Because you invaded their country

An Indian man wonders why no British people were willing to intervene when he was being beaten up on a train:

‘Why would nobody help me?’ Father punched in the face 18 times by racist thugs in front of 200 witnesses on a packed tram… and not one person intervened. Prakash Patel, 56, attacked while on a tram in Manchester with his daughter

Can you imagine this happening in the England in which Mr. Patel first settled 30 years ago?  No more than you can probably imagine a German complaining that French civilians didn’t come to his assistance when the French Resistance attacked him.  Meanwhile, Mr. Patel’s daughter is very fortunate that they were Indians being attacked in England and not Swiss being attacked in India.

The bien-pensant can cluck like chickens about how terrible it is that humanity does not suffer invasion of its territories and subjugation of its peoples with all the gentle good humor of lambs being led to the slaughter if they like; they will do so to no avail.  Recall that most still regard Winston Churchill, Davy Crockett, and the men of the USS Arizona heroes for their resistance of failed conquests far less credible than those attempted by Mr. Patel and his third world cohorts. The “racist thugs” of today will be the heroes of tomorrow, just as the multicuturalists thought so well of by the progressives and well-behaved conservatives of today will eventually be considered insane monsters of history in the vein of the Nazis and Communists.

Multiculturalism is worse than murder.  It is even worse than mass murder, being more akin to genocide. It is attempted sociocide.  As for the self-hating fifth columnists who piously mouth PC sacraments like “racists have no place in our society”, I suggest they go and try settling in India or Jamaica or Nigeria so they can discover how the people they are so eagerly welcoming to settle in their country truly feel about racial differences.

It doesn’t matter in the slightest how one feels personally about these matters.  It doesn’t matter how pure-in-heart and anti-racist you believe yourself to be. It doesn’t matter that people of various sub-species and races have lived in relative harmony for ten, twenty, or even one hundred years. Cultural friction, like gravity, always wins in the end. History shows, history makes it abundantly clear, that eventually the cultural differences will trigger sufficient violence to restore the violated borders once more.  It is as completely futile to blame “racism” for the inevitable violence as it is to wage war on “terror”.  Doing so is a fundamental category error.

Immigration is when a small number of foreigners are permitted to settle within a country by the native people.  Invasion is when tens of thousands or more foreigners settle in a country against the wishes of the native people, regardless of whether they happen to be armed or not. Both Europe and the USA have suffered quiet and undeclared large-scale invasions; only now are the natives beginning to wake up and become restless.

And the reason they will become considerably more violent is explained by Mr. Patel himself: “He said he would consider leaving Britain in the wake of the attack were it not for the fact that his family is so well established here.”  In other words, the invaders will not leave until they are forced to do so, as we have seen in India, in Zimbabwe, as we are presently seeing in South Africa, and as we will eventually see in England and the USA.

Now, there is certainly a case to be made that there is no need to harbor any sympathy for the British, considering how they themselves invaded more than half the countries around the world.  But it is blatantly dishonest to pretend the British people are not being invaded against their will, as dishonest as it would be to deny the invasions of the British imperial era.

The honest monohumanist, assuming one can be found, will be inclined to ask “why are you racist?”  To which one can only respond: “on what basis do you assume that this time, for the first time in over six thousand years of recorded history, it will be different?”

From Huxley to Orwell

The world isn’t binary. Sometimes it isn’t an either/or proposition, but rather, a first A, then B situation.

We have been gradually disempowered by a corporate state that, as Huxley foresaw, seduced and manipulated us through:

•    Sensual gratification,
•    Cheap mass-produced goods,
•    Boundless credit,
•    Political theater and
•    Amusement.

While we were entertained,

•    The regulations that once kept predatory corporate power in check were dismantled,
•    The laws that once protected us were rewritten and
•    We were impoverished.

Now that:

•    Credit is drying up,
•    Good jobs for the working class are gone forever and
•    Mass-produced goods are unaffordable,

  …. we find ourselves transported from “Brave New World” to “1984.”

We can take some comfort in the knowledge that all of this was foreseen and explained nearly two thousand years ago.  Of course, that doesn’t mean it is going to be a good time for everyone.

Everybody screws up

I was a bit embarrassed about my little digging-related miscalculation in A Throne of Bones.  I felt a little better about it after encountering a mistake in Isaac Asimov’s Forward the Foundation, in which a
highly improbable nightly murder rate was asserted on Trantor.  And
given the level of attention to detail for which David Foster Wallace,
supposedly one of the greatest novelists of the last 30 years, is
rightly lauded, I feel downright positive about my own blunder after catching the following error in this passage from Infinite Jest.  Apparently, the longer the book, the more likely it is that the possibility of a basic error approaches certainty.

1610h.
E.T.A. Weight Room. Freestyle circuits. The clank and click of various
resistance-systems. Lyle on the towel dispenser conferring with an
extremely moist Graham Rader. Schacht doing sit-ups, the board almost
vertical, his face purple and forehead pulsing. Troeltsch by the squat
rack blowing his nose into a towel. Coyle doing military presses with a
bare bar. Carol Spodek curling, intent on the mirror. Rader nodding as
Lyle bends and leans in. Hal up on the spotter-shelf in back of the
incline-bench in the shadow of the monster copper beech through the west
window doing single-leg toe-raises, for the ankle. Ingersoll at the
shoulder-pull, steadily upping the weight against Lyle’s advice. Keith
(‘The Viking’) Freer 68 and the steroidic fifteen-year-old Eliot
Kornspan spotting each other on massive barbell-curls next to the water
cooler’s bench, taking turns bellowing encouragement. Hal keeps pausing
to lean down and spit into an old NASA glass on the floor by the little
shelf. E.T.A. Trainer Barry Loach walking around with a clipboard he
doesn’t write anything down on, but watching people intently and nodding
a lot. Axford with one shoe off in the corner, doing something to his
bare foot. Michael Pemulis seated cross-legged on the cooler’s bench
just off Kornspan’s left hip, doing facial isometrics, trying to
eavesdrop on Lyle and Rader, wincing whenever Kornspan and Freer roar at
each other.
‘Three more! Get it up there!’
‘Hoooowaaaaa.’
‘Get that shit up there man!’
‘Gwwwhoooooowaaaaa!’
‘It raped your sister! It killed your fucking mother man!’
‘Huhl huhl huhl huhl gwwwww.’
‘Do it!’
Pemulis
makes his face very long for a while and then very short and broad,
then all sort of hollow and distended like one of Bacon’s popes.
‘Well
suppose’ — Pemulis can just make out Lyle — ‘Suppose I were to give you
a key ring with ten keys. With, no, with a hundred keys, and I were to
tell you that one of these keys will unlock it, this door we’re
imagining opening in onto all you want to be, as a player. How many of
the keys would you be willing to try?’
Troeltsch calls over to
Pemulis, ‘Do the deLint-jerking-off face again!’ Pemulis for a second
lets his mouth gape slackly and his eyes roll way up and flutters his
lids, moving his fist.
‘Well I’d try every darn one,’ Rader tells Lyle.
‘Huhl. Huhl. Gwwwwwwww.’
‘Motherfucker! Fucker!’
Pemulis’s wince looks like a type of facial isometric.
‘Do Bridget having a tantrum! Do Schacht in a stall!’
Pemulis makes a shush-finger.
Lyle
never whispers, but it’s just about the same. ‘Then you are willing to
make mistakes, you see. You are saying you will accept 99% error. The
paralyzed perfectionist you say you are would stand there before that
door. Jingling the keys. Afraid to try the first key.’
Pemulis pulls
his lower lip down as far as it will go and contracts his cheek muscles.
Cords stand out on Freer’s neck as he screams at Kornspan. There’s a
little hanging mist of spittle and sweat. Kornspan looks like he’s about
to have a stroke. There are 90 kg. on the bar, which itself is 20 kg.
‘One more you fuck. Fucking take it.’
‘Fuck me. Fuck meyou fuck. Gwwwwww.’
‘Take the pain.’
Freer has one finger under the bar, barely helping. Kornspan’s red face is leaping around on his skull.
Carol Spodek’s smaller bar goes silently up and down.
Troeltsch
comes over and sits down and saws at the back of his neck with the
towel, looking up at Kornspan. ‘I don’t think all the curls I’ve ever
done all together add up to 110,’ he said.
Kornspan’s making sounds that don’t sound like they’re coming from his throat.
‘Yes!
Yiiissss!’ roars Freer. The bar crashes to the rubber floor, making
Pemulis wince. Every vein on Kornspan stands out and pulses. His stomach
looks pregnant. He puts his hands on his thighs and leans forward, a
string of something hanging from his mouth.
‘Way to fucking take it
baby,’ Freer says, going over to the box on the dispenser to get rosin
for his hands, watching himself walk toward the mirror.
Pemulis
starts very slowly to lean over toward Kornspan, looking around
confidentially. He gets so his face is right up near the side of
Kornspan’s mesomorphic head and whispers. ‘Hey. Eliot. Hey.’
Kornspan, bent over, chest heaving, rolls his head a little his way. Pemulis whispers: ‘Pussy.’

It’s an amusing scene, but first
of all, no 15-year old boys, with or without steroids, have ever done a
single 110 kg curl, let alone more than four.  That’s nearly 250
pounds. Even at my most bulked up, when I was benching 325 pounds, I never curled more than four reps at 150.  These days, I usually top out with 4×52 kg, which is only a bit more than 115 pounds.

Based on the fact
that Wallace mentions 90 kg being on the bar, it’s pretty clear that he actually meant
90 pounds, which is one 45-pound plate per side.  Still impressive, as with
the bar, (another 45 pounds), it is 135 pounds.  Which is readily doable, although still not reasonably conceivable for 15-year old tennis players who are described as having one arm more developed than the other.

Rabbit Rules of Order

Larry Correia engages in a long dance with liberals and in the process illustrates why it is a mistake to pay attention to their inevitable and invariably one-sided appeals to etiquette:

Here, let me break this down for you.  Not just this thread, but any thread where you argue with liberals.

Liberal 1: Attack, ATTACK! Attack, attack, attack! ATTACK!
Liberal 2: ATTACK! ATTACK!
Conservative: Defend.
Liberal 1: So rude!
Liberal 2: Yes, very rude. 

Larry Correia I
do believe she started it, thought Brad was full of it, and then asked
for examples. Provided. She didn’t think there was any bias, and now
several of us are demonstrating that is incorrect.
Or are you just going to do another hit and run, like whatserface? If
you don’t know much about the target, ridicule and attack. Claim your
moral superiority and call it a day?

As for my rudeness, oh well. I guess that is what happens after years
of being called a racist, sexist, wymyn hating, child killer, corporate
shill of the military industrial complex. So put your big girl panties
on and deal with it. :)

Cenate Pruitt (p.s. anyone who nonironically uses the phrase “political correctness” needs to be sent to a reeducation camp.)

I’m going out on a limb and guessing he doesn’t realize the
last US president to put people in camps was liberal icon, FDR, but hey,
whatever.

Remember, their entire game is not to prove that they are right. This is why they will blithely ignore the fact that you’ve conclusively proven their statements to be wrong and claim the irrelevance of the very point upon which they’d previously based their entire argument. It is to force you to back down and apologize, which, according to the Rabbit Rules of Order, means that you lost.

This is why, if you want to shut them up, all you have to do is a) force them to admit that they are wrong, or b) insist that they apologize for something.  They will usually vanish rather than do either, because, by the Rabbit Rules, either of those things is tantamount to losing.  Actually being wrong doesn’t matter because their is no objective reality; their concept of reality is entirely social and subjective.

And Larry, if you happen to see this, shoot me an email, please….

Mailvox: the relevance of Kuhn’s Revolutions

Scoobius is dubious about Thomas Kuhn:

On a couple of different threads lately, knowing reference has been made to Thomas Kuhn and his book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”. Like a lot of people I read it as a snotty college kid. But unlike a lot of people, I recall thinking at the time that there was something fishy about what he was saying, something perhaps even unpersuasive. To be honest it’s so long ago since I read the book, I couldn’t even tell you now with accuracy what his arguments were. I just recall thinking at the time, Hmm, I’d certainly like to at least hear the rebuttal and the counter-arguments, but universities being what they are, his book was assigned on the topic and no others; and it wasn’t my key area of interest, so I just let the matter drop.

Anyway, being as I’m the resident “no ideas but in things” gadfly and I’m just as interested in the human sociology of ideas and where they actually personally come from, as I am in the ideas themselves, I was thinking about the title of Kuhn’s book.

It seems to me that its enduring popularity may actually have little to do with the content of his specific ideas, and more to do with the fact that the title of his book contains the words “structure” and “revolutions.”

If there are two words that the intellectual class loves to use, two words that simply push their happy-buttons and send them into transports of catnip-induced bliss, they are “structure” and “revolution”. It may be that the thing remains on the permanent syllabus simply because those two words send intellectuals into ecstasy.

I very much disagree.  The main reason Kuhn remains popular is that his reasoning provides substance and cover for those who, for various reasons, doubt the legitimacy of the dictatorial scientific consensus.  While one will not be taken seriously by claiming that the Bible contradicts global warming, the latest dating of homo sapiens sapiens, or the raspberry bush of life, one can cite Kuhn and it tends to take the wind out of the sails of even the most authoritative scientist.

Kuhn is essentially historical jujitsu contra scientific overreach.  Whether he is strictly correct or not is almost irrelevant, because reminding scientists of their many false historical consensuses is the most effective antidote against their ridiculous tendency to claim that this time, at last, their assertions should be unquestioningly and unhesitatingly accepted.

As I’ve noted in the past, those who claim science is Man’s most accurate guide to the factual truth are absolutely wrong and it is trivially easy to demonstrate how and why they are wrong.  We have a word for science that is actually reliable, and that word is “engineering”.  With the partial exception of physics, most science that has not yet reached what we might consider its mature state is dynamic and remains incapable of providing predictive models that are much more reliable than those provided by other, non-scientific means.

Owning the room

Simon Evans is awesome. “My accent may be rather unfamiliar, possibly even rather exotic to some of you. If you are struggling to place it, it is, in fact, educated.”

The corruption that encompasses

What you should understand is that everything that has happened since 2008 related in any way to the financial crisis is a lie.  Absolutely everything. It begins with the banks, but it doesn’t end there, the mainstream media and the government are in collusion with them to hide how bad the global situation is and how criminally corrupt the behavior of the banks and their enablers was that created this ongoing debacle:

Back in 2010 I wrote an article about the way German banks used Ireland as a dark pit for doing deals they could not do elsewhere. It was called Ireland was Germany’s Off-shore Tart. It seems she was Belgium’s tart too.

What Sugarman’s story reveals above all is how no one in power, whether that be financial, political or media power, wants any questions asked or truths exposed.  Sugarman has been ignored by everyone in the Irish establishment: his bank, the banks regulator, all the Irish political parties, all the newspapers and I was there when he told his story to one of Ireland’s top TV journalists only to never hear from him again.

Sugarman was the risk manager who resigned from Unicredit when his warnings to senior management, that the bank was routinely failing to hold enough capital to protect depositors from a bank run, were being ignored.

Irish law says clearly a breach of the minimum holdings of even 1% must be notified to the regulator immediately. He was finding UniCredit being routinely 19% short. When he asked an independent company to check his figures they told him the breaches were as high as 40%. This means the bank was short billions. Such a shortfall means if there was run on the bank it would not have a hope of surviving.

Sugarman was ignored and told to stop complaining. He resigned.

A month later Northern Rock collapsed when a run on the bank exhausted its cash reserves. A year later the Irish banks collapsed.

You might have thought the Irish Bank regulator would want to know what Sugarman had to say. You’d be wrong. The Irish regulator has gone out of his way to ignore him. I have been privy to all the emails and correspondence and it is a shameful and tawdry story of obfuscation, lying and threats. Meetings where he was told he could come and tell the regulator what he knew, but that if he revealed any wrong doing by the bank that occurred during the time he was there, the regulator would have to report him to the police.

It’s all a sham.  All of it.  The only thing of which you can be sure is that the various statistics are being portrayed in the best possible light.  Which, in and of itself, is rather grim considering what the reported statistics indicate.

On the book/game front

1. The Wardog’s Coin is finished.  Marcher Lord is presently giving it the editorial polishing and then the novelette will be published in accompaniment with its B-side, Qalabi Dawn.  With nearly 30k words between the two of them; it should be on Amazon for $1.99 before the end of the month.  As with AMB, I’ll be sending out the ebook to those who have promised to review it; if you’re interested, send me an email with TWC in the subject and specify if you prefer epub or mobi format. The title novelette is about a Savondese mercenary who finds himself, and his mercenary company, drawn into the service of the elven king of Merithaim courtesy of an insufficiently researched contract. It is set in Selenoth and introduces a new perspective character who will be appearing in TAODAL: Book Two.

2. A Selenoth-based game will be coming out for mobile platforms towards the end of this year, such as Android and iOS. I won’t say anything more about it now, except that it’s going to be a very different sort of game than anyone is likely to anticipate, and it is going to contain one or two innovations that I expect to be of interest to various people outside of the game industry proper.

3. While Summa Elvetica was a failure in a way that the much less ambitious A Throne of Bones was not, I’m still pleased to learn that SE has its fans who are not put off by its unconventional approach to story-telling.  Seeking the New Earth has posted a nice review of it:

The moment I knew that I did not merely like the novel, but loved it, comes here. I don’t want to spoil it, but I will say this: Marcus discovers evidence that leads him to write the Summa Elvetica, an official treatise on elves, for the church. And what he discovers actually made me cheer. Beale shows his mastery in showing, not telling, in that particular scene, and it lifts the rest of the novel from “pretty good” to “great.”

The conclusion of the novel nearly disappointed me. I thought Beale would go the hackneyed route of, “The church is shown the truth but chooses to ignore it.” Ah, but he has another trick up his sleeve to bring this story to a satisfying conclusion.

Oh! The story ended, but there’s almost a hundred pages left?

Beale actually wrote the Summa Elvetica. He wrote a treatise in the style of the medieval church. It’s included as an appendix. OK, that’s neat and all, but how many of us read medieval religious treatises?

Oh. It’s only a few pages. What else?

Beale includes two short stories set within the world of Summa Elvetica that shine more brightly than the novel. Honestly, the book’s worth the price of admission for either of these two stories. I’m delighted they’re included.

4.  Koanic Soul has posted a review of A Throne of Bones, (warning: considerable spoilers) that is much more accessible and much less insane than one would ever have imagined. Frankly, I was disappointed, as I was expecting long treatises on the conjectured skull shapes and eye sockets of the various major characters.  Or something like that.  Based on the title of his post, it appears Koanic may have reversed the analogy below, but regardless, it’s nice to hear that TAODAR compares favorably with ASOIAF in one way or another.

My preferred form of stimulation is intellectual. Vox’s latest book, A Throne of Bones, is like a 2-day morphine high. Just buy it. If you need convincing, here my review. Vox Day is to RR Martin as a box of pastries is to a pot roast
dinner. One may taste better at the beginning, but the other you
wouldn’t mind eating for the rest of your life.

 5. Speaking of ASOIAF, I was more than a little amused by this discussion on the Martin fan site Westeros.org, which is nominally about A Throne of Bones, but is more devoted to my various ideological and personal shortcomings by Martin fans who haven’t bothered to read the book before opining on the author.  This comment about my discourse with R. Scott Bakker, in particular, made me laugh out loud:

“When you’re the condescending douche in an argument with Bakker you’re in trouble.”

Such is the burden of life as a superintelligence. One ignores at the price of being considered arrogant. One explains at the price of being deemed condescending.

White smoke spotted

“The Catholic church has chosen a new pope. White
smoke is billowing from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel, meaning 115
cardinals in a papal conclave have elected a new leader for the world’s
1.2 billion Catholics. The new pope is
expected to appear on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica within an
hour, after a church official announces “Habemus Papum” – “We have a
pope” – and gives the name of the new pontiff in Latin.”
And a million conspiracy theorists held their breath… and were disappointed.

“Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio from Argentina has been elected the new leader of the Catholic Church. The 76-year-old – now known as Pope Francis I — was the archbishop of Buenos Aries and was appointed by Pope John Paul II. Bergoglio became the first pope from the Americas elected and the first from outside Europe in more than a millenium.”

Land of the Not-so-much-Free

The USA is not the least free country in the world.  But it is becoming increasingly obvious to everyone that it isn’t even close to being the most free country in the world that many Americans have always assumed it be:

So, in just a week’s time, the political elite in the Land of the Free gave us bills which:

1) ensure the government cannot assassinate its own citizens with drones
2) impose price controls with insurance premiums
3) award the government with more power to initiate biosurveillance operations
4) create a quota system in the labor market

It really makes me wonder… how much more will it take for people to notice how rapidly they’re losing freedom, or how destructive the political leadership is? 

The problem is that too few natives genuinely want freedom anymore, and virtually none of the immigrants from Asia, Africa, or South and Central America place any value upon it at all.  The USA may only be a quasi-democracy, but in the end, the people will get the government they are willing to tolerate, and one of the prices of modifying the population is that the government one group of people are willing to tolerate is usually at least moderately different than the government another group of people, with different history, cultures, and tradition, are willing to tolerate.

The important distinction is that the determining factor isn’t what sort of government people actually want, but rather, what sort of government they are willing to tolerate.