Tag: mailvox

Mailvox: irritated by atheists

DB has a tough time maintaining an even keel when arguing with atheists:

How do you maintain your temper when arguing with atheists. I cannot. I find myself so angry that I cannot take anything they say at face value. God has spoken to me and told me to stop arguing with atheists. I can still witness but under no circumstances may I argue. I am directed to pity them and pray for their salvation.

Do you ever wonder if you are helping them or if you are getting through at all? I feel a visceral anger at them and the damage they have caused our society. I am no longer going to be arguing on the internet or in person. How can they be anything but enemies of all that is good?

Since good is defined by God and since atheists are, by definition, active disbelievers in God, logic dictates that atheists are enemies of God and all that is good. This logic is confirmed by observation; examine any evil and the chances are high that atheists are disproportionately caught up in it, or at the very least are overt advocates.

But that doesn’t mean you should get angry with them when they start arguing dishonestly, attempting to pass off rhetoric as dialectic, moving the goalposts, holding you to standards they don’t hold themselves, offering repeated bait-and-switches, and falling silent rather than admitting defeat. To the contrary, such behaviors indicate that they know they are losing the argument.

The reason I never get even a little upset by the atheist with whom I am debating is because I know they are not my intended audience. I don’t care if they cling stubbornly to their erroneous beliefs nor do I care what they do in order to preserve them. To me they are little more than a stage prop, a straight man, a feeder of lines. The worse my interlocutor’s behavior becomes, the more convincing my arguments are perceived by the audience. In fact, for me the difficulty is not maintaining my equanimity, but rather, avoiding the temptation to intentionally trigger the bad behavior and thereby winning a rhetorical battle rather than a comprehensive dialectical one.

(NB: this is precisely why atheists go out of their way to be so offensive and to upset the Christian. It is an attempt to win the rhetorical battle by making you lose your temper.)

So, if you are a Christian who finds that atheists tend to make your temperature rise, apologetic debate is probably not for you. Serve the Kingdom in another role; pray for them. Pick them up when they fall down. Help them when they need assistance. More souls have been won for Jesus Christ by kindness than by words.

But atheists are prouder, more intelligent, and less emotional than the norm, and are therefore less convinced by deeds than words. So, many of them require their pride in their intelligence to be broken before they can reach a state of mind that permits them to hear the Good News and contemplate it rationally. And this is where people like me can open up their minds, by forcing them to acknowledge the myriad flaws in their arguments and by making them question their previously unquestioned assumptions. I know that I am getting through to at least some of them, because they have let me know that has been the case.

It’s rewarding and inspiring to see atheists transform from bitter enemies of God to fearless servants of Jesus Christ. If you keep in mind that the next arrogant, irritating, and slippery-tongued atheist you meet may be the larval form of a John C. Wright or an Apostle Paul, I suspect you will be able to find some charity in your heart for them.

Mailvox: the psychic undercurrent

Anonymous Conservative notices that everyone’s antennae are twitching these days:

Something difficult to pin down is activating amygdalae. It’s telling everyone’s brain that bad is coming, and everyone is trying to assuage those amygdalae, to turn off all the uncomfortable warning alarms they are producing in their brains. Conservatives buy up guns and canned goods to ease the stress level and lower the warning level by preparing. Liberals, deep down know the collapse is the end for them, so the only way to assuage their amygdalae is to retreat even deeper into the bubbles of denial that are producing our problems the begin with. Part of that denial is sending anyone who doesn’t tell them the future is happy far, far away, so they won’t have to think about it.

What Vox asks is the most fascinating question of our time. How can it be that our bellies are full, we are bombarded with endless, professionally produced propaganda telling us everything is fine, and yet deep within us, we all feel like the cattle on an island that head for high ground hours before the tsunami, that nobody knew was coming, hits? How complex is our biology that we connect with our world on such a deep subconscious level that we can’t be tricked by professional liars with nearly limitless resources and a death grip on every major media? How bad is the coming mess, that we can’t be blinded to it?

And why is it in nature, when the tsunami is coming, no cattle insist on telling all the others that now is the best possible time to go swimming, but in our supposedly more advanced species, we have idiots telling us that if we only double down on the debt spending, print a little more currency, and debauch our culture sexually a little more, everything will get better, because a collapse is impossible?

Of course, some are more sensitive than others. I’ve more or less felt this way since 1999, and not due to Y2K either. Or at least not directly; my concern then was that it would be used as the same sort of excuse that 9/11 was two years later.

Remember, it’s not paranoia when they actually are out to undermine the foundations of your civilization. If only we actually had a Last Redoubt to which we could safely retreat from the rising tide of abhumanity.

Mailvox: Mozilla’s Islamophobia

BC thinks Eich could have handled it better too:

I am a little surprised that you haven’t pursued the anti-Islam angle on the whole Eich thing — e.g.  “Mozilla Policy Denies Muslims Executive Positions.” Personally, I think Mozilla’s problems started well before they forced Eich to fall on his sword, and that they let the grounds of the debate be set for them.

While I don’t think firing those who complained (as you suggested) would have worked, they had other options that a seasoned PR staff could have found. Off the top of my head, they could have responded to the crisis early by pointing out that, while senior management absolutely is pro gay marriage (I assume that they are) that denying all who oppose gay marriage the CEO position is fundamentally incompatible with their open philosophy. Then turn it around and ask why it is OK for the boycotters (OK Cupid in particular) to be so openly anti-Muslim? Since when is extreme prejudice against Muslims not just tolerated, but encouraged? As a global company, one would think Mozilla would hold itself to a higher standard.

My concern about the firings is that they would be billed as proof that he was anti-gay and actually caused things to snowball.

Obviously, what he did failed. My main point is that if you can’t manage to present OK Cupid’s position as the close minded/thought police in this kerfuffle then your PR folks are not very good. Seriously, the CEO made a small contribution to an admittedly hot button issue where he was actually in the majority at the time, therefore we should boycott an entire company that, on the whole, is probably strongly left of center? It’s ridiculous. So, I am confident that it was poor PR even if I am not 100% on the correct solution.

My guess is that a better solution would show how open Mozilla is — something like showing muslims in turbans working closely with an extravagantly gay guy wearing ass-less chaps, two women in Subaru showing up at work with an orthodox jew, then show the caption “OK Cupid would have us fire half of these people. We don’t tolerate intolerance”. I would have laughed and OK Cupid would have looked like the fascists that they are.

The reality, I think, is that Mozilla’s board and top management didn’t want Eich there as CEO and was happy to see him forced out, even though they wanted to keep him around in a non-CEO capacity. (High function rabbits understand that they need some non-rabbits around to do the actual work out of the limelight.) So, even though they could have easily won the PR war and sent the gay fascists within and without the organization scurrying for the closet, they didn’t want to fight it, let alone win it.

Mailvox: breaking the ceasefire

Gara demonstrates that he doesn’t understand the difference between legal right and common practice:

Gara: So many people bitching about the whole Mozilla thing. One would expect a self described libertarian like Vox would understand that this is eactly how the free marketplace of ideas is supposed to work. Firefox’s CEO approves of discrimination against same sey couples. And other individuals and companies such as OKCupid responded by exercising their right of free association, declining to support a CEO who holds a viewpoint they found abhorrent. This is how democratic persuasion always operates guys. If you are so angry about it, then try with all means to make your OkCupid boycott work. See if you can get even half the influence they have.

Toby: Free marketplace of ideas involve demanding another person to step down from a position/quit from work because of his/her ideas? Gara, are you crazy?

Gara: Yes it does. You have all the right to say “If Mr X does not quit his position, I won’t have anything to do with your company anymore”. And the company can they react as they see fit. Liberals have the right to do things like that as much as conservatives do.

What we have here is a left-winger and a right-winger talking past each other. Gara is absolutely right in one sense. OKCupid and the various Mozilla employees were perfectly within their LEGAL rights to behave as they did. No one, to the best of my knowledge, has accused them of criminal activity or called for them to be prosecuted.

However, Toby is equally correct to observe that it was absolutely crazy for OK Cupid and the various Mozilla employees to exercise their legal rights in that manner. Because while it is LEGAL for employers and businesses to discriminate on the basis of political beliefs and affiliations, it has most certainly not been the ACCEPTED PRACTICE for them to do so openly.

Indeed, one of the great complaints about the universities and the media is that they secretly impose political litmus tests concerning who is permitted employment in their institutions, and the danger of this practice becoming open knowledge was so great that to this day the universities and media corporations still deny what is statistically undeniable and readily obvious to even the most casual observer.

But now, thanks to the Eich affair, political employment discrimination is overt, and what was previously only legal is now PUBLIC AND ACCEPTED PRACTICE. It is purge or be purged time. So, if you are an employer in many states, you can now feel free to stop employing every non-critical employee who voted for Obama or is known to be a member of the Democratic Party. And you can impose a political litmus test on your new hires; contact DH for his new service if you don’t want to bother surfing Facebook for incrimination evidence of inappropriate politics.

What Gara has failed to realize is that there had been a de facto political ceasefire in the corporate world. The Mozilla debacle broke the ceasefire and now the political Right has the ability to return fire with impunity. I doubt it will do so openly yet, but I have no doubt that there will be more than a few unexpected dismissals quietly taking place over the next few months now that corporate executives understand what the new reality is.

Most conservatives in the corporate community have prided themselves on being “colorblind” with regards to the political spectrum. I suspect that many of them will, sooner or later, understand that they have to abandon that position as being no longer tenable or intellectually justifiable.

And in keeping with the end to the ceasefire, I have removed Mozilla Firefox from my various systems and devices. I have replaced it with Pale Moon, about which more anon. #uninstallfirefox.

UPDATE: the ceasefire is observably over:

The director of corporate giving for Google Inc. has resigned in protest from the board of a Christian aid organization after the charity reversed its decision to hire employees in same-sex marriages. As the Associated Press reported Thursday, Jacquelline Fuller said in an email Wednesday to AP that while she remains a “huge fan” of the group’s work on behalf of the poor, she resigned Friday “as I disagreed with the decision to exclude gay employees who marry.” 

If people are more concerned about homogamy or equality than with helping the poor or basic Christian principles, they should certainly resign from any Christian aid organization. Indeed, they should not be involved with the group in the first place.

Mailvox: the disqualification game

Stuck in the 1990s, Truth seems to think that successfully tarring someone with “raciss” is still a form of effective disqualification as he attempts to convince Tom Kratman to denounce me for my crimes of BadThink:

And how about if the claim of “ignorant half-savage” is based on
Vox’s tribe-to-society ratio or whatever it is he calls it? Would you
consider that genetic and therefore racist? Because as I recall, he
professes that blacks haven’t had enough time to adapt from savage to
social, generationally speaking. Which, is to say, he believes savagery
runs too thick in their genes. Would you consider that racist Mr.
Kratman?

I feel like your character is a higher quality than that. Of course, I have only the slightest evidence for that feeling. But I’d like it to be true. I’d love to be able to read a local sci-fi author who’s published through a major outlet. The only other I know of in this area code is Rod Belcher and I enjoyed his work. I’d probably enjoy yours. I’m just not one of those folks who can separate art and artist.

Disqualify… disqualify… disqualify. I find it amusing that Truth appears to think Tom
is sufficiently naive to fall for the rabbiting. But neither Tom nor I care what a Random Internet Rabbit defines as “racist”. By Truth’s lights, Tom is already disqualified because he admitted to being scientifically literate about genetic science.

Truth then addressed me:

I notice Mr. Kratman didn’t include, “calling black people ignorant half-savages is not racist.” What say you, Vox? Cultural or genetic marker? In the past you’ve said genetic. If not, correct me.

I will first ask a question of my own, which Truth will answer if he wishes to participate in the discussion: Truth, do you assert that there is not a single black individual in the U.S.A. who is an ignorant half-savage?

Now, in answer to Truth’s question, and contra Tom’s position, my observation is that you cannot possibly separate culture and genetics. It is logical to conclude, and it has been repeatedly observed, that cultural differences are derived from genetics. A society with an average 85 IQ will inevitably feature a very different culture than a society with an average 115 IQ. Among other things, the lower IQ culture will have shorter time preferences and its social mores will feature less consideration of the logical consequences of an individual’s actions. This is why secular progressives tend to equate intelligence with higher forms of civilization.

But it is also logical to conclude, and it has been also been observed, that genetic differences are derived from culture. A society where women have children at an average age of 18 will have genetically superior children to those produced in a society in which women have children at an average age of 35. Even something as purely cultural as the average number of children a woman bears will have tremendous genetic implications; there is reason to believe that some of the differences between r/selected and K/selected are genetic, and those genetic differences are, in part, derived from the culture that produces them.

(It must be made clear that this is NOT related to TENS in any way. We’re not dealing with the differences between species here, but intra-species differences for the most part and partial sub-species differences at most. Nor is most of the selection naturally imposed.)

In any event, the trivial thinkers who look at my time-to-civilization hypothesis and focus on its racial implications aren’t seeing its true scope, much less grasping the potential horror of it. The much more serious aspect of the hypothesis is its implication that civilization is the consequence of a centuries-long eugenic program that eventually, and inevitably, transforms itself into a dysgenic program. If the hypothesis holds, this would not only explode, once and for all, the secular conceit of linear progress, but would provide an elegant explanation for the cyclical rise and fall of civilizations as well as the observed inability of Africans to collectively reach a self-sustainable civilized standard despite the best efforts of well-intentioned individuals of various races for more than 150 years.

And if the fact that I occasionally contemplate such things offends you to the point that you don’t wish to read anything that I write or edit or publish, well, that leads to the obvious question: what in the name of the 1,200 sister-wives of Shaka Zulu are you doing here? Especially in light of Truth’s self-admitted anti-intellectual outlook:

I can deal with the economics, military policies, and other right wing stuff, but dismissing an entire race of humans as ignorant half-savages is beyond my threshold. The history of such thought has given rise to countless atrocities.

First, Truth’s personal thresholds do not dictate objective reality. The only thing that matters is if the observation is true or not. In this particular case, there is a considerable quantity of evidence supporting both the singular example provided, as well as the current state of civilizational progress of the human sub-species concerned. Second, we are discussing the collective mean here. In any group with more than two individuals there will obviously be those who exceed the mean, but that is totally irrelevant in this context.

As for the appeal to historical atrocity, has it never occurred to Truth that it is reality that dictated those atrocities and not the mere observation of the reality? He is assigning causal value to a consequence. If the savage behavior of a group of savages leads another group to wipe them out, it is not the second group’s belief that the first group was savage that was the causal factor, but rather, the fact that first group was a) savage, and b) aggressive.

To give one example, Julius Caesar would never have killed one million Gauls and enslaved another million had Gaius Marius not been forced to defend Rome from repeated invasions from the north 50 years prior.

A house blithely divided

It would hard to have provided a better example of John C. Wright’s Unified Field Theory of Madness than we saw in the comments yesterday. And further proving that leftists will say literally anything in order to salve their feelings without concern for their past or future arguments, consider this gem from Snowflake in which he attempts to justify the Left’s primary tactic of disqualification:

the fact that one thing (a round earth) which is true, but for which at one time there was no evidence of, does not mean that anything or everything else for which there is no evidence is also true. Nor can you properly claim anything, be it a round earth, a flat earth, or a pink unicorn to be true, until you provide evidence of it. Disqualification is valid, in that until you provide evidence, the disqualification holds, and you can’t claim that your particular unproven theories are true, simply because there is no other alternate proven theory at the time.

Now, the first statement is partially true, although we know the earth is not actually round, but rather an oblate ellipsoid. It’s rather fitting that an erroneous example should be cited here, but regardless, one can hardly argue with the statement that one cannot assume the correctness of all naked assertions on the basis of one correct naked assertion.

So far so good.

On the other hand, it is absolutely false to assert that one cannot claim anything to be true until evidence for the claim is provided. This exhibits a fundamental confusion between two different concepts, a “claim” and a “proof”. One can claim anything to be true without providing one iota of evidence. Others can freely choose to accept the claim or reject it, but they cannot credibly argue that the claim is intrinsically “disqualified” on the basis of no evidence being provided.

If that were the case, then no one could ever make any statement of fact without simultaneously providing the evidence supporting it. This is an intrinsically anti-scientific perspective, as it would necessarily disqualify all hypotheses, which are claims made in the known absence of evidence. Moreover, it is an inherently self-negating statement, as Snowflake has provided no evidence to support his claim that disqualification of a statement sans evidence is valid.

Moreover, Mr. Wright’s discussion of his theory was not presented as a proof. It was, rather, an explanation of behavior that has been observed on many occasions by many observers in the past. It was a hypothesis, in other words, and one for which considerable evidence was gathered by the feverish attempts to disqualify it.

But why is the Left so eager to disqualify claims and hypotheses? Why does it make a fetish of evidence here while simultaneously denying literal millennia of evidence collected with regards to matters such as human intelligence, genetics, and even the law of supply and demand? (Recall that Wright specifically noted this very behavior in his essay, which none of the critics appear to have actually read before leaping to attack it.) Because the entire aim is to shut down the discussion, silence the perpetrator, and to divert the train of thought before the logical incoherency of the Leftist and the obvious errors of his positions are exposed.

(This is why I crack down so hard on the fools who leap in to engage the trolls on the trolls’ terms. And I use the term “fools” advisedly; one is snapping at the troll’s bait and doing PRECISELY what the troll hopes someone will do by permitting him to shift the matter being discussed away from the one that the troll finds threatening. For example, note how every single discussion of the flaws in TENS is immediately met by multiple attempts to change the subject to Young Earth Creationism. Don’t fall for it.)

The Leftist doesn’t care that his own argument would destroy his own positions; apply this standard to human equality or evolution by natural selection and both fall apart immediately. But because he has no objective standards and no attachment to the truth, the Leftist will blithely apply one subjective standard to his opponents and another to himself without even necessarily realizing it.

The irony is that in attacking Mr. Wright’s Unified Field Theory yesterday, his critics provided the very evidence that they irrelevantly claimed was lacking. If you wish to destroy the credibility of a Leftist’s arguments, you have only to go through it step by step, until you reach the change of definition, ambiguity, logical inconsistency, or outright lie that will INEVITABLY be there. A little patience and precision is all that is required.

Mailvox: of division and hypocrisy

One of Baen’s many authors had this to say about John Scalzi’s attack on what he claimed was Baen Publisher Toni Weisskopf’s divisiveness:

John Scalzi is annoying, yes.  But his straw-manning of Toni really, really set me off.  I’ve been trying to figure out why. Tonight I think I’ve figured it out. Scalzi attacked Toni (falsely) for being a “divider” in the field for one of the very rare times when Toni politely and eloquently editorialized.  Toni does this so seldom, it’s remarkable that anyone could have an issue with it.  Especially when Toni worked hard to be non-combative, non-confrontational in tone and word choice.

Scalzi’s editor Patrick Nielsen-Hayden has been a rather routine and divisive voice on his Making Light blog for many years now.  Often combative, often confrontational.  Both he and his wife.  How much division have the Nielsen-Hayden duo sown?  How much has their invective and their involvement in various controversies helped to put up walls in fandom?  Has Scalzi ever once called either of them out for it?

Of course he hasn’t.  And he never will.  Because Patrick Nielsen-Hayden is Scalzi’s lifeline at TOR. I mean, I get it, it’s a smart business move, but it’s incredibly dickish on his part to ignore PNH/TNH then go after Toni like Toni is some kind of pest spreading discord.  That’s fucking hypocritical and untrue.

Of course, this also makes me think of Larry Correia’s rule for arguing with libs:

LIB: ATTACK, ATTACK, ATTACK, ATTACK!
CON: respond.
LIB: HOW RUDE!

The demonstrable fact is that the Nielsen-Haydens have been rudely and divisively attacking people in the genre since at least 2005. The first I’d ever heard of either of them was when they were attacking me on Making Light for a political op/ed column I’d written for WND and Universal Press Syndicate. I wrote a serious piece which observed in passing that women who were capable of writing hard science fiction did not do so because they were observably disinclined to put in the necessary time and effort required, which led to Patrick Nielsen-Hayden declaring me to be an anti-Semite and his semiaquatic life partner asserting that I could not get laid. Naturally.

John Scalzi not only didn’t take them to task for being divisive and confrontational, he did his best to pile on in his own lightweight, bachelors-degree-in-philosophy manner. Furthermore, it should be noted that John Scalzi and Patrick Nielsen-Hayden were the two individuals most responsible for creating the precedent that SFWA could purge members at any reason at any time. They put direct pressure on the current SFWA Board by threatening to not renew their memberships if I was not expelled.

From the SFWA report: Most prominently, an outgoing Board Member indicated that he intended to let his membership lapse until Beale was no longer a member: “My membership is due and I can’t in good conscience renew it until SFWA finds the means or moral backbone or whatever’s ultimately required to expel someone as hateful and wilfully destructive as Beale—not just from the organisation but from the culture present within it.”

From Twitter less than two hours after I announced the Board’s action:

John Scalzi @scalzi
I just renewed my @sfwa membership!
2:18 PM – 14 Aug 2013

P Nielsen Hayden ‏@pnh Aug 14
@scalzi So did I! What a coincidence! @sfwa

So, John Scalzi’s inept attack on Toni Weisskopf is not only hypocritical, but is indicative of the very divisiveness that he feigns to be criticizing. It is no more credible than his false claim to have 50,000 daily readers. The fact is that the SF/F Left has been divisive and confrontational ever since Damon Knight began publicly denigrating AE van Vogt for ideological reasons. The difference now is that the Left’s attacks have grown louder and more frequent while the SF/F Right no longer needs to placate and put up with their antics. They don’t want us and we most certainly don’t need them.

Mailvox: independent vs self-publishing

An anonymous author writes with an inquiry about the two primary publishing alternatives:

I’ve been following your posts about Castalia House with interest. In the comments to ‘A model comparison’ you mention the advantages of an author publishing through CH are “Awareness, editing, covers, endorsement, and not having to deal with all the business BS. Self-publishing will not suit at least 75 percent of authors.” I’m looking to publish three books later this year that would be nearly impossible to sell to traditional publishers, so even if I was okay with tradpub royalty arrangements, independent and self-publishing are my only real options. Given that, I’d be interested in reading a more detailed post on what one gains and loses with the different models, if you have the time and inclination to write it.

This is the right time to ask that question. But before we look at the advantages of publishing with us, let’s look at the three chief advantages of self-publishing, which are genuine and material.

  1. Keep all the royalty revenues. Amazon takes 30 percent plus a very small delivery fee that usually amounts to about 1.2 percent, so the self-publisher can realistically expect to make 68.5 percent of list on ebooks. That is twice what our novelists make on our standard agreement, (we offer 50 percent on all hardcovers and ebooks, which works out to 34.5 percent of list), and nearly three times what most writers will make from the independent publishers that offer 35 percent. For the sake of reference, it’s also 8.5625x what the traditional publishers pay on hardcovers. (Hardcovers are different; I will break down those numbers in a future post.)
  2. Complete control. The author can decide on his own cover, make his own editorial decisions, price the book as he sees fit, and publish the book according to his own schedule.
  3. Complete information. The author has direct access to the sales data.

Those three things are not nothing. I have nothing but respect for those who go the self-publishing route. That being said, I am certain that it is not the best route for the majority of writers who are good enough to interest independent publishers for the following eight reasons laid out at Castalia House.

There is no question that self-publishing is the optimal financial deal for those equipped to handle it. However, most writers are not equipped to properly handle it either materially or emotionally, observably tend to compromise on the production values in order to reduce their production costs, and will end up selling fewer copies than the breakeven point with independent publishing.

I fully support self-publishing. I think it is revolutionary and an unmitigated Good Thing. But I am aware that most authors, like me, would prefer to focus on writing rather than being distracted by running a publishing business. I chose to publish with Marcher Lord rather than self-publish and I would still happily be doing so if Marcher Lord had not been purchased. So, as a consequence, Castalia House has been set up to be the most author-friendly independent publisher that this author believes it is possible for a publishing house to be.

But there is no need to take my word for it. I recommend talking to our authors and asking them about their experience working with us. I believe you will find they do not regret their decisions to do so. One agent asked me how an author could possibly know his sales numbers when we were not contractually obligated to disclose them for a period of several months. He was a little surprised when I pointed out that the contract was our minimal obligation and it happens to suit us to periodically exceed that obligation so that our authors can know exactly how well their books are doing, and to know when they exceed certain objectives.

Mailvox: A brief history of the Reconquista

In which Toni corrects me concerning my observations concerning the Reconquista of Spain and the current invasion of European America:

You mention the Islamic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 711 AD. You say: “Consider how small, in comparison to the present number of invaders, the earlier immigration was,” after mentioning a force of no more than 15,000 men.

Of course, those populations were smaller. But it was not a one-time event and that number greatly underestimates the whole inflow. The Muslims sent wave after wave against the peninsula.  You also mention that “the people invaded at the time also did not realize it was an invasion that was taking place around them”. That’s not exactly the case. In a way, it’s worse than that.

In 711 AD, the peninsula was under Visigoth rule. Even before the Western Roman Empire fell in 476 AD, several Germanic tribes had invaded the peninsula (Suebi, Vandals, etc). Eventually, around 410 AD, one of these, the Visigoths (the Western Goths), managed to retain the control of the territory. Rome actually encouraged the Visigoths to pacify the peninsula against the other Germanic tribes.

But the Visigoths were a foreign minority (not more than 200,000) ruling over a larger and already diverse population. A demoralized and tired population that had recently gone through the fall of ‘their’ Empire (a few Roman emperors were actually from Hispania) and through successive invasions.

The Visigoth ruling elite was plagued by constant infighting. They had an elective monarchy and in late 710 AD they elected Rodrigo as their king. However, some Visigoth noblemen chose to side with Agila II instead. Agila II did effectively rule the Visigoth provinces of Iberia and Septimania, that is, the former Roman provinces of Tarraconense and Narbonense (northeastern Spain and southern France). Rodrigo ruled from Toledo, the Visigoth capital in the center of the peninsula.

The pro-Agila II faction sent envoys to North Africa to get military support in their fight against Rodrigo. In early 711 AD, Arab, Syrian, and Berber mercenaries crossed the Straits of Gibraltar from Africa to fight for Agila II. These Muslim forces broke their agreement with Agila II and decided to stay in the peninsula.

It is not that the locals couldn’t tell the difference between trading ships and an invading army (one has to admire Muslim historiography). It’s that the invading army was originally fighting for one of the ruling factions. And most importantly, all ruling factions were made up of foreigners anyway. So:

  1. The locals had little to no attachment to their leaders.
  2. The leaders were too busy fighting among themselves to care for the people (they were not their people after all).
  3. The invaders were disloyal to the “king” that had hired them—a king who had been disloyal to his own rightful king. Compare this to the Roman attitude “Rome does not pay traitors who kill their chief”.

About the size of the invasion:

The Muslim invasion received wave after wave of new blood both from Africa and Arabia. It usually went like this: some new Muslim leader appeared in North Africa advocating a purer observance of Islamic law. They set their eyes on Al-Andalus (the Muslim invaded Iberian Peninsula, present-day Spain and Portugal), a land of wealth, were the Muslim leaders often lived in decadence, corruption, and infighting in a soup of racial tensions between Arabs and Africans. The new sect got plenty of followers in North Africa and easily overthrew the Muslim elite in Al-Andalus, only to repeat the cycle… The newcomers were always numerous and ready to fight and far more fanatical.

In 1162, for instance, Abd-al-Mumin launched a new campaign from Africa to purify Al-Andalus and fight the Christians. Ibn Abi Zar says there were “300,000 horsemen, 80,000 volunteers, and 100,000 infantrymen.” In 1184, Abu Yakub Yusuf also crossed the Straits attempting to attack Lisbon with 100,000 men. In 1195, Yusuf II crossed the Straits with 300,000 men (mostly Berbers and black slave foot soldiers, archers, and Arab horsemen) and marched towards Toledo, Alfonso VII tried to stop them with his heavy cavalry of 10,000 men while reinforcements from Leon and Navarra were on their way. (That’s just a sample of about one million ‘”immigrants”” in less than 40 years in a context of almost 800 years). Etc…

When the Muslims crossed the Pyrenees, the Franks led by Charles Martel very soon managed to stop them at the Battle of Poitiers in 733 AD. Then the Muslims had to abandon their goal of crushing the Christendom from the Western front and retreated back to the Iberian Peninsula. The Franks set a protectorate north and south of the Eastern Pyrenees, the Spanish March, in present-day Catalonia and southern France (roughly, what Agila II had controlled, and would later become the Crown of Aragon, one of the founding kingdoms of Spain). And ‘Europe’ forgot about the peninsula. Indeed the peninsula looked like a lost cause to the European Christians, as local Christians retained only a few microscopic kingdoms up north in the cold mountain ridges that used to be Celtic.

So Europe, unlike Africa and Arabia, did not send wave after wave of new blood. Only when the Spanish and Portuguese Christians had managed to reconquer a significant size of the territory did some fellow Europeans join the fight, in Almeria and Lisbon, for example, but never in the overwhelming numbers of the relentless Muslim tide.

By the way, it is because of these difficulties that feudal serfdom never took root in Spain and Portugal. (Medieval Europe and Feudalism are not synonyms). Most of the Reconquista was actually achieved by dirt poor free men who rode southward to retake the plains and the towns, founded free cities and charter cities, years ahead of the royal armies, the religious orders, and even the hidalgos, who were exempt from paying taxes and had a right to bear arms because they fought.

Three final notes,

  1. A recurring topic in the history of (and prelude to) the Reconquista is infighting (first among the Visigoths, and then among the Christians Kingdoms and in Muslim Taifas). This is commonly referred to in Spain as “Reinos de Taifas”. As soon as 740 AD, the Muslims in the peninsula were fighting among themselves. (The Musa you mention was condemned to death by his superiors for taking too much booty for himself, the death sentence was commuted, but eventually he was murdered in a mosque in Damascus anyway in 716. His son married Rodrigo’s widow, converted to Catholicism, and was also murdered, his head sent to Damascus. Musa’s lieutenant, Tarik ibn Ziyad —Gibraltar is named after him, Jabal Tarik, Mountain of Tarik—was also murdered by his own people.)
  2. In 1492, when the Reconquista was completed with the liberation of Granada, the plan was to take the fight all the way to Mecca and rid the world of Islam. But in that same year the very same kings who rode into Granada also funded an expedition that stumbled into a New World, and then Christians decided that Islam was not such a big deal after all and that there were more exciting adventures ahead.
  3. As late as 1756, the Spanish navy was still fighting off Muslim pirates raiding the coast, without much help from anyone as usual. A thousand years had passed since the invasion of 711 AD.  Fifty years after that, an American president refused to pay the ransom that the Muslim African pirates were demanding to free the enslaved American mariners. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Barbary_War.

So there was a large native population being politically dominated by a small immigrant elite that encourages an invasion by a much larger group of immigrants that turns out to be disloyal to that elite. The historical analogy between 700s Spain and 2000s America may not be precise, but it is even more similar than the one I had previously drawn. In either case, it should be encouraging to traditional Americans to know that after 780 years of invasion and occupation, Spanish Christians were able to reconquer their own country.

Mailvox: Castalia House questions

Some of you had questions, so here are the answers:

As opportunities become available will you be posting them here?

Initially, yes. As Castalia House develops its own readership, we will tend to gradually move more CH-related communication there. We will ALWAYS be looking for more translators and it’s hard to imagine a time when we would not be on the lookout for more excellent authors. We intend to be considerably more picky than what one tends to see from the likes of Tor and the other genre publishers. We’re not at all interested in the shotgun approach that many other small publishers take and we fully support those who elect the self-publishing approach.

The inclusion of the “obscure ancient military text” hints that Castalia
House may not limit its focus to the science fiction and epic fantasy
genres. Is this a fair assumption? 

This is correct. In fact, one author has already produced an intriguing proposal that combines those elements. We intend to experiment and try different things that have not necessarily been done before. Some of these experiments will work, some of them won’t, and some of them will be done simply because we think it is worth doing. That being said, SF/F has the best chance of being accepted for publication as it stands closest to the heart of what we are doing.

Can I be Wheeler’s editor?

No. Wheeler is the perfect example of the ideal self-publisher. We will, at some point, be offering various pointers to aid self-publishing on the CH blog. We can’t publish everything. We don’t want to publish everything. But we don’t see any reason why people shouldn’t publish themselves.

Will Castalia House make certain its books qualify the authors for SFWA membership, and possible future expulsion?

It will take at least one year before Castalia House could possibly become a qualifying venue. So, it’s not what we would consider a priority. We do expect to have the necessary 10 authors as well as meeting the minimum print run and revenue requirements.

What is the Italian conceptualization of the differences between
National Socialism and proper Italian Fascism beyond the obvious
racialist accretions?

Non credo questa domanda era proprio per noi. In ogni caso, posso raccomandare il Fascisti di Giordano Bruno Guerri per un esaminazione cosi.

Will there be dead tree versions?

Yes.

Will you be limiting Castalia House or eventually allowing for fiction as neither fantasy or SF? 

Our fictional focus will be on SF/F. But we will certainly consider works outside the genre if they are exceptional.

Any chance there might be music?

Only if it is recorded by a certain award-winning techno band.

What type of submission is required, Just summary, cover letter-summary- and manuscript (Double space or single).

We’re still working this out. On the one hand, it’s faster to be able to simply scan an epub on your reader. On the other, most authors don’t know how to produce epubs. But in general, a one-page synopsis, a one-page author bio, and a single-spaced manuscript all in a single Word-formatted file will suffice. As for the bio, we are less interested in credentials than learning who you are and what you stand for.

Do you have any insights on how you will be able to avoid the fate of other publishers? 

We have zero overhead and zero salaries. We’re already profitable. And we already sell more books than many small publishing houses. Thanks primarily to the support of the readers here, we’re on a path to sell more than 10,000 books this year, not counting free downloads, in-game sales, or other authors. From a time and labor perspective, publishing is absolutely trivial in comparison with game development and we had to do 80 percent of this stuff in order to handle the in-game publishing anyhow. We are a lean, mean, disruptive machine.

I would like to submit a story or two, written with the blood of my enemies. 

Go for it. Just make sure you get them tested before utilizing your “special ink”. (Note to self: THIS is why we utilize slush readers as “the first line of defense”.)

What would be involved in being a slush reader?

Reading submitted manuscripts and rendering your opinion on them in a timely manner. We want to feature very fast turnaround times. If we’re going to say no, we’re going to do it very quickly. And if we’re going to say yes, we want to do that almost as quickly. Also, risking the acquisition of various tropical diseases from manuscripts written in the blood of the author’s enemies.

Why is there no Kickstarter for Castalia House?

We don’t need one. If you would like to support Castalia House, we would encourage you to buy our books or to join our growing list of translators.

What better protagonist than a half-savage shitlord in a douche canoe?

Nothing, obviously. Please to accept a 10-book contract at your earliest convenience.

Can I submit works for consideration that I’ve already self-published online?

Sure.

How much experience with sci-fi or fantasy do you want your slush
readers to have? And do you even WANT a woman’s opinion on these
things?

A reasonable amount would be desirable. If you haven’t read Tolkien, Lewis, Asimov, Heinlein, and Bradbury, at a bare minimum, you probably don’t have a sufficient grasp of the field to read for us. If, on the other hand, you are familiar with Stephenson, Gibson, Shikibu and Hesse, so much the better. We already have female readers. What we do not have, and do not need, are feminist, equalitarian, and left-wing readers.

Can you shed light on why an author should consider Castalia rather than self-publishing?

There are four primary reasons. First, it is a non-trivial pain in the posterior to go through the process of creating and administering a book. I’m not going to exaggerate the difficulty as it is perfectly doable by anyone who is computer literate, but there are certain economies of scale there and we’re already stuck doing it due to our other commitments. Few authors want to spend their time dealing with these things and we offer sufficiently high royalties that most authors will be happy to off-load the administrative work on us.

Second, there is the issue of credibility and exposure. I may be notorious throughout the genre, but even some of my worst enemies have freely admitted that I have pretty good taste in literature. Not even the SFWA members who purged me from its ranks had anything negative to say about my performance on the three Nebula Award juries upon which I sat. If Castalia House publishes a book, there are thousands of people, perhaps tens of thousands, who will recognize that it very likely contains something worth reading. These days, that is considerably more than one can say of Tor or most publishing houses in SF/F.

Third, our growing ranks of translators means that there is a reasonable chance that your novel will be translated into another language, thereby increasing your prospective royalties. The growing gap between traditional translation expenses and average expected ebook revenues means that other publishers are going to have to adopt our translation model or simply give up on translating anything but the biggest selling novels.

And fourth, we have better cover artists than most of the established publishing houses. You will get a good cover. You will have considerable input into that cover. Having been victimized by a major New York publisher that threw out a beautiful Rowena work-in-progress in favor of an ineptly imitated Left Behind  look, I fully understand the significance of cover to the author.

It’s possible you might exclude me. I’m a libertarian and a federalist,
and I expect my work to appeal to traditionalists. However, I’m also an
atheist, and while I respect and write about people of faith, that’s
bound to turn off some blog visitors.

We are perfectly willing to publish atheist authors. We will not publish evangelical atheists or atheists whose work denigrates Christianity, advocates secular humanism, or wallows in nihilism.

Is this a compliment to, or an integral part of, the First Sword concept? Is that a picture of Markku’s house?

It is an integral part of it. That is not a picture of Markku’s dwelling.

Would love to submit something for a cover. Can you give some parameters. 

The minimum resolution is 1667×2500. We are always looking for good artists, so feel free to submit something for review. However, our cover work is all custom and we expect the artist to read the book before producing the cover.

What is Castalia House’s policy towards publishing under pseudonyms?

Fine by us. If you’re an established author concerned about retribution from the Pink SF gatekeepers due to public association with us, we would even encourage it.