Tag: decline and fall

Repatriation is off the table

With 41.3 million immigrants now having successfully invaded the USA, it now appears to be too late for repatriation:

The number of legal and illegal immigrants living in the United States reached an all-time high, at 41.3 million people, in 2013, according to a new report from the Center for Immigration Studies.

The U.S. immigrant population has doubled since 1990, while the general population has risen just over 20 percent, and quadrupled since 1970, while the general population has risen just over 50 percent since then. The greatest increases over the last three years in the immigrant population over the last three years, between July 2010 and July 2013, came not from Latin America but from the Middle East, Asia, and the Caribbean…. Nearly one out of every six adults living in the U.S. in 2013 was an immigrant.   

Well, if repatriation is out, that leaves four possibilities:

  1. Peaceful coexistence forever
  2. A gradual amalgamation into a single new people
  3. Civil war and partition
  4. A return to a homogeneous nation through ethnic cleansing and mass slaughter

I leave it to the historically literate to present their cases for which of these four alternatives are most likely. As longtime readers are aware, my expectation is #3 in the year 2033.

As for those who try to pretend that mass immigration on this scale is not an invasion, note that this is 1.3 million more people than lived in all of England in 1931. The USA is materially more invaded and occupied than every single country that was occupied by the British Empire. The total population of France going into World War II was 41.7 million. The USA has been invaded by the equivalent of a major European power and the magic of geographical translocation has failed to transform them into white Christian Americans who regard the Constitution as law.

This is not going to end well. Not for anyone, not even the globalists who think everything is working to their long-term advantage.

The beginning of the end

This 1978 speech given by Alexander Solzhenitsyn at Harvard is not only prophetic, but appears to have fallen entirely on deaf ears:

How short a time ago, relatively, the small, new European world was easily seizing colonies everywhere, not only without anticipating any real resistance, but also usually despising any possible values in the conquered people’s approach to life. On the face of it, it was an overwhelming success. There were no geographic frontiers [limits] to it. Western society expanded in a triumph of human independence and power. And all of a sudden in the 20th century came the discovery of its fragility and friability.

We now see that the conquests proved to be short lived and precarious — and this, in turn, points to defects in the Western view of the world which led to these conquests. Relations with the former colonial world now have turned into their opposite and the Western world often goes to extremes of subservience, but it is difficult yet to estimate the total size of the bill which former colonial countries will present to the West and it is difficult to predict whether the surrender not only of its last colonies, but of everything it owns, will be sufficient for the West to foot the bill.

But the blindness of superiority continues in spite of all and upholds the belief that the vast regions everywhere on our planet should develop and mature to the level of present day Western systems, which in theory are the best and in practice the most attractive. There is this belief that all those other worlds are only being temporarily prevented (by wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own barbarity and incomprehension) from taking the way of Western pluralistic democracy and from adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in this direction.

However, it is a conception which develops out of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, out of the mistake of measuring them all with a Western yardstick. The real picture of our planet’s development is quite different and which about our divided world gave birth to the theory of convergence between leading Western countries and the Soviet Union. It is a soothing theory which overlooks the fact that these worlds are not at all developing into similarity. Neither one can be transformed into the other without the use of violence. Besides, convergence inevitably means acceptance of the other side’s defects, too, and this is hardly desirable.

If I were today addressing an audience in my country, examining the overall pattern of the world’s rifts, I would have concentrated on the East’s calamities. But since my forced exile in the West has now lasted four years and since my audience is a Western one, I think it may be of greater interest to concentrate on certain aspects of the West, in our days, such as I see them.

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course, there are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.

Political and intellectual bureaucrats show depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in theoretical reflections to explain how realistic, reasonable, as well as intellectually and even morally worn it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And decline in courage is ironically emphasized by occasional explosions of anger and inflexibility on the part of the same bureaucrats when dealing with weak governments and with countries not supported by anyone, or with currents which cannot offer any resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.

Should one point out that from ancient times declining courage has been considered the beginning of the end?

Solzhenitsyn even foresaw the vicious and unending assault of the Social Justice Warriors: “Social dogmatism leaves us completely helpless in front of the trials of our times.” Social Justice Enforcers would be a more apt term. The SJWs are nothing less than the mutaween of the godless West, the self-appointed enforcers of the would-be globalist elite’s hellish parody of morality.

This is the time to make your choice. This is the time to stand up for what you believe. This is the time to show courage rather than to keep silent in the hope that you will be overlooked and the rabid mob will pass you by. This is the time to support those who stand with you and abandon those who don’t. This is the time to stop trying to appease the voracious, insatiable rabbits, who have tasted blood and discovered that they rather like it.

This is not the time for cowardice.

Sooner or later, the end will come. Every society ever known to Man has come to an end and ours will not be an exception. But if it ends in our time, let us be found with wounds in the front of our bodies and broken, bloody swords in hand. And if it ends in our children’s or grandchildren’s times, let them be able to look to us, as we look to Solzhenitsyn, and know that we prepared them for the battles they must fight.

The internal invasion

The parasites are fleeing their self-made hellholes and are busily engaged in recreating them in their new residences:

Californians have moved to Colorado and Nevada. Massachusetts natives have moved to New Hampshire. New Yorkers have moved to North Carolina and Virginia — and, of course, have continued moving to Florida.

Over the last few decades, residents of many traditionally liberal states have moved to states that were once more conservative. And this pattern has played an important role in helping the Democratic Party win the last two presidential elections and four of the last six. The growth of the Latino population and the social liberalism of the millennial generation may receive more attention, but the growing diaspora of blue-state America matters as well.

The blue diaspora has helped offset the fact that many of the nation’s fastest-growing states are traditionally Republican. You can think of it as a kind of race: Population growth in these Republican states is reducing the share of the Electoral College held by traditionally Democratic states. But Democratic migration has been fast enough, so far, to allow the party to overcome the fact that the Northeast and industrial Midwest contain a smaller portion of the country’s population than they once did….

Since 2000, the blue-born population in red states has grown by almost a quarter, to 11.5 million, or 12 percent of the states’ total population. These changes aren’t happening simply because the national population has grown over the same period, either. In fact, the red-born population in blue states shrank, to 7.3 million from 8.4 million, between 2000 and 2012.

And thus ends the grand experiment of the laboratories of democracy. This is why the right to free association, also known to its critics as segregation, is an absolute must for any democratic society that wishes to retain its character. In an age of mobility, any system that functions will be rapidly swamped by the invading denizens of those systems that don’t work.

It should never be forgotten that most of the 18th century political principles were developed prior to the age of mass global transportation. It should not be a surprise that not all of them are capable of surviving it.

The terrible cost of equality

It is becoming abundantly clear that immigration from outside Europe is not only dyscivic, but dysgenic as well. The Men of the West are becoming literally stupider as a result of opening their nations to various orcs, trolls, and goblins combined with the widespread adoption of a feminist philosophy that significantly increases the probabilities that the West’s most intelligent women – and many of its most intelligent men – will never have children:

An IQ test used to determine whether Danish men are fit to serve in the military has revealed scores have fallen by 1.5 points since 1998. And standard tests issued in the UK and Australia echo the results, according to journalist Bob Holmes, writing in New Scientist.

Tests carried out in 1980 and in 2008 showed that the average 14-year-old was two IQ points cleverer in 1980, according to a study published in 2009. Scientists found that performance dropped the most dramatically in teenagers in the upper half of the intelligence scale, The Telegraph reported. Brighter teens who took part in the study in 2008 were on average six IQ points less intelligent than their counterparts tested 28 years earlier.

The most pessimistic explanation as to why humans seem to be becoming less intelligent is that we have effectively reached our intellectual peak….

Some have even contentiously said this could be because educated people are deciding to have fewer children, so that subsequent generations are largely made up of less intelligent people. Richard Lynn, a psychologist at the University of Ulster, calculated the decline in humans’ genetic potential. He used data on average IQs around the world in 1950 and 2000 to discover that our collective intelligence has dropped by one IQ point.

Westerns have lost 14 IQ points on average since the Victorian age, according to a study published by the University of Amsterdam last year. Jan te Nijenhuis thinks this could be because intelligent women tend to have less children than women who are not as clever, The Huffington Post reported. The perceived link between IQ and fertility is a very contentious one. Dr Nijenhuis studied the results of 14 intelligence studies conducted between 1884 and 2004 to come to his conclusion.


Each study measured peoples’ reaction times – how long they took to press a button after being prompted. It is claimed that reaction time mirrors mental processing speed – so it reflects intelligence.They found that visual reaction times averaged 194 milliseconds in the late 19th Century, but in 2004, they had increased to 275 milliseconds….

It’s amazing what equality-indoctrinated scientists are willing to throw out as hypotheses rather than even consider the totally obvious. It hardly seems likely that the intellectual peak of Man would roughly coincide with the release of “Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ‘Em”, among other things.  Not convinced because you’re one of those geniuses who “doesn’t see race” (or more properly, doesn’t understand the consequences of genetic science) or “doesn’t believe in IQ” (or, more properly, didn’t score very high on intelligence tests)? Then it should be interesting to hear your explanation for the simultaneous rise in deformed penises in Sweden, which also began happening recently “for reasons unknown”:

A condition which causes baby boys to be born with deformed penises
is becoming more common in Sweden, for reasons unknown to scientists. Researchers in Sweden assessed data collected on Hypospadias between
1973 and 2009. They found that before 1990, only 4.5 boys out of every
thousand had the condition known as hypospadias. But after 1990, the
figure had risen to 8 per 1000 boys. In an attempt to explain the
rise, the experts from Stockholm’s Karolinksa Institute considered
factors known to cause the defect, including low-birth weight, being
born a twin, and parents who used IVF treatment to conceive. However,
scientists could not link the rise to any previously known causes, and
instead concluded that an unknown factor was behind the trend, The Local reported.

Whatever might have happened after 1990 in Sweden that could possibly explain the increasing appearance of this birth defect at the same time average intelligences are decreasing and crime rates are rising? This “unknown factor” is a great mystery indeed. So congratulate yourself that you manage to avoid seeing race in the same way that Swedish scientists manage to avoid seeing basic cause and effect. Because, in a few dysgenic generations, your descendants won’t have any need to willfully ignore the readily apparent the way you do, they’ll be too stupid and deformed to see much of anything at all.

The costs of the fictitious progressive dogma of equality are real and material. Equality does not exist, it is not a positive ideal, and it must be rejected if Man is not going to continue his degradation into Orc. I don’t know Hebrew, but it strikes me that equalitarian dogma is the exact opposite of tikkun olem, the uplift of the world. Anti-nationalism is the degradation of Man. Equality is a lie. Even the historical icons of equality are lies. Consider the words and actual sentiments of The Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln:

“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

Was Lincoln correct about the prospects for social and political equality? 156 years later, consider the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, and think about the gerrymandered political districts carved out on racial lines. Then tell us how many more years will be required to reach that nominal ideal.

Once Our Land

As it happens, once our land
Was guaranteed the upper hand.
We ruled the seas from here to there
And landed armies everywhere.
The Kaiser, Hitler, Ho Chi Minh
No enemy could hope to win.
Our cities far from foreign shores,
Our people safe from far-off wars
Grew fat in their security
From sea to ever-shining sea.

And so it was we thought to share
Our good fortune as we could spare
The sacred seeds of liberty
Blooming on blood-watered tree.
We disregarded Europe’s classes
And embraced the huddled masses
Come one, come all, out went the call
As hubris presages a fall,
For did not Man want to be free
And dwell in true equality?

German, Italian, Irish too,
Norwegian, Swedish, Dutch, and Jew,
They came to seek a better life
Escaping all that Old World strife.
And yet, they did not understand
The rights of every Englishman,
The Common Law was mystery
To grandchildren of serfs unfree.
And so they swore to flag and place
While seeking to transform the base.

Whatever happened, we had got
Atomic bombs, and they did not.
But then came Nineteen Sixty-Five
When sons of refugees contrived
To open doors to all the races
Black and brown and yellow faces.
Thus assured prosperity
We gave away technology,
We ruined universities
While lauding our diversities.

God was dead or so we heard
And Nation just a racist word
We learned a new and nobler truth
Built on a dream of vibrant youth
Our jobs went sailing overseas
And to incoming H1Bs
Then aliens invaded schools
We realized that we’d been fools.
At last we saw the dreadful fact
Of copybook gods coming back.

Once we had the Maxim Gun
Whatever, so does everyone.
Now we live in exciting times
And pay the price for history’s crimes.

A nonexistent nation

A commenter at Pharyngula doesn’t understand that there are more than two sides in America these days. Considerably more:

nich, 12 August 2014 at 9:15 pm
In fact, speaking of the fucking Bundy brigade, where the fuck are all the freedom fighters using their precious 2nd amendment rights to protect the citizenry from tyranny? They’ll show up armed to the teeth to protect some fucking cows and keep the darkies on their side of the border, but the government actually rolls up in armored vehicles to squash a legitimate protest and it’s fucking crickets from these clowns.

Of course it’s “fucking crickets”. The legitimate protest is not being conducted by their people. “American citizen” is now as meaningless a term as “citizen of the world” or “member of the human race”. The “darkies” in Ferguson who are, quite rightly in my opinion, protesting the latest murder of one of their own by the badge gang, have absolutely nothing in common with the armed, civilized freedom fighters who successfully withstood the federal forces at the Bundy ranch.

It’s not even an “enemy of my enemy” situation, because the Missouri police are not the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management.

There is no nation in America any longer. The Left shattered whatever post-Civil War remnants of it remained in 1965, and it is gradually discovering that its fictitious “melting pot”, its romantic mythology of an “idea nation”, will not long survive the reality of differing peoples harboring radically different ideas inside the same borders. The armed white Christians in America will fight to defend themselves when finally forced to do so, but they’re no more likely to fight for African-Americans in Missouri than they are for African-Africans in Rwanda or the Congo. Or than any of those Africans were willing to show up to fight for a European-American rancher in Nevada.

I very much doubt that many, if any, of the Bundy Brigade support the Missouri police. But why should they risk their lives or shed any blood in the interest of defending those who are not their kind? After all, the police and the federal agents are American citizens too.

I’ve been reading Max Hasting’s book on World War I. It’s interesting, even though I disagree with his core perspective on who kicked it all off. The USA is, in some respects, in a position similar to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1900. The analogy is far from perfect, but the key similarity is that of a fundamentally divided multi-ethnic empire with incompetent, overly centralized leadership carelessly throwing its weight around while failing to realize how the empire’s internal divisions make it dangerous for it to do so. Barack Hussein seriously weighing military intervention in Iraq while ignoring the flag of ISIS flying in New Jersey is as insane as anything Franz Joseph ever did.

When cynical leaders engage in wars, thinking to unite the people behind them, they tend to forget that this works when the people are, in fact, a people. A single people, a nation. Otherwise, the stresses of war tend to fracture countries on their ethnic and ideological divides. Once an identifiable Anglo-Saxon Christian nation possessed of a unique transnational ideology, the USA is no longer a nation in any meaningful sense of the word except for lines on a political map.

Many sincerely believed that the ideological aspect trumped the Anglo-Saxon and Christian aspects. But it is becoming increasingly obvious that, despite the survival of its trappings, the former has not survived the loss of the latter two elements. One should be no more surprised that the Bundy Brigade declined to come to the assistance of the blacks of Ferguson than one is that the Roman citizens of Gaul failed to come to the assistance of the Jews during the Great Revolt of 66 AD in Judea.

The cost of conflict avoidance

Sarah Hoyt explains why the cult of non-violence is bound to have negative consequences:

Violence isn’t – by itself – bad but – more importantly – you can’t eradicate it from a human society, and we’re going about the problem of keeping the savage part of man controlled upside down and sideways, when we KNOW the solution. What we’re doing deliberately ignores hundreds of years of experience and we’re going to pay for this. We’re going to pay for this in awful ways. In fact, we’re going to pay for this in a lot of violence that will be targeted mostly at the defenseless….

Take away physical weapons, and people will use the authorities as physical weapons. (And psychological ones too, which is worse.)

Now, the weasels we shall always have with us (I think that’s in the Bible, somewhere.) And the wicked flourish like the green bay tree.

But when you take from society the manly weapons of open and clean, minor and non-lethal violence, what you’re left with are the female weapons: the denunciation, the stab in the back, the laughter, the snark, the reputation-destroying rumor. And the advantage is not just to women (the wrong kind of women) but also to entirely the wrong kind of man. Some men are very good at it indeed.

And what results is what we’re seeing in certain professional organizations: bullying of the ones perceived as weak. Hounding of those who don’t think with the group. Abuse of elders. In fact, the full panoply of the crab bucket.

This is because people have been taught violence that’s not physical is okay, and because they’re human and violence, group fighting and group protecting has to go somewhere.

And the advocates of non-violence can wipe their hands to the wall. I hope to heaven I’m wrong, but I predict that in less than a decade, those will be very bloody fingerprints.

The problem with the feminized interpretation of civilization that is presently dominant is that it eliminates the social mechanisms of violence that have kept men reasonably in line for thousands of years. Because women are direct-conflict avoidant, their form of conflict non-resolution prevents matters from ever being resolved. For example, look at how McRapey is STILL snarking about me nine years after first attacking me; in a more civilized society, I’d simply have punched him in the face two or three times and the matter would have been forgotten about years ago.

Instead, there is no resolution and conflicts continue ad infinitum. The gamma males emulate the mean girls and embrace private politics to manipulate authority and establish a legal regime to leash the strong they fear. There is no tactical difference between what Scalzi, Nielsen-Hayden, and Gould did with the SFWA Board and what Obama, Holder, and thousands of activist groups are presently doing with the IRS and many other government agencies. In the absence of a one-on-one circuit breaker, everything becomes a manipulative appeal to authority.

Which gradually leads to inevitable disrespect for the legitimacy of that authority – who here has any respect for the moral authority of either SFWA or Obama’s Department of Justice – and an eventual return to the use of violence, only far more indiscriminate and opportunistic than in its previously limited form with its code that spared the weak and defenseless.

People tend to behave very badly when they believe they are safe from consequences. I suspect that the woman who is murdered by her divorce-raped ex-husband is extremely startled to discover that the Marriage 2.0 regime may have been able to award her cash and prizes, but is not actually capable of keeping her physically safe.

What we now have is legalistic barbarism wearing the sheepskin of civilization. But it is not civilization, as will become increasingly clear over the next few years. The descent into barbarism will not be easy for anyone, but the silver lining is that open barbarism is considerably more satisfying for the strong than pseudo-civilization. There is a reason, after all, that Man likes to read stories about heroes and killers and soldiers, not lawyers and bureaucrats and lobbyists.

It’s not a fallacy when it’s real

A former advocate of assisted suicide warns of the consequences:

Legalising assisted suicide is a slippery slope toward widespread killing of the sick, MPs and peers were told yesterday. A former euthanasia supporter warned of a surge in deaths if Parliament allowed doctors to give deadly drugs to their patients. ‘Don’t do it Britain,’ said Theo Boer, a veteran European watchdog in assisted suicide cases. ‘Once the genie is out of the bottle, it is not likely ever to go back in again.’

His native Netherlands, where euthanasia has been legal since 2002, has seen deaths double in just six years and this year’s total may reach a record 6,000…. Professor Boer, who is an academic in the field of ethics, had argued seven years ago that a ‘good euthanasia law’ would produce relatively low numbers of deaths. But, speaking in a personal capacity yesterday, he said he now believed that the very existence of a euthanasia law turns assisted suicide from a last resort into a normal procedure. A ‘slippery slope’ for assisted dying in Britain would mean that euthanasia would follow the same path as abortion, which was legalised in 1967. There are now nearly 200,000 terminations a year.

Note that in Holland, “assisted suicide” rapidly transformed into “doctors killing infants”. Assisted suicide is for cowards anyhow; it is only sought by those who don’t have the courage or the decency to kill themselves, but want to offload the moral burden onto someone else. Not that I don’t understand those who don’t wish to suffer through a lingering and painful death. If I ever had a terminal disease, I’d probably want to end it quickly myself, in a room full of my enemies, surrounded by fifty pounds of high explosive.

But I have a simple and just solution. Just make advocating assisted suicide a capital crime punishable by hanging. That way there is no risk of a slippery slope leading to the murder of innocent children and cowards like that old fraud Terry Pratchett will obtain the death at someone else’s hands they are seeking.

Apparently Mr. Hitler just needed better marketing. Had he simply utilized the term “Unterstütztfreitod” instead of “Endlösung” and been careful to get signatures from each individual boarding a train, he would be a modern hero.

Darwin + Title IX = IDIOCRACY

I long suspected that there would be seriously negative ramifications to encouraging our best and brightest women to remain barren and pursue degrees instead of preparing them for motherhood, but I didn’t expect the effect to be quantified so soon. There is more detail at Alpha Game, but suffice it to say that it has been confirmed that education, and the education of women in particular, is literally dysgenic.

We already knew that female suffrage and higher education for women was dyscivic. But this is the first confirmation of the logical conclusion that they are dysgenic as well. The silver lining is that it is a societal problem that will eventually solve itself over time… assuming the society somehow manages to survive.

I see this as yet another indication that there is no such thing as linear progress, much less inevitable progress, and that human societies follow a cyclical pattern of eucivic structures arising from savagery that are gradually supplanted by dyscivic ones that cause the civilized society to collapse again into barbarism.

Pink SF/F in one picture

For all the triumphalism, award-giving, and mutual queef-sniffing of its politically-correct champions, the observable fact is that Pink SF/F has been an unmitigated disaster when viewed from an objective perspective. While the conventional argument is that it was the Internet that has devastated the short fiction magazines, this chart showing the rapidly declining market for Analog, Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and the now-defunct Realms of Fantasy show that it could not have been the Internet that had such a deleterious effect as, depending upon the magazine, the declines began between 1984 and 1992.

Naturally, those who think it is definitely wonderful that things are opening up in the genre have absolutely no idea what could possibly have caused this puzzling decline.

So, it seems that somewhere in the 1980s and the very beginning of the 90s, something, happened to both newspapers and SF magazines. Some of it is likely due to a gradual decline in reading for pleasure, but this decline is a lot less significant than the decline in newspaper or SF magazine sales. I can’t find 20+ year data for magazines, but what I could find doesn’t look as significant. I don’t have any answers, merely a question.

Whatever could that be? Speaking as a former subscriber to Asimov’s and F&SF, who finally stopped subscribing to both magazines after realizing that neither contained anything of interest any longer, I think I can shed some light on the situation. First, it was not a decline in reading for pleasure, as increasing overall book sales will suffice to demonstrate. Second, there were certainly some industry distribution issues involved, the more important factor was the way in which the gatekeepers opened up the genre to every form of subversion and perversion and left-liberal orthodoxy. This was was more than offensive to many readers’ sensibilities, even worse, it was tedious, monotonous, and uninteresting.

Consider what one SFWA member mentioned on Twitter the other day: “At Barnes & Noble. The SFF section is filled w friends. Yet the book
blurbs suggest we’re all writing the same 5 books over and over again.”

They are. They were. And due to this, as the statistics show, in only 20 years, the new SF/F gatekeepers managed to drive off as much as 80 percent of their audience! Notice that the chart above only runs through 2007; the decline of the traditional publishers has observably picked up speed since then with the rise of Amazon and independent publishing. (I have heard that e-subscriptions have helped the SF/F mags stop their decline; at this point there are probably no non-Pink readers left to lose.) Remember, in 2012, Publisher’s Weekly reported science fiction sales were down 21 percent from the year before.

Look at Tor’s bestsellers. It’s all Orson Scott Card, Robert Jordan, and Brandon Sanderson, followed by HALO tie-in novels. Many of these are books published 30 years ago. Some of these authors are dead. Tor’s current favorite, the ever-ubiquitous John Scalzi, doesn’t even show up until #25, and the long list of Tor-published no-name award-winners and SFWA activists are far down the list. Or look at this week’s Sci-Fi bestsellers on Publisher’s Weekly. Dune, by Frank Herbert, published in 1965, is number 9.

You may recall the pinkshirts celebrating the fact that women swept the Nebula Awards this year. And yet, there is not a single female author in the Publisher’s Weekly top ten Sci-Fi bestsellers.

Does a similar decline in newspapers invalidate this interpretation? I don’t think so. Conservatives used to read the newspaper and occasionally grit their teeth, but they religiously subscribed to one or more papers. But as the left-liberal influence over the editorial page steadily grew, until, by the early 1990s, the conservative voice was reduced to a single token moderate, conservatives quit subscribing to newspapers for much the same reason many genre readers quit reading science fiction and fantasy: they didn’t see any reason to pay money to have their views attacked on a regular basis.

I expect CNN’s ratings have seen a similar decline, the difference in the cable news market is that Fox News provided a direct alternative. In areas where there were no alternatives, such as genre publishing and single-newspaper cities, people simply turned away.

It’s not an accident that Brad Torgersen has been repeatedly voted the favorite author of Analog’s dwindled readership. He may be the only author published there who is still writing in a reasonable facsimile of classic science fiction.