Tag: decline and fall

Mailvox: the Collapsing Parodist

Tor sent out an email with a big excerpt from McRapey’s forthcoming attempt to take his inimitable skills at imitation to new heights and rip off both Isaac Asimov and Frank Herbert AT THE SAME TIME:

Enter The Flow With Excerpts from John Scalzi’s The Collapsing Empire

The Collapsing Empire is available March 21, but in the meantime, you can transport yourself into Scalzi’s interstellar epic with excerpts on Tor.com. We’ll be posting chapters all week; you can get started right away with the prologue and Chapter One, and check back all this week for additional excerpts, collected below. Happy Reading!

Yesterday I received an email from an intrepid SF reader who boldly dared to go where few would bother. His conclusions:

I read the excerpt and postscript of it just yesterday. It is really bad – there’s an entire chapter where strategy or politics is discussed by some lady who has been walked in on while fucking Wesley Crusher, and she just keeps going at it while continuing the conversation. Deeply pathetic.

Wait… it turns out I made a mistake. The Amazon Look Inside copy has missing pages during the Wesley Crusher episode, which is why I thought it consumed most of the chapter. After reading the Amazon sample, I looked at the Wesley Crusher chapter that Tor posted, and she only has her conversation while having sex for about two pages or so. It is nevertheless patently ridiculous, although much much funnier in the Look Inside version where she has her third party conversation for about 15 pages while getting plowed by a boy toy.

Sadly, the misunderstood version is a better yarn. The ironic thing about it is that end of the book gives away that the Flow or whatever it is called has been based on some convoluted lie the entire time. And now they finish by having to establish a new lie to keep the galaxy going, or something.

It is surprisingly devoid of snark. Or anything resembling emotion. It reads like a damned board meeting or something. It’s like he plagiarized SFWA treasury meetings for inspiration.

Oh. My. I’m not surprised in the least. But I am amused. You know that later today, there will be an executive at Macmillan flipping through the book and saying, “wait, Patrick paid HOW much for this shit?” But then, I thought, surely the reviewer exaggerates!

No, as it turns out, no, he isn’t.

Chapter Two

Kiva Lagos was busily fucking the brains out of the assistant purser she’d been after for the last six weeks of the Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby’s trip from Lankaran to End when Second Officer Waylov Brennir entered her stateroom, unannounced. “You’re needed,” he said.


“I’m a little busy at the moment,” Kiva said. She’d just finally gotten herself into a groove, so fuck Waylov (not literally, he was awful) if she was going to get out of the groove just because he walked into it. Grooves were hard to come by. People have sex, and he was unannounced. If this was what he walked into, it was his fault, not hers. The assistant purser seemed a little concerned, but Kiva applied a little pressure to make it clear festivities were to continue.


“It’s important.”


“Trust me, so is this.”


“We’ve got a customs official who won’t let us take any haverfruit off the ship,” Brennir said. If he was shocked or scandalized by Lagos’s activities he was doing a good job of hiding it. He mostly looked bored. “Offloading our haverfruit is why we came to End. If we don’t sell it, or develop licenses, we’re screwed. You’re the owner’s representative. You’re going to have to explain to your mother why this trip was the cause of the financial ruin of your family. So perhaps you might like to join Captain Blinnikka in talking with this customs official right now to see if you can resolve this problem. Or you can just go on fucking that junior crew member, ma’am. I’m sure those are equivalent activities as regards your future, and the future of this ship, and your family.”


“Well, shit,” Kiva said. Her groove was definitely gone, and the assistant purser, her little project, looked pretty miserable at the moment. “That was a pretty impressive jab you just gave to someone who can fire your ass, Brennir.”


“You can’t fire me, ma’am,” Brennir said. “I’ve got tenure with the guild. Now, are you coming or not?”


“I’m thinking.”

Well, it is sort of reminiscent of Asimovian naming conventions, I suppose. Awful as it is, I don’t think it quite manages to top this legendary exchange from the Hugo Award-winning Redshirts, though.

“Man, I owe you a blowjob,” Duvall said.


“What?” Dahl said.


“What?” Hester said.


“Sorry,” Duvall said. “In ground forces, when someone does you a favor you tell them you owe them a sex act. If it’s a little thing, it’s a handjob. Medium, blowjob. Big favor, you owe them a fuck. Force of habit. It’s just an expression.”


“Got it,” Dahl said.


“No actual blowjob forthcoming,” Duvall said. “To be clear”


“It’s the thought that counts,” Dahl said, and turned to Hester. “What about you? You want to owe me a blowjob, too?”


“I’m thinking about it ,” Hester said.   


You can tell from that gritty, realistic dialogue that McRapey has spent a lot of time with manly, military men, doing manly, military things. But there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that McRapey has written that I find funnier than this absolute jewel of pure, unadulterated fiction.


[Vox] really has a thing for me, which is straight-up pure envy, as far as I can tell.


My dear, very dear, Mr. Scalzi, while there are certainly authors whose literary accomplishments and talents I envy, from Umberto Eco and Hermann Hesse to Tanith Lee and Edgar Allen Poe, I can assure you, with 100 percent honesty, that you are not, and have never been, among them.

What to do, what not to do

The Men of the West have suggestions for the Alt-Right, the Alt-Lite, and other defenders of Western civilization:

So, you have looked around and realized that the world is not how it should be. Things that were good in the past  have decayed. Our culture is crumbling around us. We see things that are good and proper being ignored or even intentionally dismantled, replaced with obscenities and evil. Whether we are talking about governmental policies or business practices, or even educational opportunities, we can no longer rely on things as they are. They do not produce an end result that indicates a healthy, godly culture. So what do we do? As I see it, we have three choices.

First, the thing we cannot do, though it is an option, is to just stick our heads back in the sand and ignore it. Look, it is time to make a stand, not just let things progress down this path to destruction.

Secondly, we can point out problems. We can gripe about them. We can write articles, blog posts, and generally complain. Now, I do think we need to do this. It is important. Without calling out the problems, nothing will be done. However, we cannot stop there.

igThird, we have to address these problems, whatever they may be, and begin to do something about them. We point them out, and then enact change. The time for “go along to get along” is past. In fact, it was never a good choice, but so many of us just figured things will work themselves out. Unfortunately, that is not the case. We have to take real action.

  • Use resources that are consistent with our world view. We recently ran a post with such resources. Make it your habit to support them, whether with finances or just by using them. The more we spread these healthy alternatives, the more people will be exposed to them and the more impact they will have.
  • Use your own skills and talents to produce more alternatives. Already, good folks have created alternatives to Wikipedia, Twitter, and more. Other alternatives are in the works. We need folks to step up and create even more of these. If your skill set allows you to help produce those, then go for it. Many, maybe most, of these won’t catch on, but so what? Some will. The more that do, the more that can follow. We just need traction to get these things to succeed.
  • Stop complaining about those who are stepping up. Rather than trying to be a “moderate,” be an extremist. This is no time for moderation. As Barry Goldwater stated: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” We have no patience for moderates. We want wholesale change and will work to make it happen.
  • Network with likeminded folks. Recently, a commenter on this site pointed out that too many people spend time complaining and writing articles, but not enough time actually doing anything. While the majority of his post was incorrect, on this one point, he was spot on. 

These are key points. Unless you are a beta tester or a proofreader, don’t kid yourself into thinking that complaints and criticism are “helping” anyone or doing anything. They’re not. In almost all cases, the criticism is superficial and redundant, while the complaints are both irritating and demoralizing. And perhaps more importantly, if you had ever done anything yourself, you would know that.

So get involved. Do something. Act. Build. Cheer. Support. Subscribe. Sustain. That’s how you can make a difference. That’s how we will stave off collapse.

An amazingly bad idea

Greece completely fails history:

Athens’s half a million Muslims are set to get their first official mosque in more than a century.

The city has not had a formal mosque since it drove out occupying Ottomans in 1833, and Deputy Foreign Minister Ioannis Amanantidis told parliament last year that it was the only European capital “to be deprived of such a religious space”.

For years Muslims have resorted to praying in hundreds of makeshift sites, in crowded basements or dark warehouses targeted by racist attackers.

In May, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras declared building a mosque long overdue. The government, he said, would push ahead “out of respect for the Muslim residents in our capital, but also because we are obliged to actively defend our values.”

All I can say is that World War III is going to be beyond all imagination. These are truly the Crazy Years.

One can understand how the USA and Western Europe are naive about the existential threat posed by Islamic expansion. But one would have thought that Greece and Spain, at a bare minimum, would remember.

This demonstrates, again, why Christianity is absolutely necessary for Western civilization. It’s barely been a decade since some Western nations abandoned their state churches, and they’re already committing societal suicide.

Magic Dirt Fail: Byzantine edition

More historical lessons courtesy of the great historian Charles Oman:

The chief modifications which must be marked in the character of the empire between 320 and 620 depend on two processes of gradual change which were going on throughout the three centuries. The first was the gradual de-Romanization (if we may coin the uncouth word) alike of the governing classes and the masses of population.

In the fourth century the Roman impress was still strong in the East; the Latin language was habitually spoken by every educated man, and nearly all the machinery of the administration was worked in Latin phraseology. All law terms are habitually Latin, all titles of officers, all names of taxes and institutions. Writers born and bred in Greece or Asia still wrote in Latin as often as in the Greek which must have been more familiar to them. Ammianus Marcellinus may serve as a fair example: born in Greece, he wrote in the tongue of the ruling race rather than in his own idiom.

Moreover there was still in the lands east of the Adriatic a very large body of Latin-speaking population—comprising all the inhabitants of the inland of the Balkan peninsula, for, except Greece proper, Macedonia, and a scattered line of cities along the Thracian coast, the whole land had learnt to speak the tongue of its conquerors. By the seventh century this Roman element was rapidly vanishing.

Three hundred years for the cultural de-Romanization of the Eastern Roman Empire. We’ve seen significant cultural de-Americanization in 72 fewer years as America 1.0 gave way to America 2.0, and now 3.0, and the linguistic devolution is already well underway.

I also note the similarity between the failure of the Byzantine men to embrace the masculine duties of their citizenship during this period of decline and the failure of Western women to embrace the feminine duties of theirs.

Some of the developments of the new idea were harmful and even dangerous to the State. They took the form of laying such exclusive stress on the relations between the individual soul and heaven, that the duties of man to the State were half forgotten. Chief among these developments was the ascetic monasticism which, starting from Egypt, spread rapidly all over the empire, more especially over its eastern provinces.

When men retire from their duties as citizens, intent on nothing but on saving their own souls, take up a position outside the State, and cease to be of the slightest use to society, the result may be harmless so long as their numbers are small. But at this time the monastic impulse was working on such a large scale that its development was positively dangerous. It was by thousands and ten thousands that the men who ought to have been bearing the burdens of the State, stepped aside into the monastery or the hermit’s cave.

The ascetics of the fifth century had neither of the justifications which made monasticism precious in a later age, they were neither missionaries nor men of learning. The monastery did not devote itself either to sending out preachers and teachers, or to storing up and cherishing the literary treasures of the ancient world.

One could even observe that the office is the modern version of the nunnery, where unmarriageable women who will never have children go to spend their barren lives and busy themselves with make-work until they die.

The children of the lie

As an astute, insightful, and handsome political philosopher once wrote, SJWs always lie, and never more than when they are attempting to sell their Narrative.

The major student-run paper of UC Berkeley ran five op-eds Tuesday defending the riots on campus, and arguing that violence was an acceptable response to a speech from Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos.

The Daily Californian editorial board published five op-eds from five students and former students, who uniformly believed the riot was justified. Nisa Dang demanded critics “check their privilege” before condemning the riots, blaming the violence on the appearance of the police. “I don’t care what Breitbart article or liberal bullshit listicle you’ve read, or what your experiences in white suburbia might have taught you — police are violent agents of the state.”

Juan Prieto insisted the violence was justified because Yiannopoloulos could have outed illegal immigrant students: “To me, the argument should not revolve just around freedom of speech but also around the hate speech that fails to respect the humanity of undocumented people. This speaker has never provided an insightful look at conservatism nor provided intellectual debate to the arena. He has fabricated a tool to sensationalize himself with while providing a platform for white supremacists to come together.”

“These were not acts of violence. They were acts of self defense,” wrote queer activist and former columnist Neil Lawrence. “And to Yiannopoulos and all your friends who invited you and hosted you and defended your ‘right’ to speak: I recommend you learn your lesson. Our shields are raised against you. No one will protect us? We will protect ourselves.”

“The violence that forms the foundation of Yiannopoulos’ ideology is far worse than any tactic the black bloc uses,” argued Desmond Meagley.

It’s rather amusing that the SJWs are now reduced to openly arguing that violence is a justifiable response to speech. But it’s not hard to understand why they are so frightened and irrational; there is no place for them in Western civilization, or indeed, any advanced and civilized society. The dyscivic and the dyscivilizational will be expelled from the West because Reconquista 2.0 is coming.

Show them no pity, mercy, or quarter, because none will be shown to you or to your family. The Alt-Right terrifies them because their rhetorical weapons are helpless against it. We feel neither shame nor guilt for who we are or for what our ancestors built.

And what they destroy, we will rebuild. They cannot stop us, they cannot beat us, all they could ever do was whisper “shame” and “surrender” and “submit” in our ears. But we are not listening to them any longer. They shriek and babble in vain.

Immigration is anti-America

Ann Coulter points out the absurdity of the recent Federal court rulings on the God-Emperor’s travel ban:

To review:

— When the president’s immigration policy is to promote international communism: The president wins.

— When the president’s immigration policy is to transform America into a different country: The president wins.

— But when the president’s immigration policy is to protect Americans: Some piss-ant judge announces that his authority exceeds that of the president.

This is exactly what I warned you about in Adios, America: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole. Nothing Trump does will be met with such massive resistance as his immigration policies.

The left used to attack America by spying for Stalin, aiding our enemies, murdering cops and blowing up buildings. But, then liberals realized, it’s so much more effective to just do away with America altogether!

Teddy Kennedy gave them their chance with the 1965 immigration act. Since then, we’ve been taking in more than a million immigrants a year, 90 percent from comically primitive cultures. They like the welfare, but have very little interest in adopting the rest of our culture.

In many parts of the country, you’re already not living in America. Just a few more years, and the transformation will be complete. There will be a North American landmass known as “the United States,” but it won’t be our country.

It seems to me that the God-Emperor should simply declare the judge an enemy of America and unleash the drones. After all, Judge Robart is certainly a bigger threat to both the United States and Americans than any of the U.S. citizens that Obama ordered killed in drone strikes.

Deportation is a moral imperative

Over thirty Americans are killed every year due to the federal government’s failure to deport criminal immigrants:

At least 121 killings within a four-year span were carried out by convicted immigrants who were not deported, according to a 2015 U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee document recently reviewed by el Nuevo Herald.

Every year, federal immigration authorities release foreign nationals convicted of crimes — including murder — both because the U.S. Supreme Court has prohibited indefinite detention or because their countries refuse to take them back even after immigration judges have ordered deportation.

While the release of convicted immigrant criminals has been routine since the Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling 15 years ago, the practice is now in the national spotlight because President Donald Trump has made it imperative to deport immigrant convicts as quickly as possible lest they commit more crimes.

Research by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee has elicited evidence that could be used to back Trump’s claim. A committee document, obtained by el Nuevo Herald, contains comprehensive information from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) about the number of immigrant convicts in the United States, their whereabouts, whether immigration authorities have succeeded in deporting them and whether they committed additional crimes after being released.

A committee letter sent to the Department of Justice and the Departments of State and Homeland Security nearly two years ago said that at least 121 homicides “could have been avoided” between 2010 and 2014 had Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), under the prior Obama administration, deported immigrant convicts instead of releasing them.

“This disturbing fact follows ICE’s admission that, of the 36,007 criminal aliens it released from ICE custody in Fiscal Year 2013, 1,000 have been re-convicted of additional crimes in the short time since their release,” according to the letter, dated June 12, 2015.

Immigrants and refugees are ALWAYS an existential threat to the nation. And they are a lethal threat to individual citizens as well. Whatever happened to the “if it saves just one life” standard? Restoring the US demographic balance to its pre-1965 levels would save THOUSANDS of American lives every year.

The God-Emperor strikes back

It’s good to see that the Trump administration isn’t backing down one iota to the various challenges being presented to them:

You’re either with the Trump administration or you’re against it.

After Uber CEO Travis Kalanick’s call with President Donald Trump on Thursday and decision to quit his business-advisory council, the sentiment within the White House, according to Mike Allen of Axios, is, “If you want to cut off your access to the White House, f— you.”

That quote came to Allen from “some in Trump’s inner circle,” he reported. (Allen is deeply sourced within the Trump administration.)

Kalanick told Uber staff in a memo Thursday that he wouldn’t attend Trump’s closed-door council meeting on Friday and had quit the council after pressure from employees, drivers, and the public.

Like Gideon, the God-Emperor needs only those who are ready and willing to fight. And my prediction is that he’s going to come back with a stronger, more comprehensive immigration ban, combined with large-scale repatriations, regardless of how quickly the federal judge’s ridiculous order overturning his executive order is overturned… or ignored.

When President Trump ordered a vast overhaul of immigration law enforcement during his first week in office, he stripped away most restrictions on who should be deported, opening the door for roundups and detentions on a scale not seen in nearly a decade.

Some 6 million to 8 million people in the country illegally could be considered priorities for deportation, according to calculations by the Los Angeles Times. They were based on interviews with experts who studied the order and two internal documents that signal immigration officials are taking an expansive view of Trump’s directive.

Far from targeting only “bad hombres,” as Trump has said repeatedly, his new order allows immigration agents to detain nearly anyone they come in contact with who has crossed the border illegally. People could be booked into custody for using food stamps or if their child receives free school lunches.

The deportation targets are a much larger group than those swept up in the travel bans that sowed chaos at airports and seized public attention over the past week. Fewer than 1 million people came to the U.S. over the past decade from the seven countries from which most visitors are temporarily blocked.

Eight million isn’t a bad start. It’s a solid first step towards the full 80 million required to restore the promised pre-1965 demographic balance. It doesn’t matter if you were born American in Portugal or Somalia or Russia. It doesn’t matter if you have the government paperwork. You’re still not American. You will never be American. Not even the adulterated American 2.0. And you have to go back.

I realize that the prospect of returning to one’s ancestral homeland is not necessarily nice for everyone. Most people rather like living in a wealthy white country their parents did not, and could not, build, that they and their children cannot even maintain. And yes, hundreds of thousands of very good people will, through no fault of their own, see disruption in their lives and a decline in their living standards. And yet, I don’t care, not even a little bit, because the alternative is war. The alternative is the collapse of the political entity called the United States of America into multiple ethnostates and violence on a scale that has not been seen on the continent since the American Indian was very nearly genocided and assimilated into nonexistence.

The fact that the white settlers didn’t intend it didn’t mean it didn’t happen, any more than the fact that the architects of the 1965 Hart-Celler Act didn’t intend for 85 million first- and second-generation immigrants to colonize the USA means that they didn’t do so. Intentions are irrelevant. Consequences are not derived from intentions, but from actions.

Having the former global superpower collapse into Yugoslavia with nukes is a nightmare scenario for everyone on the planet, even for the Chinese, the Iranians, and the Russians, who would be inclined to welcome the removal of the US military’s leash on their ambitions and strategic objectives. That is the alternative the propositionals and melting potheads and dual citizens and immigrants have chosen. They prefer political collapse and mass death to giving up their self-serving 20th-century historical myths.

I understand most people can’t imagine that this is even possible, let alone the most probable outcome. Do you think the Emperor Valens ever imagined for one second that providing refuge to eight hundred thousand desperate Visigoths would lead directly to his death, the destruction of his army, the siege of Constantinople, and the Sack of Rome? Did anyone who read my column in 2002 believe that a collapse of housing prices would lead to a financial crisis six years later?

Now, I will be very surprised if the Trump administration is successful in even halfway restoring the historical demographic balance, but then, both Trump and Bannon appear to have some understanding of what is actually at stake here. No one expected Ronald Reagan to win the Cold War either, so perhaps the God-Emperor has what it takes to win the Blood War.

UPDATE: the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals refused to reinstate the executive order. They must really want him to institute martial law. Of course, that would make a lot of things easier.
A federal appeals court early Sunday denied an initial bid by the Trump administration to restore its controversial immigration order that had barred refugees and people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States.

A judge in a lower federal court had put a temporary stop to the travel ban. Because the appeals court declined to intervene immediately, affected travelers can enter until at least until Monday. The appeals court set a schedule asking challengers to the ban to file a response by roughly 3 a.m. Eastern on Monday, and the Justice Department — representing the Trump administration — to reply to that by 6 p.m. A Justice Department spokesman said government lawyers would wait until then to make their next move. “With the fast briefing schedule the appeals court laid out, we do not plan to ask the Supreme Court for an immediate stay but instead let the appeals process play out,” Peter Carr said.

One last chance

The Swog Blog explains why it will be important to keep the Left out of power:

Donald Trump’s election may have given us a lifeline, but it has also raised the stakes tremendously. There is no turning back now. If the left ever gets back in power, they will be merciless. If power is returned to the bloodthirsty mobs who have explicitly justified open violence against the right, they will be openly violent against the right. And we will never see that power again.

It will be fucking over.

The institutions that the left has seized over the last few generations must be gutted. The media must continue to see their influence and credibility destroyed. The leftist brainwashing machine we refer to as “public education” must be dismantled. Donald Trump cannot allow the left to terrorize the streets and intimidate the right. And we must dominate the elections over the next 8 years.

Social media gives me hope. It’s the x-factor that no previous wave of rising leftist tyranny has had to deal with. The effect of street thuggery may be nullified by the utilization of social media to wake up and inspire masses.

But if we are going to succeed and survive, we need to recognize the magnitude of the battle at hand. This is our last chance. Time to start acting like it.

Correction: this is not our last chance. This is merely our last chance to peacefully defend Western civilization. But regardless of how matters play out, the Alt-Right will be there. And the God-Emperor is already showing us the way.