The review that dare not speak its name

Trevor Lynch rather quixotically attempts to deny the obvious nature of FIGHT CLUB in a review of the movie on Unz Review:

Is Fight Club gay?

If Fight Club does not admit women, does that mean it is gay? The Catholic priesthood does not admit women. Does that mean it is gay? Uh-oh. There may be a point here. We can at least say that the movie plays with this question.

Fight Club is a bunch of men rolling around half naked and punching each other. Some people find that . . . suggestive. Tyler declares: “We’re a generation of men raised by women. I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer we need.” Everyman seems to be sexually jealous when Tyler hooks up with Marla. He resents Marla for intruding on his relationship with Tyler. He also clearly feels jealousy of Tyler’s affection toward Angel Face, which sends him into a psychotic rage. [Note: Chuck Palahniuk revealed that he is gay in 2004.]

But in a deeper sense, the answer is obviously no. Tyler and Everyman are both heterosexual. Beyond that there is a matter of principle: It does not make men gay to want to work or socialize with one another while excluding women. Women have a great deal of power in pre-historic and post-historic societies because they are relatively egalitarian. Women have a great deal of power over children in all societies. Thus if boys are to mature into men, at a certain point they need to separate themselves from their mothers. They need male-only spheres for that. This is much easier, of course, when they have fathers. But when fathers are absent, they can find father substitutes. One such substitute is the Männerbund. Or, in less fancy terms, the gang.

Bonded male groups are not just necessary for the healthy maturation of boys. They are what create and sustain human history and culture. Almost every important institution until quite recently was sex-segregated. Institutions probably work best that way. Feminists, of course, want to break down those barriers, and one of their techniques is to insinuate that any institution that excludes them must be somehow “gay.”

I posted a comment at Unz in response to this review, based in part on my 2008 essay that was published in You Do Not Talk About Fight Club: I Am Jack's Completely Unauthorized Essay Collection by BenBella Books.

The reviewer, Trevor Lynch, is not only flat-out wrong in declaring FIGHT CLUB not gay, he almost certainly knows very well that he is wrong.

No one who has read the book can escape the flaming homosexuality of the club that dare not speak its true name. The book begins with an gay oral sex metaphor and ends with a homosexual gang bang metaphor. In between, it provides an analogy for what it is doing to the unsuspecting reader: hiding its flaming gayness in plain sight, in the same way that it describes a theater technician slipping in a frame of a slippery red penis to tower four stories over the unsuspecting heads of a movie audience.

This subversive act serves as a markedly apt metaphor for the way in which many fans of FIGHT CLUB still remain oblivious to the fact that it is a screaming, panting, writhing ode to the custom of men having sex with other men, as well as the way that an attachment to this custom tends to supersede all other aspects of individual self-identification.

Even if we set aside all of the author’s metaphorical signaling, it requires a truly superficial viewing of the movie to fail to note the multitude of similarities between the fight clubs gathering anonymously in dark places and the shady, quasi-illegal bathhouses where gay men have gathered for decades.

“Because I’m Tyler Durden and you can kiss my ass, I register to fight every guy in the club that night. Fifty fights. One fight at a time. No shoes. No shirts”

But no shortage of “service.” By this point, it should be obvious that good ol' Tyler is not talking about “fighting” every guy in the club. In the end, the movie is little more than a gay man’s fantasy that asks the question: “how great would it be if Brad Pitt was super gay?”

Humankind: A Hopeful History

Anthropologist and Castalia House author CR Hallpike provides a taste of the bass for you in his very skeptical review of Rutger Bregman’s  Humankind. A Hopeful History, which is being pushed by the Prometheans as the latest Harari/Gladwell/Diamond-style pop pseudoscience. We will be officially announcing Dr. Hallpike's latest book, Darwinism, Dogma, and Cultural Evolution, tomorrow, and this review should provide you with an accurate picture of the sort of intellectual straight razor he brings to the dissecting table when taking apart the subversive lies of the inversive pseudointellectuals.

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There is a fashionable view that human nature is essentially selfish, competitive, and aggressive. Whenever people appear to be altruistic, so the narrative goes, we always find that they are really acting in their own interests or to bolster their own self-esteem. This view has certainly been popularised by generations of economists and political theorists, and has been a prominent feature of business schools and the financial world. Evolutionary biologists in particular have tied themselves in knots trying to explain how human beings have managed to develop highly complex systems of social co-operation if they are fundamentally selfish. As Bregman quite rightly says in his book, this is certainly a false and one-sided view of human nature that needs correcting: there is indeed plenty of evidence that human beings (apart from psychopaths) are also genuinely altruistic, kind, and co-operative although Bregman is certainly not the first person to say so.

Back in the nineteenth century Herbert Spencer pointed out that we have a kind of dual nature, displaying what he called “the ethics of amity” to our kin, neighbours, and those we consider members of “our group”, and, potentially, “the ethics of enmity” to those we consider outsiders, and Darwin completely agreed with him, emphasising the importance of co-operation for successful human groups in the struggle for survival. Wars between nations, for example, would be impossible if we were fundamentally selfish because we would all simply run away rather than risk our lives for our country. So I do not think that many anthropologists would be startled to hear that amity and enmity, co-operation and competition, are simply the opposite sides of the same coin. Some degree of selfishness is in any case a pre-requisite of survival. As Michael Tomasello very reasonably says, “All viable organisms must have a selfish streak; they must be concerned about their own survival and well-being or they will not be leaving many offspring. But human co-operation and helpfulness are, as it were, laid on top of this self-interested foundation” (Tomasello 2009:4-5).

Unfortunately it takes Bregman more than 200 pages of amateurish anthropology discussing the Neanderthals, hunter-gatherers, agriculture, and the rise of the state, as well as a host of other topics (including the Lord of the Flies, domestication, Stanley Milgram and his electric shock experiment, soldiers who wouldn’t fire their weapons, and the murder of Susan Genovese) before he finally reaches the fairly obvious conclusion that “The sad truth is that empathy and xenophobia go hand in hand. They’re two sides of the same coin” (Bregman 217).

In his opinion the problem is that our natural habitat for 95% of our history was the hunter-gatherer band, where we all lived in freedom, equality and friendship, but this was ruined by the adoption of agriculture and private property. This was “the biggest mistake of all time” that ripped us out of our natural habitat and gave us “the curse of civilisation”. “From the moment we began settling in one place and amassing private property, our group instinct was no longer so innocuous. Combined with scarcity and hierarchies, it became downright toxic. And once leaders began raising armies to do their bidding, there was no stopping the corruptive effects of power” (Bregman 244). 

As a journalist he not only knows very little anthropology but also has an irritating folksy style and refers to humans as “Homo puppy”, and to Machiavelli, sometime Florentine ambassador, as “a down-and-out-city-clerk”, and says of hunter-gatherers “Nature provided everything they needed, leaving plenty of time to relax, hang out, and hook up”.

He begins the book by claiming that “...humans have for millennia navigated by a faulty self-image. For ages, we’ve assumed that people are selfish, that we’re beasts, or worse. For ages, we’ve believed civilisation is a flimsy veneer that will crack at the merest provocation.” Whether “We”, as distinct from the intelligentsia, have actually believed this is a moot point, but the first part of the book is nevertheless dominated by the historic figures of Hobbes and Rousseau, because he thinks their influence has been staggering: “...the opposing views of these two heavyweights are at the root of society’s deepest divides” (Bregman 44). Philosophers are certainly accustomed to refer reverentially to Hobbes as “the greatest political philosopher produced by the English-speaking peoples”, or something similar, but to the anthropologist his ideas are simply uninformed nonsense.

For example, his explanation of human psychology is based on physics and the laws of motion, which is not a promising start, and his theory of “the state of nature” is no more convincing. He is faced by the problem of how prehistoric man organized his life and society, and his research technique, if we may call it one, is simply to invite his reader “To consider with himselfe, when taking a journey, he armes himselfe, and seeks to go well accompanied; when going to sleep, he locks his dores; when even in his house he locks his chests; and this when he knows there bee Lawes, and publike Officers, armed, to revenge all injuries shall bee done him”. How much worse, then, it must have been in a time when we lived in a state of nature with no government at all to enforce law and order, so Hobbes concludes that therefore the life of early man must obviously have been “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short”. Philosophers presumably feel that this very elegantly eliminates the need actually to know anything about the social life of hunter-gatherers.

If the villain of Bregman’s book is Hobbes, his hero is Rousseau, who believed the opposite: that in “the state of nature” before the invention of agriculture man had been altruistic, compassionate and peaceful. Although Rousseau was as ignorant as Hobbes about primitive societies, Bregman is nevertheless convinced that he was a great thinker who is still highly relevant today. Take”, he says, “this scathing passage about the invention of private property:

The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, “This is mine”, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, how many wars, how many murders, how many misfortunes and horrors, would that man have saved the human species, who pulling up the stakes or filling up the ditches should have cried to his fellows: Be sure not to listen to this imposter; you are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong equally to us all, and the earth itself to nobody!

“Ever since the birth of that cursed civil society, Rousseau argued, things had gone wrong. Farming, urbanisation, statehood – they hadn’t lifted us out of chaos, but enslaved and doomed us. The invention of writing and the printing press had only made matters worse...Civilisation, to his mind, had been one giant mistake” (Bregman 46).

These are not deep insights, however, but the babblings of a madman who would like to see all literature, music, and the arts, science, great architecture, technology and medicine swept away, and humanity reduced to sitting naked in the dirt on the ground munching on a root. If the numerous members of the intelligentsia who have added their praises to the cover of this book were to be magically transported to a traditional hunter-gatherer society with the prospect of spending the rest of their lives there, they would be begging for mercy within a few hours. Some degree of inequality and exploitation are simply inevitable features of modern large-scale, complex civilisation which have to be accepted.

This long-standing idolisation of hunter-gather society rests not only on a highly selective view of civilisation but on almost complete ignorance of anthropology. In the first place, the development of agriculture did not, as Rousseau, Bregman and many people assume, produce the institution of private property for the simple reason that the clearing of the ground of trees and brush, the preparation of the soil, planting and weeding, and perhaps fencing are all communal activities beyond the powers of a single individual. Anthropologists have studied many stateless farming societies, and the general rule is that land is owned by groups of kin or neighbours, and individual members of these groups inherit the right simply to use this land. (Individual ownership is typically a much later development.)

Bregman thinks that the private ownership of land must have brought the hunter-gatherer pattern of sharing to an end and replaced it with selfish acquisitiveness, competition, and growing inequality. What in fact happened was that populations increased and became dominated by kin groups like clans and lineages, and these developed leaders based on seniority of birth. There was also a marked tendency for kin and neighbourhood groups to develop norms of mutual support and solidarity that were much stronger than those typical of hunter-gatherer bands. This was in part because of their inherent stability, by contrast with the shifting composition of bands. The Konso (Hallpike 2008) with whom I lived in Ethiopia, for example, were advanced farmers whose ancestors had lived in the same very large settlements for many generations and were notable for their high degree of neighbourly co-operation. Not being able to move freely to other settlements, they had every incentive to behave properly to one another. The Tauade of Papua New Guinea (Hallpike 1977), on the other hand, were shifting cultivators and also had very impermanent group membership, and this lack of social solidarity was a most important factor in their high level of violence.

Many people like Bregman believe that the bands of our hunter-gatherer ancestors must have been altruistic and compassionate, united by a team-spirit of group loyalty and comradeship, but studies of modern hunter-gatherers do not support this. Members of bands move from one to another at marriage, or to avoid those with whom they have quarrelled, and so are not under the same constraints as members of the Konso type of society. Although sharing and mutual generosity are certainly basic customary practices, we should not exaggerate their compassionate and comradely aspects, because all this gift-giving is based on quite conscious self-interest – if you don't help others they won't help you. There is also a strong undercurrent of envy, which makes people uneasy if they have more than some other members of the group.

Marshall says of the Bushmen, for example ‘Their security and comfort must be achieved side-by-side with self-interest, and much jealous watchfulness. Altruism, kindness, sympathy, or genuine generosity were not qualities that I observed often in their behaviour’ (Marshall 1976:350).  Nor is there much evidence that band members are specially loyal and supportive of one another.  Among the Chewong of Malaysia, says Howell, ‘Individuals are expected to, and on the whole do, carry on their activities on their own.  It is a rare sight to witness someone asking someone else for assistance.  Similarly, offers of assistance are also rare.  I have many times watched strong young people lying about all day while old, and sometimes ill, people toil with heavy work without asking for or receiving help’ (Howell 1989:38). According to Woodburn, ‘The Hadza [of Tanzania] are strikingly uncommitted to each other; what happens to the individual Hadza, even close relatives, does not really matter very much.  People are often very affectionate to each other, but the affection is generally not accompanied by much sense of responsibility. If someone becomes ill he is likely to be tended only so long as this is convenient’ (Woodburn 1968:91). He discusses, in this connection, how they often leave the sick to die, and gives the example of a paralysed boy abandoned by his mother and other close relatives only a few miles from water, to which they could have carried him without too much difficulty.  Real group loyalty and altruistic self-sacrifice, like romantic love, are not universal features of humanity, but the products of more complex societies which impose more constraints on their members.

Nor is Bregman correct in claiming that hunter-gatherers were basically peaceful and non-violent, and that warfare only began with farming. In the 1960s, hunters and gatherers, in the spirit of the age, were naturally portrayed as especially peace-loving and unaggressive, and it was fashionable to believe that they represented the real nature of Man before greed, militarism and, of course, capitalism, had corrupted it. (There was even a hoax tribe, “the Gentle Tasaday”, produced in the Philippines to lend credibility to this belief.) This amiable illusion cannot be maintained, and there is a good deal of evidence to show that hunter-gatherers could quite well be aggressive and warlike.  While there was considerable variation among hunter-gatherer societies in levels of violence, very high death rates from fighting are recorded for some Aboriginal groups such as the Tiwi and the Murngin, for example, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, although these fatalities occurred over many years of small skirmishes.  Defence of territory is also recorded for some Eskimo groups in earlier times, as it is for the Indians of Tierra del Fuego, the Pygmies, Bushmen and Hadza, and there is plenty of evidence that in hunter-gatherer societies generally, quarrels sometimes led to homicide. The relatively low-level warfare found among the hunter-gatherers seems to have been more often related to vengeance than to any serious competition over resources, vengeance involving quarrels over insults, and disputes that got out of hand leading to murder. Fighting over women was an especially significant cause of violence in these societies, a cause of tension that was sometimes aggravated by the custom of female infanticide. Warner gives a very detailed and vivid account of fighting and its causes among the Australian Murngin:

There are six distinct varieties of warfare among the Murngin. Each. has a separate pattern of behaviour and an individual name. In addition to these there is another form in which only the women participate. The names are nirimaoi yelno, a fight within the camp; narrup or djawarlt a secret method of killing ; maringo (death adder), a night attack in which the entire camp is surrounded; milwerangel, a general open fight between at least two groups; gaingar (ghost spear), a pitched battle, and makaratay a ceremonial peace-making fight which is partly an ordeal. Each six forms will be described in detail. 

Out of seventy-two engagements [over 20 years] in which men were killed, twenty- nine were slain by a gaingar fight, thirty-five by maringo, twenty-seven by narrup, three by milwerangel, and two by nirimaoi yolno. Although the last is the most frequent type of fight, it seldom results in killings; gaingar, on the other hand, has only happened twice in the last twenty years, yet it has accounted for the deaths of twenty-nine men (Warner 1930: 457-8).

For the last twenty years, out of some seventy battles that were recorded for this paper in which members of the Murngin factions were killed, fifty were caused by the desire to avenge the killing of a relative, usually a clansman, by members of another clan (blood revenge). Of these, fifteen were killings that were done deliberately, against the tradition of what is fair cause for a war, because it was felt that their enemies had killed the wrong people when they retaliated for injuries done them. Ten killings were due to members of a clan stealing a woman, or obtaining a woman who belonged to another clan, by illegal means. Five men were killed because they had slain men by black magic. The clans of the men killed by magic slew the men who were supposed to be the magicians. Five men were slain because they looked at a totemic emblem under improper circumstances and by so doing insulted the members of the clan to whom it belonged as well as endangered the latter's spiritual strength. The underlying idea back of the causes for most Murngin warfare is that the same injury should be inflicted upon the enemy group that one’s own group has suffered. This having been done, a clan feels satisfied: if not, there is always a compelling urge within the group for vengeance, which causes a continuous restlessness among those who are out " buy back" the killing of one of their clansmen (Warner 1931: 458).

The following episode in which two women were killed conveys a strong flavour of their attitude to human life:

Some years ago the Liagaomir clan was holding a totemic ceremony and using their carpet-snake totemic emblems (painted wooden trumpets). A woman belonging to the Birkili clan, and a second belonging to the Liagomir, stole up to the ceremonial ground and watched the men blowing the wooden trumpet during the ceremony. They went back to the women’s camp and told them what they had seen. When the men came back to the camp and heard of their behaviour, Yanindja, the leader, said: “When will we kill them ? " Everyone replied, "Immediately." The two women were instantly put to death by members of their own clan with the help of the men from the other group (ibid., 459). 

But warfare between different groups of hunter-gatherers was obviously limited by the sheer lack of numbers of adult men, and by the lack of social organisation and leadership to coordinate military actions of any significance. It was certainly not as marked a feature of hunter-gatherers as it later becomes with the much larger and more tightly organised societies of farmers and pastoralists. Even without actual warfare, however, Bregman exaggerates the relaxed “cosmopolitan” attitude of hunter-gatherers to strangers, who often fell entirely outside the range of those to whom any concern was due.  Among the Eskimo, for example, Balikci records that “In traditional times fear, intense suspicion, and potential or actual hostility permeated relations between strangers” (Balikci 1970:158). The !Kung Bushman says of people from other ethnic groups “We call creatures who are different from us !hohm [wild animals] because when they speak we cannot understand a word” (Lee 1984:131).

According to Bregman the wars that broke out with the beginning of agriculture were fought over land, (though this was not necessarily the case at all), and because villagers became increasingly intolerant of outsiders, except when we could band together against other groups that threatened us. (Again, this was not necessarily the case, and outsiders might be welcomed as additional sources of military strength and labour power in agriculture.)

Clans began forming alliances to defend against other clans. Leaders emerged, likely charismatic figures who’d proved their mettle on the battlefield. Each new conflict further secured their position. In time these generals grew so wedded to their authority that they’d  no longer give it up, even in peacetime. Usually the generals found themselves forcibly deposed. ‘There must have been thousands of upstarts’, one historian notes, ‘who failed to make the leap to a permanent kingship.’ But there were also times when intervention came too late, when a general had already drummed up enough followers to shield himself from the plebs. If we want to understand the phenomenon of ‘war’, we have to look at people calling the shots. The generals and kings, presents and advisers: these are the Leviathans who wage war, knowing it boosts their power and prestige. (Bregman, 101)

This is reminiscent of a very bad undergraduate essay: military prowess did not lead directly to political authority, which also had to be legitimated by descent and religious status; and if we want to understand the phenomenon of war the first thing we need to do is understand the difference between primitive war, typical of uncentralised tribes, and the ‘true’ warfare of centralised states, which Bregman hopelessly confuses in this passage. Among uncentralised tribes, many of whom would have been shifting cultivators, the pattern of violence was one of continuous feuding and homicides, rather than the episodic battles typical of state warfare, and many authorities have noted the extraordinarily high death rates that could accumulate over the years in these societies. Roser (2013) and Livingstone (1968), for example quote numerous instances of stateless societies from around the world with violent mortalities among males of 20% to 50% per generation, which would give death rates of several hundred per 100,000 of population. For example, in the local group of Tauade with whom I lived in Papua New Guinea, over a period of about fifty years there seems to have been almost 1 violent death a year in a population of around 180, or 550 per 100,000.

The development of the state, on the other hand, brought about a general lessening of violence within societies because it placed a monopoly of armed force in the hands of the ruler. In medieval London, for example, the murder rate has been estimated at about 20 per 100,000, and much the same for the rest of the country. While this was ten times the rate of modern times, it was vastly less than the rate of tribal societies. The two World Wars raised the death rates in Germany and Russia to around 150 per 100,000 (Roser 2013), but even that was still far less than the death rate of many tribal societies.

But the development of the state is not all about war and violence, and so far we have not considered two aspects of human nature that are not directly implicated in the discussion of whether we are naturally selfish or altruistic. The first is the innate human love not only of personal adornment but of luxury and material possessions in general, and the second is ambition and love of power. Once the state facilitated the development of technology and crafts the upper classes throughout the history of civilisation have used their position to finance lifestyles of the greatest extravagance in houses, dress, food, and every other aspect of life. This luxury went far beyond the requirements of running the state and any conceivable material needs. The institutions of the state were also a magnet for personal ambition and provided extraordinary opportunities for the abuse of power, which certainly corrupts. (This, it should be noted, is quite distinct from the love of wealth – many powerful people, from medieval clergy to modern dictators have led notably austere lives.)

The world religions that began developing in the first millennium BC were in part a moral response to these developments, and their opposition to worldly pride, vanity, the love of money, and materialism has continued to the present day. In the Western world this has been the Christian Church, and its long dialogue over the centuries with power and wealth has been far more wide-ranging and important in its social influence than our beliefs about human nature. Indeed, since Bregman admits that our potential hostility to other groups is a basic facet of our empathy with our own people, then it cannot follow that

 “...if we believe most people are decent and kind, everything changes. We can completely rethink how we organise our schools and prisons, our businesses and democracies. And how we live our own lives” (381). 

In other words, he never really resolves the basic dilemma “naturally nice to insiders → naturally nasty to outsiders” and therefore cannot confront the fundamental issue of diversity, and the plain fact that diversity does not unify society – it divides it, as we can see every time we open a newspaper. Social conflict around the world is quite obviously exacerbated by differences in nationality, race, culture, and religion, as we can see from the fate of multi-ethnic confederations throughout the twentieth century: the United Kingdom lost Ireland in 1922 and may lose Scotland, while Ireland itself has been split by the hostility between Catholics and Protestants; Belgium can hardly hold the Flemings and Walloons together, and Anglophone Canada nearly lost French Quebec in 1995. Chinese Singapore seceded from the Malaysian Federation, the Slovaks parted company with the Czechs in 1993, and Yugoslavia had already exploded violently into its six component peoples; Sri Lanka fought a civil war with its Tamil minority, and in Rwanda the Hutu slaughtered 800,000 Tutsis; in the Middle East Shias and Sunnis and Israelis and Palestinians still battle it out, and the multi-ethnic Soviet Union collapsed in 1992.

It is also perfectly obvious that allowing mass immigration into Europe has introduced the same issues of social tensions and identity politics, but an additional problem here is the obsession with equality of outcomes. Every section of the population has different interests, priorities and, yes, different aptitudes, but when one section does not achieve the number of University Vice-Chancellors, or Members of Parliament, or High Court judges that corresponds to its proportion of the population it claims to be the victim of oppression and discrimination. Wise government should try to bring out the best in human nature, but popular political ideology in Western society is bringing out the worst, and Bregman’s book does not really give us much help here.

References:

• Balikci, A. 1970. The Netsilik Eskimo. New York: Natural History Press.
• Hallpike, C.R. 1977. Bloodshed and Vengeance in the Papuan Mountains. The generation of conflict in Tauade society. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Hallpike, C.R. 2008. The Konso of Ethiopia. (2nd ed.). Milton Keynes:AuthorHouse UK. 
• Howell, S. 1989. Society and Cosmos. The Chewong of Peninsular Malaysia. (2nd ed.) Chicago University Press.
• Lee, R.B. 1984. The Dobe !Kung. New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston.
• Livingstone, F.B. 1968. “The effects of warfare on the biology of the human species”, in War. The anthropology of armed conflct and aggression. 3-15. New York: Natural History Press.
• Marshall, L. 1976.  “Sharing, talking, and giving: relief of social tension among the !Kung. “, in Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers, eds. R.B.Lee & I. De Vore, 349-71. Harvard University Press.
• Roser, M. 2013. "Ethnographic and Archaeological Evidence on Violent Deaths". Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-evidence-on-violent-deaths' [Online Resource]
• Tomasello, M. 2009. Why We Co-operate. MIT Press.
• Warner,W. L. 1931. “Murngin warfare”, Oceania 1(4), 457-94. 
• Woodburn, J.  1968. Discussion in Man the Hunter, eds. R.B.Lee & I. De Vore, p. 91. Chicago: Aldine.

Finance vs business

The late, great Umberto Eco understood the difference. From Numero Zero, his final novel.

Don't be naive. We're talking about finance, not business. First buy, then wait and see where the money to pay for it comes from.

Numero Zero is a short, but excellent novel, a clever, more accessible Foucault's Pendulum combined with a dash of nostalgia for the forgotten backways of Milano and Eco's academic ideas about the nebulous nature of history and text.

I was hesitant to read this one after the relative disappointments of The Prague Cemetery and The Mysterious Flame of the Queen of Loanna. And I took my time with it, reading it first in Italian, then in English. It was both a pleasure and relief to discover that Dr. Eco closed out his literary career on a high note.

Tolstoy's Children's Tales

It appears there is a very good reason children's authors are seldom known for their literary greatness on the basis of this collection of Leo Tolstoy's children's tales.

“Daddy,” my stunned four-year-old son asked, “why did the lion die?” I took the book away and hid it from the children. Later I read it through. If you do this, be sure to read something lighter afterward, like perhaps Anna Karenina’s suicide scene, or a biography of Sylvia Plath. The rest of the stories are just as dark as the first one. So we have:

“Escape of a Dancing Bear.” The bear runs away after the master gets drunk. He’s too strong to capture directly, so they play his dancing music and he dances again. This allows the keepers to grab onto his chain. “The bear saw the ruse too late, roared helplessly, and tried to escape. But the master clung on tightly.” The end.

“Death of a Bird-Cherry Tree.” A property owner orders a tree cut down, then reconsiders. “It seemed a shame to kill such a beautiful thing.” But the woodcutter has already started, so he takes up an axe and lends a hand. “And then an unnerving sound came from inside the very soul of that tree. It was as if someone was screaming in unbearable pain, a tearing, wrenching, long, drawn-out scream.” The woodcutter says, “Whew, she don’t die easy, Sir!” Then the tree falls. The end.

“The King and the Shirt.” A king falls sick and is told that the only thing that can cure him is the shirt of a happy man. They can’t find anyone in the kingdom who is happy. Then by chance, the king’s counselor is passing through the woods and hears a man in a hut talking about how happy he is. The counselor steps into the hut and asks the man for his shirt, but the man is so poor he does not own a single shirt. The end. Presumably, the king dies.

“The Old Poplar.” Remember “Death of a Bird-Cherry Tree”? Well, this time it’s an old poplar. The owner wants to clear out the young poplar sprouts beneath a beautiful tree so that the old tree has less competition. The shoots had, in fact, been supporting the old tree; without them it withers and dies. “In wanting to make life easier for it I had killed all its children.” The end.

“The Little Bird.” A boy catches a bird in a cage. His mother says he shouldn’t do that. He leaves the door of the cage open. The bird flies out, straight into a glass window, knocking itself out. It suffers for a few days, then dies. The end.

I have to admit, I did laugh out loud reading this. It just sounds relentlessly horrible and almost flawlessly inappropriate. After giving the matter considerably more contemplation than I'd like to admit, I came up with a list of authors whose work should never, ever appear in the children's section. In reverse order:

• Leo Tolstoy. A man whose literary greatness apparently knew no bounds, although it should have.
• Guy de Maupassant. Forget all the drugs and ritual abuse, if MK Ultra wants to traumatize children, his story about the horse would suffice. It's the only story that has ever left me in a state of existential despair after reading it.
• Jim Nelson. Wildly unpopular.
• H.P. Lovecraft. Although the idea of combining Hogwarts and Lovecraft at Arkham Academy has occurred to me and other game designers over the years. The feeder school, presumably, for Miskatonic University.
• Samuel R. Delaney. For obvious reasons.

Book Review: The Last Emperox

An anonymous book reviewer reviews THE LAST EMPEROX by Tor's Three-Million-Dollar Man, John Scalzi. While I have not read any of the three books in the trilogy myself, it would not appear that Tor made a wise investment.

I was a few chapters into The Last Emperox when Scalzi did something he’d never done before in the Interdependency trilogy.  He made me laugh.

It was not a snicker at one of his jokes.  It was not a wry chuckle at the semi-snarky dialogue that passes for humour.  It was a genuine laugh when it hit me that Kiva Lagos is Donald Trump, with breasts!  Intentionally or not, Scalzi’s foul-mouthed rapist mess of a hero has a lot in common with the leftist perception of Trump, from the manners of a bullying braggart to the habit of rolling the dice time and time again until she comes up trumps.  There is a certain irony, in fact, that the titular character is someone who has so much in common with a populist politician Scalzi detests.  I’d apologise for the spoiler, but really there’s little to spoil.

Scalzi’s fans compare him to Heinlein.  A better comparison would be Harry Harrison.  Harrison’s comic novels didn’t take themselves too seriously, making light of everything from planetary invasions to full-scale war with a coalition of alien races.  When Harrison tried to write more serious novels, they were rarely satisfactory.  Scalzi has the same problem.  Old Man’s War was funny, but Scalzi is simply incapable of turning his keyboard to more serious work.  The Collapsing Empire and its two sequels are based on a cool concept, but their author fails to do them justice.  They simply don’t live up to their promise.

Scalzi himself admits, in his afterword, that he has a habit of procrastinating for months before turning in the first draft.  This is a major problem, as he says, because the editors don’t have time to do their job.  The three books would have made a fairly decent story if they’d been written as one volume - and had a good editor, who had the time to fix the problems - but as a trilogy they simply don’t work.  There are entire sections that Scalzi skips over, or hand-waves, or relies on his audience to fill in the gaps.  The story hops from idea to post-idea without showing us the idea being put into effect, dancing through time-skips in the hope we won’t notice.  This is irritating as hell.

The real problem is that he was incapable of developing the concept into a story.  There was ample room for a space opera on the same scale as The Night’s Dawn trilogy, but he chose to skip over the details that would have made it feel real.  The interdependency feels like a very thin universe indeed, without the sense of age or depth that writers such as Hamilton, Sanderson and Jemsin work into their stories.  Instead, he focuses on a tedious political battle and struggle for power that I thought had been resolved in the second book.  The concept of saving the vast majority of the population through flow-manipulation is better than I expected, but it simply isn’t developed.  The story does not end with the salvation of humanity or the preservation of a chunk of human civilisation.  Instead, it feels more like a retread of old ground that solves nothing.  It is, indeed, difficult to summarise the book because so little actually happens (and most of the important events happen off-stage)!

This is best reflected in the endless struggle between Cardenia Wu-Patrick, Kiva Lagos and Nadashe Nohamapetan, a struggle that would have been cut short if either of the three had shown a little more intelligence or ruthlessness.  (Seriously, Nadashe showed a little more cunning than earlier, but she would have won if she’d shot Kiva).  The bickering over who will take power, if anyone can when the writing is firmly on the wall, comes across as more than a little pointless.  More interesting plots - ways to navigate the Flow, developments on End - are hand-waved away, as if Scalzi realised he was running out of words and wrapped things up quickly.  This flows from Scalzi’s limitations.  It’s fairly clear he knows little about how militaries, power brokers and monarchies work.  A comic book empress can afford to be ignorant.  A real-life empress who’s going to inherit real power (even if she’s the spare) will have been trained for the role from birth.  Kiva Lagos is a liability to any real power broker because people like her - “whirling amoral vortexes of chaos” - tend to make enemies, people who will try to knife her in the back out of sheer spite and/or a desire for revenge.  There’s no hope of building a permanent relationship with someone you treat like shit, even if they are petty small-minded gamma males.  That too is something she has in common with Trump.

Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat books featured the beautiful and deadly Angelina, whose comedic sociopathy is funny, as long as you don’t think about it too much.  Harrison gets away with it because he’s writing comic novels, where reality is twisted to accommodate humour; Scalzi does not get away with it because his books are meant to be serious fiction and Kiva’s behaviour is horrible.  Sure, running up behind someone and yanking down their pants can be funny, but it’s also sexual assault.  It’s always fun until someone loses an eye.  I’m not laughing.

The Last Emperox has its moments, but it does not live up to its promise.  It does not present a scene of humanity getting around the problem, nor does it present a desperate struggle for survival right out of a disaster movie.  It does not even end with the collapse of the Flow and the dawn of a new era.  The plan to avoid disaster and save millions of lives is workable, but we never get to see it.  Scalzi concentrates on politics and avoids actually coming to grips with his universe.  The interesting characters get shoved aside, or forced to make stupid decisions, while the boring ones carry the show.

The series overall has its issues.  The Interdependency itself doesn’t make much sense.  The idea of End being both the sole inhabitable world in known space and an isolated backwater is bizarre.  You’d think it would be the most valuable piece of real estate in the galaxy.  The Interdependency brought some of its problems on itself, but the way it did that should have prompted it to avoid the problems.  Scalzi tries to justify it, but it isn’t convincing.  He might have been better leaving the collapse of the Flow as a natural event, as unpredictable (to the average person) as a hurricane.

A good series should have a strong beginning, a firm middle and a resounding end.  The Collapsing Empire is a weak beginning, The Consuming Fire isn’t enough to save the series and The Last Emperox ends with a whimper rather than a resounding crescendo.

I stand by my earlier opinion.  As a single book, the series would have worked (with a decent editor). As a trilogy, it’s a waste of money.

Amazon can't fix fake reviews

It's astonishing to me that Amazon STILL can't figure out how to fix fake reviews, so instead of doing the obvious and preventing people who have not bought a product from reviewing it on their site, they are trying to weight the star rating instead:

Fake reviews still exist on Amazon, but the dominant online shopping platform recently made a big change that might help drown them out instead.

The online retailer quietly introduced one-tap ratings for product reviews late last year, making it possible for shoppers to provide a star rating without needing to write a review to accompany it.

The change has already led to an increase in overall customer feedback, a competitive advantage that Amazon has over many of its biggest brick-and-mortar competitors. And new products are generating feedback on Amazon sooner, the company says, which could be a boon for new brands and sellers. But some industry observers believe another indirect impact of the change will be a significant increase in authentic ratings that will make it harder for fake reviews to break through the noise.

“As the number of ratings increase, customers can see a larger set and thus a more accurate rating,” said Patrick Miller, co-founder of Flywheel Digital, an agency that helps large consumer brands sell on Amazon. “For brands, this means the black-hat review clubs and sellers will have less impact, as fake reviews as a percentage of legit reviews should decrease.”

The new rating feature arrives at a time in which fake product reviews have been attracting more attention from the media, regulators, and Amazon itself as more consumers conduct more of their shopping online. Last year, the Federal Trade Commission brought its first case involving paid fake reviews, settling a complaint against an Amazon seller who purchased fake five-star reviews for a weight-loss supplement. Amazon has also filed at least five lawsuits related to fake-review schemes over the last five years. On one end, fake positive reviews can simply lead to the purchase of poor-quality merchandise and distrust among shoppers. But in certain categories, a flattering review of a bad or faulty product can be flat-out dangerous.

The new one-tap feature asks customers to select from one to five stars for a product. It’s only available to customers who have actually purchased the item from Amazon — “verified” buyers. That barrier alone creates one hurdle that will make the new rating system harder to game, since Amazon does allow written reviews from non-verified buyers. And as the new rating feature attracts more and more feedback from verified buyers, it’ll get more expensive for schemers to buy enough phony reviews to try to break through the noise.

“The more customers who purchased the product [who] provide feedback, the more accurately the star rating reflects the experience of all purchasers,” is how Amazon spokesperson Angie Newman put it, without directly referencing fake reviews.

Amazon does not provide many specifics about how a product’s overall star rating is calculated, other than stating that it is not a simple average but instead uses “machine-learned models” that take into account factors such as how recent the rating or review is and whether it was a verified purchase or not. It’s not clear whether one-tap ratings will carry as much weight in these models as written reviews.

It's better than nothing, but it's downright embarrassing that a company as heavily invested in AI and machine learning, and as dependent upon an algorithm, as Amazon is can't figure out how to write an algorithm that can easily distinguish an obvious fake review from a legitimate one.

Reading List 2019

Five Stars
A History of the Peninsular War, Vol. I, Charles Oman
A History of the Peninsular War, Vol. II, Charles Oman
A History of the Peninsular War, Vol. III, Charles Oman
A History of the Peninsular War, Vol. IV, Charles Oman
1Q84, Haruki Murakami
The Seville Communion, Arturo Perez-Reverte
The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu

Four Stars
Killing Commendatore, Haruki Murakami
Wellington's Army, Charles Oman
Warwick the Kingmaker, Charles Oman
Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
A Hymn to Old Age, Hermann Hesse
In the Beginning Was the Command Line, Neal Stephenson
Neuromancer, William Gibson
Count Zero, William Gibson
Mona Lisa Overdrive, William Gibson
Zero History, William Gibson
The Master of Go, Yusanari Kawabata
What We Become, Arturo Perez-Reverte
The Nautical Chart, Arturo Perez-Reverte

Three Stars
Klingsor's Last Summer, Hermann Hesse
Hooking Up, Tom Wolfe
A Man in Full, Tom Wolfe
A History of England, Charles Oman
Pattern Recognition, William Gibson
The Jews, Hillair Belloc
Captain Alatriste, Arturo Perez-Reverte
Purity of Blood, Arturo Perez-Reverte
The Sun Over Breda, Arturo Perez-Reverte
The King's Gold, Arturo Perez-Reverte
The Cavalier in the Yellow Doublet, Arturo Perez-Reverte
The Children of Hurin, JRR Tolkien

Two Stars
Fall, or, Dodge in Hell, Neal Stephenson
The Trojan Mouse, Sam Lively
The Virtue of Nationalism, Yoram Hazony
Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
I am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe
From Bauhaus to Our House, Tom Wolfe

One Star
The Right Side of History, Ben Shapiro
House of the Sleeping Beauties, Yusanari Kawabata

If you're interested in a discussion of these books and why I rated them the way I did, you can watch it on Unauthorized if you are a subscriber there.

Smoking their own supply

The Saker interviews a Russian military expert who is rightly concerned about the way in which U.S. military planners are increasingly failing both aspects of Sun Tzu 101:

Martyanov does an absolutely superb job explaining some (not all, of course!) features of modern warfare to a reader which is assumed to be only a curious amateur whose intellect can be persuaded by fact-based and logical arguments (as opposed to delusional, imperial hubris and feel-good flagwaving and self-worship). As a matter of fact, Martyanov’s book could be an ideal “introduction to military analysis” or a “planning military forces 101” course.

Martyanov is clearly deeply frustrated with the willful ignorance shown by a lot of US academics, politicians and other talking heads and he places the blame on the US educational system which, according to Martyanov, teaches nonsensical theories which are not just useless, but actually self-deceiving and outright dangerous. In all fairness to US colleges and academies, I think that Martyanov is just a little unfair: while it is true that most “political science” and other “conflict and peace studies” schools mostly teach nonsense, there are other US colleges and academies – both civilian and military – which, at least in the 80s and 90s – did teach real military analysis and force planning. Those courses were typically taught by adjunct teachers taken from military personnel who taught evening classes while still working in their regular DoD positions. Furthermore, many students had a military rank (typically First Lieutenant and Captains). I don’t know how good these schools are now, but in the 1980s-1990s some of these schools had superb curricula, “heavy” on technical analysis and computer modeling. I can also say that most of the US officers I studied with were very competent specialists and honorable men who were all acutely aware that being an officer in a superpower’s military, places upon you a double burden: that to protect your country by deterrence, but also to avoid a conflict at almost any cost because this is the only way to really protect your country!

By the way, at that time a senior officer of the DoD’s Office of Net Assessment openly told us “no US President will ever sacrifice Boston or Chicago for the sake of Berlin or Paris; but we will never admit that publicly“. In my experience, US Cold War officers were very competent, cautious and acutely aware of the immense responsibility placed upon their shoulders. Furthermore, I will say this: during the Cold War both the USSR and the US acted responsibly, even during major crises. Finally, in spite of Reagan’s (stillborn) idea of “Star Wars” aka “SDI” – I never met a single US officer who believed, even for a second, that the US could ever stop a Soviet retaliatory second strike (never mind a first one!).

During the Cold War – deterrence worked and both sides played by the same rulebook. This is not the case anymore, and that is very frightening.

This is very typical behavior of an empire in decline. The imperial forces tend to overestimate their own capabilities and underestimate the capabilities of their potential adversaries. This is what leads to imperial overstretch and empire-shattering disasters like the Syracuse Expedition and the Peninsular War.

Mailvox: spotting quality

One of the more inept File 770ers - which is saying something - is Camestros Fappletron. His Gamma backside is still burning from the spanking he received here in 2016 after he tried to pose as a Master of Rhetoric and only succeeded in demonstrating that he simply did not understand Aristotle's distinction between rhetoric and dialectic.

So, it's more than a little amusing to note that he's been trying to retroactively rectify the situation for years, as Samuel Collingwood Smith noted.

Earlier today, a leftist left a negative comment on a review I did in 2016 of Vox Day’s “A Throne of Bones”. They ended by linking to a hatepost claiming the positive Amazon reviews were deceptive based on an analysis by a site called Fakepost.com from 2017. Because, of course, the accuracy of a self-appointed analysis site using an unpublished algorithm is beyond question..

I had no idea what he was talking about, because of course I pay absolutely no attention to Camestros or his incessant anklebiting. But apparently, back in 2017, File 770's Master of Rhetoric decided to prove that many of the 332 reviews of A Throne of Bones, which average 4.5 stars, are fake.

I previously pointed to an article on people manipulating Amazon rankings for their books, today there is a bigger brouhaha on whether somebody has manipulated the New York Time bestseller list. The method used (if true) isn’t new and political books have been prone to this approach before i.e. buy lots of the book from the right bookshops and head up the rankings.

One thing new to me from those articles was this site: http://fakespot.com/about It claims to be a site that will analyse reviews on sites like Amazon and Yelp and then rate the reviews in terms of how “fake” they seem to be. The mechanism looks at reviewers and review content and looks for relations with other reviews, and also rates reviewers who only ever give positive reviews lower. Now, I don’t know if their methods are sound or reliable, so take the rest of this with a pinch of salt for the time being.

Time to plug some things into their machine but what! Steve J No-Relation Wright has very bravely volunteered to start reading Vox Day’s epic fantasy book because it was available for $0 ( https://stevejwright.wordpress.com/2017/08/23/a-throne-of-bones-by-vox-day-preamble-on-managing-expectations/ ) and so why not see what Fakespot has to say about “Throne of Bones”

Sadly for the ever-inept Fappletron, he didn't bother checking Fakepost to confirm that its initial analysis still held true, as Mr. Smith informs us.

 However, when I requested a re-analysis, the book listing now gets an ‘A’ 

• Fakespot Review Grade A
• Our engine has profiled the reviewer patterns and has determined that there is minimal deception involved.
• Our engine has determined that the review content quality is high and informative.
• Our engine has discovered that over 90% high quality reviews are present.
• This product had a total of 332 reviews as of our last analysis date on Oct 27 2019.

Nor is ATOB alone in this regard. The 100 reviews of ASOS are also graded A, whereas the 645 reviews of SJWs Always Lie are only graded B, most likely due to the 37 mostly-fake one-star reviews. Ironically, Fappletron has only managed to demonstrate that the higher-rated my books are, the more likely those reviews of those books are to be genuine.

Diversity & Comics reviews Alt-Hero Volume One

It's a fair and detailed review of the six issues collected. I disagree, of course, with the idea that comics must be relentless BIF! - SOCK! - POW! action, as I see no problem with what is described here as "the talking head problem", or as we novelists refer to it, dialogue and character development. And while I understand that not everyone is interested in current events, I am, and it would be very strange indeed if a fictional battle between globalists and nationalists did not bear some resemblances to the real-world version.

Indeed, as some have noted, the events taking place in the Alt-Hero world have even been observed to have anticipated events taking place in the real one. I also found it interesting that D&C so strongly preferred the US-based story to the Europe-based one, as it's been my vague impression that a majority of AH fans tend to prefer the latter.

But regardless, I appreciate the review, which is one of the first to look at the entire volume one omnibus.

Diversity & Comics reviews Cyberfrog

Jon Del Arroz reviews the long-awaited Cyberfrog, and in the process, demonstrates that one man's cucking is another man's opportunity. It's amusing to see idiots trying to claim that a brand still belongs to someone who literally fled from it.

As for the review itself, it appears to be in line with the general consensus. Very good art, very mediocre writing. This is not exactly a surprise; Image Comics proved, a long time ago and rather conclusively, that it's as foolish to have the illustrators do the writing as it is to have the writers do the illustrating.

Book review: Killing Commendatore

Unauthorized subscribers of a literary bent may be interested in watching my first Unauthorized book review, which is of Haruki Murakami's Killing Commendatore. It's very good, and very much indicative of the great Japanese novelist's return to form.

If you're interested in picking up a copy after watching this, we have the hardcover available on the Castalia Direct store at a discount or you can preorder the paperback for $12.99.

Mailvox: we have an answer

No, Neal Stephenson was not taking a tongue-in-cheek approach to writing Seveneves. Yes, Neal Stephenson has gone SJW, or so we are informed by a reader of his latest:

Neal Stephenson's last novel Seveneves was just bad.  His newest effort Fall is full of social justice AND bad.  Thank God I got it from the library.

In this story, he has adhered to your theory that the USA will break up sometime in the 2030s, but the "Red State" area is called Ameristan, from which all smart/educated people have fled.  Ameristan has no dentists, so everyone has brown or missing teeth.  If anyone needs medical care, they have to sneak across the border to the "Blue Lands." Nothing of value is produced in Ameristan, nothing is exported, everyone is dirt-poor.

Furthermore, Ameristan lives under the Levitican Law, which is a literal interpretation of the Old Testament.  Even the most obscure passages from the Bible are enforced, such as executing anyone who wears mixed linen and wool.  They also crucify people and burn crosses a lot.  The countryside is infested with roaming bandits, so everyone has to drive around with AK-47s or even vehicle-mounted machine machine guns, a bit like ISIS territory.  It's such a heavy-handed parody it's like something out of Saturday Night Live, but he isn't joking.

Finally, Stephenson really lays on the feminism here.  The female characters are hyper-alert for "microaggressions" (yes, he really uses that word), for instance in one scene a character "decided to let the microaggression pass without comment."  Also the women call out a male character for "mansplaining."

At one point he talks about the bad old days, where women were harassed on the internet all the time, and men didn't believe women could write good code.  Now (in the 2040s) everyone has an anonymous public ID - no one knows your sex, even when applying for jobs - so OF COURSE it turns out that when code is written anonymously, female-written code turns out to be better than men's code!

Seveneves pretty much took Stephenson from "buy immediately in hardback" to "borrow from library only" in my eyes.  Now I think I'm just done with the guy.  I guess he was probably always like this, but now has so much money he thinks he can go wild.

I don't know. It sounds so over the top that in light of his famous account of his duels with William Gibson, I can't help but suspect him of selling books while taking the piss out of his SJW readers.

The myth of al-Andalus

A review of a book on Spanish history by Dario Fernandez-Morera that I, too, found to be extremely useful in better understanding the real history of Muslim-occupied Spain:

I have just finished reading a volume that should be a required text for anyone enthusing about how enlightened and tolerant Spain was under Islamic rule in medieval times, The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise by Dario Fernandez-Morera.

The enthusiasm for the glories of tolerant Islam is suffused throughout modern scholarship, to the point of embarrassment. It is difficult not to conclude, after one looks at the actual historical facts that the scholars ignore and suppress, that their enthusiasm for Islam finds its roots in their distaste for Christianity. It is certainly not rooted in the historical evidence itself.

In this vision of Islamic Spain (renamed by the Muslim conquerors as “al-Andalus”), all three monotheistic faiths got along famously and all three enjoyed cultural flowering and prosperity under the watchful eye of a tolerant Islam.

In this version of history, the Christians of Spain were a benighted, primitive, and ignorant lot, who fortunately for them, ended up under Islam, which then offered them previously undreamt of opportunities to learn tolerance and culture. In this paradise Jews, Christians, and Muslims coexisted in a happy sunlit land, enjoying the benefits of convivencia—at least until the horrible Christians spoiled it all at the Spanish Reconquista, which recovered the land for Christendom and brought again the blight of intolerance and darkness to their land.

Ah, al-Andalus, now gone with the wind: those happy dhimmis, contented and protected under their gallant masters! How sad that such gallantry is no more than a dream remembered! How sad that it is now gone with the wind!

Or…maybe not.

My two previous blog posts relating to the book:

• Diversity + Proximity = Radicalization
• The myth of classical knowledge diffusion

In fact, I thought so highly of The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise after reading it in 2017 that I put it on list of recommended History books available from Castalia Direct, where you can pick up the hardcover at a discount. It's well worth reading.

They FEEL American

But they're not, they never were, and they never will be. A telling confession from a review of an entirely unnecessary book by the eminently contemptible Max Boot.

The best bits of The Corrosion of Conservatism come early, when Boot describes his childhood under Soviet tyranny and his years as a precocious, politically hyper-conscious teenager in Reagan-era California. The most sympathetic character we encounter is his mother—the ­fiercely loving émigré, who “enrolled me in swim classes, piano lessons, and Hebrew school to give me the athletic, musical, and religious education that she had lacked.” All this, though money was tight and his ­father largely absent.

Yet Boot never took to sports, nor the piano, nor Hebrew study, and he didn’t retain his native Russian. His real passion was America. Boot was six years old when pressure exerted by Sen. Henry Jackson forced the communist regime to allow families like his to emigrate. In a passage that had me underlining and writing “Amen!” in the margins, he explains: “I have never visited Russia since leaving. I feel entirely American.” That describes my own immigrant sensibility, though I came from Iran just before I turned fourteen.

But it soon becomes clear that Boot views his adopted homeland through a set of abstract, free-­floating propositions about rights and norms—his patriotism is attached to liberal proceduralism. The religious and spiritual warp and weft of the land elude him entirely. That is, when he isn’t disgusted by them.

America is not, and has never been, an idea. America is a nation, which means, by definition, that Americans are an actual and distinct living people. The claim that America is an idea or a creed is not merely an insult, it is an existential attack on the genetic Posterity of the American Revolution, a nation that has been invaded, adulterated, betrayed, confused, and demoralized to the point that it doesn't recognize itself or even know what it is.

If you want to know why the military doesn't defend the borders, and why the people don't defend their lands, their neighborhoods, or their families, it is because the American nation has been literally robbed of its identity. And that is why the charlatans and gatekeepers of the Right condemn identity politics, identity, and nationalism so vehemently, because they are alien usurpers who are desperate to keep the rightful heirs of the Revolution from claiming the very country their forefathers founded.

The review is much more perspicacious than the book, which makes sense, if one considers who the author of the latter is, even though the reviewer's identity complications prevent him from grasping why the metaphysical ideals of the West have been eclipsed.

Without a shared vision of the common good, society devolves into consumerist cliques and warring tribal factions. With the eclipse of the metaphysical ideals that underlie their conception of reason, America and the West can barely address other civilizations, much less win them over. And it turns out that the consent principle, without more, can authorize all manner of degradation, most shockingly evident in such phenomena as the sale of children and wombs in surrogacy, the unrestricted circulation of hard-core, misogynistic pornography under the banner of “free speech,” and the legalization of death-by-doctor throughout the developed world.

The liberal consensus, then, has emerged as a profoundly illiberal, repressive force—precisely because it grants the autonomous individual such wide berth to define what is good and true. If maximizing individual autonomy is the highest good and, indeed, the very purpose of political community, then for ­Chelsea Manning to exercise “her” autonomy requires the state to compel the rest of us to say that “she” wasn’t born male. And even absent state compulsion, as already exists in Canada and elsewhere, the institutions charged with upholding the consensus—corporations, big tech, universities, and elite media—can exact a high price for dissent.

The free world doesn’t feel free.

New haters, new fans

Some of the low-status lobsters were very upset to discover that humanity's greatest thinker, Jordan Peterson, was literally too stupid for law school.

• i like his construction much better than yours. in terms of contribution to human experience, he trumps your nonsense. did you just call him a moron? someone who saved lives of so many men? turned their lives for the better? how can you disregard all that robot?
• “When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom.”  Unfortunately, you are majorly lacking humility.  I get what you’re saying but the posturing with your scores and outbursts toward the audience exposes your arrogance.  Arrogance is inherently unintelligent especially when as it relates to effective communication. Can’t imagine this trait has played out well in your personal relationships. How can you pretend to be a Christ follower even though this displayed your utter contempt for anyone not on your intellectual level?  Are you not a charlatan by claiming you are a Christian and explicitly going against a directive by God to be humble?
• Let it go man! We get it... you think you're smarter than Peterson and you deeply resent him being celebrated and rich instead of you. Why don't you use that IQ of yours to figure out how to overcome your wounded ego?
• I guess we should not listen to JP ? Please tell me how his message will make this god aweful intellectual MESS of a worldview worse?(post moderism) If you find nothing positive in what he says then...Why attack him? Why not show some of that obviously high powered intellect and present something that makes makes better sense? I don't give a fart in a whirlwind what JPs IQ is. And you have not impressed me in the least. He does not strike me as a pompous asd.
• Joe rogan was a large part of why jordan blew up. I saw him on there and I have gotten at least half a dozen ppl to follow him. Whats not organic about that. Ur a bitter bald man. Lol owen Benjamin smarter than peterson? U are bitter my friend.
• Your smart enough to figure out how to make a buck off someone else's success, and your doing it by simply providing a contrary position and picking random holes in an othewise positive doctin for the sake of itself. Your a just a critic and thats easy low IQ territory. Thats what you bring to the table. Petsrsons maps od meaning is difficult to undetstand for you becauae yout not interested in doing the ground work to really understand what he is saying, and you dont want to understand because then you would have nothing to talk about. Bravo. How about adding something positive or constructive to the conversation?

On the other hand, people who are actually listening to the new audiobook - now available exclusively at the Arkhaven store - have found the case it presents to be conclusive, if not downright lethal.

• I wasn't impressed with Jordanetics until about chapter six when I realized I was listening to an intellectual murder, and the first few chapters had simply been you setting up your kill room. Thanks for writing the book, and for breaking it down in such an easy-to-follow way.
• I finally received the book. It's brutal. Some sections are probably in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

I found the first review to be particularly amusing, as it reminded me of the late Bane's review of The Irrational Atheist almost exactly 11 years ago.

It is the kind of writing that compels me to write, and he does all of your thinking for you, so you don't have to do anything but lay back and enjoy it. So far. And what a work of art it is. So far. It grabs you by the nose with velvet gloved fingers, pulls you around where it wants you to go...I am reminded of the Francis Dollarhyde character in Manhunter, when he is giving the slide show to the creep reporter Freddy Lounds, saying "Do you see?" as he takes Freddy from one scene of horror to the next.

I rather like the title of "Intellectual Serial Killer". All the fun and none of the mess.

Adventures in Jordanetics

Fencing Bear is discovering that the only people more inclined to turn on badthinkers and thought criminals than academics are Jordan Peterson cultists:

It is difficult to describe the crisis I have been living through these past several weeks.

Short version: Don’t call out the Devil if you aren’t ready to bout. 

Alternate short version: “Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” —1 Corinthians 1:20

There has been much bitterness. There have been feelings of betrayal. There have been feelings of being lied to while watching people whom I thought were my supporters fall away.

Friends warn me about overreacting. At which I overreact.

“Academic freedom means nothing if the faculty do not stand up for it.”

I believed that. Someone whom I have trusted my entire academic career told me that. I still believe it—but do my colleagues?

“Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from insanity.”

I heard someone say that recently on his livestream. Someone whom my friends tell me I should be wary of associating myself with because he has been called the same names I have over the past several years.

Three weeks ago I found this note tucked behind a drawing that I had posted up by my office door.

You are a white nationalist and a detriment to all forms of knowledge. Please resign, as your institution has and will continue to fail to condemn your actions.

You are a violent and malicious threat to academia and to the future. Not only do you profess racist ideologies, you collude with all sorts of monstrous people who transform your otherwise out-dated and foolish forms of racism into something much worse.

I posted the letter on my social media and my friends got a good laugh out of it. I told my dean and chair about the letter, and the campus police sent an officer round that evening to take a statement from me. Colleagues from around the world wrote to me, expressing dismay that I should be receiving such missives.

And nothing happened.

Sadly, she's come under attack for her lack of faith in St. Jordan Peterson as well. On a not-entirely unrelated note, Nick Krauser reviews Jordanetics in his inimitable, hard-hitting style:

How is it that Vox can achieve such a steady hit-rate and always be at the leading edge of the curve? His Cuckservative book came out before Trump won the Republican nomination. His take-down of Jordan Peterson came at the peak of his popularity when pretty much every right-winger I knew was riding the Canadian globalist’s nut-sack. Vox isn’t just outside the mainstream Overton Window, he’s perpetually outside the Alt-Right’s own Overton Window. So, how does he manage it?

Simple. He’s read history and philosophy. Modern retards raised on YouTube, Twitter and hyper-ventilating click-bait conservative bloggers have no sense of perspective. They think Animal Farm is a porno, Big Brother a TV show, and Franz Ferdinand an indie band. Those of you fortunate enough to get a real education are better able to spot the same old patterns reemerge.

There’s nothing new under the sun. It’s just old wine in new bottles.

The problem when first approaching Jordan Peterson is that he’s a muddled thinker, bullshitting speaker, and incompetent writer. That means to make sense of him you have to straighten out all the knots he himself has created. Reading Jordanetics reminded me of a philosophy lecture I took as a fresh-faced 18yr old scamp in a course called Rousseau and Marx. I asked the lecturer why he’d assigned the Past Masters summary books on those two black-hearted rogues rather than their original writings.

“Oh, they are terrible writers. It’ll take you forever to figure out what they are trying to say. Don’t bother. Just go to the summary books. Those are cleaned-up Rousseau and cleaned-up Marx.”

Cleaned-up? That’s how it feels reading Jordanetics. Vox has done JBP the favour of organising his muddled thoughts for him in order to get at the heart of his true meaning. Actually, it’s not doing JBP a favour at all because to explain what he says in clear terms is to expose him for the evil Satanic globalist fraud that he is. You see, JBP is a wannabe L. Ron Hubbard. He’s a mentally-ill, moral and physical coward, with a messiah complex. His role is to mislead you. There’s a fair chance that JBP was sexually molested by his own grandmother but that can’t be anything compared to the brutal rape Vox gives him in Jordanetics.

Vox’s parsing of JBP’s philosophy, as expressed in Maps Of Meaning and 12 Rules For Life, is that JBP is preaching a post-Christian religion of Balance. JBP uses the terms Order and Chaos as proxies for Good and Evil, and his advice all leads towards a Jedi-like goal of achieving Balance between the two. The goal is not to fight and defeat Evil, but to assimilate it. Obviously that’s ridiculous.

Having read much of the Western canon, Vox is able to trace the intellectual inspiration of JBP to his roots which will surprise the average Peterson fanboy. Vox makes a strong case that JBP is knowingly drawing ideas from Carl Jung and…… Aleister Crowley. Yes, the bald-headed Satanist. He doesn’t just throw those names out as insults but rather draws the connection through exegesis of Peterson’s own written words and a comparison to the gnostics, pagans and Satanists who originated the ideas. Vox firmly believes JBP is knowingly evil, and I agree with him.

There is more. Read the whole thing there.

JORDANETICS: a review

Luke Dromgoole reviews Jordanetics for The Burkean:

“Falsehoods have consequences, that’s what makes them false” – Jordan Peterson

Jordanetics is not the book I expected it to be. I expected a political criticism of Jordan B. Peterson’s politics, a takedown of atomised individualism, and a nationalist defence of group identity.

Much of this was present. However, Vox Day’s Jordanetics: A Journey into the Mind of Humanity’s Greatest Thinker is a far more interesting book because it explains what motivates Peterson while giving us the true meaning of his philosophy, something much more sinister than I had ever anticipated....

Vox Day has clearly been inspired by Thomas Aquinas’ style of argumentation. Early in the book, he lines up potential objections to his critique of Jordan Peterson, then one by one refutes each objection.  His methodical style of writing can be contrasted with a continued theme throughout the book; Jordan Peterson’s total lack of coherent meaning when he speaks or writes.

Read the whole thing there.

(snort)

To absolutely no one's surprise, the conclusion is that the new Diversity & Comics graphic novel sucks. When a guy who can't write hires a guy who can't draw and doesn't even bother to hire anyone to color it, you're probably not going to get a very good result. Richard Meyer probably would have done well to have left off the lettering as well while he was at it. A review of Iron Sights posted in the Arkhaven Forums.

Okay, Comicsgate finally has real, tangible product to critique. I received Richard Meyer's (Diversity & Comics) second IndieGoGo project and Splatto Comics first release Iron Sights today, and ... well, it's a disappointment, I've got to say.

Meyer received these from the printer months ago, but because he was packaging and mailing them all himself, it took all this time to get them out to the backers. I must've been right at the tail end of the list. Glad he finished the job, but there are surely better ways to print, pack and ship comics. I can think of one (**DARK LEGION**), but it's entirely possible Meyer's book wouldn't even have qualified for the DL label. All its product to date has been far, FAR superior to this.

So what did I get for US$32? Well, the book is B&W with tones, roughly 120 pages (not numbered). The art is amateurish. If he's relatively new to the form, maybe there's long-term hope for Ibai Canales, as sometimes new comics artists progress by leaps and bounds. Alternatively, if he's already taken a few years to get to this point ... well, sorry, it's just not good enough. Every Arkhaven book in print currently is leaps and bounds ahead of Iron Sights both artistically and in terms of presentation and professionalism. Backgrounds are minimal, characters are off-model frequently enough that you often can't tell who's who, and Canales shows no real grasp of storytelling or sequential art. There were pages when I simply couldn't figure out what was happening.

Part of the problem may be Meyer's script, which in places cuts back and forth between scenes to the point that you don't even know where you are anymore. The other problem is the lack of color, which makes it next to impossible to distinguish similar-looking characters from one another. And there are plenty of those. (Clarity in B&W comics IS possible. Charlie Adlard on Walking Dead has no problem making it work, but his art is tight and his characters distinctively modeled, whereas Canales' is loose and scratchy enough that there are times I couldn't tell a rifle sight from a drainpipe, and all his blond men looked like the same old guy.)

Back when I ordered IS, I had watched more than a few D&C reviews of Marvel comics. Meyer's stern critiques of sloppy SJW pap fooled me into thinking he might have the chops to produce something superior. He certainly seemed to know bad when he sees it. That said, whatever made him think this book was him putting his best foot forward is a bit beyond me. He's obviously been reading those blood-soaked, profanity-filled early Jason Aaron Vertigo comics (I can't remember the series now -- some Indian reservation thing), because the random, pointless foul-mouthedness taints every second panel. Considering that Meyer keeps his language fairly clean in his YouTube videos, that was a surprise.

All in all, I'm glad I didn't throw major money at the project. D&C's sniping at Arkhaven has not been on the 2VS level, but it's certainly been regular enough that I would have expected him to produce more professional work than this. How is this in any way an improvement over whatever it is Meyer doesn't like about Arkhaven books? I don't get it.

If Iron Sights is at all representative of what Comicsgate writers and artists can be expected to produce, Vox and Arkhaven absolutely did the right thing by putting major distance between the brands.

Now, I will commend Meyer for doing what few critics dare to do and attempting to do something better himself. That is a courageous act for a critic. However, I will also observe that most critics have no idea how hard it is to actually avoid making the mistakes they critique so gleefully, nor are they often able to do any better themselves. It's not a surprise Richard Meyer, even in his second attempt, couldn't manage to create anything anywhere nearly as good as any of the 25+ comics Arkhaven and Dark Legion have published this year, and the contrast between Iron Sights and the beautiful, full-color, 152-page Right Ho, Jeeves omnibus when it appears next week will serve as an effective measure of the yawning gap between an amateur operation like Splatto and a professional one such as Arkhaven.

The fact that Meyer has been sneering non-stop at Arkhaven since our very first release only makes his subsequent pratfall in print all the more amusing. Compare the artwork; even when taking color out of the equation, there really is no comparison. Can you guess which image is Splatto and which is Arkhaven?

That's just the art. With regards to the writing, there is Richard Meyer on the one side, and The Legend Chuck Dixon adapting The Grandmaster John C. Wright on the other. I don't know about you, but I like our odds. And yup, yup, that is indeed Ruff.

There was a happy barking, and a dog that was half Border Collie and half who-knew-what came bounding up the stairs. He had a white muzzle and chest, black ears, black flanks, white stockings, and bright eyes with a black mask around them. However, he lacked any collar, dog tags, or fixed place of residence. He was Gil’s dog in every way but legally. Gil did not know where he went during the day or where he slept, and he thought it too nosy to ask.

Confessions of a former fan

I really appreciate the seriousness with which even the most dubious skeptics are approaching Jordanetics, and the way in which they are honestly reassessing their previous assumptions and beliefs in light of the information it contains. This detailed review of the book explains the process of what goes through the mind of a Peterson fan when he first interprets what he hears Peterson saying versus when he subsequently encounters the verifiable reality of Peterson's teachings much better than I ever could.
- Vox

Confessions of a former, Jordan Peterson fan...
December 4, 2018

I've been a fan of Jordan Peterson (JP) for a couple years. I've watched many hours of JP video, including: classroom lectures, blog posts, event speeches, interviews, Bible story analysis, etc. I loved JP for denouncing Marxism, Leftism, SJW's and speech control as he adroitly argued against many of the standard leftist positions.

On our family road trips, I would force the family to listen to JP lectures or speeches, then proceed to tell them what JP was saying.

As a Christian and Bible student, I understood that JP's position on the Bible was flawed and that he was not a Christian himself, however, he was speaking against so many of the positions I was against that he inspired me to hope that he could stem the tide of those beliefs. I put some of my "faith" in JP...that was a mistake.

It is a strange experience to look back in time and see something I thought was so good, profound and impactful, that it moved me to tears, but now, realize JP did not really say anything I thought he said. I listened to the words he said, but I am the one that filled in the meaning...JP did not mean what I thought he meant.

As I was telling my family what he "meant", I was really telling them what I wanted him to mean. JP was my "reason", or excuse, for pontificating on various subjects and JP became a source of validation for my positions. I could state with confidence that my position was "right" and then point to JP and say, "See, he's saying the same thing...", thus making me feel good about this professor because he "backed me up".

Later, as I noticed inconsistencies, or position changes, with JP, I wrote them off as mistakes, or taken out of context, or simply ignored them. I was not willing to accept that I put my faith in someone who would actually be antithetical to my beliefs; that was something I was unwilling to consider.

About this time I learned about some of Vox Day's posts regarding JP's positions. Some of Vox's statements about JP were quite harsh. I thought, "Vox is not being fair to JP. JP is on "our side", so cut the guy some slack." However, one thing Vox said was the "key" that allowed me to reexamine my faith in JP. Vox said something like, "JP is repackaging Gnosticism and is not really saying what people think he's saying. JP is literally evil."

As a Christian, familiar with the problems of Gnosticism, I had to acknowledge that if Vox's point was true, it would be detectable if I reexamined JP's positions. My problem at that point was a pride, or ego issue. I did not want to admit that I could have been mislead, or duped, into following someone who was teaching something I knew to be evil. How could I possibly be fooled? I'm too smart to fall for that sort of thing, right? Not me.

So, I accepted some of Vox's challenges. One was to simply "read" what JP was saying, instead of "listening" to it. Wow, what a difference! Reading JP's words, I found they were devoid of the meanings I had been assigning to them. What he meant by good, evil, God, truth, etc. was not what I knew these words to mean.

When JP said to always tell the truth, I plugged my definition of truth into his statement. When JP said this or that position was "evil", I plugged my definition of evil into his statement. When JP talked about "consciousness" I "heard" my definition of consciousness, or "being" or whatever.

But after taking some time to go find how JP defined these words or ideas, and ignoring what I hoped he meant, I was shocked, to say the least.

One of my life axioms is, "Only the truth can withstand scrutiny." Therefore, never be afraid to scrutinize something; if it is true, then it will survive the scrutiny. It was time to scrutinize JP more fully.

After my own findings were eroding my faith in JP, I took the plunge and purchased "Jordanetics".

The first couple chapters did little to shed more light on JP, but did add more reasons to doubt my faith in him. However, once I reached chapter 3 and beyond, Vox's dissection of JP's positions began in earnest. Vox's approach is quite simple.

1. Here is JP's Rule for Life #X
2. Here is what JP says, which does not address said rule at all.
3. What JP is saying means this, using JP's own words.
4. Now that we are clear on what JP is saying, you have to decide what to do.

I decided. Instead of a thinking JP is a man that supports what I support, I've come to the sad realization that he is antithetical to most of my values and beliefs. Wow! That hurt my pride and ego, but truth doesn't care about those.

I'll summarize: If you believe any of the following, then JP is your man:

• There is no such thing as Objective Truth.
• Truth is whatever helps you survive.
• Being or State of Being is contingent on your acceptance of truth (little "t") and rejection of "evil" (little 'e').
• Evil is that which hinders you.
• Jesus represents a state of being, but not a person, and definitely NOT the Son of God (God being the Creator).
• Satan represents a state of being, but is not an actual fallen angel.
• Social hierarchies exist, however, if you are too low or high, that's evil. The goal is the middle, that's where "good" is.
• All ideas of God / gods are simply mankind's attempts to explain states of being.
• Belonging to a "group" will negatively affect your being.
• All concepts of "good", "evil", God, Being, heaven / hell can be unified and coalesced into one concept...the one JP supports.

I could keep going. However, if you find these concepts appealing, then JP is your man. If, like me, you find these ideas to be irrational, nonsensical, demonstrably wrong, the opposite of your beliefs, etc., and you've been influenced by JP, then read "Jordanetics" and see for yourself...

To those who wrote negative reviews; I read them. I was where you are...putting my meanings into what JP says. I feel pity for those who continue to base their support for JP because of "what they think he means", when what he actually means is there for everyone to find. However, like me, getting passed your ego and pride might be the toughest step for you to take. But take the challenge at take it...

In other words - Only the truth can withstand scrutiny.