Month: September 2019

They are coming for the geniuses

Jack Baruth addresses the ongoing cultural defenestration of Richard Stallman:

The idea of truly free software given to the world for humanitarian purposes would not exist without Stallman. He was the only person who ever had the thought. Which means it is more radical than calculus, heavier-than-air flight, the theory of relativity, or the atomic bomb. It took someone with Stallman’s particular blend of Promethean IQ and mentally handicapped social skills to push it all the way to reality. You live in Richard Stallman’s world, whether you like it or not. He has had more influence on how we communicate in 2019 than any other single human being currently living. Any sane society would consider him a national treasure of greater importance than Fort Knox, to be cherished and protected accordingly.

Naturally, our society has decided to crucify him. A young woman with an axe to grind has instigated a lynch mob through an astoundingly ill-conceived and illogical bit of emotionally dependent rhetoric:

There are so many things wrong with what Richard Stallman said I hardly know where to begin…

She totally can’t even!

There is nothing I have seen a man in tech do that a woman could not. What’s more, the woman would probably be less egotistical and more team-oriented about it.

This is how you know the author is a mental child. Any of us “could do” many things. I could have written any song, novel, or movie screenplay that has appeared between 1982 and now. Except I didn’t. The Egyptians could have invented the airplane and the laser and the K-cup coffee maker, but they didn’t. Only children deal in potential. Adults deal in reality.

Also, I hate to tell her this, and its embarrassing that I should be the one to lecture an MIT graduate on this, but teams are for normies, for neurotypicals, for trash people who can’t retain multiple levels of variable dereferencing in their heads while coding. Teams do not accomplish, and have never accomplished, anything of genuine intellectual value.

The history of scientific progress is a history of individuals. Yes, you need a “team” to actually assemble the atomic bomb or the Intel Itanium or a commercial software product. You don’t need a team to conceive it and do the mental heavy lifting. The effective IQ of a team is the same as the lowest IQ in the team; the productivity of the team is a minor percentage of the productivity you could get from its smartest member working alone. Every once in a while you will see one brilliant person be inspired by another brilliant person in the near vicinity. This happens once for every hundred million times a “team” crushes the abilities of its members.

Richard Stallman is, by all normal human standards, a complete lunatic. He also happens to be a genuine genius. And more to the point, by every sane human standard, Richard Stallman has done nothing wrong. While I think his postulations concerning possible defenses of Marvin Minsky’s alleged behavior are both a) incorrect and b) irrelevant, there is nothing remotely questionable or surprising about his formulating and expressing them.

Can you even imagine Richard Stallman being courted and corrupted by Jeffrey Epstein? That not only stretches the bounds of credibility, it’s got the potential to be a hilarious comedy sketch.

Epstein: Hey, Richard, do you like to party? I know some nice girls who would like to meet you.

Stallman: I would not be happy at a party. Especially not if it’s raining. You have a big face. Do you have a parrot?

Epstein: Um, no….

Stallman: Go away! Go away now!

But this isn’t a comedy sketch, it is today’s ugly reality.

On September 16, 2019, Richard M. Stallman, founder and president of the Free Software Foundation, resigned as president and from its board of directors.

He took his damn pills

I knew Jordan Peterson was going to find life difficult in the aftermath of Jordanetics, but it now appears that he took his own advice a little too enthusiastically:

Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist and anti-political-correctness crusader, has checked himself in to rehab in New York, his daughter has revealed.

The “12 Rules for Life” author has sought help trying to get off the anti-anxiety drug clonazepam, his daughter Mikhaila Peterson said in a video posted to her YouTube account Thursday.

“I’ve never seen my dad like this,” the 27-year-old diet blogger said in the eight-and-a-half-minute video. “He’s having a miserable time of it. It breaks my heart.”

The elder Peterson, 57, began taking the addictive medication to deal with stress from his wife’s battle with cancer and other health problems earlier this year, his daughter said.

Whatever the truth might be, it almost certainly isn’t what Peterson has been telling his daughter or anyone else. Remember, he is an inveterate liar and this is within the time frame in which he was still publicly going on about the health miracles of his new diet, upon which he never, ever cheats. My guess is that the stress of knowing tens of thousands of people have learned that he is an unmitigated fraud has been constantly eating away at his fragile psyche ever since the book came out last year.

Yes, his wife is ill, but since he’s a narcissist that’s not likely to be a significant factor in the state of his mental health. Just look at how he has successfully made his own wife’s cancer all about him. And no, I’m not even a little bit surprised by either the addiction or the resort to rehab; things will almost certainly get worse over time because Jordan Peterson can’t be cured by pills or rehab or Jungian psychotherapy. He needs to repent and to confess and to stop lying all the time. He needs Jesus Christ.

It is informative, however, to observe that all of those wicked individuals who have attempted to push a completely false narrative about Owen Benjamin’s psychological health somehow managed to completely miss Jordan Peterson’s breakdown even though I anticipated its inevitability more than a year ago.

  • It’s not an insult to observe that Jordan Peterson is mentally ill or that his mental illness has significantly influenced his worldview, his philosophy, and his most recent book. To the contrary, it is a highly pertinent fact. One does not need a PhD in psychiatry or anything else to observe that someone is crazy or to observe the effects of that craziness. Jordan Peterson isn’t wandering through the night with a knife in his hand muttering “don’t be evil” to himself, he’s doing an intellectual version of that by weeping on stage with a mic in his hand as he begs people to not be too ashamed to take their prescribed medication.
  • More and more people are becoming aware that Jordan Peterson is not only a liar, he is a complete lunatic who should be in a padded cell for his own protection.

Of all the words of screen and pen
The most painful are these:
Vox was right again.

Medieval History 101 Episode X

His supporters satirize his opponents’ anxiety about the extent of his power by calling President Trump “God-Emperor,” but the taunt is only effective because Americans are not supposed to want kings, never mind emperors. And yet, how else would one define the West? Can there be civilization without hierarchy? Can there be peace without an emperor? Throughout the Middle Ages, European Christians looked to Charlemagne as the model for the emperor who would defend Christendom and bring back the glories of Rome. How much did Charlemagne himself contribute to this ideal? Would the Franks of the eighth and ninth centuries have recognized later representations of Charles as emperor and king?

Medieval History 101 Episode X: Getting Medieval on the Emperor by the Grace of God. Episode Guide.

Following our lead

Maybe, just maybe, we knew what we were doing by setting up Unauthorized the way we did:

At the same time the government launched their probe, the top publishers in the country had gathered for an emergency summit in New York. Advertising dollars from 2015-2018 were slowly declining. 2019 trends were showing an alarming trend with programmatic revenues in freefall industry-wide. Ad revenue across publishing was down over 50{56510949195f95f693d0700c7df4a440f85fa77fe69050b28a344594aa03acbf}??? There’s gotta be an explanation for this?

Here’s the sticky-fingered culprit. Facebook has decided to sweep the leg on the entire industry, it’s actually happening now. But why now? The reason why is shockingly simple.

Google and Facebook are ad-supported businesses. They want to get you on their pages and keep you there at all costs. This puts them at odds with the publishing community, much of which is ad supported. Google. Facebook, and Amazon control 70{56510949195f95f693d0700c7df4a440f85fa77fe69050b28a344594aa03acbf} of all online ad dollars spent. The rest of the publishing world fights for scraps of the other 30{56510949195f95f693d0700c7df4a440f85fa77fe69050b28a344594aa03acbf}. But Google and Facebook got together last year and colluded with each other, asking a simple, shocking question, a question that prompted the anti-trust probe:

“What if we took it all?”

And these clowns actually agreed they should fuckin’ do it. Holy smokes.

The endgame is underway. Last Thursday, Rooster Teeth, a company I admire and have tremendous respect for laid off 50 people. To avoid the same fate publishers have absolutely littered their website with ads; Pop-ups, Auto-sound ads, the kitchen sink, to stay afloat. We haven’t followed suit. Frankly I’d rather die.

Fewer publishers, and the ones left must worship a new god. Sound familiar?

By taking it all, the Duopoly actually wins twice. Not only do they kill publishers and take their money, what’s left of the publishers who hang on will have no choice but to attach their skeleton crew to Facebook and Google for life support. Facebook will actually have the balls to play savior by creating, say, a ‘preferred publisher program’, anointing a handful of publishers as partners who will get traffic from FB and just enough ad revenue to survive. Then Facebook’s algorithm will only show you articles from those publishers that their algorithm thinks you want to see. Your entire internet consumption, as well as how you think and feel, will be dictated to you.

theCHIVE doesn’t have that option nor would we want it. Logically, if the ad-supported model is dying, we must diversify our business model. We must control our own destiny and diversify away from ad-supported to subscription model.

If you’ve noticed, we don’t advertise any of our projects anywhere. Arkhaven, Castalia, Infogalactic, VFM and Unauthorized all refuse to pay-to-play on Amazon, Facebook, Google, or anywhere else. We would rather rely upon our core supporters, focus upon serving them, and gradually grow that strong foundation than try to catch a big wave on Amazon or wherever.

Why? Because the wave belongs to the wave maker and is entirely under its control! We’ve seen, repeatedly, that even million-selling Amazon authors have ZERO support outside of Amazon. Their success is entirely in the hands of potentially hostile parties, which is why we’d rather have a small, but very reliable set of supporters than a large, but entirely unreliable one.

Build your own platform. Build your own market. TheCHIVE has belatedly realized what we knew all along: if people aren’t willing to pay for it directly, it isn’t worth doing in the first place. And if you haven’t subscribed to Unauthorized yet, you can do so here. And speaking of UATV, there is a new Chuck Dixon video on the upcoming Birds of Prey movie up now.  Yes, believe it or not, he wrote that comic too….

A publisher, not a platform

Facebook is trying to spin federal law and be protected by it too:

Facebook has invoked its free speech right as a publisher, insisting its ability to smear users as extremists is protected – but its legal immunity thus far has rested on a law that protects platforms, not publishers. Which is it?

Facebook has declared it has the right, as a publisher, to exercise its own free speech and bar conservative political performance artist Laura Loomer from its platform. Even calling her a dangerous extremist is allowed under the First Amendment, because it’s merely an opinion, Facebook claims in its motion to dismiss the lawsuit filed by Loomer.

But Facebook has always defined itself as a tech company providing a platform for users’ speech in the past, a definition that has come to appear increasingly ridiculous in the era of widespread politically-motivated censorship. Now, the not-so-neutral content platform has redefined itself as a publisher, equipped with a whole new set of rights – but bereft of the protections that have kept it safe from legal repercussions in the past.

“Under well-established law, neither Facebook nor any other publisher can be liable for failing to publish someone else’s message,” Facebook’s motion to dismiss Loomer’s defamation suit reads, justifying its decision to ban her from the platform. It also points out that terms like “dangerous” or “promoting hate” cannot be factually verified and are thus constitutionally protected opinions for a publisher – while claiming it never applied either term to Loomer, despite banning her from its platform under its “dangerous individuals” policy.

Defining itself as a publisher opens Facebook up to lawsuits for defamation and other liability for the content users publish, something they were previously immunized against. All the lies, personal attacks, and smears launched by users going forward can now be laid at Facebook’s feet. That’s a Pandora’s box they might not want to open, legal analyst and radio host Lionel told RT.

Whatever they say – platform or publisher – their words will haunt them legally from now on.

Platforms like Twitter, Google, and – until now, apparently – Facebook are protected from the legal consequences of their users’ speech by section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Facebook even makes reference to section 230 later in its motion, suggesting that it is trying to have its cake and eat it too.

As I have repeatedly pointed out, the legal departments of the SJW-converged tech companies are paper tigers. They are not at all accustomed to anyone standing up to them, they are riddled with diversity, and they are prone to flailing about dramatically and incoherently rather than articulating an internally consistent legal narrative.

Facebook cannot be both a platform and a publisher. Either it is a content-neutral platform or a publisher responsible for its content. In the Loomer case, it has clearly chosen to be a publisher and can now be held responsible for all the content it publishes.

On a not-completely-unrelated note, Indiegogo has announced new Terms of Use today.

Alt-Hero Volume 1

A backer requests a discussion thread:

Can we start a thread on the Alt-Hero Volume 1 Omnibus? Got mine in the mail.

They have gone out to US backers and we anticipate they will go out to UK/Europe/ROW next week. Discuss amongst yourselves.

Please to not Epstein

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe really, really, really doesn’t want to be Epsteined in prison:

“Will you take a deal in order to go on with the rest of your life if there is no big criminal attachment — you don’t have to do any time or anything like that?” CNN’s Chris Cuomo asked McCabe in an interview.

“Absolutely not, under any circumstances,” said McCabe, who joined CNN as an analyst Aug. 23.

“No deal?” Cuomo asked.

“Absolutely not, under any circumstances,” McCabe repeated.

Epstein assumed he was either too important or beyond their reach. McCabe obviously knows better.

Conservatives never learn

The British Conservatives are about to learn the lesson that US conservatives learned in the 2016 election.

Voters who back the Brexit Party at the next election would be helping put Jeremy Corbyn in No 10, Jacob Rees-Mogg warned last night.

The Leader of the House of Commons emphatically ruled out an alliance between the Tories and Nigel Farage in a snap poll.

He also issued a clear warning of the consequences for the Tories of Brexit not happening on October 31, saying the Brexit Party would be ‘full steam ahead’.

‘I don’t think a deal works,’ Mr Rees-Mogg told a Daily Telegraph event last night. ‘If we haven’t left by October 31, the Brexit Party won’t want to do a deal with us. If we have failed, the Brexit Party is full steam ahead.’

Urging Brexit Party supporters back to the Tory fold, he warned the audience to ‘think very hard’ before voting for it.

He added: ‘If you vote for the Brexit Party at the next election it is a vote effectively for Jeremy Corbyn.’

People stuck on binary analyses never see the third option coming. They also never seem to grasp that most people prefer open and avowed enemies to unreliable and traitorous allies.

If the leaders of the Conservative Party had any brains and actually valued political power, they would do two things. First, encourage Scottish independence. The only reason Labour ever had any power in Great Britain was due to the strong inclination of the Scots toward the Left. Once the Scottish electorate is excised from the British Parliament, Labour becomes as irrelevant as the Liberal Democrats have been historically.

Second, do a deal with the Brexit Party and build up a powerful Leave majority whether Brexit has taken place or not.

The fact that the Conservative leadership refuses to do either of these perfectly obvious things demonstrates very clearly that they are not serious about any of their professed principles. Like US conservatives, they have failed to conserve anything. They fully merit their future failure.

The end of air supremacy

The Yemeni attack on Saudi Arabia may mark a turning point in the 100-year history of air war:

Saudi Arabia spent billions to protect a kingdom built on oil but could not stop the suspected Iranian drone and missile attack, exposing gaps that even America’s most advanced weaponry failed to fill.

In addition to deciding whether that firepower should be turned on Iran in retaliation, the Saudis and their American allies must now figure out how to prevent a repeat of last weekend’s attack — or worse, such as an assault on the Saudis’ export facilities in the Persian Gulf or any of the desalination plants that supply drinking water.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was asked Wednesday on his way to Saudi Arabia how it was possible that the kingdom could have dropped its guard, failing to stop any of the low-flying cruise missiles or armed drones that struck the Abqaiq oil processing center — the largest of its kind in the world — and the Khurais oil field. Even the best air defenses sometimes fail, he replied….

Between 2014 and 2018, the Saudis ranked as the world’s No. 1 arms importer. In that period, they accounted for 22 percent of the United States’ global arms sales, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. In recent years they have acquired some of America’s top-shelf weapons, including F-15 fighter aircraft, Apache attack helicopters and the Patriot air defense systems.

None of that made a difference last weekend in the face of an attack that exposed Saudi weaknesses that might seem obvious in retrospect.

The undeniable fact of the matter is that the US is well behind Russia and China with regards to unmanned air war due to its historical supremacy in conventional manned air warfare. Because the US has focused on defending against threats of the sort that it poses to others, neither it nor its allies are prepared for “unconventional” attacks that avoid those defenses.

This is the usual pattern of military history, wherein a long-standing advantage is circumvented by technological and tactical innovations that eliminate the utility of the advantage. Think about the way in which the German U-boat circumvented the British Navy’s control of the oceans or how Wellington’s refusal to give battle at any time and place that was not of his choosing negated the massive numerical advantage of the French forces occupying Spain.