Tag: philosophy

The Pointlessness of Posturing

Either a number of people associated with Baen Books are less dialed-in to what is happening on the business side than they believe themselves to be or they desperately need lessons in some of the basics of public relations.

  • PR 101: Never deny anything that you know someone else can prove.
  • PR 102: Never get into a fight with anyone who buys ink by the barrel.

Larry Correia posted a long-winded rant both on his blog and on X regarding the piece, opening with the personal attack, “So I hear certain people are trying to stir up outrage clicks spreading dumb rumors about some publishers again.”

Our article, however, does not contain any speculation, only a reporting of facts that have been verified and direct commentary from several Baen Books authors and employees, as previously noted.

Correia did, however, elaborate that he intends to diversify his book portfolio from Baen Books even further in the coming years. He said, “Here, I’ll even add to the freak out, I’m also going to be doing some pure indy stuff in the future too. Why? Because I can, and I want to see what happens when I do. It has been a long time since I’ve experimented in that, the market has changed a ton since then, and has a lot of potential. I like making money. Me doing an indy project might make money. Go figure.”

Many of Correia’s fans reacted to his rant, voicing support for the author and making odd comments mocking his “career-ending,” responding to everything he said but not any of the information in Fandom Pulse’s article, as Correia obfuscated as to what the topic was at hand.

Former Sad Puppy Sarah A. Hoyt, who was dropped from Baen due to her poor sales and is not an American, replied with a bizarre comment, “Yeah. People asked, so I actually read the idiocy. It’s all a thinly veiled tissue of hallucinations…. Having been the subject of such ‘reporting’ before, I’m not even amused.” It’s unclear what she’s talking about.

It doesn’t take a genius to observe that Baen Books is unlikely to survive the loss of Larry Correia to both a) another publisher and b) going independent. Perhaps some of the people quoted don’t know this, but Baen is 25 percent owned by Tor Books and has a very limited number of distribution slots through its distribution partner. As with most mainstream publishers, it is heavily dependent upon its bestselling author or two propping up the rest of its authors.

This is the problem that Tor Books faces as well. The reason John Scalzi was given a massive lead author contract was because Tor needed to replace Brandon Sanderson, the late Robert Jordan, and the game tie-in business that it lost, unfortunately for Tor and Scalzi, he has been unable to do so. He still sells, he just doesn’t sell well enough.

The fact that Larry Correia walked means that Baen Books couldn’t afford the right of first refusal to his new series, which is hardly surprising. I told Larry back in 2015 that he should go independent and I’ve expected to see him do so ever since Brandon Sanderson demonstrated how high the ceiling can be for an independent author. The fact that he was willing to prop up Baen for nearly ten years longer than he probably should have from a financial perspective is testimony to his loyalty and gratitude to his longtime publisher.

But Baen has been circling the drain for years anyhow, because its business practices are out of date. It ignored the authors it should have been courting – including Nick Cole, Jason Anspach, John C. Wright, JDA, and myself, among others – while also ignoring the advent of crowdfunding and the negative impact of Kindle Unlimited. And now its window of opportunity has closed.

People can preen and posture all they like, but what will be will be. And it’s both foolish and futile to get one’s panties in a bunch over educated observers simply noting what has happened, what is happening, and what is likely to happen. Let bygones be bygones and make hay while the sun is shining; just yesterday one of my more vehement past critics and I achieved mutual understanding on a potential future project with excellent prospects for both of us; whether we follow through on it or not, the mere fact of our discussion is a testimony to the professional approach to these things.

I may not be fond of John Scalzi, just to give one example, but if the man ever decides he wants to do a deluxe edition of Old Man’s War in leather, I’ll not only agree to work with him, I’ll guarantee him that we will make him a higher-quality and more attractive edition than Easton or Folio Society will give him. Because an important part of being professional is learning how to set aside one’s personal predilections.

DISCUSS ON SG

An Intrinsically Uncompetitive Society

The cost of having your society run by nepotistic foreign socio-cultural parasites is the inevitable loss of competitiveness.

It is not surprising really. I am an innovative psychology. You can see how I synthesize stuff here, bringing together Google Streetview and surveillance camera footage, and reveal the surveillance in America as few could. Politics and biology, psychology, I come up with interesting stuff. And when I was just a young lad, I was identified by US Domestic intelligence’s grade school monitoring units as innovative, and their response was to supply me with massive amounts of pornography to try and make me a degenerate. When that was ineffective, they decided to flood in the kids of agents, acting as kid spies to try and beat me down. When that failed, they rolled out honeypots. And when I proved resistant to it all, I believe they rolled out an early version of the Havana Weapon to degrade my health physically.

I do not think I am unique in that regard. I even think there was another kid, maybe brighter than me, and certainly more disciplined and dedicated to academics, who they also beamed into chronic illness to try and clip his wings as well. I would assume that has been going on across the nation, with every young kid who showed an innovative potential, for the last thirty to forty years, as domestic intelligence has tried to make sure nobody could rise too high in society, and maybe oppose it. My guess is, given the granularity of the surveillance, if you ever have a child with real potential, the single biggest threat they will ever face in life will be US domestic intelligence, because the American Stasi will find them, it will view them as a threat, and it will try to destroy them using all the most advanced tools of the CIA. It is just how it works in America now.

As a result, at present, the only chance America has to compete lies with the rubes and imbeciles of the insecure surveillance, and there just are not enough innovators there to keep up with nations like China.

After six decades of fake science, fake literature, fake art, fake genuises, fake 115-average IQs, the financialization of the economy, and the moral and intellectual degradation of the workforce, it is absolutely no surprise that the USA is losing on every side to its global rivals in China and Russia. The fetishization of frauds from Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth to Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro, combined with the suppression and sidelining of the genuine American creative class, has been sufficient to render the USA a global also-ran.

Someone once asked: “Where is America’s Wang Hunin?” Wang, arguably the most observant individual of the 20th Century, rose from a complete nobody who wasn’t even a member of the Chinese Communist Party to the CCP’s chief ideologist solely on the basis of the merit of his prescient observations. Someone else answered: “Living in Europe making comic books.” And while I’m not the equal of Wang Hunin, who saw things 20 years before I did despite being only 13 years older than me, the difference between the way he was embraced and elevated by the Chinese political elite versus the way I was explicitly banished from even the editorial pages at the age of 23 by the US political elite is telling.

The irony is that I’ve been treated with far more respect by the Chinese and Russian state medias than by the ostensibly private medias in the USA and Europe. Pravda used to occasionally run the very syndicated Universal Press column that the newspapers in the USA refused to touch, back when I was warning everyone about the coming financial crisis in 2002. Note that I’m not at all bitter. I caught enough of a glimpse into the US political elite at a young age that I wanted nothing to do with it and I’m quite content with having been sidelined. I like what I’m doing and I harbor zero desire to get involved with The Great Game. But that doesn’t change the effect the sidelining of me and others more talented than me have inevitably had for the last six decades.

So now we have corrupt second-generation mediocrities like Donald Kagan and complete frauds like Elon Musk establishing US geopolitical strategies instead of anyone setting them in the national interests of the American people. As long as we do, China’s triumph is absolutely 100-percent certain no matter what economic or demographic vagaries it might be facing. It’s like seeing one NFL team building a historic staff with Ron Wolf at GM, Bill Belichick as head coach and Andy Reid as the offensive coordinator and the other being run by the historically awful combination of GM Matt Millen, head coach Marty Mornhinweg, and the immortal Brad Childress not calling plays as the offensive coordinator.

The truth always and inevitably wins out over time because the longer the parasitical pretenders have influence in a society, the further from objective reality their policies will reliably guide it. It’s not an accident that everything across the West from AI to zoology has become fake and gay, because convergence toward entropy is the objective. The latest iteration of The Empire That Never Ended will fall again, because it celebrates falsehood and worships evil.

DISCUSS ON SG

We are the Elendilans

Contemplations on the Tree of Woe contemplates the possibility that JRR Tolkien is the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe of our Aenean Age.

The defining conflict of Elendil’s era, the Second Age of Middle Earth, is fought by the Last Alliance of Elves and Men. The Last Alliance is a coalition of the remnants of great powers, united in the aftermath of Númenor’s fall to resist the rising darkness of Sauron. After decades of brutal struggle, The Last Alliance of Elves and Men achieves its purpose: Sauron is defeated and the One Ring is taken from him. Yet the victory is bittersweet. Elendil falls in battle and his sword Narsil shattered. His son Isildur chooses to keep rather destroy the One Ring, ensuring that the seeds of future conflict are sown. The Elves, diminished by their sacrifice, begin their long retreat into the West, and the kingdoms of Men, though triumphant, are fractured and weakened. Thus begins the Third Age.

Tolkien’s Third Age is marked by many moments of heroism and beauty, but even at its height it is a shadow of the glorious Second Age. By the time of The Lord of the Rings, the Elves have faded, Númenor has become a memory, Arnor has been conquered, and Gondor has been reduced to a pale reflection of its former strength.

If what was true of Middle-Earth is true of our own era, then what lies ahead is neither the dawn of a golden age or the night of a dark age, but rather a long twilight—an era where the remnants of greatness, having averted or avoided total annihilation, nevertheless must struggle to resist an ever-encroaching darkness at great cost. The civilization, while noble, will bear terrible scars from this struggle. Its grandeur will be tempered by humility and its ambitions will be limited by necessity.

I thus finish this essay with an unsettled heart. Tolkien, I am convinced, is truly a cultural mythmaker as influential as Goethe; and Elendil, I am certain, is a hero cut from the same cloth as Aeneas.

But Aeneas’s cloth is the purple cloak worn to an emperor’s coronation; and Elendil’s cloth is the shroud worn to a king’s funeral. Rome was greater than Troy, but neither Arnor nor Gondor was as great as Númenor. Thus an Elendilian Age would not be as bright as an Aenean Age. Its destiny would be somewhere between the inspiring future of my original essay and the hellish future anticipated by my essay’s critics.

Yet this ought be no cause for despair. If the Aenean spirit or Tolkien’s northern courage means anything, it means that the fight must be fought regardless of the likelihood of success. And Tolkien’s myths remind us that even in decline, there is beauty, heroism, and meaning. The Elendilian Age, if it were to come, might not shine as brightly as the Faustian, or even the Aenean; but it would still carry forward the light of what came before. And in the end, that light—however faint—will be enough to illuminate the path for those who follow.

When one reads a book like Brideshead Revisited, one can’t help but be struck by the way its elegaic melancholy almost perfectly expresses the mood of the end of the American empire. Evelyn Waugh was writing at, and about, the end of the British Empire, which is why the emotional tone of his literary work is so familiar to the modern American reader. The Tree of Woe is, in my opinion, to observe that we are at the end of one age and entering into a new one; whether it is as dark and challenging as he anticipates is yet to be determined, but on the basis of the panopoly of known facts, certainly appears to be correct.

Read the whole thing there. It’s well worth it. And remember that the light of Christian civilization will survive so long as at least one of us possesses the courage to stand against the rising Dark.

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All “Success” is Manufactured

Indeed. What are the odds? And looking at them, what are the chances that they aren’t related in some way? Once you grasp the basic concept of its reality, the outlines of Clown World become clearer and clearer over time. It’s a club, you’re not in it, and more importantly, if you value your immortal soul, you do not want to be in it or even have anything to do with it.

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The Litany Against Retardery

Some may find this philosophical mantra to be useful as they are subjected to a non-stop stream of retardery from the Non-Player Characters in their lives mindlessly regurgitating their mainstream programming.

THE LITANY AGAINST RETARDERY

I do not hear.

Retardery is the cosmic background noise.

Retardery is the mind-morass that inspires neural disintegration.

I will face the retardery.

I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

And when it has gone it will leave no trace behind.

Where the retardery has passed there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

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Never Sell Out

At least, not if you value your legacy. Because, sooner or later, the acquiring company will destroy what you and your family have built.

After more than 157 years, Leinenkugel’s beer will no longer be brewed in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin.

The beer that has become synonymous with the western Wisconsin town will soon be produced at parent company Molson Coors’ sprawling plant in Milwaukee.

Molson Coors said the decision to move production of Leinenkugel’s products came after improvements to its canning line in Milwaukee. Another smaller brewery under the Molson Coors umbrella, 10th Street Brewery in Milwaukee, will also be rolled into the company’s main operation.

According to the Molson-Coors Company website, the Leinenkugel’s brewery, with 120 employees at the location in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, will soon be closing.

When efficiency is the order of the day, there is never any respect for history. The money is nice, but there is no legacy in having your name on a can of Old Shoe.

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Excellence in Everything

The pursuit of excellence, in even the most humble of responsibilities, is never a waste. Indeed, it can be recognized and celebrated, even in the most humble of responsibilities:

It’s been quite the week for Trevor Skogerboe. Skogerboe, an assistant equipment director at Cal, went viral over the weekend for tackling a fan who was trying to steal a helmet as the Golden Bears faithful stormed the field following a 24–21 victory over rival Stanford at California Memorial Stadium.

That tackle—which has gained the praise of many across the college football world, including Cal head football coach Justin Wilcox—earned Skogerboe a spot among the sport’s greatest talents in February.

Jim Nagy, the executive director of the Reese’s Senior Bowl, announced Wednesday that Skogerboe accepted his official invite to the annual showcase set for Feb. 1 at South Alabama. No, Skogerboe won’t be suiting up at linebacker at the 2025 Senior Bowl. But he will be a part of the equipment staff responsible for working the postseason college football All-Star game.

Don’t ever be content with just doing the minimum required. Pursue excellence, even if you’re the only one who will know the difference. Persistence plus excellence will not guarantee success – nothing short of taking the ticket will do that – but it lays the foundation that makes success possible.

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You Can’t Beat Father Time

Not even Iron Mike Tyson. He had two rounds to put Jake Paul away, and when he didn’t, the outcome became inevitable. Still, it’s good to see the younger generation showing due respect to their elders, even when they’ve passed them by. Jake Paul may have won a unanimous decision, but he also knows greatness when he sees it.

It took a fair amount of courage for Mike Tyson to get back in the ring, even against a show pony fighter like Jake Paul. Paul, like it or not, is a legitimate boxer now. He’s put in the time, he’s put in the training, and if he’s not about to take on a top-ranked fighter, well, he’s first and foremost an entertainer. But that doesn’t make him any less legitimate or dangerous. He’s got knockout power. And in the ring, anyone can hurt you; there are no guarantees and people get injured even in sparring. I’ve seen ankles broken, noses broken, and was even knocked out myself once in training.

I’m only two years younger than Iron Mike, so I know exactly how much he has slowed down over time. On the soccer field, I’ve been dealing with my inability to reach balls I would have easily gotten to first for the last 23 years; I remember the very practice at which my top gear, upon which I’d always relied, simply vanished. It just wasn’t there anymore. It doesn’t matter how well I keep myself in shape or how smart I play, I’m just a role player now. I don’t worry about scoring goals or providing assists anymore, I just try to keep my wing in order and protect my defender; it’s up to the younger players to win the game now and all I can really expect to do is prevent us from losing it via my side.

It’s certainly painful to watch our youthful sports heroes “embarrass” themselves by showing their age and how their greatness has departed them. But they’ve earned their right to go out there and compete with their successors, and to confirm what they already suspect about their decline. And as Jake Paul demonstrated with his obvious respect for the former world champion, what a thrill it is for the younger men to test themselves, even against the faded shadows of their great elders.

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