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Saturday, December 06, 2014

You got your gay technoculture in my propaganda!

The displacement of liberal New York Jews by liberal Silicon Valley gays is probably a positive sign if it truly indicates that the post-WWII left-wing Jewish establishment is on the decline.
The majority of The New Republic's masthead resigned en masse on Friday following the owner's decision to force out the editorial leadership, move the magazine to New York, and rebrand the venerable, century-old publication as a "digital media company."

Nine of the magazine's twelve senior editors submitted letters of resignation to owner Chris Hughes and chief executive Guy Vidra, as did two executive editors, the digital media editor, the legislative affairs editor, and two arts editors. At least twenty of the magazine's contributing editors also requested that their names be removed from the magazine's masthead.

The mass departure came one day after a shakeup that saw the resignation of top editor Franklin Foer and veteran literary editor Leon Wieseltier, both of whom resigned due to differences of vision with Hughes, a 31-year-old Facebook co-founder who bought the magazine in 2012. Foer announced his resignation on Thursday after discovering that Hughes had already hired his replacement, Gabriel Snyder, a Bloomberg Media editor who formerly ran The Atlantic Wire blog....

Those who resigned are senior editors Jonathan Cohn, Isaac Chotiner, Julia Ioffe, John Judis, Adam Kirsch, Alec MacGillis, Noam Scheiber, Judith Shulevitz and Jason Zengerle; executive editors Rachel Morris and Greg Veis; digital media editor Hillary Kelly (who resigned from her honeymoon in Africa); legal affairs editor Jeffrey Rosen; and poetry editor Henri Cole and dance editor Jennifer Homans. Contributing editors Anne Applebaum, Paul Berman, Christopher Benfey, Jonathan Chait, William Deresiewicz, Justin Driver, TA Frank, Ruth Franklin, Jack Goldsmith, Anthony Grafton, David Grann, David Greenberg, Robert Kagan, Enrique Krauze, Damon Linker, Ryan Lizza, John McWhorter, Sacha Z. Scoblic, Cass Sunstein, Alan Taylor, Helen Vendler and Sean Wilentz.

Many of those who resigned on Friday believe that Hughes and Vidra now intend to turn TNR into a click-focused digital media company, at the expense of the magazine's strong editorial traditions and venerable brand, according to sources who attended the gathering at Foer's house.
Whatever will Americans do without this landmark of the neocon establishment telling them what to think and which wars to wage? And wherever will we go for our poetry and dance criticism? It's good to see some of these old propaganda centers being disrupted and demolished; it's absolutely ridiculous how much political influence The New Republic had considering that it only had 50,000 subscribers.

The antiwar site Mondoweiss notes: "This is a landmark in the era of the Jewish establishment. It’s petering out in an elite generation of far greater diversity." Given that Holocaustianity and Hollywood are much more influential in the USA than in Europe, my guess is that it will take at least one more generation before America's Jews begin following the lead of French Jewry, of whom more than one percent of the total population are expected to have moved to Israel by the end of 2014. What is interesting is the way these developmens indicate that six decades of diligent work to break down European and American homogenuity has gone somewhat agley; it appears that a constant power struggle of all against all may not actually be safer than a single well-disposed majority ruling over diverse minorities with benign disregard.

Having recently read Martin van Creveld's The Land of Blood and Honey, I suspect there will be some fairly serious cultural clashes in the future between American Jews, who believe they are the center of the Jewish world, and the Israelis, who understandably feel very differently. Those who see "Israeli" and "Jew" as being entirely synonymous really don't know what they're talking about; the amusing thing is that Israelis tend to speak more dismissively of American Jews than most Americans would dare.

One important difference that I see is that Israelis are heading rapidly towards a homogenous ethno-cultural state, while American Jews are terrified of Israeli people's "heartbreaking" embrace of nationalism because they know they are no more a part of the American ethno-cultural state than Israel's Arab citizens are part of Israel's, and they have no more desire to move to Israel than the average Israeli Arab has in moving to Egypt or Syria. But their "national homogenuity for me, but not for thee" argument is unlikely to hold water with anyone.

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Destroying the community to diversify it

There is no Paradox of Diverse Communities; one horn of the dilemma is simply false. So, the answer to his question is, yes,  we shouldn't fight against self-segregation, because divisiveness and a lack of community cohesion are intrinsically dyscivic. In fact, we should actively promote racial, cutural, linguistic, religious segregation in the interest of long term peace and harmonious civil relations across various human differences:
Urbanists and planners like to imagine and design for a world of diversity. Diversity, we like to think, is both a social good and, as I’ve argued, a spur to innovation and economic growth.

But to what degree is this goal of diverse, cohesive community attainable, even in theory?

That’s the key question behind an intriguing new study, “The (In)compatibility of Diversity and Sense of Community,” published in the November edition of the American Journal of Community Psychology. The study, by sociologist Zachary Neal and psychologist Jennifer Watling Neal, both of Michigan State University (full disclosure: I was an external member of the former’s dissertation committee), develops a nifty agent-based computer model to test this question.

Their simulations of more than 20 million virtual “neighborhoods” demonstrate a troubling paradox: that community and diversity may be fundamentally incompatible goals. As the authors explain, integration “provides opportunities for intergroup contact that are necessary to promote respect for diversity, but may prevent the formation of dense interpersonal networks that are necessary to promote sense of community.”
They are correct to point to the "federation" concept as a possible solution, but they are thinking on too small a scale. Neighborwide segregation is not enough. It should be state-wide. People like to point to the Swiss model as being an example of successful integration, what they don't realize is that religious, linguistic, and ethnic cleansing were utilized in establishing the Swiss cantons; that is why the cantons are still identified as "Protestant" or "Catholic" cantons as well as being on one side or the other of the Franco-German divide.

But more importantly, the federation concept cannot work without decentralized government. There is no point in encouraging Somalis or Nigerians to live in segregated neighborhoods if they are legally held to German or Japanese standards by a higher-level government.

The fact is that diversity is a social ill and it exacerbates rather than reduces racial tensions. I can attest that no one in Minnesota had an opinion about Somalis or Liberians 20 years ago. In only two decades, diversity has caused tens of thousands of formerly indifferent people to actively despise them. It would be interesting to test this hypothesis by using contributions to African-related charities as a metric. I surmise that there is a lower percentage of White Minneapolis residents donating to charities that aid Africa now that diversity and immigration have given them some first-hand experience of actual Africans.

Diversity destroys communities. That is the observable fact. Diversity destroys the common interest. To be pro-diversity is necessarily to be anti-communitarian and against the common interest. There is the real paradox: the progressive who claims to be a pro-diversity communitarian.

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The Top Gaming Blogs

As one of their Game and Book experts, one of the things Recommend has asked me to do is to identify and vett various other experts, particularly in fields I am qualified to do so. One of the first experts I recruited was the indefatigable Jeffro Johnson of Jeffro's Space Gaming Blog, who is also one of the two star bloggers at Castalia House, because there are very, very few people who know as much about role-playing games as he does.

Jeffro immediately grasped the utility of the Recommend system, so much so that I have already had to urge him to slow down and pace himself. But among the score of recos he has already posted, he has created an interesting list entitled The Top Gaming Blogs of 2014, which is well worth reading for anyone with an interest in games. Lewis Pulsipher is on there, of course, but there are a number of other sites with which I was previously unfamiliar.

The other new Recommend expert is less known for his excellent game design than for the fact that he is Archon of The Escapist, but regardless, he qualifies as a Game Expert twice over. He's got his first reco up and it's a good one on the classic X-Com: UFO Defense.

If you're not on Recommend yet, or if you're on it but haven't really started using it yet, I'd encourage you to give it a go. They haven't even officially "come to America" yet; but have already achieved pretty solid penetration in their native France. I don't know if it is going to grow into something Twitter-big once they enter the US next year, but it is going to be significant. They've now got the five-rating system in place, which was a needed improvement, and they'll have the Android app out in the near future. And, in due time, a proper game-style Achievements and Leveling system.

They're also working on the expansion of the categories; there will be gun categories, among others, and I will be looking for experts in a variety of new categories soon. But we're only looking for serious and proven expertise, not merely serious interest. For example, Jeffro, Archon, and I are all able to rapidly post recos because we have large quantities of our own previous writings on the subject from which we can draw. But that's merely an indicator, it's not an absolute requirement. In any case, if you think you've got that kind of expertise in something, then by all means, make your case in the comments here.

Jeffro demonstrates his depth of knowledge in this post, in which he wonders why so many of today's gamers and game designers are not merely ignorant, but don't even know they're ignorant:
Why is it that Gygax had a diet of fiction that spanned more than half a century, but the designers that followed him and the younger generation of gamers that played his stuff did not for the most part? What kinds of things do we fail to see simply because we’ve never bothered to survey the past…? And what the heck happened during the seventies to turn everything upside down? Something happened. The fact of it doesn’t require a conspiracy theory to explain it, but it does make me wonder about what all’s gone on since.

Remember: people that haven’t read from the Appendix N list tend to assume that Gary Gygax was a weirdo for using the term “Fighting-Men” instead of something like “Warrior.” They will even go so far as to say that the reasons for his word choice there are unknowable. It’s a small thing, sure… but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. These people are not only ignorant, but they don’t even know they are ignorant. They are simply not equipped to make an intelligent critique of classic D&D, much less assess Gygax’s contribution to gaming.

That “Wisconsin Shoe Salesmen” precipitated a watershed moment in gaming history. His influence is not confined to tabletop games, but spills over into computer gaming and fantasy in general. While many tropes of classic D&D have by now become ubiquitous, the literature that inspired them has since dropped into obscurity. This is interesting and bears further investigation. 

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Friday, December 05, 2014

The deadly danger of the law

Stephen Carter points out how America's legalistic culture is intrinsically dangerous:
On the opening day of law school, I always counsel my first-year students never to support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce. Usually they greet this advice with something between skepticism and puzzlement, until I remind them that the police go armed to enforce the will of the state, and if you resist, they might kill you.

I wish this caution were only theoretical. It isn’t. Whatever your view on the refusal of a New York City grand jury to indict the police officer whose chokehold apparently led to the death of Eric Garner, it’s useful to remember the crime that Garner is alleged to have committed: He was selling individual cigarettes, or loosies, in violation of New York law.

The obvious racial dynamics of the case -- the police officer, Daniel Pantaleo, is white; Garner was black -- have sparked understandable outrage. But, at least among libertarians, so has the law that was being enforced. Wrote Nick Gillespie in the Daily Beast, “Clearly something has gone horribly wrong when a man lies dead after being confronted for selling cigarettes to willing buyers.” Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, appearing on MSNBC, also blamed the statute: “Some politician put a tax of $5.85 on a pack of cigarettes, so they’ve driven cigarettes underground by making them so expensive.”

The problem is actually broader. It’s not just cigarette tax laws that can lead to the death of those the police seek to arrest. It’s every law.
This is an aspect of "there oughtta be a law" that is seldom considered. The police can, and will, kill anyone in pursuit of their law enforcement orders. And, as is now eminently clear, it doesn't matter what that law is. It can be anything from jaywalking to selling Beanie Babies without the proper license.

The law, and law enforcement, are a very blunt hammer, and it's simply not possible for either to be utilized in the delicately fine-tuned, precision manner that most people envision when they suggest using them for the purposes of petty behavioral modification.

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The mainstream discovers MGTOW

A very good article by Milo on the increasing male distrust for and disinterest in the opposite sex:
Never before in history have relations between the sexes been so fraught with anxiety, animosity and misunderstanding. To radical feminists, who have been the driving force behind many tectonic societal shifts in recent decades, that's a sign of success: they want to tear down the institutions and power structures that underpin society, never mind the fall-out. Nihilistic destruction is part of their road map.

But, for the rest of us, the sight of society breaking down, and ordinary men and women being driven into separate but equal misery, thanks to a small but highly organised group of agitators, is distressing. Particularly because, as increasing numbers of social observers are noticing, an entire generation of young people—mostly men—are being left behind in the wreckage of this social engineering project.

Social commentators, journalists, academics, scientists and young men themselves have all spotted the trend: among men of about 15 to 30 years old, ever-increasing numbers are checking out of society altogether, giving up on women, sex and relationships and retreating into pornography, sexual fetishes, chemical addictions, video games and, in some cases, boorish lad culture, all of which insulate them from a hostile, debilitating social environment created, some argue, by the modern feminist movement.

You can hardly blame them. Cruelly derided as man-children and crybabies for objecting to absurdly unfair conditions in college, bars, clubs and beyond, men are damned if they do and damned if they don't: ridiculed as basement-dwellers for avoiding aggressive, demanding women with unrealistic expectations, or called rapists and misogynists merely for expressing sexual interest. 
The readily observable fact is that the majority of women do not give a damn about men. They are so locked into their vision of intrinsic female inferiority that they assume their actions will have absolutely no effect on how men think and behave. This is profoundly dyscivilizational, which means that men are going to need to install an overt patriarchy, as the Romans eventually saw the need to do, if civilized society is to survive.

There is nothing fair or equal about feminists. Words are, for the most part, meaningless weapons to them; they would just as soon appeal to "purple" or "Kardashian" if they thought it would be useful. Men need to stop buying into those false appeals for the same reason everyone needs to stop giving ground to the SJWs.

A society of Gamma males will not survive for long. We need to get the Deltas to stop white knighting for women or the cruelest, coldest Alphas will soon rule over all. The reality is that a female-dominated society is not one that any self-respecting man is willing to maintain or live in.

No wonder young men are checking out. Consider this ridiculous, anti-male article:
They started in 2007 by forming a girls-only team. The girls started working with a robot that the boys had initially built. Almost immediately, they solved problems that the boys couldn’t. They developed competition strategies without loud-mouthed boys and repaired the robot on the fly without having to defer to the strongly held opinions of the male members of the team.
Lesson: don't lift a finger to help women in science, tech, or games. They ask, you ignore. If they're so damned superior, they can certainly figure it out for themselves. There is no need to discourage them, just leave them to their own devices and go your own way.

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Kinetic cards and verse music

Per my recent suggestion, various Ilk have been getting in touch with me about their projects. If you're interested in helping out with any of these, don't hesitate to contact the relevant individuals. One is what looks like a pretty interesting game project:
Legion 13 Games (L13G) is a small independent game design studio in Austin, TX, looking for 8 volunteer players to help us demo our new game product, NetWar: The First Connection. NetWar is a hybrid between a card game and a board game — what we at the studio call a Kinetic Card Game — and is making its first public appearance in December.

The first demo games will happen on Saturday, December 20, 2014, from noon to 4:00 PM at the Dragon's Lair in Austin, TX. During the demo we will also have a Q&A with anyone who is not playing but interested in the game.

If you want to volunteer for one of the 8 spots, please send your name, age, and a short gamer bio to support(at)legion13games.com. Players age 13+ are preferred. Spots will be filled on a first-come-first-served basis. Volunteers will receive a more detailed description of the game, the demo event, and the game manual in a PDF format ahead of time. L13G appreciates your time and interest, and will provide a special freebie to all volunteer players.

To get involved as a non-player, just show up at the event, watch the games in action, and ask a lot of questions. For more information about L13G and NetWar, visit our website: legion13games.com/
The Responsible Puppet alerts us to the fact that the new Fighter Verse is out:

This CD contains 39 helpful and encouraging songs – passages from fourteen books of the Bible.
Featuring the talents of 35 musicians (adults and children), the musical styles are varied, including folk, jazz, pop, blue grass, doo-wop, string quartet and even Gregorian chant. The arrangements are designed so that you will enjoy listening to them and will learn the songs quickly and easily.

Here are some of the familiar passages on this CD: “I am the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6) — The wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23) — Unless the Lord builds the house those who build it labor in vein (Psalm 127:1) — “I am the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25-26) — Fear not, for I am with you (Isaiah 41:10) — “My Sheep hear my voice and I know them” (John 10:27-30).


Click on the link above to find links to iTunes, Amazon, and a bluegrass video. I like the logo; it reminds me a little of the Eternal Warriors logo, sans sword and angel.

I haven't forgotten about the Life Design stuff, but with everything that's been going on with regards to the books, games, and other work, I've had to push that back to January. So, enjoy the holidays and we'll delve into that in the new year.

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Thursday, December 04, 2014

Something is wrong with these people

VERY wrong. PZ celebrates the decision of a publisher to stop marketing books to boys, as are his few remaining readers:
  • Holy crap. Somebody did the right thing for a change. I am blown away.
  • What do I think Lego should do? I think they should make half of all their future minifigs women. Construction set? Half the construction workers are women. Airplane set? Make one of the pilots a woman and one of the flight attendants a man. Police set? Not just a token woman, half women. Half the crooks, half the cops, half the bystanders. How hard is that?
  • Best news I’ve read all week.
  • This was enough to draw tears from me today.
  • My hubby the engineer bought electronics kits for our kids, and it was the oldest daughter who loved them. She happily joined him on any science project while her siblings ran off to do other things. She’s 37 now, and holds degrees in engineering, computational neuroscience and neurobiology. She’s been working for the NSF on a project to interest more women and minorities in STEM.
That last comment is my favorite. She has three degrees, but instead of actually doing any science, engineering, or biology, she's using them to work in marketing. And what do you bet she hasn't given her parents any grandchildren?

SJWs are much worse than useless. They are active participants in the ongoing implosion of civilization.

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No one raped the Dunham Horror

As I expected, the feminists' favorite self-admitted child molester is found to have been lying about being raped in college:
After a month-long investigation that included more than a dozen interviews, a trip to the Oberlin campus, and hours spent poring through the Oberlin College archives, her description of the campus remains the only detail Breitbart News was able to verify in Dunham's story of being raped by a campus Republican named Barry....

To be sure we weren't overlooking anything, Breitbart News then took the added step of visiting the Oberlin campus in Ohio during the very cold week just before Thanksgiving. Here we interviewed a number of Oberlin staffers and students. Most were pleasant and helpful. Some less so. One adamantly refused access to documents and told us outright that it didn't matter if Dunham was telling the truth.

In the end Breitbart News could not find a Republican named Barry who attended Oberlin during Dunham's time there who came anywhere close to matching her description of him. In fact, we could not find anyone who remembered any Oberlin Republican who matched Dunham's colorful description.

Under scrutiny, Dunham's rape story didn’t just fall apart, it evaporated into pixie dust and blew away.
Women may not always lie about rape, but female celebrities do. Of course, they lie about everything. One thing you always have to keep in mind about celebrities both male and female: they are fame whores. The moment they see anyone getting attention for anything, be it rape, adopting an African, or alien abduction, you can be certain that they're going to start crying about how it happened to them too.

I expect Dunham is lying by omission by significantly playing down the extent to which she molested her now-lesbian younger sister too.

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The economic imperative of Asteroid Wars

This sudden push for asteroid defenses seems a little out of left field:
Asteroids could wipe out humanity unless more effort is made to track and destroy them, a leading body of scientists and astronauts has warned. Lord Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, Brian Cox, and Richard Dawkins are among more than 100 experts calling for the creation of a huge asteroid detection system to prevent a doomsday scenario.

At an event at London’s science museum on Wednesday night, Lord Rees read out a declaration resolving to “solve humanity’s greatest challenges to safeguard our families and quality of life on Earth in the future.”
The dire threat of asteroids producing an urgent need for space-based defense systems. Now, where have I heard something like that before? As it happens, in the testimony of a woman who was an associate of Werner von Braun back in the 1970s, which dates back 14 years.
He said the strategy that was being used to educate the public and decision makers was to use scare tactics. That was how we identify an enemy. The strategy that Werner Von Braun taught me was that first the Russians are going to be considered the enemy. In fact, in 1974, they were the enemy, the identified enemy. We were told that they had “killer satellites”. We were told that they were coming to get us and control us—that they were the “Commies”.

Then terrorists would be identified, and that was soon to follow. We heard a lot about terrorism. Then we were going to identify third-world country “crazies”. We now call them Nations of Concern. But he said that would be the third enemy against whom we would build space-based weapons.

The next enemy was asteroids. Now, at this point he kind of chuckled the first time he said it, “Asteroids—against asteroids, we are going to build space-based weapons.”

And the funniest one of all was what he called aliens, extraterrestrials. That would be the final scare. And over and over during the four years that I knew him and was giving speeches for him, he would bring up that last card: “And remember Carol, the last card is the alien card. We are going to have to build space-based weapons against aliens, and all of it is a lie.”

I think I was too naïve at that time to know the seriousness of the nature of the spin that was being put on the system. And now, the pieces are starting to fall into place. We are building a space-based weapons system on a premise that is a lie, a spin. Wernher Von Braun was trying to hint that to me back in the early 70's and right up until the moment when he died in 1977.
Of course, since we know the military-industrial complex is going to manufacture wars in order to keep its system of income distribution running smoothly, I would think it is eminently desirable for the wars to be waged against space rocks and entirely imaginary. It makes for an interesting investment plan, anyhow.

And is there not an even darker possibility? What if the whistleblower who is warning about these manufactured wars is actually an agent for the aliens who wants to see Earth disarmed? Wheels within wheels, my friends. Wheels within wheels.

Anyhow, it's nice to see that the AGW/CC alarmists have a new toy with which to play.

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Sic semper cæcis

If you don't feel even the smallest touch of schadenfreude about this man's alleged murder, you're either a saint or a self-deluded SJW:
David Ruenzel knew, better than most, about the white privilege that killed him. As a writer for the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of his favorite topics was rooting out racism. And how white racism is permanent. White racism is everywhere. And white racism explains everything.

This mantra of the Critical Race Theory and the Southern Poverty Law Center applied to all white people because, even if they were not personally cracking the whips, or breaking the skulls, white people benefited from a racist system that did all that — and a lot more.

Ruenzel was writing about white privilege for the Southern Poverty Law Center as far back as 1997 — long before it became the rage at college campuses, newsrooms, churches, high schools and even grade schools.

By the time of his death, Ruenzel had accumulated many of the trappings of the white privilege he exposed: The job. The home. The intact family. And most importantly in his case, white privilege endowed Ruenzel with an expectation of safety in the Oakland neighborhood where last week two black people are suspected of killing him.
One would like to imagine that the progressive white equalitarians would wake up before they get themselves, and large quantities of other people, killed, but the lesson of David Ruenzel informs us that we shouldn't count on it. It's rather like the aid worker who was raped in Haiti; not even a callous denial of her appeal to racial brotherhood and subsequent rape was enough to convince her that black skin does not render one morally unaccountable.

Listening to the equalitarians and taking them seriously is a very good way to get yourself beaten, raped, or killed. Because eventually, objective reality asserts itself, and it asserts itself all the more cruelly to those who willfully pay it no heed.

Speaking of cruelty, granted, it may be the artist in me, but I rather like to think that before he was gunned down, David Ruenzel explained to his killers, a little indignantly, that he was a writer for the Southern Poverty Law Center and that what they needed to understand that he was on their side. Of course, what he didn't understand, and now will never have the chance to understand, is that it doesn't matter.

Ironically, the only way David Ruenzel's death will have any meaning at all is if people reject his foolish philosophy as a result of it.

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Wednesday, December 03, 2014

The pain of the rejected

In which we endeavor to soldier on:
A while back, during THE WEREWOLF ERA of our blog (seems like a thousand centuries ago), someone suggested some books by Vox Day and Larry Correia.  I dismissed them because I wasn’t interested in them, seemed too tongue in cheek or wacky or silly for me.  Apparently someone told Vox Day about it, which I think is sad that anyone should make it his business that there’s someone on the internet that doesn’t want to read his books, but whatever.

Anyway just wanted to mention that I think Larry Correia does deserve some respect, especially for having THE UNMITIGATED GALL of having opinions that most artists don’t approve of.
Actually, I understand from people who frequent GoodReads that not reading Vox Day's books is not only rather common, but qualifies as something of a badge of honor to which all good and decent people should aspire. Based on comments I have seen here and there, there even appears to be something of a competition with regards to the vehemence with which one vows never to pollute one's eyes with words whose order I have arranged. In comparison with this, I fear Mr. Webcomics's benign indifference is hardly likely to impress anyone.

Especially since he has committed the unthinkable crime of saying something positive about the International Lord of Hate, the Nemesis of the SJWs, Mr. Larry Correia.

I've never quite grasped the idea about being upset that people don't read your books. When even Umberto Eco's own children express what he describes as "Olympian indifference" towards HIS work, the miracle is that anyone has any interest in it at all.

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SJW review of games

It seems to me that just as we have a useful metric for dividing Blue SF/F from Pink SF/F, it would be helpful to have one that allowed people to summarize, in a single number, just how SJW a game is. Here is an initial pass at a points list, with 0 equaling not at all SJW and 10 indicating full SJW.

+1 has homosexual or bisexual character
+1 per token Black/Hispanic/Asian
+1 has Magic Negro and/or Saint Gay
+1 contains left-wing political message
+1 core plot concerns left-wing political message
+1 protagonist or sidekick are kickass waifu
+1 female developer mentioned in marketing and PR (see: J. Raymond, Z. Quinn)
+1 takes shots at Christianity or traditional Western morality

Any ideas for improvement? I was considering "+1 produced by Bioware", but that seemed too obvious and redundant.nt

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SJWs are out to destroy games


That's not hyperbole. That's not an exaggeration. That is exactly what their long-term objective is; that's what they mean by asserting that the game industry needs to be "transformed". They can deny it it all they like, but there is absolutely no question that their true objective is to prevent gamers from being able to design, develop, play games without their approval.

If you want to see where SJWs want to take the game industry, look at the publishing industry, where the company that publishes "Beautiful Me:
Essential Health: Strong Beautiful Girls" has announced "we dropped the ‘For Boys’ from the series name [Biggest, Baddest Books for Boys] and we all agree here at Abdo that it was a very smart idea".

Give into the SJW entryists and soon it will be deemed as out of bounds to make games for boys as it already is to publish books for boys.

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Speed bumps

Apparently the USA learned nothing from the Cold War:
The new Army commander in Europe plans to bolster the U.S. armored presence in Poland and the Baltic states and keep rotations of U.S. troops there through next year and possibly beyond to counter Russia. Lt. Gen. Frederick "Ben" Hodges, who replaced Lt. Gen. Donald M. Campbell  earlier this month as commander of U.S. Army Europe, said the Army was looking to add about 100 Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles to the forces in Eastern Europe.

Since taking command, Hodges has made clear his concerns about Russia, which annexed Crimea last March and has supported the separatists in eastern Ukraine. U.S. Army Europe, which had 280,000 troops at the height of the Cold War, now has 31,000.

The rotations of U.S. troops on training missions in Eastern Europe would provide "deterrence against Russian aggression," Hodges said. "I don't think that Russia has any intention of some sort of a conventional attack into NATO territory because they know that would generate an Article 5 response."
Translation: We know from the old Fulda Gap that 100 tanks won't actually do anything militarily except provide a speed bump, but having ground troops there would provide the US with an excuse to get further involved if the Russians elect to follow the US lead in Ukraine and arrange for a "regime change" in Poland or the Baltic states.

One thing many Americans don't understand is that they are the bad guys in Ukraine. The USA is the evil aggressor that overthrew a flawed but democratically elected government and installed a puppet leadership against which a portion of the country is literally up in arms. This, in addition to the failed US-supported "Arab Spring", is another reason why anti-Americanism is on the rise in Europe and Asia.

To put it in perspective, imagine if Russia orchestrated the overthrow of the Mexican government (which is every bit as corrupt and shady as the former Ukrainian government was) and installed a pro-Russian puppet who promptly sent all of Mexico's gold reserves to Moscow and placed Russians on the corporate boards of its oil companies? Do you think the USA would respond in as limited a fashion as Russia has?

Remember, Putin does not have to be a good guy in order for Obama to be the bad guy. The recent warning about ISIS targeting US soldiers in America is apt, as the increase in the amount and extent of US interventions abroad is infuriating more and more people around the world. If the USA won't leave other sovereign countries alone, it seems likely that sooner or later, someone is going to return the favor.

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Tuesday, December 02, 2014

The best books of 2014

For some reason, I'm on the GoodReads mailing list even though I don't use it at all, so when I saw that the 2014 Readers' Choice winners had been announced, I clicked on it to see if Larry Correia had won. And I literally laughed out loud when I saw the covers of the winners... now, do you notice anything that seven of these eight books have in common? Which one of these books is not like the others, which one of these books just doesn't belong? Of course, as we know from the Hugo and Nebula Awards, it's only a matter of a year or three before that last anomaly is viciously stamped out too. No wonder book sales are continuing to decline. Seriously, even the gamma males of science fiction aren't going to read any of that equine ejectus.

And we are supposed to believe they're honestly and truly going to make good, nay, even better, computer games. Really? To quote the Sports Guy: "The lesson, as always, is this: women ruin everything."

Here is the primary difference between men and women. In the past, women would look at a male-dominated list of book awards and be struck by feelbad because she felt excluded. A man looks at that list, laughs, and thinks, do they really read that shit? THIS STAR WON'T GO OUT? Are you freaking kidding me?

Robert Heinlein was wrong. These are not the Crazy Years. They are the #GIRLBOSS Years.

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The Cultural Collapse Progression

Roosh has written a truly insightful article concerning the way in which a cultural collapse proceeds:
The Cultural Collapse Progression

1. Removal of religious narrative from people’s lives, replaced by a treadmill of scientific and technological “progress.”

2. Elimination of traditional sex roles through feminism, gender equality, political correctness, cultural Marxism, and socialism.

3. Delay or abstainment of family formation by women to pursue careerist lifestyles while men wait in confused limbo.

4. Decreasing birth rate among native population.

5. Government enactment of open immigration policies to prevent economic collapse.

6. Immigrant refusal to fully acclimate, forcing host culture to adopt external rituals and beliefs while being out-reproduced.

7. Natives becoming marginalized in their own country.
It's particularly interesting how he traces it back to the removal of the religious narrative, given that he is not, to the best of my knowledge, a religious man.

He writes: "Cultural collapse is the decline, decay, or disappearance of a native population’s rituals, habits, interpersonal communication, relationships, art, and language. It coincides with a relative decline of population compared to outside groups. National identity and group identification will be lost while revisionist history will be applied to demonize or find fault with the native population. Cultural collapse is not to be confused with economic or state collapse. A nation that suffers from a cultural collapse can still be economically productive and have a working government."

However, I would note that conomic and state collapse are very likely to follow as a consequence of the cultural collapse, particularly if the marginalized natives were historically more economically productive than their replacements.

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Free book extravaganza

In order to celebrate the release of THE BOOK OF FEASTS & SEASONS by John C. Wright, as well as to take advantage of the Kindle Select free days program before these books (sans the first) go on sale at the Castalia House store, we are giving away the following books this week on Amazon.

ENGLISH
ESPAÑOL
PORTUGUÊS
DEUTSCH
ITALIANO
This is all preparatory to beefing up the translation section of the Castalia store, which is something we could hardly do if we didn't have eight of our translations available there. The books will still be available on Amazon, they simply won't be exclusively found there. Some of the translations which are already complete and are only awaiting ebook formatting and/or cover translations are: Big Boys Don't Cry in French and Serbian, two QUANTUM MORTIS books in Chinese, Four Generations of Modern War in Spanish, The Wardog's Coin in Italian, and there are more currently in the works.

In the meantime, if you've got an interest in one of these languages, this is your chance to grab the translations for free.

The customer is not always right

Or desired. This is an interesting technological development in customer relations:
Travelers are often asked to review their hotel, restaurant and car service. But increasingly, it goes both ways.

Drivers for Uber and Lyft, for example, rate their passengers from one to five stars at the end of each ride. If a rider receives three stars or fewer, the driver and passenger will not be paired up again. And at OpenTable, the restaurant booking system, customers are banned if they do not show for a reservation too many times.

These are among the ways that sophisticated rating systems can turn on the customer, identifying the best and worst among them.
I wonder how long it will take for this to go ideological. After all, if we know one thing about SJWs, they politicize absolutely everything and they aren't shy about cutting off their nose to spite their face. It won't surprise me if we see customers being banned from various establishments and services because their patronage is unwanted due to politics. Which is, of course, an unprotected right, or at least it is until Christians start using it as an effective proxy to deny services to those whose behavior they believe to be abomination.

I've lost one job and three book contracts due to corporate correctness to date. Which I always enjoy pointing out to those who claim bakers have to bake cakes they do not wish to bake and permit bed-and-breakfast guests they do not wish to have. As always, the SJWs seek to establish laws that only bite in one direction.

Of course, the costs of corporate correctness can be blessings in disguise. I'd much rather be publishing books through Castalia House than have published Media Whores and The Red Hand of Government with Thomas Nelson and A Throne of Bones with Lion Hudson.

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Monday, December 01, 2014

Operation Arab Sea Lion

Surge in Arabic names this year with Omar, Ali and Ibrahim all in top 100.  For girls, Maryam has shot to number 35, while Nur is new entry. And Muhammad rose astonishing 27 places to claim the number-one spot.

In England.

"Fourth Generation war is also marked by a return to a world of cultures, not merely states, in conflict. We now find ourselves facing the Christian West’s oldest and most steadfast opponent, Islam. After about three centuries on the strategic defensive, following the failure of the second Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683, Islam has resumed the strategic offensive expanding outward in every direction. In Fourth Generation war, invasion by immigration can be at least as dangerous as invasion by a state army."
- William S. Lind, "Understanding 4th Generation War", 1989

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The Book of Feasts & Seasons

It being December 1st, we are now properly in the Christmas season and so this seems a propitious time to announce the newest John C. Wright book from Castalia House, a collection of 10 holiday-inspired science fiction stories collectively known as THE BOOK OF FEASTS & SEASONS. This is not your average cup of Christmas tea, as a look at the story titles alone will tell you. Over the course of the year, from January to December, the science fiction grandmaster takes his inspiration from ten different holidays and explores their meanings in a series of stories of marvelous imagination. The book begins with New Year's Day and "The Meaning of Life as Told Me by an Inebriated Science Fiction Writer in New Jersey." The Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin is represented by "A Random World of Delta Capricorni Aa, Called Scheddi", while "The Parliament of Beasts and Birds" represents the Feast of Pentecost. The calendar, and the anthology, culminate on Christmas Eve with "Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus".

My personal favorite is "The Parliament of Beasts and Birds", which rather reminds me of one of Tanith Lee's best works, "The Tale of the Cat", and is, in my opinion, a serious contender for the best thing that Mr. Wright has ever written.

The animals gathered, one by one, outside the final city of Man, furtive, curious, and afraid.

All was dark. In the west was a blood-red sunset, and in the east a blood-red moonrise of a waning moon. No lamps shined in the towers and minarets, and all the widows of the palaces, mansions, and fanes were empty as the eyes of skulls.


All about the walls of the city were the fields and houses that were empty and still, and all the gates and doors lay open.

Above the fortresses and barracks, black pillars upheld statues of golden eagles, beaks open, unmoving and still. Above the coliseum and circus, where athletes strove and acrobats danced and slaves fought and criminals were fed alive to wild beasts for the diversion of the crowds, and the noise of screams and cries rose up like incense toward heaven, statues of heroes and demigods stood on white pillars, glaring blindly down.


Within other walls were gardens whose trees were naked in the wind, and the silence was broken only by the rustle of the carpet of fallen leaves wallowing along the marble paths and pleasances.


Above the boulevards and paved squares where merchants once bought and sold ivory and incense and purple and gold, or costly fabrics of silks from the east, or ambergris from the seas beyond the Fortunate Isles, and auction houses adorned and painted stood where singing birds and dancing girls were sold to the highest bidder or given to the haughtiest peer. And here were gambling houses where princes and nobles once used gems as counters for cities and walled towns, and the fate of nations might depend upon the turn of a card. And there were pleasure houses where harlots plied their trade, and houses of healing where physicians explained which venereal disease had no cures and arranged for painless suicides, and houses of morticians where disease-raddled bodies were burnt in private, without any ceremony that might attract attention and be bad for business.


And higher on the high hill in the center of the city were the libraries of the learned and the palaces of the emperors adored as gods. But no history was read in the halls of learning and no laws were debated in the halls of power.


Not far outside the city was a mountain that had been cut in two, crown to root, by some great supernatural force. On the slopes of the dark mountain, in a dell overgrown and wild, two dark creatures met, peering cautiously toward the empty city.


A black wolf addressed a black raven sitting in a thorn-bush. “What is the news, eater of carrion? Did you fly over the city and spy out where the corpses are?”

As you will have noticed from the text sample, THE BOOK OF FEASTS & SEASONS is not the traditional light-hearted seasonal fare, but is as deep and as dark, as full of grief and joy, as the true story of St. Nicholas, Wonderworker, Defender of Orthodoxy, Holy Hierarch, and Bishop of Myra, himself. It is available from Castalia House as well as on Amazon.

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Mailvox: the plus side of pay-for-play

In my opinion, Cinco didn't think this one all the way through:
I recommend you do what Valve did get rid of the +5-8% advantage, and just offer loads of different skins/models for people who want to play the game more than casuals/fund the kick starter.
Now, T11 is the most successful game of its kind out there; so why would we want to simply turn up our nose at what quite clearly works very, very well? What most non-game designers don't seem to understand is that a perfectly "fair" game in which no one can buy any advantage is actually going to be considerably more unbalanced, in practice, than one where you give people a reasonable means of compensating for their lack of time to develop mastery.

Let me give you an example, do you think you would have any chance against me in ASL? I've got thousands of hours in over more than 30 years, if one includes Squad Leader, Cross of Iron, and Crescendo of Doom as proto-ASL. You'll need a hefty advantage or be an Ender-style natural just to make it a game of it at all. The objective is not to maximize the advantage those who are willing to spend time rather than money on acquiring mastery, but rather, to provide for the broadest possible range of interesting and challenging competition for everyone.

Or for another example, take Maddens, with which I have been down since 1992. I haven't played it seriously in years. And yet, I have repeatedly demolished younger players who play it incessantly and consider themselves to be very good; one twenty-something game artist who works for a studio I know was absolutely shocked when he challenged me to a game and I beat him by 70 points even though he had a higher-rated team. Ender finally beat me for the first time when we played a game on Madden 25, a version I'd never played before with a team whose playbook I didn't know, and he still needed me to miss two field goals in order to eke out a win with a last-minute score.

Not only will the game be more fun for the lesser player if he can purchase a chance of being able to compete with the best, but more importantly, it is more fun for the best players too. I almost never play ASL without giving my opponent the strongest balance, because otherwise the game tends to get rather tedious for me. (Ender consciously tries to take advantage of my tendency to get bored and mentally check out before the end game.) The fact that the likes of Zynga go way too far - unsurprisingly, since they were never gamers - does not mean that the mechanic of substituting money for time is entirely useless for play-balancing purposes.

What about the potential problem of piling the purchasable advantage on top of the time advantage? Please, that's hardly even worthy of being labled a design challenge! It's easy to focus the monetary advantages towards game mechanics that will favor the less experienced player against the more experienced player, rather than vice-versa or on a horizontal competition. The fact that a mechanic is poorly implemented (especially in games for non-gamers), does not mean that it should be dismissed.

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"Shut up, boys," they explained

The St. Louis police appear to have been underwhelmed by the Black Power-style Ferguson gesture made by five of the St. Louis Rams at yesterday's game:
“The St. Louis Police Officers Association is profoundly disappointed with the members of the St. Louis Rams football team who chose to ignore the mountains of evidence released from the St. Louis County Grand Jury this week and engage in a display that police officers around the nation found tasteless, offensive and inflammatory.

“All week long, the Rams and the NFL were on the phone with the St. Louis Police Department asking for assurances that the players and the fans would be kept safe from the violent protesters who had rioted, looted, and burned buildings in Ferguson. Our officers have been working 12-hour shifts for over a week, they had days off including Thanksgiving cancelled so that they could defend this community from those on the streets that perpetuate this myth that Michael Brown was executed by a brother police officer and then, as the players and their fans sit safely in their dome under the watchful protection of hundreds of St. Louis’s finest, they take to the turf to call a now-exonerated officer a murderer, that is way out-of-bounds, to put it in football parlance.

“I know that there are those that will say that these players are simply exercising their First Amendment rights. Well, I’ve got news for people who think that way, cops have first amendment rights too, and we plan to exercise ours.  I’d remind the NFL and their players that it is not the violent thugs burning down buildings that buy their advertiser’s products.  It’s cops and the good people of St. Louis and other NFL towns that do.”
It was a remarkably stupid gesture. But young men are foolish, and spoiled young black male athletes are more foolish than most. It signifies nothing. What I find more interesting about their gesture was the public reaction to it. It tends to support the notion that blacks have lost the average white American's inclination towards sympathy. The 60's-instilled white guilt over slavery and white enthusiasm for the civil rights charade is rapidly dissipating in a considerably less white country where tens of millions of Hispanics, Asians, and Arabs simply don't give a quantumn of a damn about blacks or their historical sob story.

"Oh, lawsy, mah great-great-great grandpappy wuz a slave!"

"Qué chingados, cabron. I just got here five minutes ago. What the fuck do I care about your pendejo grandpappy?" 

This mass indifference quite naturally causes many whites to wonder why they are expected to feel guilty about the continued inability of Africans to behave, or even to want to behave, like 18th century Englishmen. Not that there aren't plenty of white SJWs who will salute the five players for their "courage" and "inclusivity" and spew all the customary buzzwords, but the anger and contempt most fans felt for the anti-police gesture was palpable on a number of sports-related sites. I also suspect that the half-hearted nature of the riots may have been in part due to blacks correctly sensing that there are an increasing number of whites who would welcome the race war that blacks have been threatening for fifty years.

It's easy to be magnanimous and optimistic about the prospects for a permanent state of kumbaya when everything is going well economically and the majority population doesn't feel threatened. It's when the economy goes south and the majority is in the process of becoming a minority itself that race relations, class relations, and ideological relations tend to disintegrate.

Remember, majorities exist in almost every human society for a reason. And where they don't exist naturally, they usually create themselves, often through less than entirely peaceful means. Fred points out the observable reality:
We need to realize, but will not, that blacks are a separate people, self-aware and cohesive. They have their own dialect, music, and modes of dress, which they value. They name their kids LaToya and Keeshawn instead of Robert and Carol because they want to maintain a distance from whites.

The races spring from utterly different cultures. Compulsory integration is thus a form of social imperialism in which whites try to force blacks to conform to European norms. Blacks have no historical connection at all to Greece, Rome, the Old Testament Hebrews, Christianity, the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, to Newton, LaGrange, or Galois, to the philosophic tradition of Thales, Aquinas, Schopenhauer, or Hegel. Nor do Eurowhites have roots in Africa. No commonality exists.
Postracialism isn't merely one of the many equalitarian unicorns, it is intrinsically opposed to black self-determination. They don't want to be white. They have their own identity, their own pride, and their own culture. And there is nothing wrong with that, except for the fact that it has been forcibly intertwined with white American culture.

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Sunday, November 30, 2014

Kickstarter rewards

So, here's a thought. We're looking at doing a Kickstarter for a game, quite possibly in coordination with another gaming organization, which will likely be of considerable interest to wargamers of various genres. This is not First Sword or any other combat management game, just to be clear.

Having looked at various game kickstarts, successful and unsuccessful, I haven't been terribly impressed with most of the rewards. I've got a few ideas, but since this is one of the communities that would be most likely to harbor a supporter or two, I'm interested in knowing what sort of rewards might be of interest to you.

We're just brainstorming here, so go ahead and throw them out. I won't say anything more about the game, except that it will be multiplatform.

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VPFL Week 12

71 Greenfield Grizzlies (9-3-0)
44 King (5-7-0)

82 Mounds View Meerkats (7-5-0)
76 Favre Dollar Footlongs (5-7-0)

75 Bane Cornshuckers (8-4-0)
52 Boot Hill Bogs (2-9-1)

85 Texas Chili Eaters (7-4-1)
73 RR Redbeards (7-5-0)

108 Gilbert Gamma Rays (7-5-0)
48 Clerical Errs (2-10-0)

The playoff race is tightening up, as only the defending champions look safe. Four teams are essentially out already, leaving five teams ranging from 8-4 to 7-5 battling for four spots. No one has a particularly easier schedule, so a lot of it is going to come down to head-to-head competition.

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The Ministry of Lies

With its recent public statement on Syria, the U.S. government has gone full 1984:
The US has seized on Syrian air force strikes on the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) stronghold of Raqqa to denounce Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and push for his government’s removal. For the past three years, the Obama administration has backed anti-Assad militias in Syria. The main aim of its new Middle Eastern war remains regime-change in Damascus.

US State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki on Wednesday said the US was “horrified” by reports that Syrian air strikes the previous day killed scores of civilians. She condemned the Syrian regime’s “continued slaughter of Syria civilians” and “callous disregard for human life,” declaring that “Assad long ago lost all legitimacy to govern.”

According to the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, at least 95 people were killed in the air strikes on Tuesday, including 52 civilians. A Raqqa activist with the Syrian opposition network—the Local Co-ordination Committees—told the BBC that further deaths were likely because only one hospital was operating normally in the city and “a lot of people [are] dying from their wounds.” Both organisations are aligned with the pro-Western opposition in Syria that is hostile to both Assad and ISIS.
 Meanwhile:

Although the US-led coalition has conducted about 300 air strikes in Syria since September, it has evidently failed to weaken the Islamic State, stated Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem. "All the indications say that (Islamic State) today, after two months of coalition air strikes, is not weaker," Walid al-Moualem emphasized in an interview with the Beirut-based Al Mayadeen TV broadcast, as quoted by Reuters.

It's like a very bad, very dark joke. Washington is denouncing Syrian air strikes on the Islamic State while simultaneously launching 300 of its own air strikes on the Islamic State in Syrian territory.

Do you still seriously question the obvious fact that the US government are the bad guys here? Do good guys ever behave in a manner indistinguishable from Orwell's fictional monsters? Do you still wonder why fewer and fewer people believe a single word coming out of the U.S. federal government? Perhaps the biggest irony is that Washington is decrying Syrian air strikes that caused LESS collateral damage, in percentage terms, than the AVERAGE U.S. air strike.

If Assad's government is said to have lost its legitimacy to govern on the basis of a single day's air strikes, has not the U.S. government also lost its legitimacy on the basis of the hundreds of air strikes it launched over the course of three months?  I also note that this further supports William S. Lind's statement about the effectiveness of air power:

"Air power works against you, not for you. It kills lots of people who weren’t your enemy, recruiting their relatives, friends and fellow tribesmen to become your enemies. In this kind of war, bombers are as useful as 420mm siege mortars."
 -  from "Incapable of Learning", ON WAR

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Temperatures rising in the East

Taiwan hasn't declared independence yet. But they are clearly moving in that direction, apparently in response to the Chinese crackdowns in Hong Kong. From Generational Dynamics:
Taiwan's ruling nationalist party KMT (Kuomintang) suffered disastrous losses in local elections across Taiwan on Saturday, giving victories to the opposing DPP (Democratic Progressive Party), and forcing the resignation of the prime minister. Thousands of municipalities, including the capital city Taipei, that had been ruled for years by KMT mayors and politicians will not be ruled by DPP mayors and politicians.

The Kuomintang (KMT) is the modern day incarnation of Chiang Kai-shek's original nationalist party of soldiers that fought against Mao Zedong's Communist Revolution and lost, and fled to Hong Kong, then a British colony, and from there to Formosa (Taiwan) in 1949, at the conclusion of the civil war. The KMT position has always been that Taiwan would reunite with China.

KMT held an iron grip on power in Taiwan after the war, and that only began to fade in the 1980s with the founding of the DPP. However, the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, which people in Taiwan viewed with horror, proved to be a catalyst in turning Taiwanese people against Beijing, and by 2000 the DPP won a national election. A DPP corruption scandal in 2006 put KMT back into power, and KMT officials have been working closely with Beijing officials to woo Taiwan's public to voluntarily want reunite with China.

The policy hasn't really been effective. There are two groups of people who don't want to reunite. One group is the indigenous Taiwanese people who lived there before 1949, and who have suffered at the hands of the KMT. Young people generally form the second group, and they distrust China and they distrust the KMT for selling out to China.
The problem isn't that the Red Navy is capable of defeating the US Navy. It isn't. But it increasingly looks capable of giving the US Navy a seriously bloody nose if it intervenes in cross-strait hostilities between China and Taiwan, and never forget, the Chinese always play a long game. And there is no way, none, that the American people have any stomach whatsoever for war with China after thirteen years of pointless and desultory war in Afghanistan.

I suspect the Chinese may be aware of that, which may explain why so many of their wealthy are stashing their children and buying up properties in the USA. I doubt there will be any open war, but there will likely be growing pressure being exerted on Taiwan with the threat of force behind it.

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