Tag: mailvox

Mailvox: deportation is not war

Asked asked about the abandonment of multiculturalism:

Vox, your position seems to abandon multi-culturalism.. how do you envision this practically? France has 4-5 million Muslims, it’s not possible to deport them without a MAJOR war. The other alternative would be forceful conversions to Christianity/atheism… yeah.. be ready to strike France out of the map.

This is a false dichotomy. Of course it is possible to deport 5 million people. It’s neither difficult to accomplish nor likely to inspire war, let alone a MAJOR war. The oft-heard insistence that mass deportation is either a) impossible or b) necessarily violent is intrinsically ignorant. One has to literally know nothing about 20th century history in order to make the assertion, as one’s knowledge of the subject does not even rise to the level of Wikipedia.

  1. Eastern Europe, 1945: German Reichsdeutsche and citizens of other European states who claimed German ethnicity were forced out of many Eastern Europe countries to Germany and Austria, and to Australia or the United States from there for many, during the later stages of World War II and the post-war period. The areas of expulsion included former eastern territories of Germany, which were transferred to Poland and the Soviet Union after the war, as well as areas annexed or occupied by Nazi Germany in pre-war Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, northern Yugoslavia and other states of Central and Eastern Europe. By 1950, a total of approximately 12 million Germans had fled or been expelled from east-central Europe into the areas which would become post-war Germany and Allied-occupied Austria. Some sources put the total at 14 million, including migrants to Germany after 1950 and the children born to expelled parents. The largest numbers came from territories ultimately ceded to Poland and the Soviet Union (about 7 million), and from Czechoslovakia (about 3 million).
  2. Soviet Union, 1932: Population transfer in the Soviet Union may be classified into the following broad categories: deportations of “anti-Soviet” categories of population, often classified as “enemies of workers,” deportations of entire nationalities, labor force transfer, and organized migrations in opposite directions to fill the ethnically cleansed territories. In most cases their destinations were underpopulated remote areas (see Forced settlements in the Soviet Union). This includes deportations to the Soviet Union of non-Soviet citizens from countries outside the USSR. It has been estimated that, in their entirety, internal forced migrations affected some 6 million people.
  3. USA, 2011: Nearly 400,000 people were deported from the United States in the past
    fiscal year, the largest number in the history of the U.S. Immigration
    and Customs Enforcement agency, the government announced Tuesday. Overall in fiscal year 2011, immigration officials said, 396,906 individuals were removed.
  4. USA, 1954: Overall, there were 1,078,168 apprehensions made in the first year of
    Operation Wetback, with 170,000 being captured from May to July 1954.

It is simply false to claim that it is impossible to deport 5 million people from any country without a war. It can certainly be argued whether a mass repatriation policy is desirable or not, and it can be debated precisely how such a policy would be best and most civilly enacted, but it’s utterly ridiculous to claim that such a policy would necessarily lead to war when it has never before done so in all of military history. In general, mass deportations tend to be a postcursor to war rather than a precursor. Note that an immigration regime no stricter than that presently practiced by the current US ICE agency could send every Muslim in France back to the Dar al-Islam by 2025. That’s hardly a blueprint for Armageddon.

Of course, the first step in abandoning multiculturalism is to stop the bleeding. Which is to say, shut down all immigration immediately. Shut down all income redistribution from the native population to the non-native population. That alone will address one-third to one-half of the problem. Then the question of repatriation can be reasonably debated.

The alternative is not much of an option, as it should be abundantly clear by now that going further down the multiculturalism and diversity path will lead to civil war followed by vicious and violent ethnic cleansing. If you genuinely wish to avoid violence across the West, an approach that involves closing the borders, ending the income subsidies, and repatriation is the only civilized answer.

Mailvox: Did Charlie Hebdo have it coming?

MB asks a pertinent question:

Although it may appear to be like pouring salt on a wound, it occurs to me (and also from your POV) that the people at Charlie Hebdo were quite a bit involved in their own demise (which I do not celebrate or condone).

Just as the nations of the West can’t help but reap what they have sown, so too, the satirists at CH never seemed to accept the consequences of their actions and weren’t prepared to defend themselves very well. They attacked religions in the most vulgar terms (from what I’ve read) and thought it rather a lark. Although their offices were firebombed, they promised to continue to poke jihadis in the eye. But it appears they blithely thought giving offense to seriously nasty people should be inconsequential given their own finely ordered sense of c’est la vie and “can’t you take a joke?”

Back in 1981, I once attended a show in a small comedy club in San Francisco near the Haight. A very small young comedian who I thought was quite funny did some sort of riff that an older man in the audience was offended by and made it known. The comic tried to play it for a joke, but in this tiny venue (30- 40 people at best), the offended gentleman stood up and made it known he was going to kick the punk comic’s ass. He was a large man who looked like he could do it. All of a sudden, things, the comic, didn’t seem so funny as he tried to find a way to defuse the situation humorously, and it didn’t work.

The comedian feigned mock fear, for example, but the angry man was not impressed or deflected and made to approach the small, low stage. The fear in the comedian’s eye’s was not simulated. Members of the audience prevailed upon the the angry man to relinquish his complaints and let it pass, but the damage had been done. The event was no longer any fun.

Like Bill Maher et al, Charlie Hebdo felt it could attack other people’s most cherished beliefs with impunity, and their targets should simply take it in the spirit of ‘damn you if what we say offends your pathetically stupid sensibility’. It is horrific what happened in Paris, but should we wonder about those who sow literary contempt and reap violent physical contempt?

Charlie Hebdo was a self-conscious standard-bearer for secular France. Unlike most secular standard-bearers, unlike today’s SJWs, the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo actually stood by their professed principles of freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and disrespect for the sanctity of sacred cows. They were true Voltaireans; I don’t know enough about them to know if they were consistent or not (we know they attacked Christian symbols as well as Muslim symbols, but did they refrain from attacking Jewish and secular ones?) but they were certainly more consistent and catholic in their satires than the average Western secularist who heaps contempt on Christianity and Western tradition while remaining dead silent about Islam, Judaism, and the various shibboleths of political correctness.

Amused by him or not, the jester who enjoys immunity from the king has long been a feature of Western civilization. Charlie Hebdo was one such jester. I didn’t find their cartoons to be amusing, or of any artistic value, but then, I am not French. More importantly, they were acting under the long-respected Western principle of jester’s immunity, and by doing so in the expectation of continued immunity, they were upholding Western civilization in their own way.

Now, I had begun writing this post with the intention of saying that Charlie Hebdo should have taken more responsibility for its actions, and taken better defensive precautions, and therefore it was negligent in that regard, but in the course of thinking through that argument, I find that it is fundamentally flawed. The jester is neither knight nor king. It is not his job to defend himself, but rather, it is the responsibility of the warriors of the society whose hypocrisies and inconsistencies he criticizes to defend him.

So, my answer is no, Charlie Hebdo did not have it coming. It is the responsibility of the king and his knights to defend their jester, even though they are the primary target of his jests. (Of course, it also behooves the jester to listen to his king when he is warned that he has gone too far in offending the king; at the end of the day, he serves at the king’s pleasure. His immunity is not total.) And moreover, any party that insists it possesses a king’s veto over the king’s jester is a usurping party that presents a direct challenge to the king’s lawful authority and therefore must be expelled from the kingdom.

In fact, through their deaths, the men of Charlie Hebdo have fulfilled their traditional jester’s role of warning the king that his policies are false and harmful. Had they focused instead on defending themselves, they would not have been able to do so. Now it is time for the king and his knights to fulfill their traditional roles and address the active threat to the kingdom.

UPDATE: at least two people killed after shooting at kosher grocery in eastern Paris in which at least five were taken hostage

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.