Author: VD

This is what individualism looks like

Jordan Peterson’s me-first philosophy is NOT helping you or the society in which you live:

I feel like a ghost. I’m a 35-year-old woman, and I have nothing to show for it. My 20s and early 30s have been a twisting crisscross of moves all over the West Coast, a couple of brief stints abroad, multiple jobs in a mediocre role with no real upward track. I was also the poster child for serial monogamy. My most hopeful and longest lasting relationship (three and a half years, whoopee) ended two years ago. We moved to a new town (my fourth new city), created a home together, and then nose-dived into a traumatic breakup that launched me to my fifth and current city and who-knows-what-number job.

For all these years of quick changes and rash decisions, which I once rationalized as adventurous, exploratory, and living an “original life,” I have nothing to show for it. I have no wealth, and I’m now saddled with enough debt from all of my moves, poor decisions, and lack of career drive that I may never be able to retire. I have no career milestones and don’t care for my line of work all that much anyway, but now it’s my lifeline, as I only have enough savings to buy a hotel room for two nights. I have no family nearby, no long-term relationship built on years of mutual growth and shared experiences, no children. While I make friends easily, I’ve left most of my friends behind in each city I’ve moved from while they’ve continued to grow deep roots: marriages, homeownership, career growth, community, families, children. I have a few close girlfriends, for which I am grateful, but life keeps getting busier and our conversations are now months apart. Most of my nights are spent alone with my cat (cue the cliché).

I used to consider myself creative — a good writer, poetic, passionate, curious. Now, after many years of demanding yet uninspiring jobs, multiple heartbreaks, move after move, financial woes, I’m quite frankly exhausted. I can barely remember to buy dish soap let alone contemplate humanity or be inspired by Anaïs Nin’s diaries. Honestly, I find artists offensive because I’m jealous and don’t understand how I landed this far away from myself…. I used to think I was the one who had it all figured out. Adventurous life in the city! Traveling the world! Making memories! Now I feel incredibly hollow. And foolish. How can I make a future for myself that I can get excited about out of these wasted years?  What reserves or identity can I draw from when I feel like I’ve accrued nothing up to this point with my life choices?

Man is not a solitary creature. He thrives best when surrounded by his own herd, his own pack, his own kind. This is not “collectivism” or “statism”, and group identity is not “pathological”, it is, to the contrary, the epitome of healthy and normal humanity.

Putting individualism first and foremost is a good way to end up broke, friendless, and feeling that you’ve wasted your life.

Darkstream: Dealing with deplatforming

One of the interesting things about this particular Bookstream was that it was initially ad-limited, presumably by a YT algorithm that was set to trigger on either the word “deplatforming” or “SJW”. My assumption would be the latter, as there has been an attempt by SJWs to rule the word officially out of bounds as excessively pejorative.

(Which, you will note, underlines how foolish all the dialectic-speakers who kept trying to think up awkward alternatives to what has proven to be extremely effective rhetoric.)

This is why I encourage everyone who subscribes to the Darkstream on YT to also follow me on the Stream.Me channel as a backup. Anyhow, I didn’t bother asking for a review of the limit because I have no idea what the advertiser preferences are. That’s why it was a surprise to see that the ad-limitation had already been lifted this morning, even though I knew there was absolutely nothing even remotely objectionable in the video itself. It appears sanity prevailed for the time being.

Speaking of deplatformings, the third torpedo in the Indiegogo campaign is off and away and the fourth will be launched later today. If you don’t resist each and every deplatforming attempt and make it brutally not worth their investment of time, effort, and legal expenses to target you, you can be relatively certain that another will soon follow. 

Confessions of a gamma

I understand why masculinity is under attack because I used to attack it. I once rejected all things masculine because I was bitter that I couldn’t be a protector or leader. I let my jealousy of strong men turn into hatred and resentment. It was a miserable way to live.
– Andy Ngo

Sounds like someone graduated to delta. Or is at least on the way. Gammas are always bitter and envious. That’s why they constantly accuse everyone else of jealousy. They can’t fathom a state of being that isn’t full of it.

The Wall 2029

The Israeli Prime Minister shows Americans what they can look forward to on their southern border, hopefully in less than 10 years. 

Completed in 2012, the 200km Egyptian border fence cut illegal immigration to almost zero.

SJWAL audiobook now at Arkhaven

Expect to see a lot of these notices over the next few months as we make more and more of our 40+ audiobook library available direct. Anyhow, SJWAL narrated by Bob Allen is now available at the Arkhaven store for $14.99 in high-quality MP4 format.

It’s the first of the formerly exclusive-to-Audible titles we’ve been able to make available this way, and it will be followed by many more in due time.

Please note that the audiobooks we sell often includes a copy of the ebook in both EPUB and MOBI formats for Kindle. I’ll probably be doing a Bookstream tonight to discuss the audiobook in light of the latest deplatformings. Also, speaking of deplatformings, if you’re a Darkstream subscriber, be sure to sign up to Stream.Me and follow my channel there. Just trust me on this one and recall that I am seldom insistent about these sorts of things if I don’t have a good reason to be.

Count Dankula ???????
‏So I wake up this morning, all happy that I hit 400k subs, I then see that I have a DM from a Buzzfeed reporter, asking about my monetization, I found this strange, so I checked, and @TeamYouTube have demonetized everything on my channel, everything.

Notice the media-platform tag team. It appears to have been the same thing with NPR, Bleeding Cool and Indiegogo. The media reports on something they don’t like, whether it is a successful comic book campaign or 400k subscribers for a badthinker, then the technology company deplatforms the target, sometimes without even waiting for the media report to stir up public protests against it.

When this happens, you have to strike back and strike back hard. It’s difficult for Americans to do so, which is why it is incumbent upon those of us outside of the US judicial system, where the laws are considerably less favorable to the technology platforms doing whatever the hell they want to whomever they want whenever they want, to do so.

Take screenshots every single day. Keep every single email. Build your case against them before the deplatforming or demonetization takes place. Don’t just be a hard target, don’t just be a bump in the road, be a freaking land mine capable of sending a tank flying.

Appeal to an amenable authority

As described in SJWAL, SJWs successfully swarm Roku in order to deplatform Alex Jones again:

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has been removed from Roku after the streaming platform faced fierce criticism from users, the New York Times reports.

Last year, Jones’ InfoWars channel, as well as his other media projects, were scrubbed from most major social media platforms and streaming services for violating various rules and standards. However, this week, Jones’ free channel became available on Roku devices, which are used by about 27 million people.

“After the InfoWars channel became available, we heard from concerned parties and have determined that the channel should be removed from our platform,” Roku said in a statement.

“Deletion from the channel store and platform has begun and will be completed shortly.”

You can’t run because they won’t let you run. You can’t hide because they are actively seeking out every last violator of the Narrative.

So you might as well fight.

The cognitive gap in coaching

SJWs in the sports media are perturbed that the new emphasis on offense in the NFL is rapidly proving to be raciss:

There’s an exceedingly narrow path to becoming an NFL head coach at a young age, as Kingsbury, Kitchens and LaFleur have done, and the first step on the drawbridge—the prerequisite—is privilege. That necessarily leaves a number of boys, white and black, on the outside looking in. At an immediate deficit are those from single-parent homes, those whose fathers aren’t coaches, those who aren’t surrounded by advocates and resources and examples of professional success in close proximity.

As a result, the game suffers. When the pool of candidates in any field is narrowed by pedigree, connections and nepotism, many of the best potential candidates are never seeing the light of day.

The statistics tell us the boys in this group are disproportionately children of color, and the history tells us that America’s legacy of chattel slavery, Jim Crow, the War on Drugs, and every other manifestation of systemic oppression of African-Americans in this country is a direct influence on the station of the typical black child in America.

This is only part of the problem, of course. The argument can be made that white coaches may appeal more to predominantly white decision-makers, whether those decisions are conscious or unconscious, the result of intentional racial bias or bias unknown to the boss himself. An equally compelling argument could be made that black coaching candidates are held to higher standards than white candidates.

The reality is that as the complexity of offenses grows, the cognitive floor required for coaches and offensive coordinators rises as well. This is going to make it more and more difficult for black coaches, black coordinators, and even black quarterbacks, to be successful, no matter how much affirmative action is imposed in the sacred name of Rooney. It’s not an accident that Bill Belichick has been the most successful coach of the last 20 years, because he is also the smartest and most innovative coach of the last 20 years. And the smarter the coach is, the smarter he is comfortable having his coordinators, his assistants, and his players be.

In the current era of NFL football, intelligence is increasingly necessary for success in order to counteract the exceptional athleticism that is now available to every team. The athletic arms race has resulted in near-equality across the league, so schematics, pattern recognition, and rapid decision-making has risen to the fore.

Former Vikings coach Denny Green was an excellent example of a good coach with cognitive limitations that put a ceiling on his success. He was a smart, hard-working man who was well-liked by his players and by the public. No Vikings fan will ever forget his “leather is sexy” commercial for Wilson’s. He created the now-ubiquitous Tuesday charity routine that most teams now embrace. He was always prepared, he did a very good job of building and drilling a team, and he was usually outcoached in the playoffs by smarter coaches who were more capable of quickly outthinking and making in-game adjustments. He was who we thought he was and we liked him for it anyways.

The SJWs are in a catch-22 here. They can try to create a false narrative that black coaching candidates are held to higher standards than white candidates, but the observable reality is that black coaches are held to lower standards than white coaches. No white coach was going to be given two seasons to go 1-31 without losing his job like Hue Jackson was. Few white coaches as mediocre as Marv Lewis are permitted to hold onto their job for 16 years with a .504 winning percentage while going winless in the postseason.

Given the offense-heavy rules of the game and the increasing cognitive burden it imposes on coaches, quarterbacks, and offensive players, the more blacks are pushed into those positions, the more they are going to very visibly fail. The irony is that in order to have a cognitively-limited black quarterback succeed in the NFL these days, the more likely it is that a team will require a white coach who is more intelligent than his peers.

Dividing and conquering

The attempts to defend the reprehensible, misandric Gillette commercial are just another form of trying to prevent white men from forming a political identity of their own to compete with all the other identity groups striving for power in the West:

When did simply suggesting that people conduct themselves with common decency become enough to spark public outrage? As part of a new campaign against toxic masculinity, Gillette have decided to put some weight behind their 30-year-old ‘the best a man can get’ tagline by putting out an advert that encourages men to be the best people they can be as well. Smart, right? Well, actually, it turns out that they have potentially lost themselves a fair few customers, with men’s rights activists and far right campaigners crying on Twitter over claims of ‘emasculation’, while threatening to never purchase a Gillette razor again.

But, as their advert and accompanying statement so aptly points out, ‘turn on the news today and it’s easy to believe that men are not at their best.’ And, while it may be a bit exploitative of the #MeToo movement, their prompt to their consumers to try to change this seems entirely reasonable. As marketing campaigns go, it’s probably one of the most poignant that we’ve seen in a while. From the handling of the classic ‘boys will be boys’ excuse for misbehaviour to the notion that men should be working to set a new example for the younger generation, the advert’s proposals for a revised understanding of what it means to be a ‘good’ man navigate the thorny issues of gender inequality extremely well.

So, to be frank, if people are offended by the advert, then they are probably part of the problem. Gillette’s campaign isn’t an attack on masculinity or men; it’s simply an attempt to eradicate the toxic behaviours that have become commonplace and assumed as ‘normal’ in our patriarchal society. No one is taking away the beer, the barbeques or whatever else men have seen in the advert that has caused them to have meltdown over razor blades. They’re just telling men to be nice.

Notice how everyone from Jordan Peterson to this Gillette defender are telling white men to be INDIVIDUALS, to refrain from embracing their evil IDENTITY and engaging in any COLLECTIVE attempts to defend themselves and their interests.

This is not an accident. This is not about helping those men. This is about neutering and neutralizing white men. This is about dividing and conquering white men, often with the assistance of foolish white women.

Don’t fall for it.

An onslaught of audiobooks

The good news is that Audible graciously granted our request to make ALL of our audiobooks nonexclusive with them, which means that we can start offering them for sale on the Arkhaven store. This is great because we can sell them in a much higher-quality DRM-free MP4 format, which is both 4x better in audio terms and considerably more flexible in terms of the audiobook readers and audio players that can handle it.

For example, you can simply copy the file onto a USB stick and listen to it in your car.

However, since we have more than 40 audiobooks to convert to our preferred format and our Audio Editor is very busy editing the massive A Throne of Bones audiobook, we could use three volunteer audio interns to help us mass-convert the original audio files into the correct format. If you are a) interested, b) modestly competent technically and c) in possession of a reasonably modern Macintosh computer, please shoot me an email letting me know. If you’re on Windows or Linux, please do not volunteer, as the necessary software is Mac-only.

UPDATE: we now have more volunteers than we required. Thanks to everyone who contacted us. The Audio Editor will be in touch with you shortly.

One problem with the new format that we are currently sorting out is the way in which the iPhone’s walled garden attempts to prevent iPhone users from putting MP4 files on their iPhones. So far, the best alternative we have found is Bookmobile for iOS, which costs $4 in the App Store.

On Android we recommend Voice Audiobook Player, which is free in the Google Play Store. But we recommend that you read our complete post concerning instructions for audio books on the various platforms

Here’s what you need to do in order to play our .mp4 format audio books on different platforms. But first of all: On any platform, do not simply click the link and start listening to it in the browser’s internal player that will launch when you do. It will begin playing the file correctly, but eventually it will choke due to the very large length of the audiobook file. In all platforms, you need to download the file in one way or the other. Remember that the links will expire in a month. You will want to have the file in your own storage by that time.

UPDATE: SJWs Always Lie is now available in audiobook at the Arkhaven store.