terrible idea look good through sheer weight of effort and duplicity practiced on an heroic scale. Think Vietnam…or Project 100,000.

“can’t be controlled.” Tom, man. What’re you saying, dude? That people use sex to game the system? (Some people use anything to game systems.) And somehow that’s what, especially unfair? Or you’re saying, what, the act of sex is so inherently super-special it has in itself some peculiarly distorting effect on hierarchies? (Or maybe you’re saying something about sexual coercion, but I’m not going there.) I say to this: grow some imagination. I’m tired of hearing “the future can’t be different because [argument which boils down to “I don’t want to think about what would have to change”].” Like I said, these may not be stories you want to read or tell? But don’t pretend they can’t be told, or that other people may not find your futures as implausible – and even unpleasant – as you might theirs, on good grounds. From where I stand, your futures do live in Opposite World. And unless you bring a more SFnal imagination to our present interaction, my opinion of your wrongheadedness isn’t likely to change.

No, you are presupposing that things which cannot be changed can. Worse, you have no obvious basis for believing it except that you want to. Do you have any expertise in the matter of combat? I do. What you’re demanding isn’t SF; it’s fantasy. The mere fact that you can so lightly dismiss the effect of using sex to game the system, and as if that were all of it, indicates that anything that interferes with your particular fantasy has to be rejected.

Yes, the effect of sex has distorting effects in hierarchies. Perhaps it doesn’t matter at any given corporation, but combat units are not corporations. The next time Bill Gates has to worry about a near ambush or artillery strike on his way to the office will be the first.

In this particular, no, the future cannot be different unless you write away what men and women are, how they think and act, what they care about, and what they’ll take risks for.

Tom’s response is brilliant because it highlights the essential inhumanity of Pink SF. If great fiction speaks to the human condition, the great flaw of Pink SF is that it specifically and overtly rejects the human elements of the human condition. While I defer to Tom Kratman on what he insists is the legitimate possibility, given a considerable quantity of extreme and particular training, of women serving in an effective military unit, I remain extremely dubious that even the conventional notions of superstrength and mandatory reversible birth control could begin to permit women to become even mediocre soldiers. (4-3-6), in ASL terms, would be a best case scenario.

While I am not a military veteran, I am both a student of military history and a former martial arts fighter. As the former, I am aware that what settles battles is not who can kill the other side more effectively, but rather, who can cause the other side to run away or otherwise quit fighting first. As the latter, I have observed that women quit fighting as soon as they take a single damaging strike and not infrequently before then.

I have seen many men fight with broken bones; I myself once won a ringfight after having my nose broken in the initial exchange. I have never seen a woman get up off the ground after being flattened or bloodied and continue fighting except when she is in training with someone she trusts not to intentionally hurt her. In fact, when a woman isn’t hurt but simply gets frightened while sparring, she tends to turn her back on the opponent and literally cringe.

So, my conclusion is that women in combat will either surrender or run like rabbits as soon as they get sufficiently frightened or their unit takes a few casualties.

This comment, in particular, amused me:

Then again, on the other hand, we have John Scalzi, against whom I can
levy no such complaint. Scalzi, unlike Ringo, Kratman, or Williamson,
doesn’t have a military background of his own. Yet I find his future
military more convincingly science-fictional than those of the aforementioned authors. Why is that?

I would think the answer is entirely obvious. Because you know nothing about war or the military and you prefer your weird non-science fantasies about old people’s orgies and men exchanging sexual favors to anything that can be reasonably extrapolated from the last 8,000 years of recorded military history.

The militaries in the science fiction world of QUANTUM MORTIS do not utilize female soldiers for the obvious reason that they are actually expected to engage in combat. The science fiction elements there involve physical augmentation, targeting-assisted weaponry, artificial intelligence, and interstellar mercenary corporations. They do not involve silly fantasies about strong, independent warrior women, which by rights should be classified as women’s erotic fiction rather than science fiction because it is quite literally anti-science.

Pro-vibrancy will eat itself

It is very, very amusing to see how those who have championed vibrancy for decades finally getting pushed out of the way by the very vibrants they championed now that the vibrants have the numbers:

Party caucuses are going on tonight in precincts across Minnesota. Caucuses are an old-fashioned civic tradition, more noted for boredom and long nights than anything else, but tonight there was some excitement at a DFL caucus in Minneapolis. A fight broke out:

A very tense night at a caucus site in Minneapolis where DFLer Mohamud Noor is challenging longtime DFL state Rep. Phyllis Kahn. The heat in one Minneapolis location resulted in police being called out. With 300 people at the Byan [sic] Coyle Center, a fight broke out and people rushed the stage. After the melee, the Minneapolis police shut down the caucus. See the video below and the live blog for more.

A lot of cultural history is packed into that paragraph. Phyllis Kahn, 76 years old, has been in the Minnesota legislature for an astonishing 42 years. A political insider for her entire adult life, she lives in one of the notorious $1 homes on Nicollet Island that were given to prominent Democrats. Mohamud Noor is a Somali, one of many thousands who have thronged to Minnesota in recent years. Until recently a state employee, he was elected to the Minneapolis school board less than two months ago.

It’s always hilarious to see whites who are of their “color-blindness” finding themselves getting booted out on their asses by the various tribal peoples they have championed with such moral superiority. In the same way that only women living in historically safe environments can afford to claim they don’t need men, only a dominant ethnic majority can claim to be “color-blind”.

Once those “color-blind” individuals are outnumbered and getting beaten up for being out-group, they tend to belatedly discover their tribal identity that they’ve denied for so long. That’s why the post-racialists are so absurd; one has to wonder if they’ve ever had a frank conversation with someone who isn’t an English-speaking American of Western European descent.

The Left always devours itself. We’re seeing it in the New York Times. We’re seeing it in Minnesota politics. We’re seeing it on Wikipedia. We’ll see it in the SFWA now that the Right has been effectively purged. Because, as John C. Wright has observed, the heart of darkness is relentless.

A statue for Scalzi?

This is getting absolutely ridiculous. I mean, I realize that John Scalzi is the doyenne of Pink SF with ~50 kazillion readers and he has won a Participation Hugo and all, but a statue? Seriously?

The sculptor did get the whole shambling thing right, though. And he did a nice job of capturing the whole sexyrapey gamma male vibe. All it needs is that notorious quote.

“I’m a rapist. I’m one of those men who likes to force myself on
women without their consent or desire and then batter them sexually.”
– John Scalzi

The decline of the Grey Lady

This New York Observer article doesn’t tell us anything new. We all know the New York Times editorial page is terrible. But it does help explain why:

IT’S WELL KNOWN AMONG THE SMALL WORLD of people who pay attention to such things that the liberal-leaning reporters at The Wall Street Journal resent the conservative-leaning editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. What’s less well known—and about to break into the open, threatening the very fabric of the institution—is how deeply the liberal-leaning reporters at The New York Times resent the liberal-leaning editorial page of The New York Times.

The New York Observer has learned over the course of interviews with more than two-dozen current and former Times staffers that the situation has “reached the boiling point” in the words of one current Times reporter….

“I think the editorials are viewed by most reporters as largely
irrelevant, and there’s not a lot of respect for the editorial page. The
editorials are dull, and that’s a cardinal sin. They aren’t getting any
less dull. As for the columnists, Friedman is the worst. He hasn’t had
an original thought in 20 years; he’s an embarrassment. He’s perceived
as an idiot who has been wrong about every major issue for 20 years,
from favoring the invasion of Iraq to the notion that green energy is
the most important topic in the world even as the financial markets were
imploding. Then there’s Maureen Dowd, who has been writing the same
column since George H. W. Bush was president.”

Yet another former Times writer concurred. “Andy [Rosenthal] is a wrecking
ball, a lot like his father but without the gravitas. What strikes me
about the editorial and op-ed pages is that they have become
relentlessly grim. With very few exceptions, there’s almost nothing
light-hearted or whimsical or sprightly about them, nothing to gladden
the soul.

Of course, it probably doesn’t help that the paper has largely converted itself into one massive editorial page. A recent study showed that only one in six front page articles could be considered proper news, the rest were all editorials cloaked in a newsy disguise.

The thing is, newspapers are absolutely allergic to permitting anyone who isn’t a doctrinaire left-liberal get any exposure, so they sentence themselves to grim and tedious left-wing dogma. It is little surprise that even liberals tend to find it less than scintillating.

Civilization is not guaranteed

Victor Davis Hanson reminds us of the thin and fraying thread that is the survival of Western civilization:

Had the Greeks lost at Salamis, Western civilization might easily have been strangled in its adolescence. Had Hitler not invaded the Soviet Union, the European democracies would have probably remained overwhelmed. And had the Japanese just sidestepped the Philippines and Pearl Harbor, as they gobbled up the orphaned Pacific colonies of a defunct Western Europe, the Pacific World as we know it now might be a far different, far darker place.

I am not engaging in pop counterfactual history, as much as reminding us of how thin the thread of civilization sometimes hangs, both in its beginning and full maturity. Something analogous is happening currently in the 21st-century West. But the old alarmist scenarios — a nuclear exchange, global warming and the melting of the polar ice caps, a new lethal AIDS-like virus — should not be our worry.

Rather our way of life is changing not with a bang, but with a whimper, insidiously and self-inflicted, rather than abruptly and from foreign stimuli. Most of the problem is cultural. Unfortunately it was predicted by a host of pessimistic anti-democratic philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel and Spengler. I’ve always hoped that these gloom-and-doomers were wrong about the Western paradigm, but some days it becomes harder.

The problem is cultural, but not in the sense that most people mean it. Western civilization is Christian and European. There are other civilizations, to be sure, some of which predate Western civilization, but no one who has studied the history of Chinese and Japanese civilization is under any illusions that life under global Han domination is likely to resemble the world when the sun never set on the British Empire. The fact that Western civilization was less than perfect does not mean that its replacement, whether it be by pagan savages, sterile seculars, or one of its old rivals, will not be considerably worse by every objective measure.

Societies are seldom wiped out by conquest, at least, not until they have been sufficiently enervated by their own failure of confidence in their foundational principles. Western civilization cannot survive either the abandonment of Christianity or the importation of non-European peoples. The geography will remain, but neither the culture nor the values will survive. Just as we wonder at how the Romans declined, future generations will read about us and marvel at how the most powerful civilization in human history murdered its children and welcomed their replacements with open arms.

Representative democracy is already effectively dead. Christianity will survive, but probably not in its culturally dominant form. The European subspecies will survive, but in a smaller, more concentrated, and more tribal form that will likely transform into a larger and more lethal variant of the Jewish diaspora. Warlords have always arisen amidst the ashes of empires and I see no reason to doubt the same phenomenon will occur when the collapse of the American empire brings an end to the 60-year Pax Americana.

Free Wardog

In honor of the publication of UMA MAGIA PERDIDA, the  Portuguese translation of A Magic Broken, Castalia House is giving away free copies of The Wardog’s Coin on Amazon today. Thanks to Daniel Wilhelm Mayer, the translator, as well as to proofreader N, and to JartStar, who has become increasingly adept at figuring out how to adapt different title lengths to the same space. On Thursday and Friday of this week, UMA MAGIA PERDIDA will also be a free download. If you happen to be a Portuguese speaker, particularly a Brazilian Portuguese speaker, and you would like to receive a review copy, please let us know.

The description is as follows: “Passando-se no mundo épico de A Throne of Bones, Uma Magia Perdida é
uma história fantástica de crueldade, coragem e astúcia. O conto retrata
a estória de Nicolas du Mere, um exilado em fuga após a morte de seu
suserano rebelde, e Lodi, filho de Dunmorin, um bravo anão em busca de
resgatar outros anões da escravidão. Seus caminhos se cruzam, mas de uma
maneira totalmente imprevisível.”

I know this sort of thing will rapidly get boring, especially since we just added two new translation languages yesterday, so with the exception of a few upcoming new releases I am not intending to continue posting Castalia House news here. If you’re interested in SF/F and supporting the Blue SF revolution, I would encourage you to either bookmark the Castalia House blog or follow @castaliahouse on Twitter.

The problem of in-app purchases

I could not agree more with this critical take on in-app purchases. Games have to offer value, real entertainment value. They cannot simply be addictive feedback-reward systems designed to scam the unwary.

One of the things we are committed to doing with First Sword is ensuring that everyone can not only play the game, but remain competitive, without purchasing anything. This may mean we reduce our maximum potential profit, but that is beside the point. The primary objective of a game must always be to entertain, not to chase profit.

Fear of a Black Yoga Class

One has to salute the remarkable courage of this brave young woman who was faced by a terrible moral crisis in the very last place she expected it:

A few weeks ago, as I settled into an exceptionally crowded midday
class, a young, fairly heavy black woman put her mat down directly
behind mine. It appeared she had never set foot in a yoga studio—she was
glancing around anxiously, adjusting her clothes, looking wide-eyed and
nervous. Within the first few minutes of gentle warm-up stretches, I
saw the fear in her eyes snowball, turning into panic and then despair.
Before we made it into our first downward dog, she had crouched down on
her elbows and knees, head lowered close to the ground, trapped and
vulnerable. She stayed there, staring, for the rest of the class.

Because I was directly in front of her, I had no choice but to look
straight at her every time my head was upside down (roughly once a
minute). I’ve seen people freeze or give up in yoga classes many times,
and it’s a sad thing, but as a student there’s nothing you can do about
it. At that moment, though, I found it impossible to stop thinking about
this woman. Even when I wasn’t positioned to stare directly at her, I
knew she was still staring directly at me. Over the course of the next
hour, I watched as her despair turned into resentment and then contempt.
I felt it all directed toward me and my body….

I got home from that class and promptly broke down crying. Yoga, a
beloved safe space that has helped me through many dark moments in over
six years of practice, suddenly felt deeply suspect. Knowing fully well
that one hour of perhaps self-importantly believing myself to be the
deserving target of a racially charged anger is nothing, is largely my
own psychological projection, is a drop in the bucket, is the tip of the
iceberg in American race relations, I was shaken by it all the same.

Reading
this, one is left with one immediate and inescapable question: how on
Earth can anyone possibly even attempt to justify female suffrage?
Although one can’t help but be amused by the idea that a single invasion
by one African is sufficient to make this no-doubt “anti-racist” white
woman begin to question the safety and value of six years of yoga
classes.

Now, a few years ago, one might well have
assumed that this simply had to be an SWPL parody. And perhaps it is.
But we now live in a post-parodic society where nothing, no matter how
absurd, can be assumed to be a joke.

Especially such deadly serious matters as interracial inter-subspecies same-sex stare rape.

Mailvox: Castalia House questions

Some of you had questions, so here are the answers:

As opportunities become available will you be posting them here?

Initially, yes. As Castalia House develops its own readership, we will tend to gradually move more CH-related communication there. We will ALWAYS be looking for more translators and it’s hard to imagine a time when we would not be on the lookout for more excellent authors. We intend to be considerably more picky than what one tends to see from the likes of Tor and the other genre publishers. We’re not at all interested in the shotgun approach that many other small publishers take and we fully support those who elect the self-publishing approach.

The inclusion of the “obscure ancient military text” hints that Castalia
House may not limit its focus to the science fiction and epic fantasy
genres. Is this a fair assumption? 

This is correct. In fact, one author has already produced an intriguing proposal that combines those elements. We intend to experiment and try different things that have not necessarily been done before. Some of these experiments will work, some of them won’t, and some of them will be done simply because we think it is worth doing. That being said, SF/F has the best chance of being accepted for publication as it stands closest to the heart of what we are doing.

Can I be Wheeler’s editor?

No. Wheeler is the perfect example of the ideal self-publisher. We will, at some point, be offering various pointers to aid self-publishing on the CH blog. We can’t publish everything. We don’t want to publish everything. But we don’t see any reason why people shouldn’t publish themselves.

Will Castalia House make certain its books qualify the authors for SFWA membership, and possible future expulsion?

It will take at least one year before Castalia House could possibly become a qualifying venue. So, it’s not what we would consider a priority. We do expect to have the necessary 10 authors as well as meeting the minimum print run and revenue requirements.

What is the Italian conceptualization of the differences between
National Socialism and proper Italian Fascism beyond the obvious
racialist accretions?

Non credo questa domanda era proprio per noi. In ogni caso, posso raccomandare il Fascisti di Giordano Bruno Guerri per un esaminazione cosi.

Will there be dead tree versions?

Yes.

Will you be limiting Castalia House or eventually allowing for fiction as neither fantasy or SF? 

Our fictional focus will be on SF/F. But we will certainly consider works outside the genre if they are exceptional.

Any chance there might be music?

Only if it is recorded by a certain award-winning techno band.

What type of submission is required, Just summary, cover letter-summary- and manuscript (Double space or single).

We’re still working this out. On the one hand, it’s faster to be able to simply scan an epub on your reader. On the other, most authors don’t know how to produce epubs. But in general, a one-page synopsis, a one-page author bio, and a single-spaced manuscript all in a single Word-formatted file will suffice. As for the bio, we are less interested in credentials than learning who you are and what you stand for.

Do you have any insights on how you will be able to avoid the fate of other publishers? 

We have zero overhead and zero salaries. We’re already profitable. And we already sell more books than many small publishing houses. Thanks primarily to the support of the readers here, we’re on a path to sell more than 10,000 books this year, not counting free downloads, in-game sales, or other authors. From a time and labor perspective, publishing is absolutely trivial in comparison with game development and we had to do 80 percent of this stuff in order to handle the in-game publishing anyhow. We are a lean, mean, disruptive machine.

I would like to submit a story or two, written with the blood of my enemies. 

Go for it. Just make sure you get them tested before utilizing your “special ink”. (Note to self: THIS is why we utilize slush readers as “the first line of defense”.)

What would be involved in being a slush reader?

Reading submitted manuscripts and rendering your opinion on them in a timely manner. We want to feature very fast turnaround times. If we’re going to say no, we’re going to do it very quickly. And if we’re going to say yes, we want to do that almost as quickly. Also, risking the acquisition of various tropical diseases from manuscripts written in the blood of the author’s enemies.

Why is there no Kickstarter for Castalia House?

We don’t need one. If you would like to support Castalia House, we would encourage you to buy our books or to join our growing list of translators.

What better protagonist than a half-savage shitlord in a douche canoe?

Nothing, obviously. Please to accept a 10-book contract at your earliest convenience.

Can I submit works for consideration that I’ve already self-published online?

Sure.

How much experience with sci-fi or fantasy do you want your slush
readers to have? And do you even WANT a woman’s opinion on these
things?

A reasonable amount would be desirable. If you haven’t read Tolkien, Lewis, Asimov, Heinlein, and Bradbury, at a bare minimum, you probably don’t have a sufficient grasp of the field to read for us. If, on the other hand, you are familiar with Stephenson, Gibson, Shikibu and Hesse, so much the better. We already have female readers. What we do not have, and do not need, are feminist, equalitarian, and left-wing readers.

Can you shed light on why an author should consider Castalia rather than self-publishing?

There are four primary reasons. First, it is a non-trivial pain in the posterior to go through the process of creating and administering a book. I’m not going to exaggerate the difficulty as it is perfectly doable by anyone who is computer literate, but there are certain economies of scale there and we’re already stuck doing it due to our other commitments. Few authors want to spend their time dealing with these things and we offer sufficiently high royalties that most authors will be happy to off-load the administrative work on us.

Second, there is the issue of credibility and exposure. I may be notorious throughout the genre, but even some of my worst enemies have freely admitted that I have pretty good taste in literature. Not even the SFWA members who purged me from its ranks had anything negative to say about my performance on the three Nebula Award juries upon which I sat. If Castalia House publishes a book, there are thousands of people, perhaps tens of thousands, who will recognize that it very likely contains something worth reading. These days, that is considerably more than one can say of Tor or most publishing houses in SF/F.

Third, our growing ranks of translators means that there is a reasonable chance that your novel will be translated into another language, thereby increasing your prospective royalties. The growing gap between traditional translation expenses and average expected ebook revenues means that other publishers are going to have to adopt our translation model or simply give up on translating anything but the biggest selling novels.

And fourth, we have better cover artists than most of the established publishing houses. You will get a good cover. You will have considerable input into that cover. Having been victimized by a major New York publisher that threw out a beautiful Rowena work-in-progress in favor of an ineptly imitated Left Behind  look, I fully understand the significance of cover to the author.

It’s possible you might exclude me. I’m a libertarian and a federalist,
and I expect my work to appeal to traditionalists. However, I’m also an
atheist, and while I respect and write about people of faith, that’s
bound to turn off some blog visitors.

We are perfectly willing to publish atheist authors. We will not publish evangelical atheists or atheists whose work denigrates Christianity, advocates secular humanism, or wallows in nihilism.

Is this a compliment to, or an integral part of, the First Sword concept? Is that a picture of Markku’s house?

It is an integral part of it. That is not a picture of Markku’s dwelling.

Would love to submit something for a cover. Can you give some parameters. 

The minimum resolution is 1667×2500. We are always looking for good artists, so feel free to submit something for review. However, our cover work is all custom and we expect the artist to read the book before producing the cover.

What is Castalia House’s policy towards publishing under pseudonyms?

Fine by us. If you’re an established author concerned about retribution from the Pink SF gatekeepers due to public association with us, we would even encourage it.