Tag: mailvox

Mailvox: Kindle Unlimited

Will Best wonders if I’ve changed my mind:

I was interested if VD has changed his opinion on Kindle Unlimited since his July post? The NYT via drudge seemed to put it in a pretty negative light, and its concern as it relates to distorting story length does seem legitimate.

Well, I suppose I should find out what my opinion was back in July, as I don’t rightly recall the details. Let’s see, I wrote:

  • My initial impression is that this is excellent for serious readers.
  • Casual readers, book collectors, and fans of particular authors aren’t likely to be too fussed about it.
  • It is horrific for the Big Five publishers and their writers, as their unwillingness to participate indicates.
  • It’s neutral to modestly positive for independent publishers, their writers, and self-publishers.  

Now let’s compare it to the New York Times story:

  • It may bring in readers, but the writers say they earn less. 
  • The author H.M. Ward says she left Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program after two months when her income dropped 75 percent.
  • “Your rabid romance reader who was buying $100 worth of books a week and
    funneling $5,200 into Amazon per year is now generating less than $120 a
    year,” she said. 
  • Amazon
    usually gives self-published writers 70 percent of what a book earns,
    which means a novel selling for $4.99 yields $3.50…. But
    Kindle Unlimited is less generous, paying a fluctuating amount. In
    July, the fee for a digital “borrow” was $1.80. It fell to $1.33 in
    October before rebounding slightly to $1.39 in November.

It appears I was correct about the first three points and wrong about the last one. I wasn’t aware of the relevant math, but it is entirely clear that $120 < $5,200 and $1.33 < $3.50. The math doesn’t work for the writer. I don’t see how the math works for Amazon either.

I have to confess that Kindle Unlimited hasn’t really been on my radar because Castalia House withdrew nearly all of our books from the Kindle Select program in order to be able to sell them from the Castalia House store. We never considered Kindle Unlimited at all. So, besides that initial post, I haven’t given it any thought. But the more I look at the math, the more I wonder if Amazon hasn’t made a serious mistake here based on the false assumption that every author has to be on Amazon. It looks to me like a classic corporate overplaying of a strong hand.

Everyone wanted to be on Amazon because that has been where they were able to earn the most money. But already, both we, and perhaps more importantly, our associates, are seeing that Castalia can sell between 10 percent and 20 percent of Amazon’s sales of a newly released book. And since the author makes more money on each Castalia sale, that’s the equivalent of up to 28 percent of the revenue derived from Amazon. The math still favored Amazon, obviously, but if one then reduces the Amazon revenue by 62 percent, suddenly the total Amazon revenue is only 35 percent more even when the unit sales are 400 percent higher. This means that with Kindle Unlimited, Amazon is rendering themselves considerably less relevant to writers, which strikes me as a counterproductive long term strategy.

So, my revised conclusion is that Kindle Unlimited is likely to prove massively unpopular among successful self-published writers, of no interest to independent publishers and their writers, and off-limits to mainstream published writers. Barring significant changes, I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon ended up discontinuing it within two or three years. If they don’t, Kindle Unlimited will likely become a digital books ghetto filled with little more than romance, porn, and conspiracy theory written by unknown authors who can’t draw interest from independent publishers.

The only writers to whom I think it might be useful are those new writers who don’t have an audience and simply want to throw stuff out there in the hopes that one will find them. But even there, you’re probably better off going with Select than with Unlimited.

Mailvox: is war in decline?

CED asks about The Remnants of War and the idea that war is in decline:

Are you aware of the book The Remnants of War by John Mueller? It was published back in 2004, with a paperback edition in 2007. The book argues that contrary to popular belief, war is on its way out, and the only people still engaging in it are opportunistic criminals easily scared off by competent, disciplined troops from developed countries.

Its main thrust is that developed countries, which used to get into frequent wars with each other, no longer did due to the harrowing experience of World War I, and that World War II was an aberration caused by Hitler’s personal charisma. The book states that changing cultural attitudes toward organized violence, not trade links or new military technologies like nukes, ended war as a possibility among developed states.

Furthermore, even in undeveloped states, much of the “war” is caused by roving yet cowardly criminal gangs that seek easy targets, not disciplined soldiers or even guerrillas (he emphasizes the Yugoslav wars as Exhibit A) — and that this is the main form of warfare that remains. According to Mueller, this form of war can only be handled by competent native governments with disciplined police and military forces. Once this is done, war, like slavery and dueling before it, will recede as a human institution. A related point he makes is that ethnic conflict need not explode into civil war if there is a competent government in place.

Now, it has been a long time since this book was published. I see a few problems with his thesis:

Chinese saber-rattling. In the South and East China Sea, China has been building up its navy in preparation for a war. This has driven countries like Vietnam closer to the US and forced Japan to begin its own military buildup. Of course, there’s also Taiwan. While Mueller is careful to say that war between disciplined, developed states is still possible, it cuts against another claim he makes — that the Cold War’s losers see the world the same way as the winners and thus don’t want to upset the international order.

Russia’s interference in Ukraine. Russia was the principal loser in the Cold War, and there is very little evidence that they see the world the “same way” as the US and the EU. The interference in the Ukraine, as well as the sanctions imposed in response, to say nothing of Putin’s domestic policies that are at odds with Western promotion of homosexuality and godlessness, show fundamental differences. The only reason there has been no war is because it would inevitably go nuclear.

The Iraq debacle. Take note of when The Remnants of War was published — 2004, a mere one year after the Iraq invasion. Disciplined US troops displaced Saddam’s government and occupied the country, policing it to get rid of opportunistic predators that wanted to profit from the social chaos. Things still looked hopeful for the occupation at the time. Eleven years later, The US has withdrawn and the Islamic State has risen. Either the Muslim fundamentalists have proven more disciplined, or war isn’t declining as much as Mueller would have us believe. In his schema, something like the Islamic State shouldn’t even be possible.

Fourth-generation war. To Mueller, “war” is a battle between disciplined armies for control of a government or territory, or between a government and disciplined guerrilla forces. He waves off notions of 4GW (though he never uses the term) by saying that war has been reduced to its dregs — mere predation by criminal packs in areas without effective governments. To Mueller, what appears to be a “new form of war” is just the death rattle of war, and once those areas could be competently policed, even criminal “war” will disappear. In contrast, William S. Lind says that 4GW is the wave of the future and has been defeating the state wherever it has arisen. This complicates Mueller’s conclusions about the inevitable end of war, though he does mention that a government has to be effective to end war. Lind also says that 4GW comes from a state’s crisis of legitimacy, so maybe both Mueller and Lind are making the same point in a different way.

Anyway, do you have any thoughts on John Mueller’s idea that war is on the decline and soon to disappear as a human institution?

I was not aware of the book, but if CED has fairly represented Mueller’s views, I think his core idea is conventional, outdated, short-sighted, and ahistorical, and temporally biased. There have always been periods of relative peace. During such periods, it is common for the more foolish sort of thinkers to believe that those periods have somehow magically become established as the permanent human norm. Considering that the world has been in one of the longer periods of economic growth, technological advancement, and population growth since 1950, and it should be no surprise that even after 9/11 and the dot com crash, there were still those who thought that this time, it would be different.

I’ve been reading World Order by Henry Kissinger, and it is clear that one reason the global elite is attempting to tighten its grasp these days is because it fears the world declining into the sort of disorder that makes it difficult to milk. But it will fail, order will decline into disorder, and low-grade war will cover most of the planet because the centers of order are no longer homogenous and stable.

The one genuinely mitigating factor is the way in which nuclear weapons tend to prevent the major state militaries from engaging each other. But this too creates problems, as it forces them to fight on the 4GW non-battlefield where their every action tends to foster more of the very disorder they are attempting to destroy.

We are fortunate to have lived in such peaceful times. It is unlikely that our children and our grandchildren will be similarly fortunate. So, my answer is no. War is not in decline. As I wrote in the preface to RIDING THE RED HORSE:

[T]he end of the Pax Americana is rapidly approaching and it is readily apparent to every well-informed observer that War is preparing to mount his steed, and he will soon be once more riding that terrible red horse over the nations of men.

It is no accident that the THERE WILL BE WAR series came to an end in 1989, in harmony with the end of the Cold War. Nor is it an accident that there is an increased interest for military fiction, or that we launched RIDING THE RED HORSE this month.

Henry Kissinger writes in World Order:

In the world of geopolitics, the order established and proclaimed as universal by the Western countries stands at a turning point. Its nostrums are understood globally, but there is no consensus about their application; indeed, concepts such as democracy, human rights, and international law are given such divergent interpretations that warring parties regularly invoke them against each other as battle cries. The system’s rules have been promulgated but have proven ineffective absent active enforcement. The pledge of partnership and community has in some regions been replaced, or at least accompanied, by a harder-edged testing of limits.

A quarter century of political and economic crises perceived as produced, or at least abetted, by Western admonitions and practices—along with imploding regional orders, sectarian bloodbaths, terrorism, and wars ended on terms short of victory—has thrown into question the optimistic assumptions of the immediate post–Cold War era: that the spread of democracy and free markets would automatically create a just, peaceful, and inclusive world.

Translation: don’t count on the end of history. And mark this: “A struggle between regions could be even more debilitating than the struggle between nations has been.”

What you can do, part 2

This is the second part of my response to someone who asked what they could do to help fight the SJWs. A few days ago, a #GamerGater named @Ignideus with less than 500 followers came up with the idea for #OpSkyNet as a prospective solution for the tendency of e-celebs to dominate the public discourse on Twitter. Today, it is the #3-trending hashtag on Twitter and #GamerGate has been re-energized as the leaderless, decentralized force that it is.

Larry Correia did little more than mention a few SF/F writers he felt had produced work that merited award consideration, and in the process, exposed the corruption and hyperpoliticization of the SF Awards process.

Yesterday, a non-gamer named RooshV announced the creation of Reaxxion, a pro-#GamerGate game review site for men. He writes:

My younger brother, who considers himself a gamer, gave me the
definitive push into starting Reaxxion. He plays Xbox, PC games on
Steam, and also some mobile games. He particularly likes games with long
and intricate story lines, telling me that gaming is just not about
pushing buttons to advance a level but to be affected on some level by a
compelling story, but now those stories are being perverted by people
who truly believe that men are evil and holding women down just because
they may want to enjoy a traditional story line with attractive women.

The infiltration of SJW’s into gaming may mean that my brother will
have to put up with their narrative in his games. It may mean that his
entertainment options become more limited because a developer was subtly
threatened unless he inserted another “empowered female” in a game
where such a character simply doesn’t fit. I’ve learned that unless you
fight back against these people, unless you spread awareness and develop
a megaphone as big as them, they will surely get what they want and
impact the culture in a way that hurts normal men who don’t subscribe to
their strange worldview.

Roosh isn’t a gamer, but he understands the importance of #GamerGate as the current Schwerpunkt, or focal point, of the SJWs. That’s why he’s stepped in with the sort of material assistance that only someone of his stature on the Internet can; the very name of the new game site is a gesture of contempt for those who consider themselves progressives.

Ingnideus was an unknown. Larry is a New York Times bestselling author. Roosh is Internet-famous, or if you prefer, infamous. But all three of them are taking what action they can take and all three of them are having a real impact.  What you can do entirely depends upon your capabilities, resources, and inclinations, but all of it is, at the very least, capable of mattering.

Most people who want to get involved are more akin to Ingnideus than Roosh. What that means is finding someone who is already leading the way by doing something and lending support to their efforts. Find a Schwerpunkt of interest to you and throw your weigh behind it. Many of you are already doing this with Castalia House, by buying our books, subscribing to our New Release newsletter, or in some cases, proofreading, formatting, narrating, and slush-reading. A few are assisting Alpenwolf, Joe and Kirk have been helping with the First Sword art. But we can always use more and we are far from the only independent writer, developer, publisher, site or blog that can use the help.

General

  • Support the good. Don’t support the SJWs in any of their flavors.
  • Get on Twitter. Tweet once with #OpSkyNet. Retweet and favorite one #GamerGate tweet per day.
  • Email one Gawker (or other #GamerGate target) advertiser per week.
  • Join Recommend. Write one Game- or Book-related reco, good or bad, per week and I’ll add it to the appropriate list. Be sure to follow me first so I will see it.
  • Try an indy game from a #GamerGate developer.
  • Submit an article to Reaxxion. 
  • Speak out. Do a blog post. Tell a friend.
  • Stand by those under attack, especially if you don’t agree with them. The primary SJW tactic is 3rd Generation. They cut off, isolate, then swarm. They can’t do that if you refuse to permit them to separate you from their target.

Castalia House

  • I’m ridiculously behind on submissions. We need new slushreaders and probably someone to manage the process.
  • PR. We haven’t sent out a single press release to anyone yet even though we have a pretty good story to tell. We’re too busy producing to talk about it.
  • Bloggers for Castalia House. Mascaro is too busy now and Jeffro has needed to take a few weeks off due to burnout. It’s difficult doing one quality blog post per week; many people can manage one or two, but consistency is the key.
  • PDF Layout. LL is getting up to speed on this, but we have a pretty big backlog already and we are contractually obligated to get some of our newly signed books out in print.

Alpenwolf

  •  Art. We’re doing all right for code, I think. (Markku, correct me if I’m wrong) but we could use additional art help. 
  • PR. We don’t need it yet, but we will.
  • There is probably something else I’m missing.

Why bother? Who cares about random guys living in their mother’s basements fighting for large pixellated breasts sporting chainmail bikinis in their games? Nero explains why he, a non-gamer, is following the battle:

GamerGate is remarkable—and attracts the interest of people like me—because it represents perhaps the first time in the last decade or more that a significant incursion has been made in the culture wars against guilt-mongerers, nannies, authoritarians and far-Left agitators.

Games are merely the current battleground. TV is already lost to the SJWs. Movies are lost. Literature is largely lost. Genre literature is all but lost. Remember, this is the mentality we’re up against:

Humphrey, the former Subway worker, had been living with her uncle before she lost her job. She now bounces from couch to couch in her circle of protester friends — a sacrifice she said is worthwhile, because what is the point of working when she says she could be killed any day because of the color of her skin? Now, she said, standing at the Rowan Community Center on a run-down block in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood of St. Louis, “I sleep, eat and breathe this.”

Sure, that sort of commitment easy for someone with no talent, job, or responsibilities, who has literally nothing else to do to throw themselves into something 24-7. But we’re not talking about that level of commitment, but rather a small and spare-time, but persistent one. My perception, and I could be wrong, is that far too many people on the Right are overly concerned that someone, somewhere, might profit from their assistance whereas there are no shortage of volunteers on the Left who don’t care at all about that. (This may, admittedly, be due to their general failure to grasp the concept in the first place.) Did Joe Farah benefit from my contribution of more than 500 columns to WND? I should bloody well hope so! What would be the point if he didn’t? I didn’t give him money, I gave him 30 minutes per week, and I remain pleased to see what effective use he made of it.

The Catch-22 is that there is never any money involved in getting something started from nothing, which is why it is hard to start anything without the approval of the SJW gatekeepers who have successfully infiltrated the foundations and the large corporations. There is only one way around this, which is for the talent of the right to be willing to follow the example provided by the Free and Open Source crowd.

This sort of thing should never be seen as a job, but a contribution to the cause given out of a positive spirit. It might turn into a job one day, but it probably won’t. And if you’re worried that Castalia, or Roosh, or the guys at Recommend, or might one day end up making a buck due in part to some of the time you’ve put in, consider this: Would you be here in the first place, reading this, if I has been unwilling to write columns or blog posts without being paid for my time?

Anyhow, those are my thoughts. Some of you will have additional ideas, and feel free to throw them out here. This is an open discussion, so brainstorm, don’t critique. And above all, one thing is clear. Don’t wait for permission. Don’t expect direction and management. Adopt a Fourth Generation mentality. Ignideus is the Leader of #GamerGate, Roosh is the Leader of #GamerGate, I am the Leader of #GamerGate, and so can you.

What we can do

That’s what I was asked in the comments yesterday. I came up with one solution, which I’m pleased to see that about 100 of you implemented right away. But that’s just a start. First, I think it is important to take Cailcorishev’s observation into account of why the SJWs are so often successful with their entryist tactics and how they so regularly obtain positions of power in an organization or an industry.

They’re able to take over the things they do because normal people just don’t care that much. It’s how they run all the committees in a school: no one else wants to. People who create games and play games don’t care much about the incidental stuff like reviewing. We don’t need that to exist at all, so when someone emerges to do that, we figure “Better her than me.” Most of us don’t realize until too late how much power that concedes to them, because what they do looks so irrelevant from our ends.

This is true. I know the power of what he’s saying, because I entered into the industry via reviewing games myself. I started out as a contributor to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, then was syndicated by Chronicle Features, and before long was appearing in papers from the North Bay Nugget to the Boston Globe and the Atlanta Journal/Constitution. Within 18 months, I was personally acquainted many of the major game developers, guys like John Carmack, Richard Garriott, and Chris Roberts, as well as important media and publishing figures like Johnny Wilson and Scott Shannon.

How? It was easy. No one at the Pioneer Press seriously played computer games. They didn’t have anyone to do it, and they even started to rely upon me to do things like analyze the Unabomber’s manifesto for the editorial page. Of course, the Left polices itself much more carefully than the Right. When there was a vacancy on the op/ed page, I asked for the spot. The editor met with me – I was only the sixth columnist in the paper’s history to be nationally syndicated, so he couldn’t just blow me off – and politely made it clear there wasn’t a chance in hell he was going to put a libertarian extremist on the page every week. But the tactic works.

Now, I have to go for the time being. Work takes priority over the Cause. It might, however, be worthwhile to consider this until I’m able to finish this post and provide some concrete suggestions. Everyone knows that I don’t get paid for blogging. But what many people don’t know is that I never took any money to write eleven years worth of columns on WND. (Hence my amusement when people talk about Daddy getting me the “job”.) They couldn’t afford it when I first started, but I supported the alternative media that the Farahs were attempting to build.

That’s why the Left is progressing. Because they are willing to invest the time.

Mailvox: Vee have vays

Uff making you borrow, hein? JD asks about the prospective new Attorney General:

Wikipedia reports that the Black woman being considered to replace Eric Holder as Attorney General spent seven years on the Board of Directors of the Federal Reserve Bank for New York. Fed alum as Attorney General.  Is that ominous?

It depends. If she’s a black woman of the sort you see at the DMV, everything should be fine. I would absolutely approve of such an appointment; that sort of AG isn’t about order children burned to death or automatic weaponry sold to Mexican cartels. All she’ll demand is to be left alone in the near vicinity of a well-stocked vending machine. If, on the other hand, she’s a true-believing freshwater Chicago School monetarist, Americans may soon find themselves being prosecuted for the federal crime of Willful Failure to Borrow.

That would be one way to boost L1, anyhow.

Mailvox: why C&C isn’t strategy

RD asks about strategy vs tactics:

I was browsing through some of your old columns on WND and came across
an article where you mentioned that one of the premiere, defining games
of the RTS genre, Command & Conquer, could could not actually be
described as a “strategy” game. You wrote:

“Like those video game
reviewers who insist on describing RTS games like Warcraft and Command
& Conquer as “strategy” games, the media consistently confuses
tactics with strategy.”

Would
you care to elaborate on this point? As a long-time fan of the C&C
series and the RTS genre, I am most curious to hear your justification
for distinguishing between tactics and strategy with respect to
describing RTS games. Also, what in your opinion is the best example of
an actual “strategy” RTS game?

The difference between strategy and tactics is pretty clear. If you’re trying to win a war, it’s strategy. If you’re trying to win a battle, it’s tactics. Even Wikipedia is useful in this regard:

Strategy (from Greek στρατηγία stratēgia, “art of troop leader; office of general, command, generalship”) is a high level plan to achieve one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty. In the sense of the “art of the general”, which included several subsets of skills including “tactics”, siegecraft, logistics etc., the term came into use in the 6th century C.E. in East Roman terminology, and was translated into Western vernacular languages only in the 18th century. From then until the 20th century, the word “strategy” came to denote “a comprehensive way to try to pursue political ends, including the threat or actual use of force, in a dialectic of wills” in a military conflict, in which both adversaries interact. The father of Western modern strategic study, Carl von Clausewitz, defined military strategy as “the employment of battles to gain the end of war.” B. H. Liddell Hart’s definition put less emphasis on battles, defining strategy as “the art of distributing and applying military means to fulfill the ends of policy”. Hence, both gave the pre-eminence to political aims over military goals.

Military tactics are the science and art of organizing a military force, and the techniques for combining and using weapons and military units to engage and defeat an enemy in battle. Changes in philosophy and technology have been reflected in changes to military tactics; in contemporary military science tactics are the lowest of three planning levels: (i) strategic, (ii) operational, and (iii) tactical. The highest level of planning is strategy, how force is translated into political objectives, by bridging the means and ends of war. The intermediate level, operational level, the conversion of strategy into tactics deals with formations of units. In the vernacular, tactical decisions are those made to achieve the greatest, immediate value, and strategic decisions are those made to achieve the greatest, overall value, irrespective of the immediate results of a tactical decision.

That’s the formal distinction, and it should be fairly obvious that most RTS are intrinsically tactical in nature. But there is also another way of looking at it, which is the one I actually had in mind, which is that strategy implies thinking and planning, whereas tactics implies acting and responding. Most RTS games such as Warcraft and C&C, involve considerably more of the latter than the former. Indeed, even if we disregard the fact of the old “grunt rush” tactic or the fact that success often boiled down to superior click speed, thanks to the “technology tree”, most RTS involve virtually no thinking or anything that can reasonably be described as strategy.

My old friend Chris, who has designed a few notable RTS games, is even quoted in the RTS article: “[My first attempt at visualizing RTSs in a fresh and interesting new way] was my realizing that although we call this genre ‘Real-Time Strategy,’ it should have been called ‘Real-Time Tactics’ with a dash of strategy thrown in.”

So, for both reasons, I don’t think it is possible for an RTS to be a proper strategy game. I actually designed an RTS, as it happens; the original WAR IN HEAVEN game was supposed to be an RTS. It would have been a lot better if we had gone that route too, but Valu-Soft wanted to chase Walmart with a DEER HUNTER-style game, which, as I have related in the past, backfired rather spectacularly when they foolishly hired the buyer who wanted it before the game was finished.

Mailvox: DISQUALIFY!

They just never stop. Which is fine, the important thing to keep in mind is that they never stop lying. A comment from Judge Judy & Executioner:

Vox; your late latching on to #gg and insistence on establishing yourself as a cheerleader despite the fact that the main #gg either didn’t know who you are or if the did, didn’t want you, has made me realize your sigmaness is less about being an alpha with no interest in playing the game and more about being a gamma who’s figured out how to.

Maybe that analysis is wrong, but this who thing has been very gammay of you

This is interesting because it not only demonstrates the usual SJW dishonesty and inability to understand the other side, but also shows how #GamerGate is now perceived as having status that must be denied to opponents deemed dangerous.

As to the “late latching on to #gg”, I merely note the obvious:

  • On August 20th, Vox Day posted Another Purge? about the purging of 4chan and wrote: “My purging from SFWA was, as I warned at the time, a small harbinger of
    much bigger things to come. Don’t think you’re safe simply because
    you’re not controversial. It’s not only the controversy they hate, or
    even the open resistance, it is the mere fact of failing to kowtow to
    their dogma.”
  • On August 21st, Vox Day posted “Kotaku and the Quinnspiracy”. 
  • On August 27th, Vox Day posted “A female dev on the Quinn debacle”.
  • On August 27th, actor Adam Baldwin posted a tweet linking to Internet Aristocrat videos along with the hashtag #GamerGate. 

Also, gammas don’t turn into sigmas. It is omegas that do so. The gamma mindset can never transform to the degree required; they care too deeply about the social order.

Mailvox: somehow, I doubt it

One of the Baby Boomers who was defending her generational cohort emailed me this morning:

Well, I’ll give you this much, Vox. In twenty years of Internet discussions, this is the first time I have ever been told by a fellow Christian to SHUT. THE FUCK. UP and hurry up and die. I have never talked about myself in the NYT (or, for that matter, the Poughkeepsie Palimpset); I didn’t destroy America; I haven’t personally ruined your life. In fact, up until three months ago, neither of us had ever heard of the other. But I guess none of that matters. Because I’m a boomer.

I have no idea what inner demons you’re wrestling with on this issue, or why. I would wish you peace, but the truth is I don’t give a rat’s ass.  However, I do have more important things to do with my time than hanging around just to be abused by you for the apparent crime of not sharing your personal hatreds.

Therefore, your wish is granted. I will SHUT. THE FUCK. UP. and go away.

The amusing thing is that this is the commenter who kept saying that GenX was whining. Who is whining now? Isn’t it terrible that we don’t abase ourselves in admiration before their special world-changing specialness! The amazing thing is that even when it is being directly pointed out to them, this sort of Baby Boomer is so haplessly narcissistic that they cannot tell the difference between personal and generational criticism. Their identity is apparently so closely tied to that of their generation that any criticism directed at it is taken as a personal affront.

Nor can the commenter bear to recognize, in spite of the evidence right in front of them, that my feelings about their generation are, in fact, quite widespread. I do not know a single member of Generation X who admires or speaks well of the Baby Boomer generation. If you do, by all means, I’m quite open to hearing your reasons why… but only from an actual member of Generation X. Not from a Baby Boomer with cool stories about how the kids think she’s amazingly with it and not at all old because “love Sam Cooke!”

I will be utterly shocked if this individual does, in fact, manage to shut up and go away. Because, let’s face it, few Boomers can resist when someone is t-t-talking about their g-g-generation.

Steve Sailer adds:

Babyboomers like me are pretty much impervious to the strategies that we pulled on our parents to put them at a generational disadvantage, which disadvantages newer generations.

See how cool they are? They’re still at the top of the generational heap and impervious so you totally can’t, like, say they’re old and irrelevant. Now, I wonder why that might be? I find it telling, as only a Boomer would be so obtuse as to brag about his generation’s bulletproof self-absorption.

They certainly don’t seem to be impervious to hearing that they’re not admired.

Six of Five

Seven different people have independently come up with the notion that this should be my Borg name, so I suppose in the event that I am ever assimilated by the science fiction hive mind, I shall most certainly adopt it. Nerd minds really do think alike. What I think is funniest about the Hugo results is the speed with which the Wikipolice were quick to add them to the Wikipedia page about me; apparently I am so important that I am the only not-winner to have his not-winning deemed notable. Not even the massive International Lord of Hate is a figure of such significance.  I thought the quad-sourcing was particularly amusing. (Blame Jamsco for the image. Why do I have the feeling it is going to end up on the Encyclopedia Dramatica?)

In 2014 Beale’s novelette, “Opera Vita Aeterna”, was nominated for the Hugo Award.[17] It came in sixth out of five nominees, behind “No Award.”[18][19][20][21]

Four sources makes it that much more true! The pinkshirts just never learn, do they? The more they go out of their way to exhibit the extent of their irrational hatred for me, the more they seek to DISQUALIFY me, the more interesting I become to everyone else who isn’t part of their twisted little world. I suspect some of them, like John Scalzi, are aware of this but lack the necessary emotional control to restrain themselves. The call of the hate is simply too strong to resist.

Speaking of McRapey, it was suggested that it was not entirely fair for me to call out him out for his traffic fraud when I haven’t publicly provided any evidence of the Google pageviews at VP. (There was no similar complaint about AG, as the running “monthly” total is displayed on the left sidebar there. If anyone knows how to get that widget running on the old Blogger template, please let me know.) After all, the Sitemeter pageviews are considerably lower than the Google pageviews claimed, so it was theoretically possible that my traffic might be lower than I was asserting. Fair enough, if perhaps a little insulting to even an intelligence much more modest than mine. So, I grabbed this screenshot yesterday towards the end of the day; yesterday’s total was actually 36,241.

This covers the last month, so it is no one-day spike. As you can see, the daily pageviews have averaged about 34k; at no point in the last month have the daily pageviews descended below 26,328. And one has only to visit Alpha Game to see that the running 30-day total is 1,475,512 at the moment, or rather, a bit more, since the number rises throughout the day. August should end up somewhere around 1,535,000, plus or minus 25k. Anyhow, there it is, so I hope everyone is satisfied that everything is scrupulously fair.

I shall now await all the fawning puff pieces about me in various media sources and the inevitable book contracts offered by eager mainstream genre publishers now that it is proven beyond any shadow of a doubt that I have nearly four times more traffic (3.75x more, to be precise) than the “extraordinary amount of traffic” that impressed so many people in the recent past.

8 million views

8 million views for 2014. Just passed the number. Thanks to ESR for the assist. I’ll note again that this is just the views recorded by Google’s software; the actual number of views is higher. I’ll have a full report at the end of the year. But still: 8 million views. It doesn’t suck. Thank you.

I’m afraid I’m not being completely honest here. The actual number of Google pageviews recorded was 8,352,092, so 8 million was passed about a week ago. I just thought it was funny to imitate McRapey’s self-congratulatory auto-backpatting for his all-time best year… at the end of July.

And speaking of things I found amusing, this extended apology from Giuseppe, who felt he misjudged me, would have forced me to accept it on that grounds alone, if I had been inclined to take any offense in the first place, which I’m not.

Hi Vox.

Fuck! I read a lot more of your blog. And actually writing this e-mail is literally kinda painful. Honesty and honour demand it, but fuck, I don’t need to enjoy the process right?!

It has become quite clear, at least with respect to your elucidation of rhetoric vs dialectic that your understanding of the subject far surpasses mine. One could put this down to the simple fact that a number of things would seem to indicate you simply have spent more time studying the subject, and while this is undoubtedly true, as is the fact that your training as an economist no doubt also allows you to sift through volumes of data that personally I would find too boring to bother with (not saying they are devoid of instruction, just that they would not grab my attention to the required extent necessary for me to indulge enough in it that I would benefit from it anywhere near as much as you seem to have) and no doubt, other endeavours I may be better at, but the fact is that it has become clear that you excel at it compared to me because of another factor.

I don’t think you are materially smarter than I am. That is, you are very smart and in your chosen fields you will be more capable than me as a result, but  I would guess in my own chosen fields I would be more capable than you. It’s sort of academic anyway, and I don’t care, but precisely because it is extremely rare for me to come across someone smarter than me (and in a demonstrable fashion) I did notice it. Painfully sharply I have to say….

Your post on Modern vs Postmodern discourse on the Alpha Game blog was enlightening because it made me aware of how much I despise the postmodern methods (long before I came across you I came up with my own virulent hatred of all postmodern bullshit). It was so strong I literally had to take three goes at reading the postmodernist list, because it literally made my head spin with discomfort as if I had got a decent punch to the jaw. Now that this has become conscious knowledge, of course, I realise that psychologically I now have basically no option but to temper myself by full immersion/exposure to all that postmodernist babble, if for no other reason than banishing its existence wherever I find it trying to enter my life.

 [Long personal section redacted]

On some levels I still harbour a suspicion (increasingly I think I know it’s unfounded) that maybe, deep down, you’re still maybe just a very smart and well-read racist, fundamentalist Christian asshole… but… deep down I am realising this is not really the case. In fact, I recognise a certain level of natural ostracism by the crowds precisely because they are not smart enough to cope/see what you are really saying. Possibly, if I may even go so far, there may even be a certain level of humility in you. If I can see it, it is only because certain aspects of your style are not foreign to me. If the monkeys are gonna label you arrogant anyway, so be it, it’s a quick filter for stupidity.

And you may be guilty too (I know I have been) of probably taking a somewhat excessive pleasure in teasing their monkey-like brains (you bad Christian you!)

Nevertheless, all that said. I really just need to read more of your blog and learn more…. I know we are strangers, and that it probably means little or nothing to you, but I had clearly misjudged you. Honesty demands I apologise, at least to the extent that I was wrong, which I was. There are few people I can have honestly engaging discourse with. I have no doubt however, that you are one of them. Even if we were to disagree totally on some things, I am certain I would be able to respect your position for its integrity at least.

So yeah. Bastard of an e-mail to write, only one of its kind really, but it had to be done.

It is unusual for a writer to find a reader who genuinely understands him, even in part. What does Giuseppe mean by a certain level of humility in one of the most nakedly arrogant bloggers on the Internet? Well, he may not have been clear on the difference between rhetoric and dialectic, but unlike normal binary thinkers, he understands the difference between “I know I’m right” and “I know you’re wrong”. One can be humble with regards to the truth and yet utterly arrogant and dismissive of various peoples’ incorrect assertions regarding it.

He also grasps that the reason I don’t get upset about what he describes as “natural ostracism” is because I expect it. It’s exactly what has happened my entire life whenever I didn’t go to the trouble of veiling my intelligence and refraining from openly departing too far from the acceptably defined borders of consensus reality. Those who called me racist because I observed human differences when they insisted that “we are all the same inside” didn’t apologize to me when it was discovered that Caucasians and Asians are genetically different from each other, and from Africans, anymore than anyone apologized to me after repeatedly mocking me by demanding to know where the second Great Depression was when the economic recovery was declared for the first, second, and third years in a row.

It’s the behavior that is expected out of midwits. Stray too far from the intellectual fold and they are threatened by it. I’m not the first to be hated for it and I won’t be the last. But it is encouraging to learn that so many people are sufficiently open-minded to consider what I’m saying and actually think about it, rather than simply dismissing it out of hand because it is alien and scary to them.