Author: VD

JORDANETICS now in audio

JORDANETICS: A Journey Into the Mind of Humanity’s Greatest Thinker

by Vox Day

Narrated by: Thomas Landon

7 hours 32 minutes. $14.99. DRM-free MP3 format. Available only at the Arkhaven store.

Jordan Peterson is believed by many to be the greatest thinker that humanity has ever known. He is Father Figure, Philosopher-King, and Prophet to the millions of young men who are his most fervent fans and followers. He is the central figure of the Intellectual Dark Web, an academic celebrity, and an unparalleled media phenomenon who has shattered all conceptions of what it means to be modern celebrity in the Internet Age. He has thought thoughts that no man has ever thought before. He has dared to dream dreams that no man has ever dreamed before.

Of course, Jordan Peterson also happens to be a narcissist, a charlatan, and an intellectual con man who doesn’t even bother to learn the subjects upon which he lectures. He is a defender of free speech who silences other speakers, a fearless free-thinker who never hesitates to run away from debates, difficult questions, and controversial issues, a philosopher who rejects the conventional definition of truth, and a learned professor who has failed to read most of the great classics of the Western canon. He is, in short, a shameless and unrepentant fraud who lacks even a modicum of intellectual integrity.

But is Jordan Peterson more than a mere fraud? Is he something more sinister, more unbalanced, and even more dangerous? In JORDANETICS: A Journey Into the Mind of Humanity’s Greatest Thinker, political philosopher Vox Day delves deeply into the core philosophy that Jordan Peterson advocates in both his written works and his video lectures. In doing so, Day methodically builds a shocking case that will convince even the most skeptical Jordan Peterson supporter to reconsider both the man and his teachings.

Note: remember to turn NoScript off if you’re having trouble with your order. If it’s your first order, you may need to call your bank to tell them to approve the European charge.

There is a bonus in the Bookstream, when one of Richard Spencer’s little gamma pals shows up and demands that I talk to Spencer… apparently not realizing that Spencer ran away from a debate with me proposed by the Ralph Retort. And it seems 2VS is now running around telling people that I plagiarized… NN Taleb?

This is why there is no media or new media worth doing anymore. It’s all just grist for the drama mill.

Invasive species in Europe

It’s strange that scientists expect people to be concerned about the threat invasive species pose to the native squirrel population, but not the native human population.

Meet 9 Creepy Species That Pose Greatest Threat to Europe

Scientists have identified 66 species of plants and animals that pose the greatest threat to biodiversity and ecosystems. These species, entering and falling into new territories, displace the local flora and fauna.

Scientists considered eight species to be the most dangerous, another 40 to be high-risk, and 18 others to be medium-risk.

Species considered by the team of researchers included plants, terrestrial invertebrates and some marine and freshwater vertebrates and invertebrates.

This is just additional evidence that even those who affect to believe in evolution by natural selection don’t really believe in it.

How to spot a liar

Owen Benjamin explains:

Number one is a passive voice. Notice when someone doesn’t use the word “I”. Passive. Like saying “you”. When you add too many words, liars a lot of times are trying so hard not to be caught lying that they overdescribe things. They won’t say things like “I saw, I see”, those are direct, that’s direct language. It’s always passive. “You’d be inclined to believe that”. Liars also speak in the negative. Always understand that when a liar is speaking, they’re always simply trying to avoid being caught in a deception. They’re not trying to say anything, they’re only trying to evade. It’s like word judo.

So they don’t say what they saw, they say what they didn’t see. And they say “you”. It’s never “I”. Because when you say “I saw, I went, I am, I will” that is people hold you to that. That’s why Kennedy was like “We will go to the Moon. That’s very direct language.

Evasive language is when you say “the gun went off”. You don’t say “I shot someone”, you put all the onus on the object and not yourself. Like “you know how fast you were going?” “The car started accelerating.” No.  A liar is always trying to take everything off you and you’re never going to make a statement that can later proven to be false.

It’s so funny because if someone speaks clearly and strongly and with meaning, I am so much more likely to give them the benefit of the doubt as just being wrong than if someone speaks this way. The odds are really high that they are liars…. They also tend to stutter on the word “I” when they are lying. “I… I… I.”

I am immediately suspicious of anyone who will not answer a direct question or who begins evasive action. I knew Jordan Peterson was a liar due to his dishonest response to criticism on the IQ question, so when I saw his first video and witnessed his “I… I… I’ve been thinking so deeply about this for so long that I can’t possibly give you an answer”, that simply confirmed what I already knew. But it would have been enough to make me deeply suspicious of anything the man said.

Another tell is when they avoid precision with regards to quantities. They suddenly can’t remember what their IQ is, but somehow, they know it is really high! They can’t tell you how much they owe you, but they always know to the penny how much someone else owes them.

Financial blacklisting

Allum Bokhari traces it back to the credit card companies and the SPLC:

Crowdfunding platforms like Patreon, which allow online content creators to collect donations from their supporters, are frequently cast as the primary villains in financial blacklisting. Patreon’s recent ban of YouTuber Carl Benjamin, better known by his moniker Sargon of Akkad, triggered a crisis for the platform. Both donors and creators — including prominent atheist Sam Harris — quit the platform in protest, while Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin pledged to create an alternative platform that is pro-free speech.

But Patreon and other crowdfunding platforms are not the real villains. They are dependent on the whims of the credit card companies, something that was already apparent in August when Mastercard forced them to withdraw service from Robert Spencer. We now know that the credit card companies were also a factor in Patreon’s decision to boot Benjamin.

YouTuber and Patreon creator Matt Christiansen recently released a transcript of his conversation with Jacqueline Hart of Patreon about Benjamin’s ban. Hart frankly admits that the sensibilities of credit card companies play a key role in Patreon’s decisions.

Here’s an excerpt of that transcript:

JACQUELINE: The problem is is Patreon takes payments.  And while we are obviously supportive of the first amendment, there are other things that we have to consider. Our mission is to fund the creative class. In order to accomplish that mission we have to build a community of creators that are comfortable sharing a platform, and if we allow certain types of speech that some people would call free speech, then only creators that use Patreon that don’t mind their branding associated with that kind of speech would be those who use Patreon and we fail at our mission.  But secondly as a membership platform, payment processing is one of the core value propositions that we have. Payment processing depends on our ability to use the global payment network, and they have rules for what they will process.

MATT:  Are you telling me that this was Patreon’s decision then, or someone pressured you into this?

JACQUELINE:  No – this was entirely Patreon’s decision.  

MATT:  Well then I don’t understand passing the buck off to somebody else.  

JACQUELINE:  No, I’m not passing the buck off.  The thing is we have guidelines, but I’m trying to explain, #1 it is our mission to fund the creative class and obviously some people may not want to be associated.  

MATT:  Well if it’s your mission, then payment processors are irrelevant.  It’s your mission. That’s what you’re pursuing.

JACQUELINE:  We’re not visa and mastercard ourselves – we can’t just make the rules.  That’s what I’m saying – there is an extra layer there.

This “extra layer” places platforms like Patreon in an impossible position: abandon free speech or lose your ability to process payments. That’s also why so many free-speech alternatives to Patreon have failed: FreeStartr, Hatreon, MakerSupport, and SubscribeStar all tried to offer a more open platform, and were promptly dumped by the credit card companies. All are unable to do business.

This exposes the emptiness of establishment conservative arguments about the free market. Those who oppose Silicon Valley censorship aren’t allowed to just build their own alternative platforms. They must build their own global payment processing infrastructure to have any hope of restoring free speech online. That, or they must find a way to stop Visa, Mastercard and Discover from taking advice from the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and Color of Change.

I’m a little dubious that Patreon and other companies engaged in financial deplatforming are quite as innocent as Allum paints them here; it strikes me that they are really doing what they want to do and using the credit card companies as an excuse. But this financial deplatforming is unlikely to continue for long, as the political pressure is growing for the Republicans to do something about it, and it will probably not be long before we see the first successful legal action against a deplatforming platform, which should have a salutory chilling effect on those attempting to wage financial terrorism. Because that is quite literally what it is.

And perhaps more importantly, a number of Asian payment processors are extremely eager to move into the vacuum that is being created by the Third World-style unreliability and lack of accountability of their Western counterparts.

A satanic racial imperialist

In case you ever had any doubts about my complete rejection of Richard Spencer or why I identified him as a Fake Right anti-nationalist, this video should resolve them for you. This is a partial transcript of ‘The Richard Spencer Show: Moonraker’ with Mark Brahmin on HEELTURN

RICHARD SPENCER: This is our view of the world, this is what we do for you now, and this is our view for the future. At some point we need to put forth a legitimate vision and a legitimate platform, saying this is our answer to the world’s problems. I think there’s something to be said for such a vision.

CALLER: Ancient Greeks sacked cities and set fire to their homes. Modern paleocons say that there must be a homeland for all. They are gay. Nations rise and fall, we either live to colonize the stars or die honorably. Paleocons aren’t even right-wing.

RICHARD SPENCER: I basically agree with this criticism of what you could say is pan-nationalism. It’s almost like egalitarian nationalism, but it’s almost nationalism as egalitarianism. You know, every single little people will have an ethnostate homeland and we’ll all therefore kind of unify, or, you know, at least treat each other fairly, and kind of be unified, the friendship of peoples, you could say, and so on. I think there is something to be said for such a vision, and something at least rhetorically that we should call upon, and say that you have your ethnostate, this is what we want.

But as an actual ideology, I think it absolutely fails. This is not, this is simply not, how the world works. Nations and states are born, they live, they flourish, they decay and die. And we can’t just freeze the world as it is now and say nothing ever changes from here on out. No, we believe in an organic view of society. There is going to be life, and death, and decay, and victory, and defeat.

I think as an actual philosophy, this pan-nationalism has never, I’ve never had any interest in it. And also, one thing we can learn from the ancient world, we can also learn from the modern world as well, there are hegemonic power blocs across the world. That is not going to go anywhere. We aren’t going to just simply devolve into little statelets, or city states, or neighborhoods, whatever they want. There’s going to be big kahunas out there, who have more power than others, and are going to form the geopolitical world order. That just is what it is. We need to live in the world that exists and not just in some fantasy land.

MARK BRAHMIN: It’s also desirable. I mean, honestly, it’s also desirable. There is this famous parable in the Bible about the Tower of Babel. And the whole premise of that parable is that there are effectively these kind of non-Jewish figures whoa re trying to build a tower to go to the heavens. The Jewish god effectively sees them as a competitor, right?

RICHARD SPENCER: Right.

MARK BRAHMIN: He sends down his minions. He says lets go down and confuse their languages and disrupt them. So that Tower of Babel is kind of an ideal. That’s something that our adversaries wouldn’t want. When I say “the Tower of Babel” that would actually be a kind of unified culture. This unified language, or a common language, and common culture. We already have that to on extent or another, with English being a coommon language in the Western World. I think going in that direction, further in that direction, is actually a good thing.

RICHARD SPENCER: We need to flip all this supposed Biblical wisdom on its head. This is the paleocon answer: Oooh the Tower of Babel or whatever! It’s funny that a lot of these people are Catholics. No, we build structures that last a thousand years. That is what we do. We build the Tower of Babel. We build Rome and we centralize things and bring people together. And this can last a long time.

First, he doesn’t know what “pan-nationalism” means. He himself is actually a pan-national imperialist, and what he’s criticizing is genuine nationalism. Second, he’s not merely non-Christian and he wasn’t “confused about Brexit”, he openly supports globalist projects like the European Union and looks to the Tower of Babel as an ideal.

Spencer is no more on the side of Western civilization than Jordan Peterson or George Soros. He’s just another head of the globalist hydra.

Here we go again

Apparently Literally Who is uncontrollably attractive to niche journalists:

Last June, DC Comics announced that the company would be reviving their graphic and adult content imprint, Vertigo Comics. The relaunch was announced alongside several new titles which aimed to speak to current social issues, such as xenophobia in Eric Esquivel’s Border Town or sexual freedom in Tina Horn’s Safe Sex. One of the titles announced for this relaunch was Goddess Mode, a cyber punk adventure series written by Zoë Quinn with art provided by Robbi Rodriguez.

Recently, The Verge’s Laura Hudson conducted and  published an interview with Quinn. The published piece is a fairly standard promotional interview in which Quinn speaks at length on Goddess Mode in order to promote her book in the wake of the comic’s official release. Yet many readers were quick to point out that, while the piece itself was innocuous, there was a glowing omission: Hudson did not disclose her personal relationship with Quinn.

If there is anyone in the media who does not have a personal relationship with Zoe Quinn, please raise your hand. At least we can all look forward to the inevitable CSI-SVU episode about a crazed ComicsGater kidnapping the Zoe Quinn stand-in.

The ride never ends.

Universal liberal imperialism

As promised in last night’s Darkstream, I started reading Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism last night. I only read up to Chapter 8 before turning in, but so far, Hazony appears to be a genuine nationalist rather than a fake nationalist Neopalestine-Firster like Dennis Prager and Ben Shapiro. He makes some excellent observations, and while he so far has steered almost entirely clear of the heavy involvement of members of his nation in what he calls “the international liberal empire”, that’s not particularly important in light of the focus of his work on the intrinsic imperialism of universal liberalism.

MY LIBERAL FRIENDS AND colleagues do not seem to understand that the advancing liberal construction is a form of imperialism. But to anyone not already immersed in the new order, the resemblance is easy to see. Much like the pharaohs and the Babylonian kings, the Roman emperors and the Roman Catholic Church until well into the modern period, as well as the Marxists of the last century, liberals, too, have their grand theory about how they are going to bring peace and economic prosperity to the world by pulling down all the borders and uniting mankind under their own universal rule. Infatuated with the clarity and intellectual rigor of this vision, they disdain the laborious process of consulting with the multitude of nations they believe should embrace their view of what is right. And like other imperialists, they are quick to express disgust, contempt, and anger when their vision of peace and prosperity meets with opposition from those who they are sure would benefit immensely by simply submitting.

Liberal imperialism is not monolithic, of course. When President George H. W. Bush declared the arrival of a “new world order” after the demise of the Communist bloc, he had in mind a world in which America supplies the military might necessary to impose a “rule of law” emanating from the Security Council of the United Nations. Subsequent American presidents rejected this scheme, preferring a world order based on unilateral American action in consultation with European allies and others. Europeans, on the other hand, have preferred to speak of “transnationalism,” a view that sees the power of independent nations, America included, as being subordinated to the decisions of international judicial and administrative bodies based in Europe. These disagreements over how the international liberal empire is to be governed are often described as if they are historically novel, but this is hardly so. For the most part, they are simply the reincarnation of threadworn medieval debates between the emperor and the pope over how the international Catholic empire should be governed—with the role of the emperor being reprised by those (mostly Americans) who insist that authority must be concentrated in Washington, the political and military center; and the role of the papacy being played by those (mostly European, but also many American academics) who see ultimate authority as residing with the highest interpreters of the universal law, namely, the judicial institutions of the United Nations and the European Union.

These arguments within the camp of liberal imperialism raise pressing questions for the coming liberal construction of the West. But for those of us who remain unconvinced of the desirability of maintaining such a liberal empire, the most salient fact is what the parties to these disagreements have in common. For all their bickering, proponents of the liberal construction are united in endorsing a single imperialist vision: They wish to see a world in which liberal principles are codified as universal law and imposed on the nations, if necessary by force. This, they agree, is what will bring us universal peace and prosperity.

The book so far almost reads like something John Red Eagle and I might have written as a follow-up to Cuckservative. It’s definitely something Castalia House would not have hesitated to publish. A warning for libertarians, though. You will find yourself distinctly disappointed, if not outright angered, by the positions espoused by Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek with regards to liberal imperialism.

It also makes me suspect that Hazony’s tangential attack on globalism as a particularly virulent form of imperialism might prove to be more effective rhetoric than attacking it directly in its own right.

Breaking the SPLC

It’s long past time that victims of anti-American thought policing began waging lawfare against the con artists of the SPLC:

In December 2018, a Baltimore lawyer filed a devastating lawsuit against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and two of its employees. The SPLC targeted Glen Keith Allen over his former ties to the National Alliance (NA), a white nationalist group. In doing so, the liberal group allegedly violated laws and legal codes of conduct by receiving and then paying for stolen documents in violation of confidentiality agreements. The group went after Allen with the intent of getting him fired by the city of Baltimore and permanently destroying his future prospects.

Allen’s suit claims that the SPLC should have its 501c3 tax-exempt status revoked, that it owes him restitution for racketeering, and that it should pay $6.5 million in damages. It also references Allen’s pro bono work on behalf of African-Americans and his mentorship of an African-American teen, powerfully rebutting claims that he is a racist. Allen told PJ Media he now regrets his NA support, and an African-American friend of his laughed at the idea of this lawyer being branded a racist.

Perhaps most importantly, the suit attacks the liberal group for undermining America’s tradition of free expression. In an August 2016 interview with The Washington Post cited in the lawsuit, SPLC Intelligence Project Director Heidi Beirich (a defendant in the case) claimed to have watched Allen “like a hawk” because he had “the worst ideas ever created.”

“This East Europe Communist thought-crime surveillance mentality is antithetical to fundamental American cultural and Constitutional principles protecting freedom of expression and association,” Allen wrote in the suit, which can be found on his website. His lawsuit uses concrete claims of lawbreaking and defamation to expose the SPLC’s Orwellian strategy of branding its opponents “hate groups” and orchestrating campaigns against them.

In August 2016, the SPLC published an article branding Allen a “neo-Nazi lawyer” and insinuating that this lawyer’s work for the city of Baltimore was racist. Beirich, the article’s author, smeared a small political party as racist and then published allegedly stolen documents protected by confidentiality agreements connecting Allen to the National Alliance.

This article led Baltimore’s law department to fire Allen immediately, costing him at least 10 years of employment at a salary of $90,000 or more. The article also destroyed his reputation, making it extremely difficult for him to obtain a job, create a good relationship with clients, or argue before judges and jurors who would immediately judge him a “neo-Nazi lawyer.” Furthermore, a year after Allen’s firing, Baltimore badly lost the case, losing $15 million in damages.

It is said that around 60 Organizations’ “Are Considering a Lawsuit Against the SPLC Following $3M Nawaz Settlement”. They should do more than consider it. Both the SPLC and the ADL are thought-policing scams that make a very profitable living from defamation. The very name of the “Anti-Defamation League” is an example of the inversive wizardry that Owen Benjamin decries.

Darkstream: The rise of fake nationalism

If you’re wondering why I selected Dennis Prager as the example of a Fake Nationalist in tonight’s Darkstream, just read this paragraph from a column on “nationalism” he wrote in 2015.

In the United States, however, a national American identity has always been a major part of what it means to be an American. The three pillars of Americanism, constituting what I have called the “American Trinity” — are found on every American coin and banknote: “Liberty,” “In God We Trust” and “e pluribus unum.” The latter is Latin for “out of many, one.” Because America has always been a nation of immigrants, it has no ethnic identity. Therefore, unlike almost all other nations, America could not depend on an ethnic identity to keep its people together. In fact, if all Americans retained their ethnic identities, America would simply splinter. So a non-ethnic American national identity had to be forged and preserved.

Count the lies. America was not, is not, and could never be “a nation of immigrants”. The claim is as false for Americans as it is for the English, the Germans, or the Swedes. The British colonists did not emigrate to the American Indian nations of the New World. One might as reasonably declare that “Palestine is a nation of immigrants” and insist on referring to Israelis as “Jewish-Palestinians”.

Fake Nationalists rely on the same sort of wizardry that the New Atheists and Jordan Peterson utilize. They substitute “nation” for “state”, then declare that if you have the right piece of paper, that somehow eliminates every tie of blood, birth, and DNA that connects you to your actual nation. Of course, a Fake American is no more a genuine American than a fake woman is a genuine woman, no matter what the state-granted paperwork says.

The state does not define reality. The state does not define sex. The state does not define gravity. And the state does not define nationhood. It may defy these realities, but it will not do so forever.