Tag: mailvox

One of the more inept File 770ers – which is saying something – is Camestros Fappletron. His Gamma backside is still burning from the spanking he received here in 2016 after he tried to pose as a Master of Rhetoric and only succeeded in demonstrating that he simply did not understand Aristotle’s distinction between rhetoric and dialectic.

So, it’s more than a little amusing to note that he’s been trying to retroactively rectify the situation for years, as Samuel Collingwood Smith noted.

Earlier today, a leftist left a negative comment on a review I did in 2016 of Vox Day’s “A Throne of Bones”. They ended by linking to a hatepost claiming the positive Amazon reviews were deceptive based on an analysis by a site called Fakepost.com from 2017. Because, of course, the accuracy of a self-appointed analysis site using an unpublished algorithm is beyond question..

I had no idea what he was talking about, because of course I pay absolutely no attention to Camestros or his incessant anklebiting. But apparently, back in 2017, File 770’s Master of Rhetoric decided to prove that many of the 332 reviews of A Throne of Bones, which average 4.5 stars, are fake.

I previously pointed to an article on people manipulating Amazon rankings for their books, today there is a bigger brouhaha on whether somebody has manipulated the New York Time bestseller list. The method used (if true) isn’t new and political books have been prone to this approach before i.e. buy lots of the book from the right bookshops and head up the rankings.

One thing new to me from those articles was this site: http://fakespot.com/about It claims to be a site that will analyse reviews on sites like Amazon and Yelp and then rate the reviews in terms of how “fake” they seem to be. The mechanism looks at reviewers and review content and looks for relations with other reviews, and also rates reviewers who only ever give positive reviews lower. Now, I don’t know if their methods are sound or reliable, so take the rest of this with a pinch of salt for the time being.

Time to plug some things into their machine but what! Steve J No-Relation Wright has very bravely volunteered to start reading Vox Day’s epic fantasy book because it was available for $0 ( https://stevejwright.wordpress.com/2017/08/23/a-throne-of-bones-by-vox-day-preamble-on-managing-expectations/ ) and so why not see what Fakespot has to say about “Throne of Bones”

Sadly for the ever-inept Fappletron, he didn’t bother checking Fakepost to confirm that its initial analysis still held true, as Mr. Smith informs us.

 However, when I requested a re-analysis, the book listing now gets an ‘A’ 

• Fakespot Review Grade A
• Our engine has profiled the reviewer patterns and has determined that there is minimal deception involved.
• Our engine has determined that the review content quality is high and informative.
• Our engine has discovered that over 90{d59209821fe989e78e8725839671fe688f075485293e05af5d9ebcd097c17187} high quality reviews are present.
• This product had a total of 332 reviews as of our last analysis date on Oct 27 2019.

It’s always amusing when midwits attempt to question their intellectual superiors:

The past few posts leave me wondering “where else do Vox and many of his fans entertain absurdly contrarian opinions on topics they demonstrably know next to nothing about?”

If this loser had any idea how much success I have had over the years by flat-out ignoring the advice and the opinions of the subject-matter experts who know vastly more about their subjects than I do, he simply would not believe it. In fact, two of my three biggest failures were the direct result of being overruled by people who knew considerably more and refused to listen to me.

Mere information very seldom overrules genuine intelligence. Remember, nearly all the economic experts will tell you that free trade is good for America and it wasn’t all that long ago when all the nutrition experts told you that not eating meat was the way to lose weight.

A veteran with multiple active-duty deployments in Iraq confirms a young officer’s observations about the state of the US Army, and specifically, its Officer Candidate School:

I wanted to comment on and, sadly, confirm a good chunk of what your recent OCS attendee wrote.

“Equal” Opportunity: 

Women and especially brown and black women were absolutely given preference. Nothing so brazen as ignoring stated orders and being given a pass, but things like being told to our faces that our waste-of-a-cadet black nurse would be held to a lower standard (supposedly because nurse), or seeing women given consistently higher marks for actions that would have been given at best a “nice job” had she been a man. Some instructors were happier about this than others, but it was obviously an understood thing.

Second Generation Modern Warfare Training: 

Yes, and lots of it. Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) cannot deal with innovative thinkers. Not will not, cannot. Everything is cookie cutter down almost to the last detail and any deviation is punished. I watched our Ranger-tabbed cadet get his ass chewed for not doing things exactly the TRADOC way, never mind that he had met with success by the instructor’s own admission. While the units can and often do beat this out of junior officers, to say that newly commissioned 2LTs are hidebound and risk-averse as a rule is an understatement, and too many continue to be so as their careers progress. If the US Army retains any vestiges of 3rd generation capability, it’s in spite of TRADOC.

The F-Word and A Culture of Gullible Murderers: 

This is also true, but it’s also the fastest one to change with experience. Most of these men are young and fresh out of college, and all of them know that the way you get ahead in the Army is to in part be more bloodthirsty than the next guy. You don’t get points for being thoughtful or even remotely isolationist. Fortunately, much of it is posturing and many change their tunes after deploying a time or two. Not to say it isn’t a problem, just that it’s probably the most superficial and fastest to change of all the so far published points.

What I Call the “NuBoomer” Sub-Generation: 

This one’s a bit more complicated. Do they exist? Yes, but part of it is inexperience, part of it is social conditioning, and the rest is telling the boss what he wants to hear. There are a lot more open dissidents in the Active and Guard ranks, especially in combat arms, including commanders. Of the several commanding officers I’ve served under, the closest I ever saw to this was a disgruntled Gen Xer who by virtue of his wife and where he lived, had a tendency to spout the Narrative. The incoming officers, at least in combat arms, will more often shuck the Narrative as soon as they see no one else is buying, though the superficial sense of religion is sadly spot on. They are, however, just as post-literate as the rest of their generation and civnattery is the last of the Narrative to go, if it ever does. Racism and sexism remain the only unforgivable sins in the Army.

Based on your source’s published letter, the rot I saw has gotten worse. From the view of a veteran, most of it is still confined to the support elements. Their reputations as hives of LGBT+, feminism, and all of the other contaminants of the Clown World are, from what I’ve observed, sadly merited. Combat arms still tries to focus on warfighting, but we are not immune and the rot is creeping in.

An email from a US Army officer who shares his perceptions of an organization in decline after completing Officer Candidate School:

I’ll just say that my experience is very fresh. I think it’s important to give a bit of backstory to how I’ve become so disillusioned, because in military culture disillusionment is automatically regarded as a defense mechanism for underperformers. I come from a military family with a line of high US officers. I used to believe in all the neo-con talking points that my peers endlessly spout. I even tried out for special forces, I believed in the whole US military thing so much….

“Equal” Opportunity: 
I believe you and your fans will already know of the low standards women are held to, so I’ll just share a risible story of the worst example here. The first Friday of the course OCS always has a “Class Up Run,” of 3 miles at about a 9-minute pace. We were sternly warned that falling out of formation would result in a day-one reset, which carries with it the sentence of being a holdover at the Company HQ barracks. This is the worst thing candidates fear being done to them short of dismissal. Well, wouldn’t you know it but four brown females decided to walk the last mile. Nothing happened to them. All of the First Sergeant & Company Commander’s aggressive warnings (and these guys are infantrymen with the latter having the vaunted Ranger tab) were subsequently memory-holed.

Second Generation Modern Warfare Training: 
All the training we’ve received here is precisely in line with what Mr. Lind would call “Second Generation.” It is procedure obsessed and crushes innovation. Oh, they talk constantly about the awesome talent of the Imperial German Army (Stormtrooper tactics) and the later Wehrmacht innovations and pretend that their manuals and whatnot are derived from them, but in practice that’s a lie. If you tried to innovate outside the holy law of the field manuals, you would provoke a mighty REE the likes of which a gamma would give when his perceived ruleset is broken. The training tries to pound you into a box and then stay in that box.

The F-Word and A Culture of Gullible Murderers: 
“Freedom.” That’s all you gotta say to get the otherwise decent men that comprise my peers to want to murder people en masse minding their own business in their own countries. It’s a variant strain of NPC “orange man bad,” except it takes the form of “Taliban/Iranian/Russian/Chinese bad, me kill.” They love talking about killing people without regard to why, who, or the consequences so long as the act is justified by authority figures, whom they – most of them anyway – believe without reservation. This leads me to my next point…

What I Call the “NuBoomer” Sub-Generation: 
Boomer mentality has been successfully transmitted to a subset of millennials who are making up most of the high-spirited white officers. They are boomers except that they were born in the 90’s or very early 2000’s. What is boomer about them? The previously-mentioned automatic, sacrosanct trust in authority. If the media and gubmint tell them Iran blew up the ships, they believe it. Fake belief in the Bible; they will either be ‘cultural’ Christians who read Thomas Jefferson’s heretical tract as a substitute for the real Bible, or blithely ignore the politically incorrect passages of scripture. They furthermore embrace civnattery wholeheartedly, talking about how awesome it is to have fifth columns and grifters representatives from all colors and creeds in the ranks. Not to mention women and LGBT+ (soon to add P). Questioning mainstream narratives is beyond the pale  to them, and they love to consume mainstream ‘culture,’ i.e. movies, Netflix & pay-to-win games. These are the young men that the neo-cons are dependent on keeping sated and nationally/religiously unconscious for it is they who fight the imperial wars with high morale.

Part II to follow on Monday.

A native of Hong Kong responds to yesterday’s email from a mainlander.

I am born and raised in Hong Kong and are currently lived in the city for the past 5 years.

The reason why people oppose the government and react the way they do is simply the lack of trust for the government.

The mainland mailer is correct in a sense the Hong Kong people are spoiled brats because we have been at peace prospering for as long as this generation remembers. And so they are all boomer-like in a sense that they believe in lies that the government tells its people and such.

What Carrie Lam, the chief executive in Hong Kong, did that outraged the people is the obvious show of brute force that essentially served as a wake-up slap to the public. And they, being spoiled by peace, are throwing a fit.

We don’t hate the mainland Chinese people, However their tourists actions are equal that of an illegal immigrant from Mexico to the US. They have no intention of abiding by our cultural rules, I have personally seen two incidents where they openly defecate in the street, even outside the public bathroom!

Due to multiple incidents of fake and poison milk powders, they raid our food supply.The major city centres close to the broader have been turned to a mainland China city-like environment. The obvious cultural erosion has been putting pressure in the bomb for about 10 years now. And now is the result of the explosion.

SullyRob goes full gamma-rage because he didn’t get the attention he craved.

This is probably the last time vox will let me post here, I tried being nice to him for a while and that never got me anywhere with him or anywhere else on this blog. So since he refused to ever engage with me when I tried being respectful to him in the past. I see no reason to exit gracefully.

Gamma meltdown. Quelle surprise. Anyhow, comments are now locked-down, as per usual.

A reader emails concerning his interest in the new Castalia Deluxe line we are currently in the process of creating:

I am interested in the Castalia House leather bound books you have been proposing. My commitment is firm.

After growing up with reading being a prominent pastime, I had become post-literate myself. I had stopped reading for fun or leisure for over a decade.

Why? Because, increasingly, nearly everything that was readily accessible or recommended to me was subverted, converged, perverted, plain wrong, incompetent, amounted to nothing more than propaganda, was revisionist garbage, etc., etc. I had not finished a book in years that did not leave me feeling distorted, disgusted, or contributed to my mounting nihilism in some way. The same has been true for movies, TV, and pop culture generally which I have also abandoned. The odds were too good it would be utter *@!$.

Castalia House has been a welcome relief to my literary drought. Since I discovered you and Castalia House, aside from my professional and academic duties, I have read more in the last few months than I have in years. It’s not just the books Castalia publishes, but also Castalia’s blog, your blog, and the other resources you have exposed me to that has allowed me to reliably track down things worth reading. Things that leave me with a sense of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

A Throne of Bones was excellent. (Looking forward to A Sea of Skulls). David Eddings’s The Belgariad series was an effortless, enjoyable read. A History of France by John Julius Norwich wasn’t revisionist garbage. I am about to crack the first volume in my 1910 edition of Charles Oman’s The History of England.

Thank you for Castalia House and all you do. Keep up the good work.

P.S. Sometimes the presence of gatekeepers make people aware there’s a gate. Despite my growing disdain for Jordan Peterson, I took notice of his interview with Milo. I wondered what had changed because, for lack of a better phrase, one was authorized and the other wasn’t. When I watched the interview, Peterson reminded me you existed with his “Say hi to Vox for me” line. I quickly realized what had changed is Jordanetics was published. Jordanetics clearly articulated why I had developed such disdain for Peterson. This led me to Castalia House, Vox Popoli, and the Darkstream.

So, thanks, Jordan.

For those who aren’t aware, over the last week I’ve been working on expanding the concept of the requested deluxe leatherbound Castalia Junior Classics to an entire line of high-quality Castalia Deluxe books in the vein of Easton Press and Franklin Mint. The interest in this has been unexpectedly high, even among the presumably post-literate video crowd, and the project is looking extremely viable due to the way in which it builds directly on what we’re already doing at Castalia House.

The current plan is to offer a 50/month subscription to Castalia Deluxe, which will provide six books per year to the subscriber, delivered every other month. These subscriber books will NOT be limited editions, but they may have some features that the regular Deluxe books do not, such as gilded page edges and bookmark ribbons. The Castalia Junior Classics will NOT be part of the subscription, but both the regular hardcover and Deluxe editions will be available for sale.

We will offer a discount on non-subscription Deluxe books to subscribers, probably on the order of 5 or 10 dollars per book. We MAY also offer free shipping if we can ship a purchased book with a regular subscription shipment.

The first two books we will send to subscribers will be The Missionaries and Summa Elvetica & Other Stories. And in answer to some more of the frequently asked questions I’ve been getting:

Where do I sign up for the Deluxe subscription?
You don’t yet. We still have to decide how we want to set this up exactly, most likely through the Arkhaven store, and confirm that all the numbers add up correctly. But if you are seriously interested – by which I mean an 85 percent chance you believe you will sign up for a subscription if and when it becomes available – email me now with CASTALIA DELUXE in the subject.

How do I get the Castalia Junior Classics?
Through the crowdfunding campaign that is expected to begin in 2-3 weeks. The Junior Classics are NOT a part of this subscription program. The only connection is that we stumbled upon the idea of a new product line as part of figuring out how to offer a Deluxe edition of them.

Are you only going to be offering Castalia House books in Castalia Deluxe?
No. We’re just starting the Deluxe line with books we already publish because that is one less issue to sort out at the start. We’re trying to keep the degree of difficulty to a reasonable minimum. In addition to some of the usual classics, we want to publish great reference works of history, science, and philosophy. For example, I’d particularly like to bring back the first edition of The Cambridge Medieval History.

Will A THRONE OF BONES/AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND be available as part of the Deluxe subscription?
Yes, they will probably be included in the first year. We need to re-layout AWAKE, otherwise it would replace SUMMA as the second subscription book. And beginning with a monstrosity like ATOB would not be minimizing the degree of difficulty.

Will large books like ATOB cost more for subscribers?
No. Some books will cost us more, some will cost us less. This may affect the retail price, but will not affect the subscriptions.

Is the paper for the Deluxe editions going to be acid-free?
Yes, the paper is acid-free and meets ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 standards for archival quality paper.

Will you be publishing THERE WILL BE WAR in Deluxe editions?
Absolutely. They’re very near the top of the list.

I’m an author. Will you publish a Deluxe edition of my book?
That depends. Is your name “Nick Cole” or “William Gibson” or “Arturo Perez-Reverte”?

Will the Deluxe editions ship outside the USA?
Yes, although it is POSSIBLE that an international surcharge to cover shipping will be required for the subscription shipments.

UPDATE: the initial response has been enthusiastic.

Count me in for $50 a month! I find your literary curation absolutely invaluable. This year alone you’ve been the driving force behind me digging into Richard Adams, Hesse, Wodehouse, Umberto Eco, William Gibson, Owen Stanley, Quigley, Norwich, Van Creveld and more. It’s been an incredibly rewarding and transformative process.

A fellow Hesse fan reaches a conclusion:

I’ve been reading Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse and something occurred to me. I first intended to ask what sociosexual rank you think Harry Haller inhabits, but then I got to this passage and started laughing outside the sauna:

For long during this night’s walk I had reflected upon the significance of my relation to music, and not for the first time recognized this appealing and fatal relation as the destiny of the entire German spirit. In the German spirit the matriarchal link with nature rules in the form of the hegemony of music to an extent unknown in any other people. We intellectuals instead of opposing ourselves to this tendency like men, and rendering obedience to the spirit, the Logos, the Word, and gaining a hearing for it, are all dreaming of a speech without words that utters the inexpressible and gives form to the formless. 

Instead of playing his part as truly and honestly as he could, the German intellectual has constantly rebelled against the word and against reason and courted music, in wonderful creation of sound and wonderful beauties of feeling and mood that were never pressed home to reality, has left the greater part of its practical gifts to decay. None of us intellectuals is at home in reality. We are strangers to it and hostile. That is why the part played by intellect even in our own German reality, in our history and politics and public opinion, has been so lamentable a one. Well, I had often pondered all this, not without an intense longing sometimes to turn to and do something real for once, to be seriously and responsibly active instead of occupying myself forever with nothing but aesthetics and intellectual and artistic pursuits. It always ended, however, in resignation, in surrender to destiny. 

The generals and captains of industry were quite right. there was nothing to be made of us intellectuals. We were a superfluous, irresponsible lot of talented chatterboxes for whom reality had no meaning.

I wish I would have read Steppenwolf years and years ago because I think that passage would have helped me as much back then as it did today. At that passage I realized that it’s a book written by a German for the German people to help us understand ourselves. Occasionally someone asks you if it would be a good idea to move back to his own ancestral homeland. It may be a good idea, but it’s equally good to start by reading one’s own people’s literature because it was written for you yourself as one of those people.

A German girl I met on vacation about four years ago recommended that I read Steppenwolf, I think now because she recognized me as being truly German and as such would benefit from it like other Germans have. I plan now on diving into Goethe, as my grandfather told me a long time ago that “Goethe is the German Shakespeare.”

I’ve always felt that it was a bit ironic that the band that recorded “Born to be Wild” called themselves Steppenwolf since if they had remained true to the novel, the song would have been named “Born to be Mild”.

And “a superfluous, irresponsible lot of talented chatterboxes for whom reality had no meaning” is a fairly accurate description of the average intellectual today, except, of course, for the bit about talent.

A reader emails about convergence creeping in at Project Gutenberg:

For some time now, I’ve been a volunteer at Distributed Proofreaders (DP), which is the main site providing public domain e-books for Project Gutenberg. I had hoped this project would be somewhat immune to convergence as its mission is to preserve any and all works of literature in the public domain.

However, today the CEO of Project Gutenberg, Gregory Newby, published a notice in the forums for Distributed Proofreaders:

We recently updated the website with information about submitting public domain works to Project Gutenberg. There are two notable changes. The more important change, to me, is to firmly write that PG only accepts works in the public domain in the US. Historically, we’ve added a reasonable quantity of copyrighted works (perhaps a few {20631733b5a15c3694dbfcf360b60a1948a54005354f1d1bb00d126531fe1735}). But now, we send copyrighted submissions to http://self.gutenberg.org .. this change isn’t impactful to DP, since DP, also works exclusively with public domain works (with very few exceptions). The rationale for being firm about PD-only is twofold. Mainly, because there are many ways a contemporary author can distribute his or her works on the Internet (in the olden days, PG was one of few eBook outlets that would accept contemporary works for free, unlimited redistribution). Secondarily, because we were never very good at it: we don’t offer many services to authors, including the ability to post improvements, different formats, get stats on their readers, etc.

The other notable change is more impactful for DP, though still rarely an issue. This is to be more explicit about not wanting items that are hate speech or predecessors to hate speech, or items that are pornographic and obscene.

Hate speech or “predecessors to hate speech”? The latter is a new one for me. Fortunately, there was a speedy and overwhelming backlash… this time.

After a large outcry by the volunteers at Distributed Proofreading, the CEO of Project Gutenberg was essentially forced to walk back his decision and remove the language banning “hate speech” from the Gutenberg terms & conditions. He’s now pledged to uphold an open collection policy.

He needs to be forced out anyhow, though. Because he’s shown that he’s more than willing to cuck, given that he already did so without even coming under any external pressure.

A reader emails:

“A post-literate age.” This term resonated with me the moment you uttered it. I’m now seeing it almost daily.

The requests to ‘dumb down’ the language are approaching comedic, and I currently operate at government levels. I was asked to explain the difference between ‘woman’ and ‘women’ just last week.

In response to one recent request, I (in totally undisciplined irritation) asked if they’d prefer the document produced in brown paper and crayon. I try to be patient, but it’s getting harder.

Once again, your blog is a bastion of sanity.

We are living in the Crazy Years. It falls to us to build fortresses and monasteries of sanity. It is our responsibility to preserve knowledge and truth. It is our honor to stand up for that which is rather than that which someone feels it should be. And it is our responsibility to show up for the future, in order to ensure that the insane do not inherit the Earth.