Oh am I conflicted in reviewing this book!

Let’s just establish a baseline: I absolutely recommend this book. I read it cover-to-cover in one day, and I feel like I got good value for the £12.99 that the paperback version cost me. I read it the day after I read the Nietzsche book and, for the first half of SJWADD at least, I kept thinking “this is much more like real philosophy than that Nietzsche bullshit” [1]. So, in light of the critique I’ll subject certain parts of it to, don’t lose sight of the fact that I like this book.

The reason I’m conflicted is that I respect Vox Day more than any other blogger [2] and many times in the past five years I’ve taken his advice. He’s one of the few writers out there who, should I find myself in disagreement with him, I’ll immediately start worrying that it’s probably me who is wrong [3]. Here’s a few examples of his influence:

• It was his articles on self-publishing that got me interested in making a professional job of Daygame Mastery in late 2013 and his then-fledging Castalia House publisher that gave me the idea of my own smaller-scale Sigma Wolf
• His adaptation of Roissy‘s sexual hierarchy is the one I adopted and in particular his concepts of sigma and gamma were extremely influential in my inner- and outer-game ideas
• I was aboard the Trump Train long before the first Republican primary but Vox was one of the steady voices whose analysis of polls and voting reassured me I wasn’t crazy in thinking he’d win (Bill Mitchell, Scott Adams, Heartiste, and Mike Cernovich were others). I won £5k backing him.
• I was mostly Alt-Right back in 2008 but Vox’s constant promotion of Christianity has encouraged me to become a “cultural Christian” in that I don’t believe in God but I strongly support Christendom.
• I watched every one of his Darkstream periscopes and was positively impacted by his moral fortitude, humility (while he’s not given to false modesty, either), work-rate, and tireless working behind the scenes to promote Alt-tech and organise against Leftist narratives [4]
• Vox’s prodigious reading and writing gave me encouragement towards my own long-standing desires to keep up my reading and writing.

So, after reading that it sounds I’ve got my nose right up his brown-eye does it not? Well, before I get into anything critical about SJWADD let’s first look at what I thought the book did well. Perhaps time for some context.

Vox uses his blog as a test bed for ideas so, if you read him as long as I have, you’ll see him introducing concepts, fumbling towards the core ideas, and his numerous regular commentators debating him. Over time this crowd-sourced debate leads to elegant and precise theories. For example, I remember he used to talk of the SFWA crowd as “the rabbit people” and that debate led to the crossover of r/K and SJW that is pursued in SJWADD. I remember the term “secret king” emerge through a series of comments under his posts on gamma males.

One outcome of this crowd-sourcing was the three laws of SJW:

• SJWs always lie
• SJWs always double down
• SJWs always project

Vox has presumably planned a trilogy of books with each taking it’s title from a law, because SJWADD is the sequel to SJWs Always Lie [5]. What Vox has done with this series is to extract the results of his blogging into a structured book format to give it both permanence and a little extra polish. This is both its strength and weakness.

The obvious main strength is he has originated new ideas, streamlined the concepts, and subjected them to a peer review before even writing the book. We thus get some mature theorising that can already anticipate and rebuff the most obvious critiques. I like that.

The second main strength is at the meta-level. Vox is well into his military history and table-top gaming (Advanced Squad Leader, I believe). He is a strategic thinker who applies the lessons of military history to his own work. One recent Castalia House publishing effort has been towards popularising the concept of 4th Generation Warfare (I reviewed one here) in which a key takeaway is the importance of capturing the moral high ground and maintaining troop morale. This was succinctly put in one of his Darkstreams. I paraphrase:

“There have always been folk tales of dragons attacking the tribe and heroes going out to fight them. The point of those stories is not to teach the young that dragons exist. The point is to teach them the dragons can be killed.”

This is the role of morale in warfare. Marx knew this full well, which Mises points out in the introduction to his book Socialism in which he outlines the three memetic inspirations Marx added to the otherwise moribund corpse of Utopianism which suddenly resurrected it and inflicted Marxism upon the masses. Read those three – they are all in the introduction – and you’ll see Marx was engaged in meme warfare to improve the morale of Utopians.

Vox gets this and therefore he avoids the defeatism of most “conservative” writers on Leftism. Most take the frame that the Left is attacking society, we are under threat, and this awesome menace is so terribly frighteningly awful. They are cowering before the dragon. Vox writes about the inevitability of winning (using one of Marx’s three memes against him) and goes so far as to repeatedly state the rhetorical mantra: The Alt-right is inevitable.

This meta-level tactic is best seen in Chapter 2, “Peak SJW and the Backlash of 2016” which is one long victory parade about Trump smashing Hillary. It may seem a bit crass and irrelevant in a book that advertises itself as “your guide to understanding, anticipating, and surviving SJW attacks” until you realise this is about morale. Before stepping into the cesspit of SJW evil, Vox wants to fortify your morale by reminding you that we are winning, and our winning is inevitable. We will rout the SJWs and cut them down as they flee in panic.

Something else I like about this book is its place in what I see as a growing convergence [6] in the modern alt-social sciences towards a Grand Unified Theory Of Everything. I say that somewhat facetiously. What I mean is this: SJWADD weaves the following strands into its fundamental framework of social life:

• The socio-sexual hierarchy
• Meme warfare, and its predecessor in Aristotle’s “Rhetoric”
• r/k mating strategy and its influence on politics and interactions
• narcissism

I believe the world is moving towards a better understanding of where Evil springs from. Vox’s thesis is that SJWs are a bizarre hybrid creature of r-selection, narcissism, Gamma ranking, and pseudo-rhetoric. In his chapter on “Understanding The SJW Mind” he explicitly draws these threads together to uncover why SJWs act in such evil, relentless and utterly stupid fashion. I agree with his analysis.

However the book has by now already begun to fall apart, something I noticed from Chapter 6 onwards. So, let me talk about the weaknesses.

The first is that this book was obviously rushed. I know this to be true because I watched his Darkstreams where he continually expressed frustration that his other projects were preventing him from finishing SJWADD [7]. I’m guessing that it was towards the end of chapter 5 where this crunch hit because the book nosedives in literary quality after that.

Not in quality of ideas, mind, they are still excellent. Rather, it’s evident that he went from writing new prose specially for the book to simply copy-pasting former posts into the document with only a cursory re-write. Chapter 7 is most obvious because his socio-sexual hierarchy text is almost word-for-word from his original 2010 blogpost, the Gamma discussion felt extremely familiar (though I can’t place it to a specific blog post), and then Chapter 8 on GamerGate feels like a rehash of tangentially-related history that assumes an incredible amount of preexisting knowledge on the ins-and-outs of the Hugo Awards that a new reader couldn’t possibly be expected to have.

It’s not just the copy-pasta. Chapters 1 thru 5 patiently lay out a case that builds organically and explains each concept as introduced. It has a logical flow as the five chapters combined are building into a coherent case. Vox then outlines the SJW Convergence Sequence which is the key value-add of the book (when assessed against the book’s stated goal). As I reached the end of chapter 5, I thought “this book is excellent!”.

It falls apart from there as it seems like it hasn’t had an editor. I know how Vox thinks because he has the same predilection as me towards hopping around topics and skipping links in the logical chain because he just assumes the reader can fill in the blanks themselves. The best way to smooth out these problems is to have test readers unfamiliar with the material to highlight points of confusion as they meet them [8]. There were many cases where SJWADD, a book intended to reach a wide audience, would benefit from precisely this process.

Some of the points of confusion are small, such as mentioning “secret king” without explaining what it means (p.134), as if it had already been addressed earlier in the book, or odd turns of phrase like “remember, nothing is ever forgotten or forgiven by a gamma” (p.135) when this wasn’t first explained for us to now remember.

Chapter 6 is mostly a discussion of logical fallacies employed by SJWs, using Aristotle as the guide. This could be considerably clearer. It feels like Vox wrote an essay to trace SJW tactics back to Aristotle (which he does admirably) and then just threw it into this book. It feels out of place stylistically (though not intellectually). In the previous chapter there’s a cleanly-written outline of the SJW Convergence Sequence using pertinent modern examples and an emphasis on clear exposition so that a newcomer can follow the argument and appreciate its modern-day relevance. In contrast, the Aristotle chapter is scholarly and archaic with unnecessarily obtuse language. The “individual SJW tactics” that follow are clearer but not as patiently explained nor demonstrated through examples as is the Convergence Sequence.

Am I nit-picking? Yeah, probably. These are not game-breakers, just a sign of being a bit rushed.

Others things made me feel the book was wandering off topic, no longer being a guidebook to “anticipating the thought police”. From the mid-point his central developing argument is abandoned and instead replaced with a potpourri of concepts that are all interesting but aren’t coherently tied to the main thrust of anticipating the thought police. For example:

• Just after outlining the socio-sexual hierarchy, there follows a lengthy exploration of Gamma. “Great!” I thought, “he’ll tie that to examples of SJW behaviour or show how CEOs can filter for Gamma so as to keep them out of important roles”. What actually follows is advice on how to stop being gamma yourself (and a longer treatment of that in the appendix). This is good stuff but not really relevant to the book’s main thrust and thus a missed opportunity. It feels it was put in because it had already been written for other reasons and the author was too rushed to adapt it specifically for SJWADD.
• There’s a review of the Rapid Puppies exercise (p.147-156) which seems like it belongs more in a memoir or “history of SF/F” than SJWADD. It doesn’t really have any learning points or show how to keep SJWs out of your organisation. If anything, it just shows how to burn things down rather than save the institution.
• The ComicsGate discussion is focused on why SJWs are a problem and how destructive their entryism is, but doesn’t offer lessons. It’s descriptive not prescriptive. The bullet point lessons of GamerGate at the end are good but SJWADD would’ve really benefited from systematically applying them to the stories therein, not tagging them on the end. It was something Vox was doing great at in the first five chapters.

Okay, that’s enough. I don’t want to give the impression I disliked the book, because I thought it was excellent. I’m just faintly disappointed that a disciplined, systemic and original thinker like Vox couldn’t maintain the quality he’d started off with right the way through the book. I’m well-versed in all his ideas and own personal history of battling SJWs so I had no trouble following the book and filling in the blanks where needed. [9]

If you like the idea of a grand unified theory of everything that weaves together r/K, socio-sexual hierarchy, memes, and narcissism but on the topic of shagging birds rather than battling SJWs, you’ll love Daygame Infinite which you can buy here.

NEWS: I’ll be drinking heavily this weekend, out of town, with Team Krauser. Thus I’ll be a bit slower in fulfilling Infinite orders. Don’t worry, they’ll still get done by Monday (which is when printer opens offices again anyway).

[1] The more I think about it, the more I think Michael Tanner represents everything bad in philosophy and that Nietzsche was a worthless gamma hack who deserved the obscurity he seemed destined for.
[2] Yes, even more than the original Roissy.
[3] There are numerous times where I concluded I was right and he wasn’t, but the fact that I considered the disagreement itself to be grounds enough to look deeply into the topic is the sign of the esteem in which I hold him.
[4] Incidentally, it’s this organisational push which I like most about Roosh. He’s been good at building an alternative forum and various meet-up initiatives and troll jobs.
[5] Which I also read and enjoyed.
[6] In the normal sense of the word, e.g. how smart phones have converged calls, texts, browsing, cameras, video players into one device.
[7] I don’t fault him for that, he had a lot on his plate. Infogalactic, Alt Hero, Castalia House editing etc
[8] I did precisely this for Daygame Infinite and A Deplorable Cad.
[9] I’m not implying my books maintain their focus and quality any better than his either, so don’t read this as me trying to say I’m better.