Tag: history

Kasich endorses amnesty

I find it hard to believe that anyone in Ohio is genuinely supporting this overtly anti-American lunatic:

1) “God Bless” Illegal Immigrants

Illegal immigrants are a “critical part of our society,” John Kasich told the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce last October. “For those that are here that have been law abiding, God bless them,” Kasich said—arguing that illegals “should have a path to legalization.”

2) “I couldn’t imagine” enforcing our current immigration laws: “That is not… the kind of values that we believe in.”

On the GOP debate stage in February, Kasich told millions of American voters that enforcing the nation’s immigration laws is not “the kind of values that we believe in.”

“I couldn’t even imagine how we would even begin to think about taking a mom or a dad out of a house when they have not committed a crime since they’ve been here, leaving their children in the house,” Kasich said. “That is not, in my opinion, the kind of values that we believe in.”

3) Kasich likened deporting the illegal population to Japanese internment camps

“To think that that we’re just going to put people on buses and ship them to the border—look at our World War II experience where we quarantined Japanese—I mean it’s a dark stain on America’s history,” Kasich said in November.

“We shouldn’t even think about it,” Kasich said of the “nutty” idea:

    “I don’t know many people that believe we should deport 11 million people—just because people shout loud doesn’t mean they’re a majority. I think most Republicans would agree that you can’t deport 11 million people. We shouldn’t even think about it. What are you going to do? Break their families up?”

I don’t think the people still relying on sob stories and worrying about breaking families up don’t understand that the long term alternative to repatriating most of the 60 million post-1965 immigrants is civil war. The USA is heading towards partitition at an increasingly rapid rate, and the more foreigners who are involved in the process, the more vicious the ethnic and religious cleansing is likely to be.

The dirt is not magic. The USA is not magically exempt from the same rules of power, politics, and war that have stricken nearly every other multiethnic society in history at one time or another. There is absolutely nothing preventing what has happened many times elsewhere from happening on US soil.

The post-1965 invasion is the largest invasion in all of human history. Think about it. What are the chances that it doesn’t end in violence? What is the scenario that doesn’t involve various ethnic groups scrabbling ruthlessly for power?

Deporting the illegals is only the first step to avoiding a nightmare, but Kasich is determined to keep making things worse.

Queens at war

A historical study of European queens produces some unexpected results:

After sifting through historical data on queenly reigns across six centuries, two political scientists have found that it’s more complicated than that. In a recent working paper, New York University scholars Oeindrila Dube and S.P. Harish analyzed 28 European queenly reigns from 1480 to 1913 and found a 27 percent increase in wars when a queen was in power, as compared to the reign of a king. “People have this preconceived idea that states that are led by women engage in less conflict,” Dube told Pacific Standard, but her analysis of the data on European queens suggests another story.

Interestingly, Dube and Harish think the reason why queens were able to take part in more military policy can be explained by the division of labor that tended to happen when a queen — particularly a married queen — ruled. Queens managed foreign policy and war policies, which were often important to bring in cash, while their husbands managed the state (think taxes, crime, judicial issues, etc.). As the authors theorize, “greater division of labor under queenly reigns could have enabled queens to pursue more aggressive war policies.” Kings, on the other hand, didn’t tend to engage in division of labor like ruling queens — or, more specifically, they may have shared military and state duties with some close adviser, but not with the queen. And, Dube and Harish argue, it may be this “asymmetry in how queens relied on male spouses and kings relied on female spouses [that] strengthened the relative capacity of queenly reigns, facilitating their greater participation in warfare.”

The queens’ marital status made a difference here; as the authors write,
“among married monarchs, queens were more likely to participate as
attackers than kings.” If a queen were single — which was the case with
13 of those they studied — she was more likely to be attacked compared
to the times when a king was in power, perhaps because her country was
seen in the outside world as being more vulnerable and thus easier to attack.

Ironically, as Nate pointed out, this means that female leaders are more strongly correlated with warfare than religion. And it would be hard to argue that this relationship is not causal, given the fact that the queens were responsible for the decision to go to war.

The preference cascade

Glenn Reynolds makes a connection between the Trumpening and #Brexit:

In America, Donald Trump — who many of the experts thought had no chance — is dominating the polls. In Britain, meanwhile, much of the public seems to be mobilizing in favor of exiting the troubled European Union — a British Exit, or Brexit.

Writing in The Spectator, Brendan O’Neill puts this down to a class revolt on both sides of the Atlantic. And he’s right as far as he goes, but I think there’s more than just a class revolt. I think there’s also a developing preference cascade. O’Neill writes: “In both Middle America and Middle England, among both rednecks and chavs, voters who have had more than they can stomach of being patronised, nudged, nagged and basically treated as diseased bodies to be corrected rather than lively minds to be engaged are now putting their hope into a different kind of politics. And the entitled Third Way brigade, schooled to rule, believing themselves possessed of a technocratic expertise that trumps the little people’s vulgar political convictions, are not happy. Not one bit.”

Well, that’s certainly true. Both America and Britain have developed a ruling class that is increasingly insular and removed from — and contemptuous of — the people it deigns to rule. The ruled are now returning the contempt.

Robert Prechter predicted this more than a decade ago. It’s also happening in other European countries. This is what happens when the social mood changes. The blithe, mindless optimism that permits the populace to be used and abused by the financial elite is gone. People are seeing more clearly now, and they are beginning to recognize what was done to them, and by whom.

There will be a reckoning. There will be many reckonings. And unfortunately, not all of them will be pretty, or even civilized.

When the tide goes out, it’s easy to see who was naked all along.

Traffic report 2015

The growth in site traffic this year was more than expected, as a surprising number of people initially stopped by to see what was going on with the Hugo Awards in August and then stuck around for the remainder of the year. Last year we saw a single 1.5-million pageview month; this year we had 10 in a row. All of the growth was at VP, as AG was pretty flat due to my sporadic posting there. But as was the case last year, 2015 finished very strong; December was not only up 30 percent over last December, but was the second-most-highly-trafficked month of the year.

In 2015, Vox Popoli had 16,211,875 pageviews and Alpha Game 4,565,094 for a total of 20,776,969 Google pageviews. The blogs are now running at a average rate of 56,923 daily pageviews. And yes, I do find it amusing that the blogs are now seeing considerably more genuine traffic than the “extraordinary amount” a certain SF blogger once lied about having. As for the running annual totals, they are as follows:

2008: 3,496,757
2009: 4,414,801
2010: 4,827,183
2011: 5,969,066
2012: 7,774,074
2013: 13,111,695
2014: 15,693,622
2015: 20,776,969

Thank you all for the part you have played in making that happen. However, there are some more important numbers that merit mention. 2015 ended with 465 Vile Faceless Minions pledging their mindless obedience to the Supreme Dark Lord and preparing for battle in 2016. Expect heavier use this year, VFM, as the SJWs react to our media offensive in a variety of means both fair and foul.

On Twitter, I ended the year with 6,230 followers and 14.628 million impressions for 2015. Not bad, but I can clearly put in a little more effort on that front.

Castalia House grew from 21 books published to 37, including 5 in print and 1 in audiobook. Book sales increased 145 percent and no less than six category bestsellers were published. We also added three editors, an Editor-at-Large, an Audio Editor, and a Blog Editor; see the Castalia blog later today for more details there. Speaking of the Audio Editor, the audiobook for Cuckservative is now available on Audible and Amazon, and is already one of the top 50 Philosophy audiobooks. We expect even faster growth for Castalia in 2016 with the release of upcoming books such as Riding the Red Horse Vol. 2 by Tom Kratman and Vox Day, Iron Chamber of Memory by John C. Wright, Clio and Me by Martin van Creveld, Do Buddhas Dream of Enlightened Sheep by Josh Young, and There Will Be War Vol. XI by Jerry Pournelle, among others.

And yes, one of those others will be A Sea of Skulls.

Thank you for your interest, even if it is no more than morbid
curiosity, thank you for your support, and while 2015 was certainly intriguing, I believe 2016 is going to be absolutely extraordinary.

The GT incident

VD, any reference to the GT incident that you are talking about? I
tried looking it up, but it is hard to search for, apparently, for
someone that isn’t already familiar with the story.

It’s a matter of public record:

Contracts; pleading; prevention of performance of condition precedent; repudiation and right to terminate; implied duty of good faith and fair dealing. Tortious interference with contractual relations. Alleged breach of agreement granting defendant rights relating to two software video games. Motion to dismiss (CPLR 3211(a)(7)). Standards for pleading breach of contract. The court upheld a breach claim. The court rejected an argument that plaintiff had failed to comply with a condition precedent because defendant had allegedly prevented the performance of the condition. The court dismissed a claim for repudiation of the entire agreement since under it defendant had had an unconditional right to terminate, which it did, and thus could be liable only through that date, there being no provision for acceleration of future payments. The court ruled that a fair reading of the contract indicated that defendant had an implied duty of good faith to assist, or not interfere with, plaintiff’s entering into bundling arrangements with computer manufacturers. A third claim was thus upheld. The court found that plaintiff had set forth only conclusory allegations regarding interference with prospective contractual relations and thus dismissed that claim. Fenris Wolf Ltd. v. GT Interactive Software Corp., Index No. 601206/99, 10/15/99 (Cozier, J.)

We were working on a groundbreaking SF 3D shooter with AI-driven squadplay called Rebel Moon Revolution that was signed to GT Interactive. We’d had a huge success with Rebel Moon Rising thanks to bundling deals with IBM and Intel; GT used to joke that we were the only developer who had ever sent THEM checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

(This is why I’m never bothered by people claiming I’m a failure. My most spectacularly stupid moves, the mistakes I would most like to have back, have usually been related to my failure to properly exploit either opportunity or success. We gave GT a percentage of our revenue to handle the tech support; it turned out to be the most expensive tech support in computer game history. Idiotic.)

However, GT lost their crown jewels to Activision and soon came under financial pressure due to their funding practically every type of shooter EXCEPT the one that we pitched them twice: a WWII shooter. No one, they explained, would be interested in THAT. No wonder they went out of business.

In the summer of 1998, they went weirdly silent after we delivered a milestone that should have been routinely approved and paid. I got a phone call from our producer, who was very upset and told me that the milestone was not going to be approved. When I asked what was wrong with it, he said, “nothing”. Then he told me it would never be approved, and that they were terminating many development contracts, pretty much everything that wasn’t due to ship before the end of the year.

I’d heard rumors that this might be in the works; Sega of Japan had recently shut down Sega of America, and with it our Dreamcast launch title, an SF RPG that we were developing with Julian LeFay of Daggerfall fame, so I wasn’t exactly shocked. I asked when we could expect the termination notice, which was due within 30 days of a milestone rejection according to the contract, and was shocked when he said, “yeah, that’s the thing, they’re not going to terminate.”

You see, what GT was doing was trying to get back the money it had already paid out to its developers by refusing to release their claim on the IP unless the developer returned a substantial percentage of the advance it had already earned via milestones. This meant that the developers couldn’t take their projects elsewhere; we had good relationships with Microsoft at the time and would almost surely have gone there. Unlike other developers, we resisted their legal pressure, filed a lawsuit, beat them in the initial rounds of court, and ultimately forced a settlement in the place of the simple letter of termination they should have sent us.

The victory came at a serious cost, though. The legal process takes a long time, and by the time GT offered us a settlement worth taking, our entire team was already dispersed throughout the industry in the jobs we’d helped them find. My partner and I were so burned out and disenchanted that we both left the industry for several years. It was a substantial victory, but a Pyrrhic one; we would have been much better off in the long term just signing up with Microsoft and letting them deal with the legal complications such an action would have created.

Hitler’s 125 IQ

It’s rather remarkable to see that the entire Nazi leadership was nearly a standard deviation more intelligent than the average Ashkenazi Jew, especially when we are so often informed that the reason for Jewish success is their exceedingly high level of intelligence. That being said, I suspect the average IQ of the current Israeli leadership is even higher; the same clearly cannot be said of the current U.S. or German leaderships.

As I recall from what I’ve read on Hitler and internal Nazi politics, of the above list, particularly “close associates” of Hitler would include: Goering; Ribbentrop; Speer; and until his “betrayal,” Hess. Their average IQ is 129.

While there was never much love lost between Hitler and the German military establishment, the closest military connection to Hitler from that list would be Keitel, who was infamous for his toadying behavior towards the Fuhrer. His IQ also happened to be precisely 129.

(Incidentally, while Jodl is regarded as far more competent than Keitel – he is the guy who actually made OKW command structure run – it’s interesting to note his IQ was actually lower than that of his boss, if marginally so).

In practice, Goering’s IQ during his time as Nazi bigwig might have actually been lower, due to his morphine addiction. On the other hand, there are suspicions that Speer was in fact considerably cleverer than his test scores indicated, because he was playing the “dumb dreamer architect” type so as to pretend ignorance of the death camps and avoid execution (if so he was successful). So these two factors might cancel out.

Adjusting for the Flynn effect – but only modestly, since the most useful (not rules-dependent) forms of intelligence haven’t improved all that radically, and we have an IQ of around 125 for Hitler normed to today’s Greenwich standards.

While I was initially skeptical of the idea of estimating Hitler’s IQ by those of his associates, on second thought, the fact that the average IQ in the Digital Ghetto was above 140 forces me to admit that it’s not a completely unreasonable basis for an estimate. It also fits with the available evidence; it’s pretty clear from reading Mein Kampf that Hitler was bright, but not highly intelligent.

For obvious reasons, the most successful popular leaders tend to be within the 30-point communications window of the norm. I would expect that Stalin was north of 130 IQ, both on the basis of his writing and his erratic, introverted behavior; unlike Hitler and Churchill, he had no need to rely upon personal popularity with the masses.

What state is that?

Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton tells Minnesotans who prefer the real Minnesota to leave the state if they don’t like living next door to squalid third-world Africans:

Governor Mark Dayton was one of the speakers at the NAACP Community Conversation, hosted in St. Cloud, Minnesota.

For several years now, St. Cloud has been one of the locations specifically targeted for “refugee resettlement”. The large influx of East African immigrants has caused racial tension between the White St. Cloud residents, and the East African immigrants.

“Look around you. This is Minnesota,” he said. “Minnesota is not like it was 30, 50 years ago. … This is Minnesota and you [Africans] have every right to be here. And anybody who cannot accept your right to be here, and this is Minnesota, should find another state.”

He described alternative views to his own as “unacceptable, un-Minnesotan, illegal and immoral”.

“If you are that intolerant, if you are that much of a racist or a bigot, then find another state.” said Dayton. “Find a state where the minority population is 1 percent or whatever. It’s not that in Minnesota. It’s not going to be again. It’s not going to be that in St. Cloud, or Rochester or Worthington.”

Where are they going to go? What would be the point? When I grew up in Minnesota, it was one of the whitest states in the country: 96.1 percent in 1980. First, aside from California or possibly Texas, there isn’t a state that can hold 100 million white Americans, which is about how many people would move to a state that was guaranteed to be Asian, Hispanic, and African-free. Second, even if a state is completely white, what is to prevent it from being invaded just like Minnesota and Germany have been invaded? Third, it is outrageous to state that alien invaders have the same right to be there as native citizens. They simply don’t, by any legal or moral standard.

History strongly suggests that Dayton is wrong. I can safely predict that the land presently called “Minnesota” will again feature a strong majority population with a minority population below five percent at some point in the future. After all, it already has twice within the past 165 years. All this imposed “refugee resettlement” means is that a lot of people are going to die and a lot of people are going to be forcibly expelled from the land. Whoever is willing to fight for it will hold it.

Where does Dayton think these homogeneous populations that he hates so much come from in the first place? Except in some extreme circumstances they don’t occur due to geography; mass migrations have taken place for millennia. They arise out of invasions, ethnic cleansings, and wars of the sort that are taking place right now everywhere from Myanmar to the Crimea. Of course, speaking as an American Indian from a tribe that bravely and repeatedly, and in the end, unsuccessfully battled the immigrants invading their land, I can also state with some authority that there is no guarantee the majority population that ends up living in that territory mostly unsullied by minorities will be of European descent.

For decades, Americans have assumed that all the terrible things that happened in Bangladesh and the Congo and China could not happen in the USA. And that assumption was true, mostly due to the halt in immigration in the 1920s. Now, thanks to diversity, labor mobility, the 1965 Immigration Reform Act, and the European Union, both the USA and Europe are going to see an insane amount of violence that will probably surpass the Holocaust and the Holodomor over the next three decades.

The lesson of history is very clear. The killing season is coming. And those with the eyes to see are well aware of it.

I am saying that all the ingredients are there for complete breakdown and large-scale deaths given the right initiating incident. I am saying that volatility is baked into the cake – even into the cake of what today looks and feels normal. I am saying that while it may be possible to keep loading box upon box of societal Semtex into the truck, given the right detonator the collapse will be swift, unstoppable and devastating.

And when it comes, as it always does sooner or later, don’t think that the explosives or the truck were responsible. The blame lies with those who loaded it.

Future trends, future history

It would appear that Richard Fernandez sees much the same future unfolding that I do:

Conventional wisdom has had  a pretty bad run these last 15 years.  For that reason there is little purpose to trusting it further. Instead it might be better to predict a future based on observable trends rather than scenarios that politicians offer. If those trends continue one would expect to see in 2025:

  • The self-destruction of the Muslim Middle East;
  • The rise of ethnic and national politics in Europe;
  • The widespread resurgence of religion and cultural identity as a consequence of (2);
  • Mass expulsions or segregation in large parts of the world to deconflict incompatible communities
  • Everyone packing personal weapons like the Wild West
  • The collapse of multi-ethnic countries into simplified pacts based around of national defense, with most social law generated by local communities and affinity groups;
  • One or more large regional wars with casualties in the tens of millions.
  • Several, possibly many WMD attacks on major cities involving radiological weapons, low yield nukes or biological agents.

Such a world would be rough, dangerous and in many places, miserable.   Perhaps it will not even be as good as that; for the list above omits the occurrence of an event equivalent to World War 3, in which case we can describe the future with a single word: ruin.  But it is the world we are building, absent any change of course.  The oddest circumstance is that politicians still pretend without the slightest basis, that if we stay their perverse course we’ll go right through the ruin and out the other side and find the dream we glimpsed as we crossed into the 21st century. 

I’m not concerned about nukes or radiological weapons. What concerns me are genetic weapons. I expect genetic research to be shut down and highly regulated in the relatively near future. In addition to the way advancement in genetic science keeps disrupting the Narrative, it also poses a genuine large-scale threat to Mankind that is very nearly unprecedented in human history.

The events of the post-WWII period desperately need to be chronicled in detail, because future generations need to learn from the utter idiocy of the international policy makers of the last 70 years. In the unlikely event we happen to have enough historians here, I have in mind a project like the Cambridge Medieval History series, where the different writers each focus on a different set of actors. If this is of any interest to you and you think you might have the ability to contribute a section, email me with POSTWAR in the title.

Also, in not entirely unrelated news, we still need 3-5 more non-fiction articles for THERE WILL BE WAR Vol. X. If you’re a published military writer, we’re looking for high-quality reprints, so if you’ve got any, let me know.

Mailvox: get your syllogisms straight

TB goes awry in the second step:

This post (which was about IQ, part of a larger issue of Civilization) seemed to me to be about the very foundation of the Civilization discussion.

1. Genetics and culture are inseparable,
2. Only British genetics can grasp and enact Western Civilization,
3. The U.S. cannot allow a drop below a certain level of British derived population.

I understand that civilization requires trade-offs in education, economics, religion, and other systems. It just seems that the Civilization you describe was doomed the very moment it started. I believe the Constitution allows the nation to be hardier than this hot house flower being described.

2. is false. The U.S. Constitution is not synonymous with Western civilization. Western civilization is hardier than the U.S. Constitution, which was not only written by and for Englishmen, but is only understood correctly by them and those who have sufficiently adopted their culture.

More than that, it was only written for them and their descendants and was never intended to apply to anyone else except some of the German colonists who successfully grasped, accepted, and supported their unusual limited government philosophy.

The descendants of the countries who came later, the Irish, the Italians, the later Germans, the Scandinavians, the Jews, and the Hispanics are not the posterity of the Founding Fathers. It should be no surprise that they have not successfully defended a philosophy they have never accepted or understood nor respectfully abided by a document that was never written for them.

And my rebuttal to those who would argue is very simple and straightforward. Look around you. Do you see anything that is even remotely respectful of the concepts put forth in the U.S. Constitution?

Rise of the ultras

The result of the recent Greek parliamentary election is in line with my prediction of the European ultra-nationalists coming to power in two election cycles.

Golden Dawn, one of Europe’s most violent far-right parties, has emerged as one of the biggest winners of Sunday’s general election in Greece, consolidating its presence in parliament and power on the streets. The neo-fascist group came in third with 7% of the vote, behind the triumphant leftwing Syriza and conservative New Democracy….

“Golden Dawn is a movement of power, it is not a protest movement any
more,” the party’s Swastika- tattooed spokesman, Ilias Kasidiaris, told
Star TV as it became clear that the extremists had retained their
position as the country’s third biggest political force. “Golden Dawn is
the only party seeing an increase in its percentage. In October when
Greeks begin to experience the consequences of the memorandum and
illegal immigration you will see our support increase radically,” said
the former marine, berating the country’s mainstream media for
boycotting the party.

With 18 MPs in the 300-seat house, around 500,000 Greeks cast ballots
in favour of Golden Dawn. The organisation performed especially well in
Attica, the greater Athens region and the Aegean islands of Lesbos and
Kos where voter support doubled. Both islands have been overwhelmed in
recent months by thousands of refugees and migrants fleeing conflict and
poverty.

Golden Dawn’s anti-immigrant stance at a time of mounting fears over
Greece’s frontline role in Europe’s biggest humanitarian crisis in
recent history, almost certainly helped. The party, portraying itself as
the “only nationalist choice” played heavily on fears that Greeks could
soon become a minority in their own country. But, so too, did its
shrill opposition to the internationally sponsored bailout accords, or
memoranda, that the extremists have said amount to “ethnocide” or death
of the nation. Polls showed that some 16.6% of those who voted for
Golden Dawn were victims of record levels of unemployment – the most
grievous side-effect of massive budget cuts and lay-offs enforced as the
price of being bailed out to the tune of €326bn creditors in the EU and
International Monetary Fund (IMF).

“In terms of absolute numbers Golden Dawn was the only party to hold
its ground,” said Aristides Hatzis, political commentator and Athens
University professor.

The Fascists and the National Socialists came to power in the 1930s because they were the most credible options available to the Italian and German publics at the time. Don’t confuse the beginnings with the ends; 1933 was not 1941 or even 1939. Fascists were not elected with the idea that they would throw in with German imperialism (it is usually forgotten that Mussolini was an ally of France and Great Britain and only threw in with Germany after Great Britain betrayed Italian interests), and the National Socialists were not elected because they promised they would invade the Soviet Union, slaughter the Jews in Eastern Europe, and get Germany into a war with the USA.

One can’t learn anything useful about the future prospects of revolutionary parties by what other revolutionary parties did AFTER they came to power, one can only learn about their prospects by looking at what the other parties were doing BEFORE they came to power.

The worst thing about the established anti-nationalist European parties is that they have failed so spectacularly that even the violently murderous anti-immigrant parties will be preferred to them by even the most sane and civilized elements of the electorate. In a time of invasion, it doesn’t matter how dangerous the only party willing to defend you might be, what matters is that they are the only ones willing to defend you, your family, and your children.

As for those who are historically ignorant enough to point out that Golden Dawn only won 18 seats in the Greek parliament with 7 percent of the vote and therefore will never come to power, I will type very, very slowly and point out that in 1928, five years before they took power, the National Socialist Workers Party won 12 seats in the German parliament with 2.6 percent of the vote.

Two election cycles. And then you will see an absolute sea change in Europe. And if the EU attempts to entirely abandon even the pretense of democracy in defense of the invasion, the change will come even faster. And harder.