Tag: mailvox

Mailvox: still not getting it

I’m getting very, very tired of this tedious line of woefully uninformed thought. This is neither the first time nor the one hundredth time I’ve heard the same clueless sentiment expressed:

Linguistic Kill Shots aka a New Lexicon

It strikes me that our language to describe the malice and evil the Marxist Left perpetrates is weak. For example, Social Justice Warrior actually sounds kind of cool and virtue signaling is vaguely academic.

While the language is accurate, none of it is persuasive. As part of meme war, I’d like to propose the re-branding of leftist actions to better convey the harm they cause, much like the left re-branded tea partiers “tea baggers.”

To get the ball rolling (although not that well. this begs to be crowd sourced):

Social Justice Warrior —>  Social Justice Parasite

Virtue Signaling —> Virtue Implants (as in fake, like breasts)

Scott Adams owes all of us an apology for convincing people that because they’ve read his blog and his book, they are suddenly masters of strategic persuasivery. Yes, let’s “rebrand” one of the most effective pejoratives coined in recent years and replace it with something obvious and utterly harmless that no one will ever use. All because conservatives are uptight about words and prone to sperging about dialectic. FFS, read the Social Justice series already!

From SJWAL:

The correct strategy is to fight dialectic with dialectic, expose pseudo-dialectic with dialectic, and fight rhetoric with rhetoric. And the most important thing about implementing that strategy is to understand that with rhetoric, the actual information content is largely irrelevant.

Rhetoric is all about what emotions you trigger in the other person; when SJWs talk to each other, they try to inflate themselves at the other’s expense in order to sort out their position in the SJW hierarchy. Of course, SJW metrics are all but unintelligible to normal, sane human beings, so it can be amusing as well as educational to watch them attempt to simultaneously exaggerate both their importance and their victimhood. The perfect Queen of the SJWs – and she would be a queen, never a king – would be a mixed-race lesbian Swedish immigrant who was abused as a child by a conservative white Republican politician and kept as a sex slave by neo-Nazis with Confederate-flag tattoos prior to writing a bestselling novel about a fictionalized version of her terrible experiences, appearing on Oprah, and starring on a science fiction TV show popular with white nerds.

The basic idea is that if you can make the other person feel small or angry, you are winning at SJW rhetoric. This is why SJWs are constantly accusing other people of being mad or upset; it’s just another way of them claiming to be winning the conversation. If you can make the other person submit, run away, or fall silent, then you have won the conversation, and you are higher in the SJW hierarchy than he is. So it doesn’t matter what you actually say, and in fact, resorting to straight-up namecalling, the more ridiculous the better, is often the fastest and most efficient way to get through the conversational process with an SJW. If he launches the usual “sexist, racist, homophobic, Nazi” line, don’t blink and don’t defend yourself. Just hit him right back with “racist, child molester, pedophile, monster” and watch him run. If you’re of a more delicate constitution and are not willing to go that far even when attacked unprovoked, try “creepy” and “stalker” on the men and “psycho” or “ugly” on the women. This will usually have much the same effect.

You will know your rhetoric is effective when they block you online, or in person if their eyes widen with shock and their jaw drops. And you have mastered the art of rhetoric when you can make an SJW retreat in tears or cause a room full of people to gasp in disbelief before bursting out laughing at the SJW.

Again, you must keep in mind that the actual information content is irrelevant. SJWs communicate in competitive emotion. If you’re not doing the same, then you’re not communicating with them, you’re doing little more than serving as a punching bag for their verbal strikes. I realize this probably doesn’t make sense, but that is because you are a normal, sane individual who thinks rather than feels. But keep in mind that just as their argument “X is Not X because feelbad” makes no sense to you, your argument that “X cannot be Not X due to the law of non-contradiction” makes no sense to an SJW.

Don’t try to work through the logic of it all. Just try it. It works. Chances are that you’ll be as surprised as I was to discover how effective it can be to speak in rhetoric to the rhetoric-speakers. When Milo Yiannopoulos destroyed a feminist on live television during a public debate concerning modern Britain’s hostility to men, it wasn’t his smooth recitation of relevant facts that left her reeling in shock and disarray; she blithely ignored all of that. It was his dismissive use of the word “darling” that literally muted her. Her wide, staring eyes and gaping mouth made it very clear how powerful a well-placed, well-timed rhetorical bomb can be.

Calling an SJW a “social justice parasite” or a “social justice whiner” doesn’t work. It will NEVER work. They know they are parasites and whiners. That doesn’t burn. But they WANT to think of themselves as warriors, and they know they are not. So, when they hear you calling them a “warrior”, they hear the sarcasm and contempt in your voice, and it burns.

Rhetoric follows a different logic than dialectic.

And before any self-appointed champions of Gab jump in to push their false narrative that I am being hypocritical due to my advice about ways to effectively respond to a verbal rhetorical attack, please trouble to note that context always matters, especially when it comes to the law. You will note that I have not changed the text of SJWAL in light of the subsequent situation nor do I have any need or reason to do so. SJWAL addresses the verities of rhetoric, not the vagaries of the law.

Mailvox: posturing and plagiarism

Tublecane accuses the Zman of plagiarizing David Stove

If those paragraphs you quoted in your update are supposed to be Z-man’s words, uttered without reference to their source, oh boy. I thought they sounded familiar, so I checked my copy of David Stove’s Scientific Irrationalism and Z-man copies verbiage found on page one. Right down to the year 1580, the letter “A,” and the phrase “uncommonly ignorant.”

Stove, being much brighter than the Z-men of the world, wasn’t making an “everything scientists say is factual, so shut up” argument. He doesn’t even share Z-man’s opinion on Popperian falsifiabilty, though he lays into Popper and finds him guilty of launching a line of irrationalism (or a “postmodern cult,” as the subtitle has it) in the philosophy and historiography of science. A line which isn’t so bad with Popper but gets worse and worse as you go through Kuhn, Lakatos, and Feyerabend.

The point about accumulation of knowledge, which is robust in Stove’s book, is neither here nor there regarding the subject at hand. Z-man thinks he’s dealing with nihilists, and nihilists would have trouble with facts accumulating. But of course that has nothing to do with how you characterize varieties of “science” in the 16 Points. Science since 1580 could have simultaneously been more wrong than right and still served to advance human knowledge.

Upon closer inspection, Z-man explicitly mentions David Stove’s Popper and After, but in a separate post from the one in which he steals from it.

I call plagiarism!

Moreover, plagiarism that would be insulting to Stove, RIP, since he wouldn’t be caught making an argument as silly as Z-man’s.

I haven’t read any of David Stove’s books, so I can’t testify to the accuracy of the accusation of plagiarism. But it’s not particularly surprising to be informed that the argument the Zman’s was making is not his own, as 8 hours before Tublecane posted his comment, I had made this observation: “One definitely has the impression that the Zman has not read Popper, or even Kuhn, himself, but rather, has read what people have written about Popper.”

In any event, this demonstrates why it is important not to feign knowledge you do not possess, not to pass off the arguments of others as your own, and not to express opinions on subjects you do not know very much about. Especially on the Internet, someone is bound to eventually notice that you are an intellectual fraud.

The power of omninationalism

This email from MD may tend to confuse more than a few of my more unvarnished critics.

I am a 32 year old Kenyan man. Kenyan being a full-blooded African as we say. I have been mulling writing this email for sometime now. It is primarily to say thank you for the good work you are doing. I came across your blogs sometime in 2011/2012. I started off with Alphagameplan(AGP) and really started on Vox Popoli(VP) at the beginning of 2014. I think I have read all the posts on AGP but haven’t really dug into the VP archives.

I got to reading the manosphere as I searched for a way to make sense of women. I am relatively intelligent (have an engineering degree) and struggled in my relations with the opposite sex. I would say I had several gamma tendencies and self sabotaged myself in this area for a while. In addition I have grown up in a staunchly Christian home struggled to reconcile my Christian faith and the local way of gender relations. This local way primarily involves sleeping around a lot. Our traditional family and moral structures have heavily eroded my modernity.

Anyway in short I came to learn how to relate with women, succeeded and moved on to learning the basics of civilization. I got married this year to a wonderful Christian girl from a family which also acknowledges the Lordship of Christ and hopefully will be a dad soon. Your take on women, men’s roles and relationships and marriage really gave me hope when I had almost given up on having a Godly marriage. I hope I do not sound too spiritual but it is the truth.

I tell my wife that your writing helped me reconcile rationality and Christianity. I always felt lacking in apologetics when people around bad mouthed Christianity. Now I have a fairly good framework for tackling the why and when they bad mouth it. One of the sad bits about the intelligentsia here in Kenya is that they suppose that their intelligence qualifies them to look down on believers.

A lot of people here are Christians because of the promise of a better tomorrow, me included. I have seen how far belief in Christ has brought my dad and mum. Unfortunately many Christians have no theological grounding and are taken advantage of. Basically people (especially intelligent ones) consider Christians to be idiots. Your writings have exposed me, sharpened my critical thinking skills and given me hope.

The post ‘On the necessity of Christianity’ gave me hope. It may not be in  my generation or the one after it but that one day the same transformation it have on the backward Germanic and other European peoples will be seen here in my homeland. Especially if we embrace the transformative power of Christianity.

Thank you. Even as you defend the West, you have allies even here in the supposed dark continent.

He is quite welcome, of course. He is also far from the only African reader here. And the fact is that it is men like MD who are the best hope of the global South and the West alike, Christian men who are willing to accept the hard task of accepting even the most bitter truths, and then taking on the challenge of building their families and their nations despite the additional degree of difficulty involved.

His comparison of the historical backwardness of the Germanic peoples with the present backwardness of his own is an apt one. Things will not always be as they are now. A reckoning is coming. A winnowing is coming. And it is strong Christian men who will serve as the foundation for the successful societies to come, wherever they may be.

Yes, Africa faces serious challenges, both material and spiritual. But imagine what an Africa that somehow, through the will of Man and the grace of God, managed to surmount them would look like. Imagine how iron-forged and formidable it would be!

We can only play the hand that we are dealt. It is our responsibility to play that hand to the best of our ability, rather than spend our lives lamenting the fact that someone else, somewhere else, happend to receive better cards.

Mailvox: another challenge to Amazon fails

Macmillan throws in the towel:

Two years ago Pronoun set out to create a one-of-a-kind publishing tool that truly put authors first. We believed that the power of data could be harnessed for smarter book publishing, leveling the playing field for indie authors.

We are proud of the product we built, but even more so, we’re grateful for the community of authors that made it grow. Your feedback shaped Pronoun’s development, and together we changed the way authors connect with readers.

Unfortunately, Pronoun’s story ends here.

While many challenges in indie publishing remain unsolved, Macmillan is unable to continue Pronoun’s operation in its current form. Every option was considered before making the very difficult decision to end the business.

As of today, it is no longer possible to create a new account or publish a new book. Pronoun will be winding down its distribution, with an anticipated end date of January 15, 2018. Authors will still be able to log into their accounts and manage distributed books until that time.

For the next two months, our goal is to support your publishing needs through the holiday season and enable you to transition your books to other services. For more detail on how this will affect your books and payments, please refer to our FAQ.

Thank you for the time and attention you’ve contributed to this experience. It has been a privilege to publish together, and we look forward to meeting again. #keepwriting

Sincerely,

Macmillan Publishers

We gave Pronoun a shot, and from a user’s point of view, it was actually very good. The interface was solid and very easy to use; you could get a book published on every major ebook platform in less than ten minutes. The problem, and the reason we eventually withdrew most of the books we put on it, was that it simply didn’t perform from a sales perspective.

The only real volume came from Amazon, and being on Pronoun meant not being on Kindle Select and Kindle Unlimited. Even accounting for the lower compensation on KU – a complete book read is about one-third the compensation for a Kindle book bought – KU brought in about 10x more revenue per book than all the other platforms.

This does not bode well for the major publishers. KU is cutting deeply into their sales and they can’t do anything about it because they can’t put their books on it. As for us, KU accounts for about 10 percent of our unit “sales”.

It’s too bad, because KU’s too-low KENP page-rates do not bode well for Amazon responsibly managing its monopoly position; I expect that sooner or later, they will squeeze the authors and publishers more tightly than anyone will find comfortable. But people simply don’t want to buy ebooks anywhere else. That’s why we don’t often put them on the Castalia store anymore.

Mailvox: inventing sin

TB is unhappy with the descent of his church into worldly racial cuckery:

I was baptized in the Seattle church, where there was none of this bunk. We’ve moved to the Portland church and have been part of the church here for four years. The last year or so has caused me concern. Our minister, Steve Johnson, is from the south and has been experiencing white male guilt as he gets older.

What is with men turning into mush pies as they age? Reminds me of Teddy Roosevelt.

The one thing I am certain of is that any solutions to the problems mentioned in the linked content by anyone in agreement with the content in the letter , provided the proposer of the solutions informs of the desired result, will fail. Our church was very Bible and Jesus focused. That focus is weakening, but hopefully only in our local church and not the ICOC as a whole. So many churches are terrible, I’m not looking forward to finding a new one.

More and more Churchians are revealing themselves to be lukewarm, far more concerned about seeking the world’s approval than they are about following the lead of Jesus Christ, far more fearful of the judgment of Man than of the judgment of God, and unwilling to condemn genuine sin while constantly posturing in condemnation of that which is not, and has never been, sinful.

We write this letter not as Democrats or Republicans or as partisans of any political philosophy, but as Christians who are partisans of the kingdom of God described in the biblical text.

We write because of the racial tensions that now engulf our nation—racism against blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and other ethnic minorities. But what has triggered our concern at this particular time is the tension that surrounds black/white relations—an extension of America’s original sin, the sin of slavery.

The question begs for an answer: how will we who claim the name Christian respond?

The choice before us is clear. We can allow the racism that abounds in America’s popular culture to set the agenda for the church. Or we can allow the biblical vision of the kingdom of God to determine what we believe, how we feel, and how we act.

The biblical text is clear: racism is a sin. It violates Jesus’ command to love our neighbors as ourselves.

But here we have another choice. We can read the biblical text through the lens of American culture or we can read the culture through the lens of the biblical text.

Put another way, we can acknowledge that racism is a sin and behave accordingly, or we can act as if racism is only a minor problem or, even worse, participate in the racism that scars such large segments of this nation…. But racial bigotry is only half of our problem. The other half is widespread misunderstanding on the part of many white Americans—including many white Christians—of the unique set of challenges that faces American citizens if the color of their skin happens to be black.

Nothing has reflected that reality more clearly than the popular response to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Racism, as a concept, did not even exist until it was coined in 1902; the Oxford English Dictionary  gives 1936 as the first recorded use. The idea that it could possibly be a sin, much less the very worst sin of all, defies not only the Bible and nearly two thousand years of theological literature, but reason and the calendar too.

Remember, Christians are given a spirit of discernment and we are to judge things by their fruits. And the fruits of the false concept of racism as sin are deeply poisonous indeed. They have proven to be incredibly destructive of individuals, families, societies, and nations alike. When I was a child, I used to wonder how it could be that so many supposed Christians could ever be so deceived by the Antichrist as to literally worship evil.

Now, as I see Christian ministers angrily denouncing racism and sexism from the pulpit even as they embrace Babelist globalism and sexual abomination, it all makes perfect sense. Aslan is not a tame lion, and God’s definition of sin is not determined by temporal human sensitivities. Neither racism nor hurting someone’s feelings by your beliefs are sins, and anyone who tells you they are is not merely lying, he is a servant of the spirit of Antichrist.

This is really not that difficult for any educated believer. By EVERY single definition of racism utilized by the anti-racists, both Jesus Christ and God are revealed to be sinners by their overtly racist words and actions. Therefore, the perverted theology of anti-racism is obviously and necessarily false, and quite possibly blasphemous as well. And in that vein, notice how many female names are among the letter’s signatories.

Every so-called pastor who preaches against racism should be expelled from the pulpit. And if he refuses to repent, from the Church. They are among the wolves in sheep’s clothing of whom we were warned.

Mailvox: It is none of your business

Non-Hollywood Reporter finally manages to be on-topic.

Vox, your greatest mate who you said you’d stand by forever said he attended several Hollywood parties where he witnessed “very young” boys being raped. You knew this at the time.

Your best friend who you stand by also said he wouldn’t name the rapists because it would be “indiscreet”.

Have you asked your best friend Milo to name these pedophiles publicly, or at least make a statement to the police?

If not, why not?

Why do you keep deleting these questions and never answering them?

Do you think you can delete them forever?

First, Non-Hollywood Reporter is lying and has been banned and spammed for spamming unrelated topics in a monomaniacal manner. Milo is my friend. Milo is not my best friend. Second, it is absolutely none of Non-Hollywood Reporter’s business what I have discussed with Milo or anyone else. Nor is it anyone else’s business. One of the reasons even people who don’t particularly like me tend to trust me is because I am demonstrably capable of keeping things in confidence. Third, I do not owe any answer to the Non-Hollywood Reporter or anyone else for someone else’s decisions and behavior, be they ally, friend, or foe.

I will never permit anyone to use me to put additional public pressure on a friend or ally. Go ahead and try to attack me on the basis of questions I will not answer if you like. You will do so in vain. My track record on this particular issue more than speaks for itself and will continue to do so in a very material way. So, for that matter, does Milo’s, as he has publicly identified three more pedophiles than virtually every journalist and reporter who has condemned him for not doing more than he has.

I have outed THREE pedophiles in my career as a journalist. That’s three more than any of my critics and a peculiar strategy for a supposed pedophile apologist.
(a) Luke Bozier, former business partner of Louise Mensch
(b) Nicholas Nyberg, anti-GamerGate activist who self-described as a pedophile and white nationalist
(c) Chris Leydon, a London photographer who has a rape trial starting March 13 thanks to my reporting.

I have never defended and would never defend child abusers, as my reporting history shows.

I kept deleting the questions because they were a) off-topic, b) obviously rhetorical, and c) primarily intended to discredit and disqualify me and others. I certainly can delete them forever if I so choose; the moderators and I will simply prevent any comment by Non-Hollywood Reporter from even appearing momentarily on this blog. However, I chose to address them today to make several points.

  1. No commenter will ever succeed in pressuring me to do anything. Even the attempt to do so is sufficient grounds for banning and spamming. /pol/ is not your private army. Neither am I, my VFM, or the Dread Ilk.
  2. I do not even betray the confidences of my enemies. I absolutely do not betray the confidences of my friends and allies.
  3. Your ignorance of my actions is not evidence of the non-existence of my actions.
  4. I am not perfect. I am as fallible as any man. But as those who know me and work with me can attest, I am consistent.
  5. I do not answer to anyone but my Lord and Savior, and His Father.

Mailvox: Churchian convergence, Senator Cuck, and Generation Rebel

CK discovers that truth is now hate in the eyes of the converged Churchians on Facebook:

Apparently saying that 3 does not equal 1 now qualifies as “hate speech.” An episode unfolded yesterday here in town that exposed just how far gone even most conservative evangelicalism is in riding the inclusivity train right off the cliff.

A local Christian women’s Facebook group, after a couple months of ambiguity, determined to update their policy to clarify that they were open to Christians only, not unbelievers. My friend politely asked what this did and didn’t mean, since there were Mormons in the group as well, who by definition are not monotheists. The group admin *deleted* her comments, then, when confronted, insisted that she had somehow done so by accident.

So my friend dutifully posted again, bending over backwards to coat her words with grace and love, and merely noting that it was important to be clear that Christians and Mormons don’t really share the same faith at all, so the group should be simply be renamed for the sake of clarity and accuracy. A Mormon friend of hers cheerfully rejoined and said that actually Mormons are Christians, and another said, “Yeah, we believe the Trinity—three distinct beings in one Godhead, etc.”

My wife piped up briefly to say, “Well, see, that’s the problem. Actually Christians don’t believe in three distinct beings” and quoted from the Athanasian Creed. One of the Mormons responded fairly defensively seeking to justify the Mormon view from Scripture.

At that point, the group admin shut down the thread, declaring that it was not glorifying to God, the devil was at work, it was hateful and slanderous, and posted a general rebuke warning people not to debate their beliefs. This was the cue for the other (mostly conservative evangelical) people in the group to pile on and accuse my wife and her friend of “hate speech.”

Meanwhile, BP in Arizona is entirely unimpressed with his departing senator:

I know you keep being right on just about everything, but it is still strange and impressive to watch it happen, again and again, exactly as predicted.  Watching Senator Jeff Flake (may God forget he was our countryman) talk about muh principles, while blubbering about all of Trump’s failure of character, leadership, etc, ad nauseum, and then quitting, announcing he isn’t running for re-election…

Well, you nailed it, exactly, again.  Flake is everything you said conservatives are and have become was illustrated perfectly in that self-important speech, in all its limp-wristed glory.  What an amazing cuck.  It also amazes me that the idiocy he says is self-evidently false, and yet he stands up there and says it anyway, illustrating he’s an evil, duplicitous, lying, traitorous bastard, or he’s just the stupidest, most egotistical asshole ever.  Arizona is going to be so much better off with him and McCain gone, and so will the rest of the country.

Drain the swamp, and MAGA!

And finally, a woman writes in of her husband’s unexpected enthusiasm for Alt★Hero:

So Sig. Other, after over 10 years of mocking me for my mild interest in comics, has not only backed the Alt-Hero campaign at the figurine level, he suggested Rebel as a middle name for our daughter. While the name would be a tribute to his Southern heritage and not the character, he admitted he wouldn’t have thought of it if it weren’t for Alt-Hero.

Thought you’d be amused. Alt-Hero is changing hearts and minds already.

I am indeed amused. But taken in the whole, it should be readily apparent that across the increasingly divided West we are now caught up in a full-blown culture war. It is still a cold war, in that it is merely livelihoods rather than lives that are being lost, but it is clear that the conflict is gradually heating up.

Mailvox: successfully fighting SJWs

HS writes to tell how SJWADD helped her rout an SJW attempting to converge her neighborhood’s site:

Just wanted to send my thanks for your great primer on fighting SJWs.  Today on a social networking site used in my neighborhood I saw an attempt at an SJW convergence.  I instantly recognized the technique from reading your book about SJWs, and used the methods you described to stop it.  Of course she used the SJW argument about “civility” and “inclusion” but I was able to predict and rebut her arguments, and those of her white knight.  My instant fighting back and strong rhetoric encouraged others neighbors to attack her, and she ended up leaving the site.  I’m glad I read your book because I would probably have argued in good faith and not been aggressive, and we may have lost a great tool my neighborhood uses for security, recommendations, and finding services.  It was really amazing to watch how she argued exactly as you said she would, it was like being psychic.  Thanks for your effort in fighting these people!

This stuff actually works because it’s real and it is battle-tested. It’s not all just theory and hypotheses.

Mailvox: the furrowed brow

As I pointed out in Cuckservative, it doesn’t matter which side the moderates say they are on. They will always, always, always prefer to virtue-signal by shooting at “their” side. Either you’re too impolite or you’re insufficiently inclusive or you’re too extreme or your bow tie is tied improperly. Regardless, they are always irrelevant and serve no purpose except as speedbumps for the side they nominally support.

A Castalia House blogger notes that the moderates have discovered Alt★Hero.

There’s another outraged blog post about Alt★Hero, this time from Kasimir Urbanski. He claims that what you’re doing is just like SJW Marvel. I read the post, and he behaves exactly as you said moderates do — they shoot at their own side, saying that we have to behave more civilized than the opposition, all in some attempt to avoid charges of being too mean instead of backing up people who actually take action. They expect to both fight the SJWs and follow the (im)moral standards SJWs set, standards the SJWs happily ignore.

Let’s see what this gentleman has to say:

And that’s what bothers me about Alt-Hero. We certainly could use someone coming along and making a new comics universe that was ABOUT THE COMICS in the same way the OSR is about the games. One that didn’t ignore politics completely, or shy from moral lessons, or push a leftist agenda, but that wasn’t just a facade for right-wing propagandism either.

 I would love to see a universe that had heroes that actually embodied heroism, that had moral values, that were patriotic, that believed in family, that stood up for classical Enlightenment values, who saluted the flag. And this would have the “Aleena Effect” of SJWs protesting against a hero in a US flag, and everyone who likes US flags abandoning the SJWs.

 But above all, that it would focus on the comics. Instead, Alt-hero has every appearance of being something that will involve someone who is fundamentally not really all that into comics (at least, not enough to value the subculture) injecting ideological propaganda into the medium of the comic, with the comics’ conventions being largely an afterthought to sledgehammering their political agenda.

 That means Alt-Hero looks like it’s going to be pretty much just like SJW Marvel.

That is pure textbook. One of the reliable marks of the moderate is his total inability to distinguish tactics from objectives. The ironic thing is that to ignore something like the SJW invasion of literally every aspect of society would be to inject ideological propaganda into the comics, as it is one of the most significant aspects of our society today. Omitting that, or immigration, would be like pretending the Cold War wasn’t happening during the 70s and 80s.

But this is good news, in my opinion. The more the moderates are concerned and even upset, the more likely it is that Alt★Hero is going to be effective.

Mailvox: If this is failure

I suspect success might go to my head.

I actually put off reading the Throne of Bones series because I figured your fiction couldn’t possibly be any good. Why? Well, nobody can do everything well! You’re a clear political writer and superb thinker, you even had a band at one point. You’re an immensely creative organizer, you started your own publishing house… “What are the odds for this guy also being a good epic fantasy writer?” I asked myself. Also, the title, Throne of Bones kind of put me off. I thought you were referencing G.R.R. Martin. Well, I finally read it, and was delighted. Sea and Summa followed in due course. Your writing has the key characteristics that I value in excellent fantasy: resonance and novelty. There is a sense of familiar mythic themes, but rendered in a new and surprising way. Elves and orcs and dwarves and Romans! Oh my!

I noticed a mention that you will come out with a revised book (Sea?) soon. I’m wondering, why revise? Why not write another one? (Please?) Will the revision be an expansion where I can just start reading the new stuff, or will I need to read the whole thing again to find the additions? (Not that this would be a dreadful fate!)

Now that F&SF has become a loathsome wasteland of Social Justice and Abused Pronouns, we need more writing like this.

Actually, it’s not a revision, but an extended edition. By Amazon’s reckoning, A Sea of Skulls will go from 430 pages to 924 pages. I don’t quite see how that is even possible, since by my count, it will go from 165,000 words to 297,500. None of the existing story will be excised or even modified; I have no reason to change anything, and besides, I don’t have the time.

And don’t forget, The Last Witchking & Other Stories is now available in audiobook. I waited years to put any of this out in audio because I was waiting for the right narrator, and Jeremy Daw is just that.

An excerpt from “The Last Witchking”.

In the eyes of the villagers of Pretigny, Speer Gnasor was a boy not terribly unlike any other. He was taller than the other boys his age, but someone has to be the tallest in every village, and no one ever appeared to think it odd that at nearly thirteen years of age, the top of his father’s head barely cleared his shoulder. Speer was quick-witted but not remarkably so, although he was both envied and mocked by the other boys for his ability to read.

He participated in their games, albeit in a desultory manner. He was not unpopular, and if he had exerted himself even a little, he might well have made himself a leader of one of the little packs that divided the children of the town on lines roughly conforming with their fathers’ occupations.

Per Gnasor, his father, raised bees and made candles, and his mother raised the small flock of geese and chickens that provided him with his daily egg, and on feast days, the fowl for their little family. His two passions were fishing and books, and it was said that he had read every one of the twenty-eight books in the village at least twice.

The Gnasors themselves were said to possess seven books. By Pretigny standards, this amounted to a family library of almost mythic proportions. He dutifully attended the small church of the Immaculate twice each week, and if he ate the wafer and drank the wine given to him by the priest with little thought for what it represented, in this he was no different than any other boy in the village.

He was not an unhappy lad, and he was entirely content with his life as he found it. He did not, like some of his youthful acquaintances, chafe at the smallness of their familiar surroundings or dream of one day seeking his fortune in what, from the perspective of Pretigny, was considered to be the great city of Niederholen. Even the rumors of the riches of distant Stalchwil on the banks of the Ghlêne more than a ten-day journey away held little fascination for him. He learned to tend his father’s bees, to twist wicks and shape wax, and slowly, but surely, he even began to take notice of the butcher’s daughter. She was a tall, slender girl with a wide mouth and pale blue eyes who was nearly of a height and an age with him.

Left to his own devices, allowed to pursue his homely dreams, it was likely that Speer Gnasor would have married the butcher’s daughter, learned the butcher’s trade, and eventually become a fine, upstanding pillar of the local church and community.

But on his thirteenth birthday, everything he knew about himself and the world around him was forever transformed by a letter from his father.

After a dinner that featured rare treats such as Valoyan sausages and the sweet cheese called Niederholt, Per Gnasor sent him into the forest armed with nothing more than his warmest coat and a small shovel and told him to unearth his birthday present one hundred paces north of his favorite tree.
Both excited and confused, he lost little time in finding the peculiar oak with a thick lower branch that twisted over its leftmost neighbor, and paced off the distance. He had to dig a hole that was deeper than his knees before he struck something hard. With a little more work he saw it was a small wooden chest. His heart beating faster, he extricated it from the ground and opened it.

The first thing he saw was a letter written in an unfamiliar hand. Despite the shadows cast by the looming trees, there was just enough light breaking through the leaves to permit him to read it.

To my son and my heir,

You are not what you think you are. You are more, so much more. Kings and princes would tremble and scour the earth in search of you were they to hear even a rumor of your existence. It was to save you from their wrath that your mother sacrificed herself. It was to protect you from their vengeance that you were hidden away even from yourself. The man and woman you believe to be your parents are my true and loyal servants, and they have raised you at my command, even as they release you now to your destiny as they have been instructed.

You will be told many lies about your true kind, we whom the vulgar and the frightened wrongly named witchkings. But this is nothing more than fear. It is the shameless perversion of history by the vicious little minds of its victors.

As you will learn, we Wahrkönigen were simply dedicated to the truth and only the truth, regardless of its consequences and heedless of its costs. And what was this fearful truth, this dark god that struck such terror into the hearts of Men and Elves, Orcs, and Dwarves? Only this: There is no Good and there is no Evil. There is only what Is. Nothing more. Have the courage to grasp this fearful truth, and you shall be a worthy successor to the long line of kings before you.

I have prepared the means that you will require to learn both the Lesser and the Greater Arts. Master them well. An arduous task lies before you, but I know you will succeed, for you are my son and you will surpass me. And in the place that has been prepared for you, you will also find the answers to your inevitable questions, including your true lineage.

You are a phoenix raised by sparrows, my son. Now it is time for you to fly. When you have grown into your strength and become worthy of your heritage, you will set the world on fire.

These are the three charges that I lay upon you, my son. Instruct the Elves. Break them of their ancient pride and shatter the remnants of their kingdoms. Humble the Northmen. They must pay a tithe of blood for their treachery. Harry them throughout their islands and drive them into the sea. Preserve the Blood. You must not be the last of your line. Father many children, on many women, but instruct only the most worthy in the Wahrkunst. The Blood will tell.

You are young and you are alone in a harsh and unforgiving world, but never doubt that you were loved as few sons have ever been loved. For your mother and your father so loved you that they died for you, not once, but twice. We allowed ourselves to perish and we erased ourselves from the minds of mortals, so that you might live.

Your enemies, and they are many, will not find you until you are ready to be found. Be brave, my son, be strong, and never permit yourself fear. For you are a true Wahrkönig, and in your veins flows the pure blood of the greatest and most powerful sorcerers the world has ever known. Embrace your greatness, my son, embrace the Blood, embrace the challenges I have set before you, and one day, you will teach the world that you are harsher and more unforgiving than it could ever dare to be.

Avenge me, my son. Avenge your loving mother. Avenge your noble race,

Mauragh, son of Thauragh
King of Thauron, Nordandir, and the Wolf Isles