Year: 2023

With Tongues of Neoclowns

European puppets are speaking words that are literally put into their mouths. Notice the particular choice of language utilized by the EU commissioner that is being specifically criticized by the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov:

In a desperate attempt to assert its dominance by punishing the disobedient, the United States has moved to destroy globalization, which for many years it extolled as the greatest good of all mankind.

Now the United States and its allies blacklist anyone who dissents from their “golden billion” and tell the rest of the world, “those who are not with us are against us”.

Yet the “Western minority” has no right to speak for the entire world.

Its “rules-based order” amounts to rejection of sovereign equality, the key principle of the United Nations Charter, as evidenced by European Union commissioner Josep Borrell’s infamous statement about the European “garden” and the “jungle” outside it.

In addition to the string of United States military “adventures” from Yugoslavia and Iraq to Libya, the worst violation of the United Nations Charter was its meddling in the affairs of post-Soviet states,

As examples are the “color revolutions” in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan and the 2014 coup in Kiev.

The garden and the jungle is a geopolitical metaphor popularized by Robert Kagan, the neoclown intellectual who writes deceptive little instructional pamphlets that inform Clown World leaders what rhetoric they should be utilizing and also happens to be married to the notorious neoclown color revolutionary, Victoria Nuland.

While “the rule of the jungle” first appeared in George Bush’s “New World Order” speech in 1991, there is not a single reference to the jungle/garden metaphor in either Present Dangers (2000) or The Return of History and the End of Dreams (2009). But the metaphor is the framework for The Jungle Grows Back (2018), which concludes thusly:

The liberal order is as precarious as it is precious. It is a garden that needs constant tending lest the jungle grow back and engulf us all.

Based on Lavrov’s criticism, the Russians are clearly aware of the servile nature of those who speak with the tongues of neoclowns. And they’re clearly not inclined to accept the imposition of the new narrative upon “the jungle” either.

Moscow will not abide by the “so-called rules” invented and imposed by “certain countries,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday, as he delivered a speech at a meeting of Russia’s Council of Legislators in St. Petersburg.

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Two Years of Arktoons!

ALT★HERO Episode 69: The Italian Issue
SILENZIOSA Episode 31: The Last Gasp
GORGO Episode 12: New Waters
AESOP’S FABLES Episode 1: The Wolf and the Lamb
FULLSTRIKE! Episode 3: Ninjas in the Rafters
GIVE MY REGARDS TO BLACK JACK Episodes 1-2: Introduction / The Top One Percent
FRIDAY FISH FUNNIES Episode 17: Wet Noodle
FLYING SPARKS Episode 69: In Enemy Territory
BOVODAR & THE BEARS Episode 21: You Are Nothing But a Savage
上嫁小鼠 插曲 1
NEURAL NETWORK NOVELLAS Episode 15: Wanted: Dead Man
CHUCK DIXON PRESENTS: ADVENTURE Episode 73: The Brigand
VEGFOLK FABLES Episode 221: The Arkhaven Anniversary Amplification
三更战 插曲 1
TREASURY OF TALES Episode 1: Old Mother Hubbard and Her Dog
CHATEAU GRIEF Episode 233: Fleambuoyant
THE SWORD OF GOD Episode 56: Ballroom Blitz
THE SIEGE OF THE BLACK CITADEL Episode 3: The Man for the Task
FRANKENSTEIN – THE RETURN Episode 1: Rebirth of the Monster
THE HAMMER OF FREEDOM 2 Episode 1: Lambs to the Slaughter

Congratulations to everyone involved. You are making a difference all around the world, whether you realize it or not. And yes, the production team should probably be sanity-tested after deciding to release 20 – TWENTY – new episodes today. Can you imagine what ideas they’ll come up with to celebrate our 25th Anniversary?

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End No-Fault Divorce

Ending no-fault divorce would be a very, very big winner for Republicans if they are smart enough to fully embrace the issue:

Now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned, Republicans are already looking ahead to their next moral crusades, and it sure looks like they’ve found one in… divorce. A new report from Media Matters for America shows a rising trend of right-wing influencers and Republican leaders and politicians, including U.S. Senate candidate J.D. Vance, advocating for the end of no-fault divorce—a policy that allows people to end a marriage without being required to prove wrongdoing by their partner, including adultery, abuse, or desertion.

No-fault divorce, which was first enacted in California in 1969, has always been a feminist issue. It’s allowed domestic abuse victims to leave a bad marriage without onerous barriers, and it certainly empowers women and all people to escape legally binding situations with someone they don’t love. One would think no-fault divorce is a no-brainer—a completely non-controversial issue decided half a century ago.

But Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion in the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe very clearly opened the door for further rights, particularly around marriage, to be reversed. “We have a duty to correct the error established in those precedents,” he wrote, while specifically calling the Griswold v. Connecticut (1965, birth control), Lawrence v. Texas (2003, same-sex intimacy), and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015, same-sex marriage) decisions “demonstrably erroneous.” And already, the Texas Republican Party—the same people currently suing the Biden administration for the right to let pregnant people die—includes a proposal “to rescind unilateral no-fault divorce laws and support covenant marriage and to pass legislation extending the period of time in which a divorce may occur to six months after the date of filing for divorce” in its 2022 party platform.

Ironically, marriage is one of the only contracts into which one can enter without being held liable to the terms of the agreement. Using an Internet site is literally more contractually binding, which only underlies the absolute absurdity of the legality of divorces that allow one party to unilaterally break the contract for no reason and without any penalties.

The fact that the feminist media is already worried about this possible development demonstrates how effective a wedge issue it would be for Republicans.

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Never Relax the Rules

An SGer suggests a Clean Speech exception:

Now BB is back on Twitter, we may need a special CS exemption for quoting him. Basically impossible otherwise. Globe, payments for male encounters, you get the idea.

My response:

No exceptions, no exemptions. In fact, if you were a moderator, you’d lose your position just for suggesting this. This sort of special exception is precisely how the rot always begins.

Now, there is nothing wrong with a SocialGalactic user throwing out ideas, regardless of whether they are good or not. The site is an autocracy and the users have absolutely no power to change anything. However, it’s important to understand that sort of suggestion is a red flag and the mindset behind it is potentially very dangerous because it is precisely the way that infiltrators always begin the process of changing an organization.

The problem is that most justifications for initial change not only sound reasonable, they are reasonable. But that is why those who are in charge of enforcing the rules need to be indifferent to reason and deaf to reasonable appeals to relax them. If you give ground on one core principle, you have laid the groundwork and provided part of the justification for the next retreat.

I would rather permanently ban every single UATV creator, including myself, from SG than relax its Clean Speech policy by so much as one emoji. I don’t care what Owen says on Twitter or on Gab; if anyone on SG wants to know what he has said, they can follow him on those alternate social media sites. Clean Speech is one of the most important attributes of SocialGalactic, and it is not a policy that is open to discussion or modification.

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Thursday Arktoons

CHATEAU GRIEF Episode 232: Whiskey Smash

TALES OF THE FENRIS WOLVES Episode 3: Poor Dirty Drek

STONETOSS Episode 184: Seeing Red

THE GOLDEN AGE Episode 4: Tritonic Neuroform Composition

Tomorrow marks the second anniversary of Arktoons. And while we haven’t completely conquered the world of comics yet, we’ve taken some significant steps forward while the competition has continued to implode. We’ll be marking the anniversary by launching some new comics, ending some hiatuses, adding some translated series, and beginning at 7 AM Eastern Time, we’ll be releasing a new episode every 30 minutes.

UPDATE: From the Dark Herald, some not-unrelated news.

IDW has been delisted from the stock exchange. Apparently, it was “voluntary.” Last I heard about 40% of the staff has been laid off.

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Enjoy Being Poor

The British people are told to shut up and accept their national impoverishment. But at least they’ll have the satisfaction of knowing their poverty was caused by choosing the wrong side and backing a certain loser:

British households and businesses need to accept that they are worse off and should stop asking for wage increases and pushing prices higher, the Bank of England’s chief economist, Huw Pill, said on Tuesday. According to Pill, “a series of inflationary shocks” generated by the pandemic, the conflict in Ukraine, and crop shortages have sent prices in the UK to a 40-year high. He claimed that in response to surging bills and other rising costs, workers and businesses are attempting to transfer the impact of inflation onto each other.

The neoliberal world order’s promised benefits to the nations of the West are failing at a remarkable rate. Remember, all of the nations of the West are suffering massive invasion and crime because importing foreigners was supposed to be good for their economies. Only it observably hasn’t been while the societal costs have been catastrophic. The end results have been the complete opposite of the shiny happy seculatopia that was promised.

And yet, there is an easy fix for most of the problems of Clown World, from the economy to the environment. And that is mass deportation on a scale that has seldom been seen before. It may be unthinkable at the moment, but it is inevitable because the alternative is chaos and violence that will ultimately produce the same results at a much higher price to everyone.

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Et tu, Argentina?

Argentina abandons the dollar in favor of the yuan for trade with China:

Argentina will aim to pay for the bulk of its monthly imports from China in yuan rather than US dollars, Economy Minister Sergio Massa announced on Wednesday. Buenos Aires and Beijing signed a currency swap agreement last year, aimed at stemming the outflow of foreign currency from Argentina’s central bank.

China is currently Argentina’s second largest trade partner after Brazil, and the second biggest destination for Argentinian exports. Argentina’s total imports from China was around $13.5bn in 2021, according to the United Nations database on international trade.

Massa said that Buenos Aires will pay the equivalent of $1 billion in yuan for Chinese goods and services this month, with $790 million of monthly imports paid for in yuan each month thereafter. The currency swap agreement, expanded and finalized earlier this year, also allows Argentinian exporters to make settlements in yuan or dollars, to help balance the flows of foreign currencies in the central bank.

Even the neoclown Robert Kagan warned of the potential consequences for the neoliberal world order if the USA were to abuse its privileged position, which it generally avoided doing between 1945 and 2020.

The success of the order, however, also depended on the United States abiding by some basic rules. Chief among these was that it not exploit the system it dominated to gain lasting economic advantages at the expense of the other powers in the order. Put simply, it could not use its military dominance to win the economic competition against fellow members of the order, nor could it treat the economic competition as a zero-sum game and insist on always winning.

The Jungle Grows Back, Robert Kagan, 2019

The decision to weaponize the dollar in lieu of challenging Russia directly in a military context may prove to be one of the more catastrophic errors in the history of empires. Astute historians such as Victor Davis Hanson have for some time been wondering exactly when, and where, the Imperial USA’s Syracuse moment of imperial overstretch would take place; in The Father of Us All, published in 2010, VDH argued that the Iraq War was not likely to be a serious candidate for the Moment.

Athens’s disastrous 415 B.C. expedition against Sicily, the largest democracy in the Greek world, may not prefigure our war in Iraq. (A hypothetical parallel to democratic Athens’s preemptive attack on the neutral, distant, far larger, and equally democratic Syracuse in the midst of an ongoing though dormant war with Sparta would be America’s dropping its struggle with al-Qaeda to invade India).

However, it increasingly appears that the attempt to control Russia using the leash of the dollar reserve system may have marked that long-anticipated Moment, as dropping its economic neutrality and putting pressure on the rest of the participants in the global economy in order to pressure Russia into withdrawing from Crimea and the Donbass, then doubling down on that mistake by financing the Kiev regime’s war appears to have been even more devastating to the neoliberal world order than an invasion of India.

UPDATE: The Global Times expresses China’s belief that de-dollarization is not merely desirable, but inevitable.

One of the most direct reasons behind the global de-dollarization trend is that the US has been increasingly weaponizing US dollar hegemony to impose economic sanctions as well as political repression. For instance, key Russia banks have been excluded from the SWIFT system, a service that facilitates global transactions among thousands of financial institutions.

What’s perhaps more surprising – and potentially worrying for Washington – is how expensive and scarce offshore US dollars are becoming. As the US Federal Reserve’s aggressive interest rate hikes hit global financial systems, an increasing amount of foreign capital flowed back to the US, leading to a global US dollar shortage. The US’ interest rate hikes and the resulting shortage of US dollars serve as another important factor driving more countries to push for a quicker pace of de-dollarization.

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Debt-Cancellation in Ancient Greece

Jesus said debts should be forgiven. So did the ancient Greeks, as Rev. Matt points out.

One of the most consistent arguments made against the policy of society wide debt forgiveness is this: “You need a Christian or believing (in the sense of ancient Israelite) nation for it to work. It cannot work in a nation like ours because it is non-Christian, so either people will not go for it, or they will abuse it and it will not work.” Almost every time I have made a case for debt forgiveness somebody makes this argument. But it is a fallacious one, both historically and logically.

It is fallacious logically because there is nothing inherent to many pagan philosophies saying that debt cannot be forgiven. Forgiveness, liberty and debt cancellation were all concepts that existed before either Israel or Christianity had graced the face of the earth. Indeed, the most ancient usage of words that can be translated as “liberty” were pagan words referring to debt forgiveness.

It is fallacious historically, because we have countless examples throughout history of ancient societies practicing debt forgiveness. From the ancient Sumerians, Akkadians, and other Near Eastern societies, on through to Greek city states and the Roman public, we see that debt forgiveness was either practiced, debated, or offered in various contexts. In fact, many ancient pagan leaders saw it, correctly, as an effective means of shoring up popular support for their reign, and limiting the damage their nobles could do to both their reign and their society.

Many examples of debt forgiveness in pagan societies can be given, here is one from ancient Athens,

“Now later writers observe that the ancient Athenians used to cover up the ugliness of things with auspicious and kindly terms, giving them polite and endearing names. Thus they called harlots “companions”, taxes “contributions”, the garrison of a city its “guard”, and the prison a “chamber”. But Solon was the first, it would seem, to use this device, when he called his cancelling of debts a “disburdenment”. For the first of his public measures was an enactment that existing debts should be remitted, and that in future no one should lend money on the person of a borrower.”

Debt enforcement and the refusal to cancel fraudulent debts such as student loans is neither moral nor Christian. Precisely how is it “progress” for a modern society to be observably less moral and less forgiving than ancient pagan societies?

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Color Revolution in Sudan

AUG 24, 2022 – US Ambassador appointed to Sudan following a 25 year absence.

SEPT 28, 2022 – US Ambassador warns Sudan against finalizing Russian naval base deal

NOV 11, 2022 – Blinken urges Sudan to consider “US support for the rapid formation of a civilian-led transitional governnent”.

DEC 5, 2022 – UN brokers Framework Agreement between Sudan’s military leaders and leading pro-democracy parties

DEC 7, 2022 – Blinken threatens travel ban for Sudanese who endanger Framework Agreement deal

FEB 12, 2023 – Sudan confirms deal for Russian naval base, key players Lavrov and General Burhan.

FEB 16, 2023 – CIA payout cash sent. Biden administration sends $218 million in humanitarian aid to Sudan.

MAR 9, 2023 – Coup plans finalized, orders given as Victoria Nuland visits Sudan to “discuss democracy”

APR 8, 2023 – Conflict escalates between Sudanese Armed Forces (under General Burhan) and paramilitary group RSF (under Dagalo)

APR 22, 2023 – US diplomats evacuate Sudan

APR 24, 2023 – Biden submits a War Powers Resolution to Congress regarding the Deployment of U.S. Military Forces to Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Sudan.

APR 25, 2023 – U.S. moves intelligence assets, troops into Africa.

This is precisely the process that what Victoria Nuland’s husband, Robert Kagan, describes as “tending the jungle on behalf of the garden of democracy” in his 2019 book The Jungle Grows Back.

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