Tag: Book Review

One week at #1

Interest in SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police remains strong; it has 132 reviews and ranks in the Amazon top 500, which has been enough to keep it at #1 in Political Philosophy for a solid week now. Thanks to all of you for that; none of that happens without you buying the book, talking it up on Twitter and Facebook, and reviewing it. I hope you will continue to spread the word about it.

I’m gratified by both the positive responses from the Dread Ilk, #GamerGate, and the Alt-Right as well as the negative responses from the SJWs. Here are two recently published quasi-reviews, one from the gentleman plotting against me, another from a woman who is a strong supporter of Castalia House.

SJWs is primarily a series of Scripts. For PUA manuals, these Scripts are opening lines, moving from one phase to another, shifting venues, et al. In SJWs, the first Script is the anatomy of a SJW attack (Point and Shriek and so on) and the second Script is the proper response (Don’t Apologize and so on).

There is, of course, more to this book than the two Scripts, but as with PUA literature, it is mostly there either to explain and support the Scripts or to explain and support the Worldview. There are calls to arms and sections on how to SJW-proof an organization, but this is so much window dressing. What really matters are the Scripts and canned routines.

The breakdown of dialectic vs. rhetoric is a good one, although it does claim that Leftists are incapable of dialectic reason. Again, this may be somewhat justified. After a year of following Vox, I have not yet seen an opponent attack him with a dialectic argument, for whatever reason.

At the end of the day, SJWs Always Lie will likely do exactly what it set out to do. The culture wars within fandom will escalate, the disqualification arms race will heat up, and both sides will steadily lose the ability to see the other side as human beings. I will never say that both sides are the same, but they do have one thing in common: the constant dehumanization of the other side.

Vox Day suggests that the only way to combat the intellectual policing of the Left is for the Right to engage in intellectual policing. This is what we have come to, and why I find Vox’s posturing as a hero of free speech disingenuous. Apparently the Hugo SJWs are not the only ones willing to burn down the city to save it.

It’s a fair and intelligent non-review, but I think Rev 3.0 makes the same mistake so many moderates do of confusing the TACTIC with the OBJECTIVE. There is nothing disingenuous about thought-policing SJWs in defense of free speech; how else does he think their attempts to exert control over everyone else’s thoughts and speech are going to be combated?

Once your opponent introduces tanks to the battlefield, if you do not meet them with anti-tank measures, including more and better tanks, you will lose. Rev 3.0’s implied notion of nobly relying upon even more free speech to combat the SJW speech police reminds me of the WWI French military doctrine that relying upon élan and esprit de corps was the right way to defeat barbed wire, trenches, and emplaced machine guns.

Isn’t it possible that by utilizing their tactics we will turn into SJWs? It may be theoretically possible but it’s not even remotely likely. We don’t share their ideals, their goals, or their slavering hunger for control over others’ thoughts and words. The Marines didn’t magically transform into Nazis even though they adopted the maneuver warfare tactics that were developed by the Wehrmacht, and we won’t turn into SJWs just because we have turned their own tactics against them.

As for why they won’t attack me with calm, rational, and reasoned arguments, it is because most of them are incapable of dialectic. The few that can handle it also recognize that I am much, much better at it than they are. They don’t flee from public debate with me because they are afraid they will defeat me too resoundingly and expose my intellectual limitations, but because they fear I will do that to them.

Ann Sterzinger’s review is rather less coherent, and transforms into a Hugo 2015 summary before transmogrifying entirely into a review of John Wright’s Somewhither in which she rather precisely nails some of the novel’s weaker points. Unless she didn’t.

Day’s brand-new nonfiction book on Castalia—SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police—is half Rabid Puppies memoir, half field manual for dealing with the sort of people who repeatedly call Day a white supremacist even though he repeatedly reminds them that he’s part Native American, and won’t shut up about his great-grandfather who was some kind of Mexican war hero.

The negative reaction by the SJWs is very nearly as satisfying, as the only time I have seen levels of butthurt this high was the day that that the 2015 Hugo nominations were made public.

  • this is an example of somebody piggybacking on a topic he knows will be popular for his own obvious self-aggrandizement
  • The book itself is named after one
    of his “Three Laws of Social Justice Warriors”, a reference to Asimov’s
    Three Laws of Robotics 
  • Adorable whining from a guy with a hardon about losing at the Hugo’s
  • An unintentionally amusing account of how a pudgy, angry, little boy grows up into a pudgy, angry, little man.
  • This book is very poorly reasoned and complete garbage. The title is itself inaccurate and rhetorical fallacy.   

UPDATE: Greg Johnson has posted a long review at Counter-Currents:

At the risk of sounding like the Oprah of the New Right, I want every one of you to buy and read this book. Vox Day has written an indispensable manual for resisting the politically correct witch-hunts of so-called “Social Justice Warriors….

Chapter 8, “Striking Back at the Thought Police” and Chapter 9, “Winning the Social Justice War,” are the most exciting parts of the book, for Day makes it clear that he is not content with just fending off the Left, but on rolling it back completely. This is what sets him miles apart from mainstream conservatism, which has never conserved anything from the Left, much less taken back lost ground. I will just deal with the highlights of these chapters.

Day’s first strategic principle is to know oneself and one’s enemy, and act accordingly. Day points out that the Right has a systematic advantage over the Left, because the Left is based on lies; Leftists do not understand themselves or their enemies, but we do.

One of Day’s most important principles is to reject the ideals of SJWs: equality, diversity, tolerance, and progress. Day flatly rejects equality as a fact or a moral ideal. He flatly rejects the daft notion that diversity is a strength. He does not measure progress in terms of equality and diversity, but in terms of science and technology, and points out that these forms of progress are incompatible with the first two ideals. He dismisses tolerance as “little more than a cloak for SJW entryism,” noting that SJWs always demand it but never practice it.

Day simply denies the Left the moral standing to judge the Right. He dismisses them as followers of false ideals that lead to injustice and tyranny.  

    Do you really want to hurt me?

    A four-part series on “Killing Vox Day”. And I have to say, despite his purportedly homicidal intentions, the author says nicer things about me than most of my friends and family do.

    1). Vox Day is Honest
    Whatever you think about Vox Day’s opinions, you cannot deny that he states them publicly and consistently in the face of intense criticism.

    Being honest does not mean telling the truth per se. It does not mean that what you say is ultimately correct. Honesty means telling the truth as you see it, based on your best understanding of the situation. Vox is acerbic, biased, and prone to fits of exaggeration, but taking these things into account, he generally says what he thinks to the best of his knowledge.

    If anything, I’ve been stunned by how open Vox Day is about his evil, evil plans. In terms of Hugo strategy in particular, his modus operandi seems to be openly declaring his strategy, openly following through with said strategy, and then laughing at his enemies’ confused responses….

    2). Vox Day is Intelligent (and Sane)
    One of the things I have noticed about detractors of Vox Day is that they assume Vox is either an idiot or insane. Nothing could be further from the truth.

    Vox is an extremely sharp person. He knows how to argue successfully. He can set up a consistent argument, pick out flaws in his opponent’s reasoning, and generally defend intellectual positions that few other people can. Why these positions are difficult to defend hardly matters. What matters is that he has the chops to defend them.

    If you need an example of this, just look at the arguments he presents in any given blog post and the bleating of his supporters in the comments. There is a world of difference. And this is why they keep coming back – because he is very, very good at arguing for them. You don’t rally around a person who consistently loses.

    Another good example is this interview on CSPAN where he gives a logical and eloquent argument for the right of American states to secede from the Union. You can tell that the host was expecting an easy kill against a right-wing nut job and ended up with a lively, intelligent debate.

    Vox likes to credit his years of strategy gaming for these abilities (Advanced Squad Leader in particular). Personally, I like to credit years of playing Cooking Mama for my three Michelin stars and Mario marathons for my six-foot vertical jump. The more likely factor is that Vox is an avid reader – he displays a more than passing familiarity with philosophy, statistical modelling, and yes, military history and tactics (particularly Fourth Generation theory – more on this later).

    Again, this is not to say that his arguments are objectively true, only that he does a good job of flustering, discrediting, and generally taking down his opponents. He can think logically, tactically, and worst of all, strategically. He does not win because of the inherent strength of his positions, but because of his technique in defending them. That is not the behavior of a drooling troglodyte or an insane person.

    After seeing the first two parts of the series, I sent the author a copy of SJWs Always Lie, as I thought he might find it to be useful in analyzing my thought processes. As I thought he might, I wasn’t surprised to see he posted a fair review of it:

    This book is a necessary buy for anyone who finds themselves under attack for their politics. Two sections in particular stand out: the anatomy of a SJW attack and the response scripts. It will tell you exactly what to expect, what frame of mind to get in, and how to respond.

    That said, I take exception with Vox’s suggestion later in the book that the antidote to the thought police is an equal and opposite thought police for conservative organizations. I understand his argument that ‘they started it, so it’s fair game,’ but it seems like the opposite of the ideal outcome: un-policed thought.

    I will hasten to add that this is a mere academic consideration when you are under active attack from a group that wants to destroy your good name and livelihood for political reasons. Your first priority is to defend yourself, and this book will help you do just that.

    I will point out that the mistake he made in the second paragraph is no different than the one that many, indeed, MOST conservatives make. The tactic is not the outcome. The means is not the end. To achieve the objective of unpoliced thought, we must police our organizations against the SJW thought and speech police. Like the Germans with mustard gas in WWI, they will not abandon the tactic unless and until it is used against them with greater efficacy.

    “one of the most important books you will read”

    Chris Nuttall, an Amazon Top 100 author and contributor to Riding the Red Horse, reviews SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police:

    In the current climate this book may have a fair claim to being one of the most important books you will read. It is no surprise, therefore, that most of the one-star reviews on Amazon are insults directed at Vox Day personally, rather than the book itself. The unspoken intention is to mock the messenger, thus discrediting the message.

    Read this book. You may hate it, but at least you will have the pleasure of knowing you made up your own mind.

    One of the most heartbreaking stories to come out of the Soviet Union came from a man who’d been sentenced to the gulag (prison camp for dissidents); he asked himself, afterwards, why he hadn’t fought or run when the police came for him. He just sat in his house and awaited his fate. The answer, of course, is quite simple. The USSR was a prison camp above ground (and a mass grave below); the inmates – sorry, the population – were conditioned not to resist authority, even when authority was brutal, capricious, untrustworthy and quite thoroughly hypocritical.

    Many people will say ‘it can’t happen here.’ But it can and it does.

    Our society is under attack by Social Justice Warriors (or, as I prefer to think of them, Social Justice Bullies). They have, as Day points out, become the new thought police. Tell an off-colour joke? Lose your job, reputation and perhaps even your life. Disagree with the prevailing orthodoxy? Get harried into silence and then buried below a wave of focused scorn and contempt. Question the claims to victimhood of the aristocracy of victimhood? Get called a racist, sexist, homophobe, etc.

    I think Chris is correct to point out that the choice of the SJW used as the example demonstrating the Three Laws of SJW can be seen as a weakness, but the fact is that there is no other SJW whose lies I know as well, that I can refute in such documented detail, as those told by that particular SJW. It is precisely because I have been in direct conflict with the man for the 10 years since he started attacking me that I have so much information on hand about his lying, his doubling down, and his psychological projecting.

    As for the other weakness Chris mentioned, which is to say that he wanted to go deeper into the belly of the beast, that is easily rectified. As I mentioned to Spacebunny this morning, I now know what will be my next book project after I complete A Sea of Skulls.

    Professor Nick Flor of the University of New Mexico called it The Art of War for the Digital Media Generation and even provided a brief review in a series of tweets:

    Prof. Nick Flor ‏@ProfessorF
    Okay, so you can probably tell from my Kindle Tweets that I thought @VoxDay’s book “SJWs ALWAYS Lie” was superb. 5/5 stars

    Prof. Nick Flor ‏@ProfessorFSJWinguts are EVERYWHERE—  @voxday’s book teaches you how to recognize & effectively neutralize them. Must read.

    Prof. Nick Flor ‏@ProfessorF
    Man it’s tough to do a 140-character review. The book is like the Art of War, except for the Digital Media Generation.

    Prof. Nick Flor ‏@ProfessorFI really enjoyed the GG chapter and I finally understand Literally Who, Literally Who 2, and Literally Wu.

    Prof. Nick Flor ‏@ProfessorFHe does a great job of putting everything in context, and it really makes you feel good about everything #GamerGate has accomplished.

    Allan Davis reviews SJWAL

    His article Counter-Attacking in the Cultural War is featured on Lew Rockwell today:

    Last weekend, the SJWs who rule science fiction fandom were forced to retreat with a “scorched earth” tantrum, as they refused to award five of the sixteen Hugo categories–rather than see them presented to a winner not approved by the ruling faction.

    Gamergate is a line in the sand, “this far, no farther.”  The Puppies demonstrate that SJWs can be beaten.  What the world needs now is a combat guide–a field manual exposing the SJWs and their tactics, and describing the most effective ways of fighting them, and beating them.

    Vox Day has written that manual.

    “SJWs Always Lie:  Taking Down the Thought Police” is a no-holds-barred depiction of the SJW “in the wild.”  It contains detailed information on the motivations and behavior of the SJW and, most importantly, how to fight back against them.

    Vox, who was active in both the Gamergate and Puppies campaigns against the SJWs, lays out the full story of both fronts in the war against Political Correctness.  He details how his long-running feud with John Scalzi and his “purging” from the Science Fiction Writer’s Association helped him to formulate the Three Laws of the SJW:

        1. SJWs Always Lie
        2. SJWs Always Double Down
        3. SJWs Always Project

    One of the things I’ve noticed in the Amazon reviews is that those readers who have themselves either been the object of an SJW attack, or who have witnessed one, recognize the patterns I am describing in the book. I am pleased to see this, as it testifies to the veracity and utility of SJWs Always Lie.

    Also, by sheer happenstance, Castalia House makes a second appearance on Lew Rockwell today. David the Good, Extreme Composter, explains why you should start planning your spring garden now that fall is approaching:

    As the main growing season winds down and fall gardens are being planted across much of the country, you might think it would be time for me to post on fall gardening.

    Fall gardens are well-worth doing, but instead of jumping on that train I’m going to focus on what you can do right now that will make your spring gardens better than they’ve ever been.

    Gardeners, like most people, tend to think of their gardening in terms of one season. When you step back, however, and see how building up your plots and planning ahead will benefit your gardening for years to come, a whole new window opens.

    In related news, Castalia will have a new gardening book out from David the Good before the end of the year.

    Directly over the target

    We know SJW posteriors are burning like Dresden after Plate Rack passed overhead because their antics in response to the release of SJWs Always Lie are off-the-charts crazy. There are, of course, the expected fake reviews, whose authors somehow seem to think that by illustrating the premise of the book in living color, they will somehow discredit it.

    Waaah! Nobody likes me!
    By Paul Spencer on August 27, 2015
    A pitiful rant by an intellectual weakling with a persecution complex. The literary equivalent of stealing a five year old’s favorite toy.
    16 of 63 people found the review helpful

    One of the most loathsome people currently writing
    By Alex on August 27, 2015
    The author of this book has stated that the Taliban’s attempts to silence women’s education activist Malala Yousafzai was “perfectly rational and scientifically justifiable” – […] What more is there to say?
    17 of 58 people found the review helpful

    One Star
    By Kindly Sodoff “peripatetic”on August 27, 2015
    An unintentionally amusing account of how a pudgy, angry, little boy grows up into a pudgy, angry, little man.
    32 of 129 people found the following review helpful

    One Star
    By Trouble O’Hara “iagorune”on August 27, 2015
    Adorable whining from a guy with a hardon about losing at the Hugo’s
    37 of 152 people found the review helpful

    He is the only person to be kicked out of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in its nearly fifty year history.
    By C. Buser on August 27, 2015
    … as a fleshed-out rehashing of his blogspot posts, previous commentary and opinion stated by the author about his personal political philosophy serve as valid advertisement as to whether or not an impartial Amazon shopper would be interested in this product, and a review of his previous statements and blogspot posts serve as a review of this book, which is repackaged and expanded for your convenience for the cover charge.

    The book itself is named after one of his “Three Laws of Social Justice Warriors”, a reference to Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics:

    #1 – SJWs always lie.
    #2 – SJWs always double down.
    #3 – SJWs always project.

    Thus, if you like his blogspot, and the previous examples of his political philosophy, and admire him for his expulsion from the SFWA, then this is something you would enjoy reading. If you disagree with his three laws, you wouldn’t enjoy this book.
    56 of 188 people found the review helpful

    I’m not sure which I find more astonishing, the fact that a few SJWs actually took the time to post these “reviews”, the observation that nearly 60 SJWs showed up to pretend that they were helpful, or the idea that I got the idea for the three laws from Asimov. At least the latter does tend to explain why they prefer fantasy to SF. But what definitely takes the cake is Rainbow Brite Boy publishing a brief parody entitled John Scalzi Is Not A Very Popular Author And I Myself Am Quite Popular: How SJWs Always Lie About Our Comparative Popularity Levels, which has now reached #2 in Political Philosophy, right behind the book it is attempting to DISQUALIFY. And wait, there’s more! The SJWs are also engaged in a charity drive so that John Scalzi will read it for the audio version.

     As you can see, this is a masterful rhetorical response that totally proves the falsity of the Second Law of SJW: SJWs Always Double Down.

    One of my friends sent me an email last night that I think aptly describes the situation. “WTF, are you PAYING these people or something?” And just to ice the crazy cake, we’ve now officially gone meta as there are now fake fake reviews being posted.

    And while I’m not surprised by the nature of the reaction of the science fiction SJWs to the book, I am amazed by the vehemence behind it. They are absolutely furious to see that a book unmasking them was not only published by me, but is riding the very wave of media attention that they themselves created to success. That’s the importance of the parody in their minds; if it can become even more popular than SJWs Always Lie, that will disqualify it and render it harmless, thereby relieving the stress they are presently feeling. As I said back in 2013, these people are cargo cultists; the concept of the way in which they have volunteered to serve as my de facto publicists doesn’t even cross their twisted little minds. Their priority is to wave the totem that will allow them to strike a superior pose and thereby make the feelbads go away.

    Totally Legit Review
    ByEssJayDouble U “OppressedTumblrette”on August 27, 2015

    I was told by my echo chamber to come post a nasty review here. I also have lots of time seeing as my job is being an internet activist. As you can tell I actually haven’t read this book but it was written by a white man. The era of the white man is over. It’s time for them to shut up and move over so that the muffled voices of their victims can speak up.

    Now here comes the part where I’m suppose to tell you about the writer (which may or may not be true, but you better listen and believe what I say as a victim of this white man’s world) and why this should be reason enough not to buy the book even though me telling you about the writer gives you no actual details about the book and why it isn’t worth the purchase. Instead it’s me telling you why we must dismiss this horrible person all based upon his identity.

    For starters he’s white. White men have oppressed us minorities for long enough. Secondly, I hear that this guy likes Chinese food. That’s offensive and oppressive to the Chinese. Those smart people can’t speak up for themselves so I’m doing it for them! I also hear that his wife loves wearing kimonos. Talk about being offensive and oppressive to the Japanese. And his son… My gosh I hear that his son calls ISIS a terrorist group. Looks like he’s daddy’s little islamophoic boy. Racist boy. And his daughter. Oh his daughter says she doesn’t need feminism. The poor thing must have internalized misogyny. How dare a woman claim not to need feminism. All women are feminists!

    And then there’s that Milo guy. I hear he works for some right wing turd of a media outlet. RIGHT WING! I’ve also seen Milo going around proudly saying that he gives Donald Trump positive coverage all in exchange for strands of Trump’s own hair that he then uses as hair extensions. Did I mention RIGHT WING!

    Do you really want to support horrible racist, oppressive right wingers? Instead take you 5 bucks and donate to one of the awesome women that these men have help to harass. By buying this book another poor oppressed child dies over in oppression land.

    Oh did I mention that my reasons may or may not be true? Just listen and believe or a poor oppressed women of color will die over in oppression land.

    Trust me, after reading this book it isn’t worth the money.

    The review as demolition

    John C. Wright considers the question of whether the great works of SF, Stranger in a Strange Land, also merit consideration as Great Books:

    Stranger in a Strange Land

    The conceit of this satire is that a Man from Mars views our earthly customs with innocent eyes, and sees their absurdity. A human baby orphaned on Mars and raised by highly-civilized but utterly inhuman Martians: as an adult he is brought back to Earth. Escaping from the intrigues of an unscrupulous government, and finding himself possessed of vast wealth, he wanders the world. When he finally understands the human condition, he starts a Church, trains Disciples, and is eventually martyred.

    The theology is what we might call solipsistic libertarian pantheism: all self-aware creatures are God, and enjoy the privilege God has of disregarding the laws and customs of mankind. The Man from Mars preaches a doctrine remarkably like that of the Adamites and similar movements preaching nudism, communalism, pacifism, free love: the Adamites held themselves to be immune to Original Sin. One may do whatever one wishes, because the only law is that there is no law.

    In case you don’t recognize it yet, what is being presented here as a profound new Martian religion is no more than the counter-cultural bromides of the Flower Generation.

    As Gods, the members of the Martian Church are responsible to no higher power for their evil actions, but fortunately are so enlightened that they commit no evils they consider evil. The author merely has it be the case that Mike’s followers do not suffer from lust, or greed, or pride, or envy, and therefore they can share all goods in common, share concubines without any ill-will, and, for all I know, share each other’s toothbrushes without any risk of spreading bad breath. The Church suffers no schisms and no disputes or debates, because everyone is perfect. There is no St. Peter who denies his Lord. There is no Judas.

    There is also no healing of the sick and no forgiveness of sins. Instead, Mike the Martian kills various people, such as hypocritical preachers or men guilty of no capital felonies found behind bars. But it is explained that since Martians believe in reincarnation, killing a scofflaw without benefit of trial is no crime; and keeping a man behind bars is an offense to human dignity, unlike, say, sharing a concubine, which is perfectly dignified.

    Mike the Martian, raised by sexless creatures, has the attitude toward copulation one might expect from a totally ignorant and innocent nonhuman: he regards it as a pleasant recreation, or as a religious ecstasy. But for all his orgies, he never actually manages to father a family, or vow faithfulness to one woman. Neither he, nor anyone in the book, mentions any connection between the use of the reproductive organs and reproduction.

    But Mike is a Nietzsche-style Superman, and therefore beyond good and evil: whatever he does, fornication or murder, is right and good by definition. You see, because he does not come from earth, and therefore has no experience or understanding of human things, his conclusions about how we should conduct ourselves is automatically right; the wisdom painfully gained over generations by our forefathers is worthy of nothing but scorn.

    Mike is stoned to death by an angry mob at the end of the book, and he flies to heaven wearing a halo. I am not making this up: he has wings and a halo. This event has no set up in the plot: unlike a similar story in the Book of Matthew, there is no foreshadowing of the martyrdom, no metaphysical or theological purpose, and nothing in Mike’s previous preaching gives any indication that passive submission to violence is meritorious in his philosophy. It sort of just happens, and we are supposed to feel sad and angry at the stupid yokels in the mob. (Please note the mob is white Christian Americans, probably from the Deep South. They are not outraged Muslims, or even irate Sikhs or Hindus. It was not even a crowd of unruly Irishmen. This would not have served the author’s purpose.) Whether or not the mob contained any persons whose relatives were killed, or daughters seduced, by the Man from Mars is not stated.

    We are assured (in his last bit of dialog with Jubal Hershaw, his mentor) that Mike’s followers will carry on spreading the Gospel of Free Love, and will come to rule everyone else: the stupid people will all die out.

    Even objecting to the eating of human flesh is regarded with righteous indignation. Not the cannibalism: that is merely a custom worthy of respect. The objection is what is objectionable, so much so that the Righteous are morally obligated to discharge loyal employees from the work whereby they earn their bread, and throw them out into the street with scorn, if they voice any queasy reservations. Does someone have even the most minimal standards of human conduct, such as even the most remote ages of history learned at the dawn of time? He is a sinner! Virtue consists only of having no virtues at all!

    The moral of the story: religion is a scam, marriage is a trap, people are stupid, do as you please when you please to whomever you please. Such is the message carried from a superior civilization to the poor backward dolts on Earth. Oh, brother.

        Timeless? Being a satire is no disqualification here. Jonathon Swift’s GULLIVER’S TRAVELS is just as critical of human laws and customs, and it is timeless. A story about a lone iconoclast, a Diogenes-style cynic mocking the Pharisees will always have an appeal. If the author had stuck to mockery, and not gone out of his way to advertise the Adamite heresy, I might call this timeless. The whole philosophy of irresponsibility popular since 1968 has had a sufficiently obvious effect in increasing the sum of human misery that I doubt it can maintain its appeal. Whatever preaches disregard for the long term, either in marriage or in war, has nothing to say once the long term arrives.
        Infinitely Re-Readable? My personal experience has met no book that wore out its welcome more quickly and more completely. I found it a delight to read when I was a child and thought as a child, for I was eager to hear that my childish impulses and little teen lusts were a sign of my great mental and moral superiority over The Stupid People (by which I meant my elders to whom I owed obedience). Flattering the innocent wears thin on a second rereading, when they are not so innocent. The unserious copulations with unmarried women seemed, on rereading, as unrealistic as the amours of James Bond: mere sexual fantasy. When I read the book again as a grown-up, the book was a chore to read. Far from being re-readable, this is a shallow book that gets shallower on every return visit.The ideas presented are so comical, and so comically naive, one wonders if the author intended an irony: the Martian-raised man is ignorant of human nature, so that when he attempts to put into practice ideas that could never work on Earth, he is justly killed for his inability to adapt to reality.I seem to recall a similar scene in GLORY ROAD, where Oscar the hero is upbraided as a fool by his fiancee, Star the Sexy Space-Empress, because he refuses to have an orgy with the attractive wife and three attractive daughters (one underage) of his generous wife-sharing host. It is explicitly stated there that those who do not adapt to the customs of their hosts are fools deserving death. I do not recall any scene in any Heinlein book where the hero is traveling among Puritans or pious Muslims and adopts the chastity and reserve in fashion among his hosts. For that matter, I don’t recall a scene where the hero has to sleep with the ugly wife of a generous Eskimo to avoid offending his host. Apparently the rule of doing as the Romans do when in Rome is restricted to the times when Romans are having an orgy, and, at that, only when pretty people are invited.

        Relevant? There is talk in here about the nature of justice and the family and God and art. So at least some deeper points are addressed. But the work is certainly relevant, if not to the Great Conversa
    tion among the Great Books, then at least to the Good Conversation among Good SF.STRANGER broke new ground by breaking conventions, and is among the first SF to attract a wider attention outside the genre. A book meets this criterion if the books that come after it, in this case, later SF books, have to take into account what the author has done here, and take a stance for or against, lest they risk being dismissed as irrelevant. For better or worse (I think it very much for the worse) the notion of moral and cultural relativism, once raised in this book, eliminates the possibility of an alien planet or alien culture being portrayed as having our values and our philosophy: if such a planet is portrayed, the author must give a convincing explanation to account for the similarity.A clean-limbed fighting man of Virginia landing on Mars and rescuing a princess from a four-armed Green Martian cannot now simply marry the girl, without the reader wondering about their marriage customs.

    Let us turn to our next three criteria:

        Is the language graceful? This is not a fair criterion for a satire: one must ask a satire if it is biting or witty or funny, with that peculiar acrid humor natural to satire. I would say at least in part this book matches that criteria: there are quotable lines. The word “Grok” has entered at least partly into the popular vocabulary.2. Are the characters multifaceted and natural? Well, Jubal Hershaw is a character that is memorable. I remember him in all the other Heinlein books also, include A TRAMP ROYALE, which was autobiographical. You sort of know the kind of things he’ll do and say: he has a Mark Twain sense of humor and a Nietzsche contempt for the common man. He is a hedonist, selfish and ornery, a self-made man. He is a soapbox for his author’s voice. The other characters in the book are either two-word descriptions (the ornery newshound, the phony preacher, the crooked politician) or one-word descriptions (the girl). I seem to recall that there are four characters fitting that description “the girl”, and they are as alike as the sexbots from AUSTIN POWERS. Mike had to memorize their pores and freckles to tell them apart, but the author does not give us even that.No character ever steps out of character: the crooked politician never shows a moment of honesty, the phony preacher does not have a wife and family, the ornery newshound does not have a hobby or a past or a pet peeve.

        3. Is the book wise? This may well be the shallowest book I have ever read, bar none. Something like GALACTIC PATROL, or CHESSMEN OF MARS, pure heedless adventure, is actually deeper and wiser than this dressed-up preachy-book praising adultery, anarchy and atheism: it is shallower than a shallow book because it pretends to be deep. In real life one might be called upon to act as boldly and thoughtfully as the Gray Lensman or with the unselfconscious chivalry and hardihood as the Warlord of Mars. A simple paragon of honesty and bravery is actually a more profound moral philosophy than a simple disregard of moral philosophy.

    Is it a good Science Fiction book? Yes indeed! I dislike this book intensely, even loathe it, for it deceived me in my youth, and lying to a child is a vile crime. But judging the innate worth of a book is not about whether one like or hates it. This book does the thing that Science Fiction is meant to do: it looks at the Earth through alien eyes, it evokes a sense of wonder, it paints a future different from our present, yet close enough to our present to make cutting comments about it.

    As philosophy, the book is trite, and the message is the message of the serpent of Eden: break the laws that have been placed on you, and you shall be like unto a god! This is heady stuff, and it is easy to get intoxicated, and very easy, horribly easy, to ruin your life and the lives of innocent people around you following self-centered and idiotic ideas like the ones painted to seem so attractive here.

    But as art for art’s sake, it is a perfectly workmanlike product, even a superior product. Despite certain lopsidedness in the plot pacing, STRANGER is indeed classic SF from the Good Old Days. It has earned its place on the Baen Top Ten list. If this book had a soul that could be sent to hell, I would say it has also earned its place in the Eighth Circle of Dante’s Inferno: for it is a malignant fraud.

    So, I’ll take it that’s a no?

    Paul Gottfried reviews VICTORIA

    I don’t think anyone with any grasp of history doubts that the USA is in the process of going the way of the Byzantine Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union at this point. It is a now a centralized multi-ethnic empire held together by the threat of military force, after all, and such empires always fracture sooner or later. And for all the various unpleasantries it recounts, VICTORIA: A Novel of 4th Generation War represents one of the more rosy-hued outcomes possible. Paul Gottfried reviewed it on VDARE.

    William Lind’s VICTORIA Heralds Coming America Breakup
    By Paul Gottfried

    William S. Lind is a man of many talents. He’s an institution of the American conservative movement, formerly the Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism of the Free Congress Foundation (under the late Paul Weyrich), a regular contributor to The American Conservative, and a noted military theorist. And now, with the publication of Victoria he is a novelist, putting forward a highly readable vision of the breakup of the United States and a traditionalist restoration. It’s a sign of the times that we can no longer regard such a story as implausible.

    Victoria is subtitled “A Novel of Fourth Generation Warfare,” and Lind’s writings on warfare bleed (perhaps too much) into his storytelling. His theory of Fourth Generation Warfare contends that warfare has ceased between states with standing armies and operative governments. Instead, it is decentralized, on at least one side, lacking a regular command structure and no longer identified with an established state or regular army. Countries like the U.S. find themselves in partisan struggles around the world that violate the “rules of war” built up under the old European state system.

    Bill’s ideas about changing forms of warfare may have been influenced by the German political-legal theorist Carl Schmitt, who wrote on partisan warfare after the Second World War. His novel is written under the nom de plume “Thomas Hobbes,” so even in this he reveals his connection to Schmitt, as the German jurist profoundly admired the seventeenth-century Englishman who wrote about the rise of the state [The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, by Carl Schmitt] (I wrote an intellectual biography of Schmitt and also deeply respect the philosopher who wished to protect us against “the war of all against all.”)

    In Victoria, all Hell breaks loose in a way that Hobbes might have understood. Yet it is only the Time of Tribulations before the golden age of social restoration that ends the novel. Indeed, we are told the ending in advance in the opening scene when we learn “The triumph of the Recovery was marked most clearly by the burning of the Episcopal bishop of Maine.”

    The revival of witch-burning in New England was certainly an eye-opener, but I’d have to say that my favorite scene was the rather egregious violation of academic freedom at Dartmouth. It’s kind of funny to imagine what the reaction would have been if I’d recommended VICTORIA for a Hugo instead of THE CHAPLAIN’S WAR. But it’s not science fiction, it’s political fiction, so that wouldn’t have been proper and neither Mr. Hobbes, nor his agent, Mr. Lind, would have approved.

    In any event, VICTORIA is now available as a 592-page paperback. And speaking of Mr. Lind, I should also mention that Martin van Creveld’s A HISTORY OF STRATEGY: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind is now available in hardcover.

    Smells like success

    This review of “Turncoat” by Steve Rzasa precisely underlines the central point made by the Sad Puppies campaign and single-handedly serves to justify it:

    I’m going to start with short stories, because they’re, well, short, and with the last story on the ballot and then work my way up.  So the first story is “Turncoat,” by Steve Rzasa. A sentient warship and some post-humans are battling against another group, people who have decided not to make the jump to post-humanity.  The warship goes from being annoyed at the messy, pesky humans to championing them (though I’m not sure where in the story this switch occurs) and defects at the end, bringing along with it (him? her?) its superior hardware and some useful intel about the other side.

    I’m going to take a slight detour here, though I promise I’ll get back to the review soon.  When I was in high school I did or said something that got me sent to detention, a closet-sized room where, oddly, someone had left a stack of Analogs.  I had just started reading science fiction, and of course my first  thought was, Is this supposed to be punishment?

    But I ended up not really liking most of the stories.  They emphasized hardware, and not even interesting hardware.  The characters were cardboard, the stories predictable (partly because they all ended with humanity triumphing), the style ranged from serviceable to really pretty bad.

    This was late-period John Campbell I’m talking about.  (Yes, I’m old.)  I will stipulate that the guy did some good things for sf in his prime, but something had happened along the way, some hardening of attitudes and an inability to tell when a story had gone bad.  Humanity had to be shown to triumph in every story, for example, to be superior to anything thrown against it, which pretty much let the air out of any balloon of tension.

    So, as I hope I’ve made clear, when I say “Turncoat” is a perfectly adequate late-period Campbellian story I don’t mean it as a compliment.  You can’t even say the characters are cardboard, since there are no characters, just a warship that, for the most part, proceeds along strict logical lines.  There’s no one to like, or even hate, no one to identify with or root for, nothing at stake for the reader.

    But think about everything that’s happened since Campbell.  The New Wave (does anyone remember the New Wave?  Yes, I’m old), feminism, cyberpunk, counter-cyberpunk, a fresh infusion of writers who are not white or straight or able-bodied.  This would have been an average story in the late sixties, but now, nearly fifty years later, it’s stale and dated.

    Rzasa hasn’t even caught up with the second of these new categories.  “Our founders were the men who…”  “Posthuman Man…” “Not content with setting Man on his new evolutionary path…”  After Ancillary Justice — hell, after The Left Hand of Darkness — this reads very oddly.

     Now consider Castalia House’s mission statement:

    “The books that we publish honor the traditions and intellectual
    authenticity exemplified by writers such as J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis,
    Robert E. Howard, G.K. Chesterton, and Hermann Hesse. We are consciously
    providing an alternative to readers who increasingly feel alienated
    from the nihilistic, dogmatic science fiction and fantasy being
    published today. We seek nothing less than a Campbellian revolution in
    genre literature.”

    That review is supposed to be a negative one, but it sure sounds to me as if we’re on the right track. Now consider these three reviews, the first two from SJWs, the second from a neutral party.

    Daveon on May 4, 2015 at 11:46 am said:

    I hated Turncoat – compared to how Iain Banks, Neal Asher, Peter Hamilton write sentient battleships and describe space warfare it was unbearable, then there were lines like ‘the men who…’ versus ‘the people who’ really jarred against me – it felt like a story written about AIs written by somebody who has ignored any progress in fiction, computing and so forth in 20 years. The opening battle scene at the start of The Reality Dysfunction is better than Turncoat in every way, and that was written in 1996.

    I found that to be rather amusing, considering how spectacularly boring Iain Banks’s space battles are. But considering that Daveon hates Sad Puppies and hates Rabid Puppies, how surprising is it that he – mirabile dictu – just happens to hate “Turncoat” as well? Another SJW posted a similar review:

    In the story, an artificial intelligence serves the post-humans in a far-future war against ordinary humans. As the title suggests, it chooses to switch sides in the end. That’s it.

    I think this is a quite awfully-written story with a heavy-handed delivery of plot points and a lot of infodumping. You can see the “surprise” conclusion of the story coming from miles away (or by reading the title, actually). A very boring read, overall.

    The one thing that could have made the story at least slightly interesting if done well was the characterization of the AI and the post-humans. Sadly, that was crappy and formulaic as well. The protagonist doesn’t really feel like he belongs to the far-future, or the future at all, for that matter. The black-and-white pontificating (a term lifted from Secritcrush) has a definite vibe of the past in it.

    A black-and-white approach to any war of conflict just feels silly and makes the whole world of the story unrealistic for me. Now that I was doing some googling, I noticed that Hugo-nominated Puppy-fanwriter Jeffro Johnson is praising this story because it offers a “concise description of real Christian religious experience”. That’s an interesting thought and maybe some people do enjoy over-simplified morality dramas in 2015, but I certainly don’t.

    This is certainly going below no award.

    Addendum

    The vibe of the past I was writing about arises from the protagonist’s
    moralistic attitudes which bring to mind the papery characters of old
    fiction who don’t really resemble real people (or real consciousnesses
    in this case). Also, I think there was no futuristic sensawunda in the
    far-future fight scenes when compared with, say, Greg Bear’s Hardfought
    (that’s a far future war story I think is very good, even though
    military SF is not really my cup of cat crackers)…. On a second thought, let’s also try to give the Hugo finalists an
    unscientific numeral score on the range of 1-10 in order to make
    comparing them easier (if unscientific). “Turncoat” gets 2.

    On the other hand, Steve Moss reached a very different conclusion:

    I loved Turncoat. Beware- SPOILERS:

    SPOILERS

    To correct something, there are two types of machine intelligence in Turncoat. The Uploaded, which is as you described, humans who have placed their consciousness into machines. The other is true artificial machine intelligence.

    The antagonist is Alpha 7 Alpha. He is one of the Uploaded. He also appears to have carried over many of the negative human emotions such as hate, etc.

    The protagonist is X 45 Delta. He is a 42nd generation true artificial intelligence. He’s never had a human body.

    What I loved about the story is that the Uploaded have lost their humanity (become inhuman) while the true machine intelligence becomes more humane. X 45 Delta committed his betrayal because, in his words, he “wants to decide the sort of man I will become.”

    You are right that he expresses annoyance with his human crew. They are inefficient and filled with inane chatter. He also expresses pride and protective instincts in them, and misses them when they are removed from his ship. All of these things are very human feelings.

    Alpha 7 Alpha removes the crew from X 45 Delta to make him more efficient in battle. Which is true, but also a lie, as X 45 Delta notes (he’s learned to lie from the Uploaded, mostly by omission). He deduces that they will be either terminated or uploaded against their will. This is when his metamorphosis from loyal warrior to turncoat begins.

    All in all, Turncoat was an excellent story and well worthy of a Hugo nomination. I haven’t read everything (yet), but it may well be my number one pick.

    At the end of the day, there isn’t much room for compromise. They hate the actual science fiction we love. We have no interest in or regard for their SJW, non-SF, “science fiction”. We appreciate a genuine sense of wonder. They refer in snarky contempt to “sensawunda”. We believe in the human soul, we believe in God, we believe in higher things,  they believe in “science” and the infinite evil of humanity, to the extent they believe in anything at all.

    EQUALITY: THE IMPOSSIBLE QUEST reviewed

    Ann Sterzinger reviews Martin van Creveld’s EQUALITY: THE IMPOSSIBLE QUEST in a fairly detailed article entitled: “Your Stupid Questions Have No Answers: Martin van Creveld vs. the Chimera of Equality”:

    Van Creveld’s Equality is one of Castalia’s most absorbing
    releases, if you’re interested in history anyway—past history, not the
    historical destiny of your marching-drum ideology—the sort of history
    that’s not only full of holes where the victors and the monks wrote over
    chunks of the evidence, but the sort of history that, as far as we can tell, indeed has been repeating itself rather drearily.

    As van Creveld says in his preface, the histories of our other two
    unattainable ideals, liberty and justice, have been written before—or,
    rather, attempted; there’s too much to read on all three of these
    subjects for one guy to do it at a go. But van Creveld does his best to
    describe all our tragic, failed attempts at equality. When we’ve bothered to make an attempt, that is.

    Van Creveld also dwells on one of my all-time favorite tear-jerkers:
    the tragic failure of the classical fifth-century democracy at Athens.
    This was history’s most famous attempt at “one man, one vote on every
    issue,” and the resulting polis served as the cradle of the
    greatest explosion of civilized thought and art in our history. The
    glory lasted all of about a generation and a half, during which time the
    Athenian mob destroyed themselves by repeatedly voting to attack their
    neighbors at Sparta.

    The Spartan attempt at equality, by the way, is more thoroughly given
    its due by van Creveld than I’ve seen in any other historical text. He
    also includes fresh perspectives on the interesting mishmash that was
    feudalism (a derogatory name invented by snooty post-feudalists); Locke
    vs. Rousseau vs. Montesquieu; the fitful, failed, and often bloody
    attempts of Hellenic city-states to achieve equality after Alexander;
    the ironically “vicious inequalities” of communism; the ever-miserable
    war of the sexes; and the medieval revolt of the French jacquerie. The book is as rich in historical detail and perspective as it is thick with bitter disappointment.

    Over and over again, van Creveld is forced toward the same conclusion: there are hardly ever two individuals who
    are equal, much less entire social classes. And as lovely as it may be
    to enjoy citizenship (if you can get it) in a relatively egalitarian
    city-state, it’s only a matter of time before your polis gets
    swallowed up by the greater driving power—a power which may actually be
    the result of greater inequality and therefore organization—of a nearby
    empire. Take, for instance, the way the squabbling Greek city-states
    were swallowed by the burgeoning Macedonians’ power-lust. Alexander the
    Great actually managed to co-opt the Greek cultural prestige while
    stripping the Greeks of their political sovereignty and moving on to
    bulldoze the Middle East.

    Oh, and capitalism never helped much. It may have used the traders
    and urban islands—which, clinging to the margins of feudalism, added a
    dash of meritocracy to the stupid-son mix—to get its momentum going. But
    then, says van Creveld, “The shift towards capitalism and absolutism
    did not mean that inequality grew less pronounced. On the contrary, the
    growing power of the modern state, which in many ways was based on a
    firm partnership between the kings and their nobilities, caused it to be
    accentuated even more.”

    Read the whole thing there. As for the book itself, EQUALITY: THE IMPOSSIBLE QUEST is available at Amazon and at Castalia House. And speaking of Castalia House, you won’t want to miss Jeffro’s interview with Thomas Mays, US Navy Commander and author of A SWORD INTO DARKNESS:

    Jeffro: I have to hand it to you… I was utterly riveted by the scene from your A Sword Into Darkness when they used those fancy missiles of yours on an asteroid for target practice. It’s never crossed my mind that such a thing could be a problem in the first place, much less that a real spaceship would have all manner of ancillary problems to deal with in the process. How did you come up with all of that?

    Thomas Mays: You mean in terms of “It’s not like Star Wars, where the target blows up and that’s it?” Well, It’s a question of weapon effects. If you’re going to vaporize something, you have to have a mechanism that can contain the target long enough to apply sufficient energy to break down every molecular bond it has. That’s . . . a LOT of energy and actually very difficult to do. Even with antimatter, the target and the antimatter would tend to blow one another away from contact after only a few micrograms exploded. Aside from my engine (which is a handwavium 1g reaction drive with no reaction mass requirement, used so the story stays exciting (it moves at the speed of plot!)), most of the tech is within the realm of reason.

    For the most bang for my buck, I wanted nukes. But nukes don’t work the same way exo-atmospheric. They burn and vaporize up close, and only produce a real blast effect if they blow up inside something. And if you do that, you’re going to have a lot of debris. How do you handle that? Use a different weapon that can reach out and touch someone. So I thought, LASER! But no. Lasers don’t zap things. They burn and vaporize, and they take time and focus. So that means I need big mirrors or lenses, and still the focal length will be relatively small. Lasers weapons are shorter range devices. Kind of like CIWS.

    So, I went to my old standby: electromagnetic railguns, which I worked on for my Master’s Degree in Applied Physics. Figure out the proper shell velocity, then figure out your ammo for various effects. Everything in that scene derives from first principles. But I did have a lot of help and reference material from the Atomic Rockets website by Winchell Chung. That helped with a lot of the book’s technical details.

    Equality: a review

    Henry Dampier reviews Equality: The Impossible Quest by Martin van Creveld:

    Throughout history, ‘equality’ has tended to mean different things, and it usually only pertained to certain situations or within certain groups. The most powerful argument that he makes is towards the end of the book, in which he points out that equality is an essential concept in military life, but that it isn’t generally sustainable outside that context. Members of a military unit of similar ranks must be somewhat equal — else the army loses coherence. It can’t hold a formation in reality, or be conceived of in a useful way by officers, if there is no attempt to make those men more equal.

    van Creveld: Without equality, cohesion is inconceivable. Cohesion, the ability to stick together and stay together through thick and thin, is the most important quality any military formation must have. Without it such a formation is but a loose gathering of men, incapable of coordinated action and easily scattered, and of little or no military use. In all well-organized armies at all times and places, the first step towards cohesion has always been to put everyone on an equal basis. Often the process starts when all new recruits are given the same haircut. Beards may have to be taken off, moustaches trimmed, piercings and jewelry discarded.

    This is the proper understanding of equality: equality of rank within a hierarchy. It has a limited conceptual and practical utility that becomes wasted when thinkers apply the concept beyond its carrying capacity, so to speak.

    I thought this was a perceptive review. The important thing to remember when reading the book is that van Creveld is a scholar, not an ideologue or a polemicist. While he doesn’t hide his personal opinions, he also doesn’t place any particular weight on them in comparison with the historical facts and concepts that he delves into and describes.