Convergence at Penguin Random House

This announcement is, I think, very promising for Castalia House, its readers, and its supporters. The stars are coming into alignment for Castalia to become bigger than any of us had ever imagined:

Penguin and Random House merged three years ago, in 2013, and today Penguin Random House’s CEO, Markus Dohle, sent an anniversary letter to employees in which he congratulated them on their hard work, but more importantly, detailed how that work is affecting people throughout the world.

“Along this road, we have continued to write our story, telling the world who we are, what we do, and why we do it,” Dohle wrote. “Equally important is how—especially in today’s dynamic and complex world, with unprecedented societal events impacting all of us.”

“Publishing is undeniably a force for good,” Dohle continued. “But working in an industry that is inherently a service to society, we risk subscribing to the notion that this is enough. It’s not. We ought to do more—and we can—by taking advantage of our capacity as Penguin Random House to drive positive social, environmental, and cultural change, locally and globally.”

Allow me to remind you of a certain quote that you may find to be relevant in this circumstance.

“Society should treat all equally well who have deserved equally well of it, that is, who have deserved equally well absolutely. This is the highest abstract standard of social and distributive justice; towards which all institutions, and the efforts of all virtuous citizens should be made in the utmost degree to converge.”
 —John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, 1861

The only substantive changes Penguin Random House is going to be making will be negative, to their bottom line and their share price. The entire mainstream publishing industry has “dinosaur buggy whip” written all over it. It’s astonishing that they can’t seem to see it yet.


SJW-convergence in Star Trek

Who would have thought that Star Trek, which has always been at the forefront of SJWism, could be further converged?

In the summer of 1968, George Takei attended a pool party at the Hollywood Hills home of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. The actor, then 31 and famous for his role as Hikaru Sulu, helmsman of the USS Enterprise, swam up to his boss and “had a conversation with him, a very private one. I was still closeted, so I did not want to come out to him.”

Nevertheless, Takei — who announced he was gay in 2005  — was fully attuned to the gay equality conversation gaining momentum at the time. He felt it was a topic worth exploring on the socially minded science-fiction series, which had previously tackled issues like the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War through keenly observed allegory.

But the show had recently seen its lowest ratings ever, with an episode featuring TV’s first interracial kiss between Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura, which NBC affiliates in the South refused to air. While sympathetic to his star’s pitch, Roddenberry felt he was in no position to take those kinds of risks.

“He was a strong supporter of LGBT equality,” recalls Takei, now 79. “But he said he has been pushing the envelope and walking a very tight rope — and if he pushed too hard, the show would not be on the air.” Alas, the show was canceled the following season anyway.

But Star Trek has lived long and prospered for studio home Paramount, spawning six TV series and 13 feature films. True to its title, the latest big-screen outing, Star Trek Beyond, has gone where none have gone before: Star John Cho — who assumes the Sulu mantle for the third time in the reboots — has told Australia’s Herald Sun that the character is revealed to be gay….

Except Takei wasn’t overjoyed. He had never asked for Sulu to be gay. In fact, he’d much prefer that he stay straight. “I’m delighted that there’s a gay character,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Unfortunately, it’s a twisting of Gene’s creation, to which he put in so much thought. I think it’s really unfortunate.”

Takei explains that Roddenberry was exhaustive in conceiving his Star Trek characters. (The name Sulu, for example, was based on the Sulu Sea off the coast of the Philippines, so as to render his Asian nationality indeterminate.) And Roddenberry had always envisioned Sulu as heterosexual.

Straights attempting to virtue-signal on behalf of gays do their best, but they never get it right. I don’t know a single gay man who likes the Saint Gay couples that pervade Hollywood entertainment or think they are anything but dressed-up suburban married couples, about as convincing as urban fantasy’s kick-ass kung fu waifs, science fiction’s men with tits, and the Magic Negroes who like nothing better than to defy gangbangers and help out white folk in distress when they aren’t busy philosophizing, providing moral instruction, or being President.

One would think, at some point, someone would have asked George Takei, or at least understood that there is an insult implicit in the idea that he could not act.


Black Iron Girl

I actually rather enjoy it when white SJWs attempt to write diversity of one sort or another. It’s reliably hilarious how they believe they’re totally pulling it off when they are doing nothing more than writing men with tits, married suburban housewives with penises, or white people with dark skin.

There’s a new Iron Man. Well, Iron Man for now. She’s still working on the name. The events at the end of the comic-book event series Civil War II will result in Tony Stark stepping out of the Iron Man suit and a new character, Riri Williams, taking over, Marvel tells TIME. (Note: Tony’s departure doesn’t mean you know the end to Civil War II yet.)

Riri is a science genius who enrolls in MIT at the age of 15. She comes to the attention of Tony when she builds her own Iron Man suit in her dorm. Creator and Iron Man writer Brian Michael Bendis spoke exclusively to TIME about the creation of Riri Williams with comic-book artist Stefano Caselli and Marvel’s increasingly diverse cast of characters.

How did you come up with the character of Riri Williams?

One of the things that stuck with me when I was working in Chicago a couple of years ago on a TV show that didn’t end up airing was the amount of chaos and violence. And this story of this brilliant, young woman whose life was marred by tragedy that could have easily ended her life — just random street violence — and went off to college was very inspiring to me. I thought that was the most modern version of a superhero or superheroine story I had ever heard. And I sat with it for awhile until I had the right character and the right place.

As we’ve been slowly and hopefully very organically adding all these new characters to the Marvel Universe, it just seemed that sort of violence inspiring a young hero to rise up and act, and using her science acumen, her natural-born abilities that are still raw but so ahead of where even Tony Stark was at that age, was very exciting to me.

One presumes RihannaRiri – even the name comes from the writer’s extensive knowledge of African-American culture; I’m only surprised it wasn’t Beyonce –  must be exceptionally intelligent, considering that she’s been able to fund her technologically advanced R&D with an EBT card.

I’m looking forward to the plot twist when, like her real-world predecessor, Riri drops out of both MIT and the Avengers in order to work as a stripper.

From Twitter:

Supreme Dark Lord @voxday
If the comics imitated life, Riri aka Black Iron Girl would drop out of both MIT and the Avengers to work as a stripper in Atlanta. #IronMan

A ‏@atmaybury
If @voxday was a halfway competent author, he wouldn’t have to run his own vanity press.

Supreme Dark Lord @voxday
That “vanity press” is on track to become the largest publisher in science fiction. The Hugos were just a warning shot.

We are going to have some very interesting announcements around the end of the month. And I have no doubt that when Castalia passes up the twitching corpse of Tor Books, the event will serve as a tribute to what can be described, at the very least, my competence as well as my vanity.


The Wikipedian war

High-ranking SJWs at Wikipedia – or in Gamaliel’s case, formerly at Wikipedia – are up to their usual tricks in attempting to disemploy journalists who fail to submit to the SJW Narrative:

Wikipedia bills itself as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” In reality, it’s a bureaucratic mess dominated by a small clique of established editors who exploit their position to bully, smear, and intimidate anyone who challenges their authority.

Their latest target is David Auerbach, a highly regarded technology columnist for Slate and a fellow at the New America Foundation. Auerbach has been in the editors’ crosshairs ever since he wrote a series of damning exposes of Wikipedia’s bureaucratic elite in 2014.

In one of these columns, Auerbach described how the Wikipedian aristocracy maintain their power.

As it turned out, I’d run into a couple of what one Wikipedia administrator terms “The Unblockables,” a class of abrasive editors who can get away with murder because they have enough of a fan club within Wikipedia, so any complaint made against them would be met with hostility and opprobrium.

Longtime editors, wrote Auerbach, “have developed a fortress mentality in which they see new editors as dangerous intruders who will wreck their beautiful encyclopedia.” According to Auerbach, the combination of hostility to new editors, and the precipitous drop in longstanding ones (MIT Tech Review counted only 31,000 active editors in 2013, compared to a peak of 51,000 in 2007) “increases pressure to retain other long-standing editors, even incredibly acerbic ones, reinforcing the fortress mentality.”

Previously, Auerbach’s opponents targeted him on Wikipedia, attempting to smear him in public articles, and  have his own page deleted — both favorite tactics of editors looking to damage someone’s public image. Although those efforts failed, Auerbach’s opponents — who hold senior positions in the Wikimedia Foundation’s DC outreach unit — are now targeting his job.

Robert Fernandez, a member of Wikimedia DC’s Board of Directors and Audit committee, who goes by the pseudonym “Gamaliel” on Wikipedia, was the primary culprit, accusing Auerbach of being “pro-Brexit, pro-GamerGate” and “anti-SJW,” as well as a “libel machine.”

One tweet in particular was amusing:

It’s good to know that I am the Dark Lord haunting SJW nightmares. Which, for some reason, happens to remind me of something. There will be a Brainstorm tomorrow, for Brainstormers and OGs only, at 7 PM Eastern. Keep an eye out for the email this evening and be sure to register, as we’ll be launching Round Two and providing a progress report tomorrow.


How to avoid raising SJWs

Jean-Batave explains seven ways to avoid inadvertently turning your children into SJWs:

1. Be present

As simple as that. Be there. Listen to them. Spot the early signs of SJW friendly attitude and nip them in the bud. A girl with an absent father, like a ship with no rudder, will turn to an ocean of cocks. A boy with an absent father will turn to crime, or worse, feminism.

Keep them close in their formative years. You are a rock, an example. Live by what you preach. There is only so much you can do. The idea here is to create a strong, independent mind that will be curious, hard to manipulate and ready to question the pre-conceived ideas that the exterior world will feed them.

2. Find the ideal environment

It starts by choosing the right mate. More on that here. Avoid criminogenic urban hives. Make sure that you approve of the local community before you move in somewhere. Don’t let them go to university. Make them learn something that will bring them a stable future.

3. Be direct but constructive

Tell them that life is unfair, that family is sacred and explain what death is, among other things. Explain clearly what are the concepts of hard work, merit, strength and beauty, that men and women are very different. That physical appearance and money are important, but that they are not the panacea. No matter what they say, no man wants to hear that he is weak and no woman wants to hear that she is unattractive.

The idea of not sending one’s children to university will be controversial, and hard for many Americans to even contemplate, but the reality is that most young men and women don’t belong at university and learn nothing that is useful or beneficial there. Even those pursuing professions that legitimately require a university degree will likely benefit from working a year or two before returning to school.

An eighth way is to teach them the value of honesty, particularly with the importance of being honest with oneself. No one who values truth and honesty will ever become an SJW, because a necessary aspect of SJWdom is a willingness to lie to oneself and others.


Gamaliel unmasked

The Witchfinder General unmasks the anti-GamerGate Wikipedia administrator Gamaliel, who was, until recently, an Arbitration Committee member, Wikimedia DC board member, and the editor-in-chief of Wikipedia’s quasi-newspaper, The Signpost.

Unmasking Gamaliel

Your author has decided to name Gamaliel. Last year I concluded that there was no public interest in unmasking Gamaliel. He was a mere administrator and there is a convention that only in exceptional circumstances is a low ranking person in a large organisation named.

Recent events have caused me to review that decision and I have concluded that it is in the public interest now to name Gamaliel and reveal his occupation and employer—The former Wikipedia Arbitrator and Administrator known as Gamaliel is known as Robert Manuel Fernandez in real life.

1. Gamaliel is no longer junior. He held an international, policy-setting, elected position on the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee.
2. Gamaliel read my article ‘Paedophiles of Wikipedia’ and breached policy by not banning an admitted paedophile.
3. Gamaliel works in an educational institution as an assistant professor and a librarian and is in a position of trust.
4. Gamaliel has made potentially ruinous allegations against users of Wikipedia like The Devil’s Advocate and afforded them no opportunity to respond – indeed this blog treated Gamaliel and Jimmy Wales better and allowed them the opportunity to comment in advance.
5. When I put this article on hold out of pity for Gamaliel, his acolytes claimed contacting his employers was, ‘extortion’ … before doing far worse to David Auerbach.

Gamaliel is Robert Manuel Fernandez, Assistant Professor, Reference / Instructional Librarian at Saint Leo University, Florida.

I don’t know that it’s much of an “unmasking”, actually, but regardless, Fernandez is the poster boy for a considerable amount of what is wrong with Wikipedia. He is also a useful study in SJW entryism, even though Wikipedia itself is an SJW-controlled organization, in light of how he continually wormed his way towards positions of internal influence.

I suspect an inordinate number of Wikipedia administrators are low-level academics at lesser institutions. That’s why they have no shortage of time to spend thought-policing Wikipedia pages for any content that might call the SJW Narrative into question. It also explains why they almost invariably demonstrate terminal midwittery.


Mailvox: SJW convergence at Baen?

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

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

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

I have no idea who Bryan Thomas Schmidt is.

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

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

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

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

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

Saladin Ahmed ‏@saladinahmed
yes. A 100% chance.

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

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

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

They should be.


Dunning-Kruger + Gamma = Aaron

The most intellectually challenged gamma at File 770, much to everyone’s surprise, doubles down.

I disagree. I think I’m very smart. And you’re dumb. I’m easily smarter than most people on this blog, including Vox. Vox said something pretty stupid, and instead of having the balls to man up, he doubled down. I’m not impressed. At all.

Easily smarter… than people with confirmed +3SD and +4SD IQs. I have no doubt whatsoever that he believes that, as he’s an example of both Dunning-Kruger Syndrome and Vox’s First Law in action.

What’s particularly funny about this is that he’s referring to this post. Notice how much of it is devoted to intelligence and immigration. Aaron, as wounded Gammas are wont to do, leaped to attack one minor point that he interpreted to be in error, then attempted to build an entire edifice of discredit and disqualify upon it, even going so far as to claim, on that basis, that “You always double down. I’ve never seen you concede any point at any time anywhere.”

No doubt this would confuse James Miller, Robert Murphy, and Thomas Woods, to say nothing of Ian Fletcher, to whom I have conceded considerably more than just a single point. Some other readers attempted to explain to Aaron that he’d missed the salient point, which he not only ended up rejecting but also claims I did not mean despite the readily available evidence to the contrary.

So, the immigration of stupid people has created conditions that make the super smart innovators have less babies, and that many of the super smart who have babies do so with Mexican fruit pickers and Somali gangsters and such like.

THAT’S what Vox meant when he said the immigration of stupid people has led to a lower average national IQ, and thus fewer smart people to be entrepreneurs.

If you SERIOUSLY think this is what Vox meant, then that’s a perfectly coherent position, although to my mind, not plausible.

But I for one, don’t think that’s what vox meant.

Of course it is part of what Vox meant, though only part, as should be obvious to anyone who is familiar with my writing about feminism’s effect on declining Western intelligence. One wonders what else I could have possibly meant, considering the following:


As the average IQ of the population declines, the number of members of the cognitive elite being born similarly decline. If the smart population mixes with the less intelligent immigrants, or even fails to breed at replacement levels, the ABSOLUTE number of smart people will decline. Do either of those scenarios happen to apply here?

Of course, both scenarios do. Aaron’s assertion of my “error” relied upon no native-immigrant intermixing and non-declining birthrates among the native cognitive elite, both false assumptions. What Aaron is exhibiting, in addition to the usual gamma “You are wrong and stupid due to incorrect assumptions on my part”, is typical SJW reasoning in action.They are binary thinkers, which renders complexity a complete mystery to them. That’s why they think that “well, it’s more complex than that” is a sufficient rebuttal, because the possibility of unraveling the complexities and successfully accounting for more than one influential factor is not only beyond their capabilities, but beyond their actions.

Notice how the SJW ends up relying upon his interpretation of what he imagines the other person to be thinking so that he can himself the victor, regardless of what every other observer concludes. The Secret King triumphs again, if only in his own head. But usually, the gamma doesn’t pay enough attention to what others are saying to even understand them correctly.

But isn’t that exactly the point? They’re in a position of weakness, so they’re using bluster and bravado to regain momentum. Thats what I said. File this under “making my point for me again” dpt. You’re good at that, vox.

No, it’s not exactly the point. Aaron failed to understand that I was correcting his statement that “pushing through their agenda in an even more ruthless and uncompromising way is the best tactic they have to deal with a moment of weakness”.  Yes, we both agree that the EU elite is in a position of weakness, which is precisely why bluster and bravado is not their best tactic if they wish the EU to survive. To the contrary, it’s a very risky bluff, which the Euroskeptics should call and exploit to the full, in order to destroy the entire edifice.

The sad thing about the gamma is that he neither knows himself nor his enemies. That is why he is, per Sun Tzu, destined for repeated failure:

YOU’RE answering ME, but it is *I* who engage in the detestable gamma behavior of never letting things go or lashing back – and since when are you known for letting go or refraining from lashing back? I get it. When you do it, it’s super duper genius rhetoric alpha Aristotle stuff, when anyone else, why, it’s a gamma. 

Yes, you are indeed a gamma male. No, you clearly don’t get it. Let’s consider the facts.

  • I very seldom write about Aaron or pay any attention to his activities. Even when I did, recently, he was not the topic at hand. The battle on A Game of Thrones was.
  • Aaron frequently opines about me and my various activities, as a search of File 770’s comments will demonstrate.
  • Aaron is here commenting repeatedly on my blog. That’s fine, but the point is, he came here to do it because he is still feeling butthurt about his risible defense of the LEEEROY JENKINS strategy in the Stark-Bolton battle. His response was so predictable that another game-savvy reader even predicted it.
  • I often respond to critics who comment on this blog. That was not a unique event.
  • I let go of most attacks directed at me. As numerous critics who comment here can testify, I don’t even reply to most of them, let alone lash back at all of them. Moreover, I am quite willing to let bygones be bygones, as numerous commenters with whom I have had differences in the past can also testify.

Unlike the gamma, I don’t dwell upon past injuries and insults, licking my wounds and biding my time until an opportunity to lash back presents itself. Nor do I feel any need to reinterpret past defeats as victories, or pretend to myself and others that my failures are successes. I don’t pretend to understand why gammas behave in this way, but I have observed the pattern of behavior often enough to be able to reliably predict it. Since most male SF-SJWs are gammas, it’s not hard to anticipate their reactions to any given stimulus.

UPDATE: Oh dear. Timing, it seems, is everything.

Aaron: It is masculine to admit when you’re wrong. Just very few people do it, and certainly not vox.

Two hours ago on Twitter:

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
Daikatana was, like my Rebel Moon designs, too ambitious for its own good.

John Romero ‏@romero
it wasn’t an ambitious design that was Daikatana’s problem

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
I stand corrected.


The education of the SJWs

This is exactly how you respond to SJW entryism:

I was able to get a summer internship at a company that does work in the industry I want to work in after I graduate. Even though the division I was hired to work in doesn’t deal with clients or customers, there still was a very strict dress code. I felt the dress code was overly strict but I wasn’t going to say anything, until I noticed one of the workers always wore flat shoes that were made from a fabric other than leather, or running shoes, even though both of these things were contrary to the dress code.

I spoke with my manager about being allowed some leeway under the dress code and was told this was not possible, despite the other person being allowed to do it. I soon found out that many of the other interns felt the same way, and the ones who asked their managers about it were told the same thing as me. We decided to write a proposal stating why we should be allowed someone leeway under the dress code. We accompanied the proposal with a petition, signed by all of the interns (except for one who declined to sign it) and gave it to our managers to consider. Our proposal requested that we also be allowed to wear running shoes and non leather flats, as well as sandals (not flip-flops though) and other non-dress shoes that would fit under a more business casual dress code. It was mostly about the footwear, but we also incorporated a request that we not have to wear suits and/or blazers in favor of a more casual, but still professional dress code.

The next day, all of us who signed the petition were called into a meeting where we thought our proposal would be discussed. Instead, we were informed that due to our “unprofessional” behavior, we were being let go from our internships. We were told to hand in our ID badges and to gather our things and leave the property ASAP.

We were shocked.

FANTASTIC! That, ladies and gentlemen, is the optimal way to handle SJWs. Once they positively identify themselves as such, fire them and have them immediately escorted off the property.

For more on how to deal with SJWs, well, you know where to find it.


The price of speaking out

SJWs will always try to force you to pay for standing up to the Narrative and speaking out against it, lest others do likewise.

Never go full racist. A Tennessee congressional candidate learned that lesson this week after his campaign took out a billboard ad exhorting voters to “Make America white again.” From local ABC affiliate WTVC:

Rick Tyler told WTVC he owns Whitewater Grill in Ocoee, but in the coming months will transition to campaigning to represent Tennessee’s 3rd District in the U.S. House of Representatives. Tyler says his “Make America White Again” sign, which plays off of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, was taken down on Tuesday evening.

The decision to take the billboard down came after Tyler’s business became the target of a boycott.

As if his submission will be sufficient to permit him to be forgiven for the sin of speaking out against the New “America”. Is it not remarkable that those who claim to love America are so determined to wipe out literally every last vestige of it?

Whatever this multiracial empire is, it is not the same nation that for its first 130 years required all new citizens to be “of good character” and “white”. And it is remarkable how many people who lament the fall away from the U.S. Constitution, designed to benefit the Founders and their posterity, don’t make the connection between the abandonment of all three things.

The reality is that the only way to Make America Great Again is to Make America White Again. The two slogans are synonymous. The SJWs know it, which is why both slogans terrify them.