Theodore Beale is an American computer game designer, technology entrepreneur, and writer. He is a member of the SFWA, Mensa and IGDA and was a founder of the electronic band Psykosonik, which recorded four Billboard Top 40 club play hits in the '90s. He has twice been a member of the SFWA's Nebula Novel Jury, has published four fantasy novels, and is a contributor to the Black Gate blog. He has also published a sci-fi novel and two non-fiction works under the pseudonym Vox Day. He first began writing under this name for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, where he wrote a weekly video game review column and other features. He presently uses the pen name for a weekly WorldNetDaily opinion column and has been nationally syndicated under it three times, once by Chronicle Features and twice by Universal Press Syndicate. He speaks four languages, English, German, Italian, and Japanese.
Beale graduated from Bucknell University in 1990 with double degrees in Economics and East Asian Studies and founded the industrial-techno band Psykosonik with Paul Sebastien in 1991. Psykosonik was signed to a recording contract with Wax Trax! Records and a publishing contract with TVT Records in 1992. In 1993, Beale and Andrew Lunstad founded a Minnesota-based video game company named Fenris Wolf, developer of the game Rebel Moon (1995) and the sequel Rebel Moon Rising (1997). Fenris Wolf was developing two games, Rebel Moon Revolution and Traveller for the Sega Dreamcast, when it closed in 1999 after a legal dispute with its retail publisher GT Interactive. In 1999, under the name Eternal Warriors, Beale and Lunstad released The War in Heaven, a Biblical video game published by Valusoft and distributed by GT Interactive. In 2008, under the name Vox Day, Beale published The Irrational Atheist: Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, a "nontheological" book devoted to criticizing the arguments presented in various books by atheist authors Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Michel Onfray. The book was named a 2007 Christmas recommendation by the conservative magazine, National Review. Beale is also an inventor and holds the design patent for WarMouse, a computer mouse that Engadget described as "the most advanced mouse we've ever seen."
Beale calls himself a Christian libertarian. He is primarily opposed to the political left, but also criticizes conservatives, especially for confusing legality with morality. He is opposed to neoconservative foreign policy and adheres to most conventional Libertarian party positions. He is a public advocate of drug legalization, opposes the war in Iraq as undeclared and unconstitutional, and has called for ending the Iraqi and Afghani military occupations since 2004. He often refers to the Republican and Democratic parties as "the bi-factional ruling party".
Economics
Beale is an Austrian School economist and is very critical of Marxist, Keynesian, and Monetarist economics. While he favors an economics-based approach to many areas outside of economics, he is skeptical of the actual ability of economists to measure the data by which economic decisions are made. He criticizes the statistical accuracy of both GDP and CPI, and has repeatedly claimed that the official Consumer Price Index underestimate the real rate of inflation by a factor of four or more. In September 2002, he correctly anticipated the global financial crisis, writing: "[T]here can be little doubt that the implosion of the equity markets will soon be followed by the pricking of the credit and real estate bubbles. As great financial houses such as Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase teeter on the edge of bankruptcy, it is well within the realm of possibility that the triple whammy of the equity, credit and real estate implosions will lead to the collapse of the entire global financial system." In 2009, on the 80th anniversary of Black Tuesday, he published The Return of the Great Depression, in which he blamed the 2008 financial crisis on outdated economic theories, declared that widespread reports of economic recovery were incorrect and claimed that "the world is in the early stages of a massive economic contraction." He is opposed to intellectual property rights and excessive electronic book prices.
Christian theology and atheism
Beale is a Christian who has publicly expressed skepticism about God's omniscience. In The Irrational Atheist, he wrote "it is important to note that the Christian God... makes no broad claims to omniscience." He coined the term "omniderigence", which describes the doctrine of Calvinists and others who believe that God is responsible for acts of evil as divine puppet mastery. In The Irrational Atheist he postulates a Game Designer God that is loosely based on the simulation hypothesis of Nick Bostrom as a potential answer to the theological problem of evil and also claims to refute the Euthyphro Dilemma. He describes the New Atheists as being "irrational" and "clowns of reason" and blames their non-belief in the existence of God on a "social autism" which he believes is the result of a mild form of Asperger's Syndrome.
Feminism and multiculturalism
Beale has argued that the notion of "women's rights" has led to an overall decrease in the social well-being of women: the right to work outside the home has led to an economic situation in which such secular employment is necessary; marriage is substantially delayed and sometimes denied; and abortion rights have led to the disproportionate abortion of unborn girls. Because of these liabilities, Beale has labeled "women's rights" a "disease that should be eradicated".With regard to abortion specifically, he has stated that, considering the 45 million American abortions performed since 1973, "the abortionettes have proven themselves to be the most lethal organization of the 20th century" and that "calling a feminist a feminazi is an insult to National Socialism" and that "even Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot are second-rate killers in comparison with Ms. Sanger, Ms. Friedan and Ms. Steinem."Beale has also written that the Judeo-Christian ethic offers better protection to women than other worldviews. Using the example of rape, Beale states that while, according to this ethic, "only a woman who is not entertaining the possibility of sex with a man can be considered a wholly innocent victim", rape is nevertheless believed to be a sin, and that "[n]either the Jew nor the Christian need hesitate before asserting the act of rape to be evil and justly holding the rapist accountable." By contrast, other faith traditions (and secularism as well) are not so unambiguous: "There may be a genuine moral argument against rape to be made outside of the Judeo-Christian ethic, but I have yet to hear it."Beale has also argued that extending the enforced gender quotas of Title IX to scientific professions would undermine the American scientific establishment.
In 2010, in a column entitled "The Revoluciónary is Right", Beale wrote that, as the notion of the social "melting pot" was first popularized by a foreigner for apologetical purposes, "Basing immigration policy on the idea of the melting pot is about as rational as setting foreign policy on the basis of the example set by the United Federation of Planets in Star Trek." Beale concluded that Americans would likely not "find the courage to consciously reject the myth of the melting pot and expel the Mexicans from the American Southwest, the Arabs from Detroit and the Somalis from Minneapolis," and would therefore be unable to "reclaim their traditional white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture."
