Tag: mailvox

Mailvox: the reluctant revolutionary

From a reader deep in the belly of the Beast:

I am a teacher at a public school in [REDACTED].  During our first professional day this year our faculty was introduced to a new administrative mandate from the state bureaucracy.  At the conclusion of the presentation we were permitted to comment.  I asked the presenter if she thought the educational bureaucracy was insane, evil, or both.  My comment elicited a few chuckles from my colleagues.  She responded that she thought the new procedures would make her a more accountable teacher.  I rejoined that it would make of me a revolutionary.  Once again my colleagues chuckled.  Teachers are some of the worst sheeple on the planet.

I later approached a colleague who is a close ideological ally.  “Well, [REDACTED], which is it?”  As is frequently the case with him, he was quick to hit the mark.  “If they’re insane, it makes logical sense to accommodate them.  If they are evil, then we are morally obliged to fight them.”  Spot on.  He is good like that.

I tried to suppress my thoughts for the rest of the week, but the realization wouldn’t let go.  I had become a reluctant revolutionary.  Or rather, to be more accurate, the state had made me a revolutionary.  The idea sickens me.  I didn’t ask for this.  I have never aspired to this sort of vocation or anything like it.  It’s one of the last things I would ever wish upon myself.  But here I stand.

The comment you posted this morning from the German president about something being wrong with the people brought to me another sudden realization. Leaders as a class have never studied the antecedents of revolution.  If they had, they would keep on their desks a handy checklist and refer to it often.  But they truly are clueless. Revolutions are not a form of spontaneous combustion.  I am reminded of the final words of Madame Ceausescu as she was put up against the wall:  “You can’t do this; I treated you like my children.”  Clueless to the bitter end.

Or, as Aristotle put it, some people cannot be convinced by information. Never forget that. They genuinely believe they are our masters. I expect events will eventually convince them otherwise.

Mailvox: how can you tell?

JI wants to know how one can accurately pick out the sociopaths among one’s acquaintances and colleagues. A few observations:

  1. Look for abrupt changes in demeanor as the situation changes, and particularly for a wide-eyed, “caught red-handed” reaction when such a change is observed. Sociopaths go from bright-eyed, charming, and friendly to dead-eyed and icy cold in the blink of an eye. Normal people do not.
  2. Beware of anyone who is too friendly too soon. It’s one thing to hit it off with someone, it’s another to have someone glom onto you for no apparent reason.
  3. Perma-victims are usually perpetrators. Female sociopaths, in particular, are adept at revising every story to make themselves the victim, especially when they were the culprit. If nothing is ever someone’s fault, it’s usually all their fault.
  4. Trust your instincts. If you find someone repellant but you don’t know why, it’s your subconscious picking up on small contradictions that you haven’t recognized. Keep a close eye on that individual and you’ll usually discover what it was that your subconscious was warning you about.
  5. Sociopaths have a very alert gaze and they are always scanning to see if anyone is watching them. If you intentionally let them know you are onto them by not looking away and smiling at them in a “gotcha” manner, they will confirm their sociopathy by abruptly changing their behavior towards you, usually by becoming avoidant and launching a whisper campaign against you. This can be risky, of course, but it does provide certain confirmation. I would not recommend it for most people, as most people are insufficiently ruthless to deal effectively with sociopaths.
  6. A shallow “salesman” effect. If someone is always “hail fellow well met”, but doesn’t have any real friends, this is a warning sign.
  7. An attempt to “take over” a group of friends or a social organization, particularly if they attempt to cut out the person who brought them into the group.
  8. Persistent cheating and parasitism, especially in small matters that no one normally keeps track of. I’m not talking about someone who is cheap, but someone who is always a taker and never a giver or even a fair-exchanger.
  9. Constant whisper campaigns. Sociopaths are even more concerned with controlling the narrative than SJWs. If you find that someone has told three different stories to three different people about the same event, be alert.
  10. Be very skeptical of all sob stories. If you encourage a sociopath telling one by feigning shock and sympathy, he will proceed to go deeper, adding more and more detail, and more and more pathos, taking the story into completely absurd territory in order to see how much of a sucker you are and what he can get away with.
None of these things are definitive, they are merely suggestive. But taken as a whole, they are reliably conclusive.

Mailvox: an American in Europe

A reader visits Italy and discovers that what I’ve been saying about the very distinct European nations is true:

This being my first time in Europe I noticed right away that I had been working with a mental blind spot that I think most/all Americans who have never been abroad are likely suffering under.  Maybe it’s the homogenization of the ethnicities in the US, or maybe just the ubiquitous “we’re all the same” message that we’re fed so much that we notice it no more than the fish notice the water, but I was surprised – more like shocked – at how obvious the ethnic differences were between the European peoples.  We spent a lot of time at major tourist sites, so we were constantly awash in a polyglot.

Besides English I can only speak a smattering of Spanish, but merely identifying the various languages is pretty easy.  I began playing a mental game of “guess the ethnicity” and was surprised at how accurate I became. I would see a family group and try to guess where they were from based on their physical appearance and behavior, before hearing them speak.  It was easy to be right 50%+ of the time after just a few days.

To untraveled Americans, I think the ubiquitous mental image of the European countries is analogous to “states” in the connotative sense, not the denotative one.  Other than the fact that they speak different languages, we picture each of them as being as ethnically diverse as California.  Maybe it’s not true for everyone, but for me at least it was an eye opener to see that I could frequently distinguish between a Frenchman and an Italian even though they likely lived less than 700 miles apart.  In fact the only people I could rarely guess the nationality of correctly were Americans, as I’d frequently assume they were British, German, or Nordic.

I find it quite easy to spot the Americans myself. They tend to be fatter and louder than anyone else, and they are the only ones besides Africans who wear white sneakers. They also have whiter and straighter teeth.

What people living in the USA tend to forget is that their imported nationalities are all watered down now. Virtually no one is pure Irish or Swedish or Italian anymore, and so the US facial features tend to be a little blurred in comparison with the sharper features of their distant Old World cousins. In fact, here one can not infrequently identify what town an individual comes from on the basis of their facial appearance alone.

Of course, given my complicated background, I can very easily pass for anything from Bavaria south. One of my hobbies is explaining my excellent, unaccented English to American tourists in need of assistance.

“Thank you so much. I spent three years studying to be a rodeo clown at the University of Idaho.”

On a tangential note, it’s hard to believe, but the USA is even more cucked than Sweden. Keep that in mind every time you hear people intoning that Europe is doomed. The situation in the USA is worse by nearly every single measure.

Mailvox: Churchianity and Cruz

JM is mystified by the continued enthusiasm of Churchian cuckservatives for Ted Cruz:

I used to respect the authors of this blog and some of those they quote with approval, but I’ve lost respect for them in the last few months, and have dropped them from my blogroll.  I find it both interesting and annoying to see how they rationalize Ted Cruz’s refusal to keep his word into an act of Christian principle.  To be charitable, they may be unaware of all the dirty tricks pulled by the Cruz campaign, but they’d probably find some way to justify them, anyway.

I suspect that Cruz, Jeb, and Kasich never had any intention of supporting Trump regardless of the pleedge they made, and they’re just making up excuses to rationalize their dishonesty.

Most of the women mentioned in this post who are so upset at Trump and Christians who favour Trump are extremely judgmental Calvinists, who seem to be making this a test of Christian orthodoxy.

If these people are so enthusiastic about Cruz’s alleged adherence to the Constitution, why don’t they notice that he isn’t even constitutionally eligible to hold the office he was running for?

It’s just a form of Christian identity politics, that’s all. After all, once you’ve determined that Ted Cruz is the Holy and Anointed One, it’s a little hard to back down and admit that not only are you wrong, but you’ve been listening to false prophets you should never again give any credence.

Like any other cult that’s faced with dealing with false prophecies, the response of the hard core is to double down even as everyone else falls away.

The only reason they’re so upset with Trump is because he has shown their prophets to be false, their principles to be fake, and their pretensions to be ridiculous. I suspect that most of these die-hards are either women or gammas, as neither can ever forgive someone who humiliates them by publicly proving them to be wrong.

I wasn’t even a little bit surprised to see the poster boy for Churchian cuckservatives, Matt Walsh, being prominently featured in the approved quotes club. That is the sort of people JM is dealing with here.

Mailvox: stop posturing, morons

The ironically named General Noitall has no idea how clueless he is, but that doesn’t stop him from making confidently authoritative statements that are complete nonsense:

Flynn, under Trump, is set to be Sec. of Defense or, more likely, Chairman of the Join Chiefs. And as we know, Flynn “has no idea how to defeat ISIS”. Yet Trump has promised to take out the IS. What’s absolutely clear about Trump is that his understanding of the geopolitical nature of the world amounts to zero. His understanding of force deployment and use is zero. His experience with the military and dealing with the worlds leaders is zero. But, he does have Flynn.

We certainly know that General Noitall’s experience with the military is zero. How, pray tell, is a retired lieutenant general whose background is in intelligence ever going to become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?

For those who don’t know how it works, while the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is appointed by the President, he is usually selected from among the chiefs of staff – the four highest-ranking generals and admirals- from one of the four armed services. One seldom becomes CJCS without first being Army Chief of Staff, USMC Commandant, Chief of Naval Operations, or Air Force Chief of Staff, and more often than not, Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as well. These top officers almost invariably have a strong background of field commands, they don’t come from intelligence or logistics.

A three-star officer such as a lieutenant general or a vice-admiral is simply not in the running, particularly one who is not even in the service anymore.

That doesn’t mean Michael Flynn couldn’t be named Secretary of Defense, but then, if elected, Trump could just as easily name the science fiction author Michael Flynn too. Regardless, Michael T. Flynn won’t be commanding any military operations, much less all of them. He’s a civilian.

Look, you’re not fooling anyone when you strike knowledgeable poses concerning things you know nothing about, and make stupid pronouncements that only suffice to demonstrate your ignorance. So stop trying!

None of us know what Donald Trump is going to do when he’s elected. Possibly Trump himself doesn’t know. But I think we can be quite confident that he’s not going to follow Michael Ledeen’s idiotic lead and declare war on radical Islam, Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba, and whoever else Ledeen suspects might be in his imaginary Global Alliance of Evil.

Mailvox: a police officer’s perspective

A former police officer writes in response to my post on the Dallas police shootings:

The short:

Good article and overall I agree with it.

The long:

In regards to the “Us Vs Them” mentality; unfortunately, it was ingrained in us from the beginning at the academy and if you do not guard against it you will find yourself moving in that direction after a short time working as a police officer.

Tribe was ingrained in us from comments such as “there are two kinds of people, those in jail and those that should be.”  “In God we trust all others we run through NCIC”.  NCIC is the national records database.

As you started working something happened to me that I was not prepared for one of those unintended consequences, everybody lied to you.  And I mean everybody, about everything.  It did not take long where you fell into “my tribe” mode.  When you make the call that you need help and all your tribe show up – that is a powerful feeling and reinforces, good or bad, my tribe.

Military affectation.  True.  When I joined, Desert Storm had just ended and the DOD was giving away the store.

As far as these current rash of shootings caught on camera – people do not want to see the bad side.  I believe that most people think that when a shooting goes down it is “Hollywood”.  Good vs Evil – clean – sanitized.  One thing people do not understand is how fast events can turn.  And I have been in situations where things went from mild or this aint’ so bad to someone did or was going to die in milliseconds.  People can not even begin to understand the violence that can happen in situations.  This is not an excuse I just offer and explanation into the mindset.

And if I can use NAPALT.  I only recall one instance of behavior that was wrong coming from a police officer.  I had a prisoner in cuffs and this officer came up to the prisoner and threatened to “kick his ass”.  If this officer would have laid a hand on my prisoner I would have protected my prisoner.  It did not get that far. Then again, I was being interviewed for the county sheriff’s department and was asked if I would take revenge on a person in cuffs if they had resisted arrest. I told her no, once cuffs are on and there is no resistance there is no reason. To this day I do not know if the look she gave me was one of disbelief or “this guy won’t fit in with us because that is how we roll”.

I agree with your statement “that being scared is insufficient justification for shooting a member of the public” and “start holding killer cops fully accountable for their actions”.  However, just because someone is unarmed does not mean they are not a danger.  In one situation I had a guy reach for a gun and as I was getting ready to shoot I saw he was reaching for a Maglite flashlight.  This guy’s intention was Suicide by Cop.  My intention was to save my life and my partner’s life. Unfortunately, my partner was shot and killed 6 months later.  He stopped an unarmed man, the man started fighting with him, took his gun, and killed him with it.

People see these videos and project their feelings, fears, biases into them.  Once the evidence starts to come out the story we end up with is usually different from what we began with.

As I mentioned in my response to him, my opinion is largely informed by my personal acquaintance with police officers in several countries. I get along quite well with cops, in fact, at a recent get-together I was the only male non-cop there. I’ve had cops for sparring partners and weightlifting partners and friends.

But that doesn’t make me blind to the institutional and structural problems with the police in America. Nor does it mean that the lessons of 4GW which Mr.  Lind and LtCol Thiele teach in 4GW Handbook don’t apply to them. Ironically, one of those lessons is that an occupying military should behave more like traditional street cops, while what we’re seeing is the traditional street cops being trained to behave more like an occupying military.

Policing is a serious and important societal role and it ought to be treated as such. Police officers should be valued and respected, but they, in turn, must always behave in a respectable manner. They should never be deemed above the law or unaccountable, to the contrary, they should be held more accountable for their actions than the average untrained individual.

And no free man should ever descend to licking a boot or a badge.

And if you want to know what a badge-licker looks like, this is it:

John Sanders ‏@Platniumblum
@voxday outed himself as a closeted SJW. Blacks have no agency, no responsibility. The cops had it coming. #Dallas #disavowBLM

So virtuous! I expect he’s preening in anticipation of all the likes and retweets from noble police officers ever so grateful for his support.

Mailvox: SJW convergence at Baen?

A new anthology would not appear to bode well for the future of right-wing authors at Baen Books who are not named “John” or “Larry”:

I finished the anthology SHATTERED SHIELDS. Supposedly a “military fantasy” anthology though there was precious little military anything about it. Two stories blatantly homosexual. Robin Wayne Bailey has a spunky warrior women sorceress who is also a lesbian.

James L. Sutter had a story of an “elite” legion of 100 pairs of homosexual lovers who fight as pairs in battles. Total bullshit on the fighting…. A Jennifer Brozek co-edited the anthology. An overweight red head from her picture. Edited a book called CHICKS DIG GAMING, a non-fiction book on how females love gaming. Ever hear of her before? She also wrote a Valdemar story for one of antholgies of stories set in Mercedes Lackey’s horse world.

I have no idea who Bryan Thomas Schmidt is.

Take home point: convergence is taking place at Baen. SJWs are infiltrating there. Nowhere is safe with the big publishers. I notice women seem to like the anthology at Goodreads. Some of this stuff manages to make Joe Abercrombie look good in comparison.

I was wondering how long it would take SJWs to go after military science fiction once Kameron Hurley won the Hugo for her ahistorical and risibly stupid blog post “We Have Always Fought”. After all, there is nothing to stop them from turning Mil-SF into converged Romance the way they did to science fiction proper, especially in the era of She-Rangers and infantrymen in red heels. Now we know. At least the Sacred Band of Thebes really existed, although I find it moderately amusing that they now appear in practically every historical fantasy for either bathetic or virtue-signaling purposes.

Baen has always been uniquely at risk of SJW entryism for two reasons. One, it is 25-percent owned by Tor Books. Two, many of its authors are libertarians who are fairly sound on the economic and political fronts, but are more than a little prone to virtue-signaling on the cultural side. It’s one thing to have the occasional gay character – but when you have more gay characters than Catholics or Baptists appearing in your work, it’s readily apparent that you are, at best, virtue-signaling for the SJWs.

And when you make a point of bragging about how your protagonists are diverse in one way or another, well, it’s not exactly hard to predict which way you’re going to bend when the cultural winds blow. Or the road you’re going to walk in the future.

aliceination @frumiouslyalice
@saladinahmed just finished your book! excited for the next one but wondering – any chance of some more explicitly lgbt+ chars in future?

Saladin Ahmed ‏@saladinahmed
yes. A 100% chance.

Despite what many SJWs think, Baen is not actually on our side, rather, Baen is the No Man’s Land between the SJW and the Right. I suspect we’ll know Baen has fully converged when it abandons its garish trademark covers in favor of the washed-out faux literary style favored by Tor. Not that there is anything right about one or wrong about the other, but SJWs always have the need to let everyone know they have taken control, and that would be the most public way of making it clear to all and sundry.

Anyhow, should Baen eventually go the way of its big brother, Castalia will be here
to assist any of its authors who prefer to align with the Alt and Traditional Rights rather
than with the cultural Marxists.

The minor hubbub over Judith Merril and the long, sordid history of the Left’s baleful influence in science fiction makes it clear what a unique opportunity is being presented today by the confluence of technology and events. No wonder they call us Nazis. No wonder they are terrified.

They should be.

Mailvox: teaching 4GW

William S. Lind and LtCol Thiele are improving the state of American university education:

I teach undergraduate courses in Political Science and after reading Lind’s Four Generations of Modern War on your recommendation, I had to throw out two whole lectures on war and terrorism.  I’ve gone two semesters with new lectures and I’m looking to expand on this theme in my Intro course through some form of non-lecture activity.  After reading an article from Jeffro on wargaming in the classroom, I’m considering introducing a game which would demonstrate thematic concepts on 4GW, but I have little experience in wargaming beyond Risk and PC gaming. 

Could you recommend an appropriate game?  My classroom size is approximately 10-12, making 2 or 3 person teams possible, and I can probably devote two 1.5 hour sessions to this activity.  Andean Abyss and Cuba Libre have come up but I can’t afford to buy multiple games in a trial-and-error fashion.  Thank you.

Interesting question. Let’s throw this out to everyone and discuss the matter. My first thought was Junta, but that’s probably too focused on the traditional civil unrest. And it has made me think that perhaps it would be worthwhile to design a game around the core 4GW concepts. It wouldn’t be too hard, the first question would be deciding whether to make it totally theoretical or utilizing real and/or historical settings.

Another possibility would be Fallujah 2004: City Fighting in Iraq. This wouldn’t teach 4GW concepts per se, but would help illustrate some of the challenges involved. However, it’s a solitaire game, which could be seen as a positive or a negative, depending upon the professor’s perspective. Decision Iraq is a two-player game that deals directly with the insurgency, so I’d probably take a close look at that one. The rules can be found on the Decision Games site here in RTF format.

Mailvox: no refunds!

MC tries, and fails, to get a refund

Recently tried to get a refund for Star Citizen, and today they sent
back a boilerplate “nope!” with a bunch of “feel good crowdfunding
garbage.”

I’ve backed literally hundreds of Kickstarters, and less than one percent have failed as spectacularly as this train wreck.

Just one more data point, but I agree with your assessment that they’re circling the drain at this point.

Now, I’ve only backed a few Kickstarters, so I am no expert, but this sounds distinctly suboptimal to me.

Mailvox: forgetting 2008

Nathan thinks the general election is already over:

The game hasn’t changed one bit. When the Gen Election hits Clinton will
know exactly the states where she has to win and she’ll secure them
pretty easily. The game is called Electoral Collage Math. She starts
with NY, CA, IL, NJ, MA and who bunch of others. My bet is that Trump
will find a way to convince himself that he SHOULD win NY and will spend
time there. Meanwhile, Clinton will camp out in places like Michigan,
Ohio, Virginia, NC, AZ, NV and WA.

The poor guy doesn’t get it. He was overmatched the minute he secured the nomination.

Nathan appears to have forgotten that Hillary Clinton was the candidate who failed to understand the rules of the Democratic nomination in formulating her strategy and named a wannabe lawyer with a poli-sci degree from Middlebury and no absolutely experience in the real world her top economic adviser.

Perhaps she’s learned from her past failures, but until we see some evidence, I wouldn’t put too much stock in the competence of the Hillary campaign, much less her overmatching anyone. Especially when one considers how much trouble she is having putting away an ancient Vermont socialist who isn’t even a Democrat, despite having the DNC, the superdelegates, and the media in her pocket. She is an exceptionally bad candidate who has never beaten anyone who didn’t take a fall.

The state-by-state demographics are the sole reason for concern, but as others have pointed out, the conventional electoral math no longer applies once whites unite behind a political identity. Will that happen soon enough to elect Donald Trump?

Therein lies the question.