Author: VD

Colorblind Morality

The Dark Herald observes something about Netflix that I observed more than a decade ago:

The Flattened Moral Landscape

Earned moral weight has been exchanged for default moral ambiguity.

You can ask deeper questions in a fantasy. I know this act is evil, so can the result of this action ever truly be good? Am I doing what is necessary — Or am I simply justifying sin?

It’s legitimate to ask questions like that – BUT NOT IN TOLKIEN! No, Sauron is no way shape or form a Walter White character unless you are going to literally the beginning of time. He is not a morally complex and tragic figure, he is absolute corruption that can not be negotiated with, only destroyed. It’s that clarity that gives the Lord of the Rings moral weight.

Everything in all ways forever being shades of grey is a modern infection. And in fantasy’s case patient zero is Game of Thrones. Its massive (early) success spawned lazy imitations. In fairness to Martin he built a world that earns its moral ambiguity. Loyalties that conflict colliding with political realities that create consequences that felt grounded and irreversible.

The Netflix Formula will always sand everything down all the time. So naturally, morality is flattened too. If Evil loses its teeth, and Good loses its meaning then Choice loses its consequence.

As naturally as a duck swims, Hollywood looked at “Build a world where moral complexity emerges” and truncated it into, “Make everything morally gray.” When you have no moral conflict, you only have moral fog. So difficult choices become interchangeable decisions.

More simply, if nothing can matter, then nothing will be remembered.

The truths are eternal. Consider how his observations reflect my own about creators who cannot create:

It is rather remarkable, when you think about it. Abrams is no different than Brooks is no different than Scalzi. They are not only “creators” who cannot create, they are parasites who, regardless of their technical skills, cannot even successfully execute a paint-by-the-numbers imitation. Like a colorblind painter, their moral blindness renders them fundamentally incapable of utilizing a full moral palette.

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Baen’s End

Fandom Pulse observes that Baen Books appears to be entering its death spiral:

Baen Books built its name by doing what the rest of traditional publishing refused to do: publish military science fiction, hard sci-fi, and unapologetically entertaining genre fiction without a political litmus test. For over four decades, authors like David Weber, John Ringo, and Larry Correia found a home there that didn’t exist anywhere else in New York publishing. Readers showed up in massive numbers. The imprint meant something.

That era is ending.

The more difficult the economy, the more failures of weak, structurally-, and strategically-flawed organizations we’re going to see. Baen Books is not going to be the first publisher to close its doors post-2025, nor will it be the last. In fact, I think there are going to be a number of major shakeups in the publishing industry before 2030.

And the publishers that survive the hard times are going to be the 21st century giants. I don’t think too many people will be surprised when Castalia turns out to be one of them; unlike Baen, we were born in the darkness.

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SPACE FLEET ACADEMY Year 3

The deadliest lessons aren’t taught in class.

Third-year cadets don’t just take classes at Space Fleet Academy. They lead them.

Constantine Ramsey and his cohort are assigned to lead a first-year survival course in Earth’s most unforgiving wilderness, the first full-immersion program of its kind. No simulations. No instructors watching from a safe distance. Real terrain, real consequences, and a generation of raw recruits who don’t yet understand the difference between a mistake and a casualty.

Constantine knows the difference. He learned it the hard way.

But something is wrong in the backcountry. Equipment fails in ways it shouldn’t. First-years go missing on routes that should be clean. And when the threat stops looking like an accident, Constantine has to lead cadets who still trust authority against something that has already beaten the people who were supposed to protect them.

Year Three was supposed to be about preparation to become an officer. It turned into a test that no one expected.

The Mandate built the Academy to create leaders who make hard choices. In his third year as a cadet, Constantine is beginning to wonder if the hardest choice is deciding who the real enemy is.

Space Fleet Academy: Year Three is the fourth book in the BIOSTELLAR series and continues the military SF series perfect for fans of Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein, and The Expanse. The training wheels are gone. Now find out what these cadets are actually made of.

Available for Kindle, KU and audiobook.

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The End of Hollywood

Fandom Pulse contemplates the significance of what was demonstrated yesterday with the animated ATOB:

Big Hollywood animation budgets start at $100 million. Traditional 2D animation outsourced to South Korea or the Philippines runs into the tens of thousands per minute for anything at broadcast quality. That economic wall has kept independent animated projects in development hell for decades, talented creators with great source material who simply couldn’t afford to make the thing move. That wall just cracked.

Any indie comic artist sitting on years of finished panels now has a direct pipeline to animation at a fraction of traditional production costs. The storyboard problem, normally one of the most expensive phases of animation pre-production, is already solved. It’s called their back catalog.

The quality ceiling will keep rising as the models improve. Seedance 2.0 is one iteration. Whatever comes next will handle model collapse better, bridge shots more smoothly, and push output closer to broadcast standard without human cleanup. Day’s timeline revision from 18-24 months to “now” happened in a single experimental session. That pace doesn’t slow down.

Arkhaven has a deep library. A Throne of Bones, Midnight’s War, Alt-Hero, years of finished panels that are now, in practical terms, an animation pipeline waiting to be switched on. Day’s confidence that this becomes a feature film isn’t bravado. The math supports it.

It’s not there yet, but it’s coming, and it’s coming fast. And Arkhaven will be more than ready for it.

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The Satanic SPLC

Everything about Clown World is fake and gay. Especially their villains.

The U.S. Justice Department has announced an Indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center (“SPLC”). The indictment alleges SPLC secretly funneled MORE THAN $3 MILLION in funds to members of white supremacist and extremist groups.

The Justice Department alleges the civil rights group defrauded donors by using their money to fund the very extremism it claimed to be fighting, with payments of at least $3 million between 2014 and 2023 to people affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, the United Klans of America, the National Socialist Party of America and other extremist groups.

The satanists of Clown World always practice Order ab Chao, a deceitful strategy in which they create the problem in order to solve it. Covid-19 was one example of this; “white supremacy” is another, rabbis painting swastikas on their synagogues and blacks hanging nooses from their college dorm rooms are as well.

Not all victims are fake. But most of those whose victimizations you see reported in the media are, because playing-the-victim has worked since even before the so-called “Civil Rights era”.

UPDATE: Unite the Right is confirmed to have been a Clown World setup in the indictment. I’m not at all surprised. Richard Spencer was trying to get me to attend it and speak there. I suspect it’s only a matter of time before we learn for whom Nick Fuentes has been working and who is funding the fake “Patriot Front”.

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The Iran That Can Say No

The White House is blustering again after Iran refuses to fall for the “let’s negotiate” trick for the third time:

JD Vance remains at the White House as uncertainty surrounds whether he will depart for Pakistan, with Iran peace talks hanging in the balance less than 24 hours before the ceasefire expires.

Donald Trump claims he’s poised to resume bombing if Tehran refuses to come to the table, he told CNBC Tuesday morning.

Trump earlier this month threatened military action against Iran as part of his ultimatum over the Strait of Hormuz, but he then backed off and agreed to a two-week ceasefire instead.

Tehran has not made it clear whether their representatives will attend a peace summit in Islamabad, Pakistan before the ceasefire expires at 8pm ET Wednesday.

Senior White House officials plan to hold meetings today alongside the Vice President to determine a path forward, according to CNN.

Trump had previously said Vance was expected to depart Washington for Pakistan on Tuesday morning. Those plans were scrapped at the last minute as uncertainty grew over whether Iran would participate.

During his CNBC interview, the President said he ‘expects to be bombing Iran’ if talks fail by tomorrow’s deadline, adding ‘the military is raring to go.’

Trump added that he does not want to extend the ceasefire despite confusion over Tehran’s participation.

What confusion? Tehran said they there is no reason to negotiate. Neither the US nor Israel has fully complied with the ceasefire. The US probably has one, at most two big air offensives left and then it will be out of stand-off offensive missiles as well as defensive ones.

A 3GW military is not going to win a 5GW war.

UPDATE: And it’s TACO time again.

Donald Trump has waivered on his threat to bomb Iran by extending the US ceasefire, claiming the regime’s leadership is ‘seriously fractured.’ The decision is Trump’s fourth delay since the initial truce was announced on March 23. The President did not provide an exact deadline for the latest extension.

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Desperation in Defeat

Clown World appears to be losing any sense of perspective as its grasp on global power continues to slip away. None of these reports can be considered highly reliable, but there do appear to be some signs that we may be on the verge of finding out if nukes are real or not.

  1. In the last 24 hours, the U.S. military blasted out nearly 100 Emergency Action Messages (EAM’s) on its High-Frequency Global Communications System (HFGCS). These are the encrypted orders sent to nuclear submarines, strategic bombers, and missile launch crews. On a normal day, you get about 10. The Pentagon has issued ZERO public statement.
  2. A recent Wall Street Journal article — Behind Trump’s Public Bravado on the War, He Grapples With His Own Fears — reports that Trump’s spate of bizarre, vulgar, threatening posts on social media, e.g., threatening to end Iran as a civilization (implying the use of nuclear weapons), is simply a negotiating ploy — i.e., convince the Iranians that he is unstable and could do anything in order to convince Iran to make concessions. If that is genuinely Trump’s intention, it has backfired spectacularly. It has raised legitimate questions about his mental competence. Although Trump reportedly is terrified of getting bogged down in another forever war that he once vowed he would never do, I think he will order a new round of attacks in hopes that he will break Iran’s will to resist.
  3. On Saturday night, US Joint Chiefs of Staff Air Force general Dan Caine stormed out of an emergency meeting with Trump. Insiders indicate that Trump wanted to evoke the nuclear codes as a deterrence against Iran during the ceasefire talks in Islamabad. But General Caine refused and invoked the US Uniform Code of Military Justice, the UCMJ, claiming specifically Article 92, covering Failure to Obey. Inside the military we call that the “duty to refuse” clause, that if given an unlawful order, we have a duty to refuse… Apparently, the Joint Chiefs of Staff went ahead and invoked the Article 92 clause.
  4. The US military has abandoned its last base in Syria and Russian warships are now docking in Syria.

Could be legit, could be cover for invoking the removal of the Short Fat Trump, could be both, or it could be fake. Either way, things do appear to be moving toward some kind of short-term resolution in the next month.

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