Author: VD

That moment you realize they’re crazy

There is a story about Terence McKenna, upon being introduced at a conference by an academic who kept going on about the epic drug-taker’s amazing metaphors concerning other-dimensional elves, standing up and angrily shouting, “It’s not a metaphor! The elves are real!” At which point everyone in the audience suddenly realized that the famous techno-philosopher was not brilliant, he was not insightful, and his thinking was neither revolutionary nor creative, he was just crazy.

Owen Benjamin – by the way, you guys were right, the man is extremely funny – appears to have had a similar epiphany about the intellectual frauds known as Jordan Peterson and the rest of the New York Times-christened “Intellectual Dark Web”. From the transcript:

Brett Weinstein comes out swinging. I was saying WeinSTINE, they were saying it was WeinSTINE. They’re such fucking little weasels. When Brett was on Rogan, they said it was WeinSTINE instead of STEEN, but that was blatantly because of Harvey. Now they’re all saying WeinSTEEN. Bunch of fucking weasels. The Intellectual Douche Weasels. IDW. Intellectual Douche Weasels.

For those of you who are like, “oh, you’re turning on your own, Big Bear,” no, I’m not. I’m using criticism and social shame to try to alter someone’s behavior. I am not taking anyone’s rights or calling for anything.

Brett Weinstein says “Quite a good discussion of some IDW-” That’s Intellectual Douche Weasel. The Intellectual Dark Web, what a bunch of fags. All right, “reactions to the Kavanaugh confirmation and push-back. Warning, contains nuance. You may be triggered. If you are, avoid social media for 24 hours. Comfort and herb tea are available free of charge at a local safe space.”

These people. I can’t believe I was once rooting for them. That’s all right. See, that’s a mistake I expect you to get past with me. I made a mistake, I said you can trust a guy like Brett Weinstein to give pushback from a liberal stance and that’s how you can come up with the best- no! These people are undercutting the American republic and they can go fuck themselves. Don’t listen to a word out of their mouths.

I’m asking you to do that out of consent, by the way. I’m not forcing anyone or condemning or “taking down”. That’s so stupid. This is Charlie’s reaction, by the way, when I told him what Jordan Peterson has been up to. He hasn’t been taking it very well. You know, he looked up to him almost like a father figure and now he doesn’t even want to clean his room! He’s just throwing his toys everywhere… he’s spiralling.

By the way, you’re the one who cleans your room. It has nothing to do with Jordan Peterson. Everybody just needs a better Dad. That’s what it comes down to. The Baby Boomers sucked at being parents and so now no one knows what money is or how the government works.

What’s interesting to me about the Official Opposition’s sudden reaction to Jordan Peterson’s massive faux pas is the way they are desperately trying to reinforce his false “thought experiment” narrative.  What a great nuanced discussion! It’s just a thought experiment that demonstrates how nuanced and thoughtful ol’ Uncle Jordan is! He didn’t actually mean what he said. LOL! Don’t you know he just works out what he thinks in public? He’s been thinking about this issue for a long time, a long time, but he’s just working out what he thinks about it now in response to your reaction to his tweet, which you must understand was just a nuanced thought experiment that struck him amidst his contemplation on how best to clean someone else’s room.

No, it’s an extremely significant demonstration of how little character and integrity these weasels possess, as they join forces in order to cover up for Jordan Peterson’s mask slipping in public and revealing the real anti-American left-wing globalist face underneath. In fact, the main thing I took from all of this was the confirmation that Scott Adams is not on our side, after he rushed to accept the Crazy Christ’s “clarification”.

Think about this. Did Milo ever get this kind of protective public insulation for his public missteps? Did they ever extend the same benefit of the doubt to Kavanaugh or anything that President Trump has ever said? The Incestuous Douche Weasels know, they immediately recognized, that Peterson exposed himself badly on Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh, and anyone who falls for this frantic ex post facto itachi kabuki is a self-deluded fool.

It is simply ghastly to observe how many Peterson cultists continue to delude themselves about the man, even after they saw him unmask himself. They have the situation precisely backwards. Peterson didn’t take one bad position after establishing many good ones, to the contrary, he very publicly took one good position early on that is very much against the flow of his entire personal and professional perspective.

Now we know the quo

Look what they made her do. The payoff was delivered as part of the quid pro quo that inspired Taylor Swift’s uncharacteristic political outburst.

Swift, 28, doubles down on her anti-Trump message and urges her fans to vote Democrat as she becomes most decorated female of ALL time at American Music Awards. Taylor was nominated for four awards on the night: Tour of the Year, Favorite Rock/Pop Female, Favorite Rock/Pop Album, and Artist of the Year, winning all four. Her four wins made her most decorated female in AMA history.

Also, she gets to stay in the closet for a little while longer. Which is nice. It’s interesting to observe that the award-winning Tour of the Year didn’t even manage to sell out on a regular basis.

No party for neocons

This fake Republican fake conservative is a perfect example of the anti-American US citizen for whom there is no longer any place in modern American politics:

Trump’s claim that he is going to “Make America Great Again” — after it has been betrayed by disloyal elites — is simply an echo, as it were, of Phyllis Schlafly’s conspiratorial rants.

The history of the modern Republican Party is the story of moderates being driven out and conservatives taking over — and then of those conservatives in turn being ousted by those even further to the right. A telling moment came in 1996, when the Republican presidential nominee, Bob Dole, visited an aged Barry Goldwater. Once upon a time, Dole and Goldwater had defined the Republican right, but by 1996, Dole joked, “Barry and I — we’ve sort of become the liberals.” “We’re the new liberals of the Republican Party,” Goldwater agreed. “Can you imagine that?”

The ascendance of extreme views, abetted in recent years by Fox News, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin and the tea party movement, increasingly made the House Republican caucus ungovernable. The far-right Freedom Caucus drove House Speaker John A. Boehner into retirement in 2015. His successor, Paul D. Ryan, lasted only three years. Ryan’s retirement signals the final repudiation of an optimistic, inclusive brand of Reaganesque conservatism focused on enhancing economic opportunity at home and promoting democracy and free trade abroad. The Republican Party will now be defined by Trump’s dark, divisive vision, with his depiction of Democrats as America-hating, criminal-coddling traitors, his vilification of the press as the “enemy of the people,” and his ugly invective against Mexicans and Muslims. The extremism that many Republicans of goodwill had been trying to push to the fringe of their party is now its governing ideology.

That’s why I can no longer be a Republican, and in fact wish ill fortune on my former party. I am now convinced that the Republican Party must suffer repeated and devastating defeats beginning in November. It must pay a heavy price for its embrace of white nationalism and know-nothingism. Only if the GOP as it is currently constituted is burned to the ground will there be any chance to build a reasonable center-right party out of the ashes. But that will require undoing the work of decades, not just of the past two years.

In fact, an active embrace of white identity politics and so-called “know-nothingism” can solidify Republican political power and possibly even save America. But Max Boot knows that, because he wants to defeat the Republicans and destroy America. That’s why there is no longer any place for him in either the pro-America Republican Party or the anti-Israel Democratic Party. And that is why he and all the other NeverTrump neocons have to go back.

Max Boot@MaxBoot
I too will crawl over broken glass. To vote for Democrats who will act as a check on Trump’s unrestrained and unprecedented abuse of power.

Alavida Nimrata

Not that the UN matters, but it will be good to have Nimrata Randhawa out of both federal and state government.

President Trump has accepted Nikki Haley’s resignation as UN Ambassador, according to two sources briefed on their conversation. The timing of her departure is still unclear. She spoke out strongly in favor of Christine Blasey Ford after the university professor levied an accusation of sexual assault against Judge Brett Kavanaugh.

Ideally, the God-Emperor won’t even bother to replace her. It will be interesting to learn if this is just part of the ebb-and-flow of politics or an element of a larger shakeup taking place.

Darkstream: the dirt is not magic

From the transcript of the Darkstream:

If you move 100 million Chinese settlers into Africa, what is the resulting society is going to be? It’s going to be Chinese. If you move one hundred million Hispanics and Africans and Asians into the United States, what is it going to be? Well, the only thing that we can be certain of is that it’s not going to be what it was before.

The dirt is the same, the physical geography is the same, but English colonists coming to the geography of North America did not become Indians. Their culture did not change, they did not suddenly start living in wigwams and dividing up into small tribes. You know, every single day we see this, and yet we see most of our government policies, we see most of the media narrative affirming something that we know to be false. Now, I’m encouraged by the fact that we’re starting to see the term Magic Dirt appear in many places that you wouldn’t expect to see it.

How to Lose an Argument

By Ben Shapiro. Code Pink’s National Director shows how easy it is to rattle Ben Shapiro and completely shut him down. The rampant hypocrisy in his contradictory approach towards his nation-state and towards the USA leaves him with an easy weakness that anyone can easily exploit. It’s also clear that both the Left and the Right have increasingly had it with all the Israel First activists in the US media. There is a very hard line between supporting Israel and supporting Israel at the expense of America, and Ben Shapiro is one of many in the US media who is observably on the wrong side of it.

It’s also a good example of how rhetoric trumps dialectic. “Apartheid Israel” is a rhetorical kill shot. Sure, one can make a reasonable dialectical argument that Israel is not an apartheid state according to the technical definition of the series of laws that were collectively known as the historical South African policy of apartheid from 1948 to 1994. But the very effectiveness of the kill shot indicates that whether the charge is technically true or not, the rhetoric tends to point towards the truth of the situation, especially since Israel has the legal equivalent of South Africa’s Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949, which was the first apartheid law, as well as a milder religious version of the Population Registration Act of 1950.

For example, the Code Pink woman could have easily pointed out that Israel observably practices religious apartheid, as the Supreme Court of Israel has ruled that even Jews or the descendants of Jews that actively practice any religion other than Judaism are not entitled to immigrate to Israel. The point is that it is relatively easy to expose even the smoothest, most-practiced wormtongues with sufficient mastery of rhetoric and dialectic combined with an awareness of their customary deceits and inconsistencies.

Regulate Big Social

It’s clear that they cannot be trusted to behave themselves:

Google exposed the private data of hundreds of thousands of users of the Google+ social network and then opted not to disclose the issue this past spring, in part because of fears that doing so would draw regulatory scrutiny and cause reputational damage, according to people briefed on the incident and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

As part of its response to the incident, the Alphabet Inc. GOOGL -1.02{1b4a17090ef37332a63a154d15b230452661fe8143e5800412403fcfe8797416} unit on Monday announced a sweeping set of data privacy measures that include permanently shutting down all consumer functionality of Google+. The move effectively puts the final nail in the coffin of a product that was launched in 2011 to challenge Facebook Inc. FB -0.05{1b4a17090ef37332a63a154d15b230452661fe8143e5800412403fcfe8797416} and is widely seen as one of Google’s biggest failures.

A software glitch in the social site gave outside developers potential access to private Google+ profile data between 2015 and March 2018, when internal investigators discovered and fixed the issue, according to the documents and people briefed on the incident. A memo reviewed by the Journal prepared by Google’s legal and policy staff and shared with senior executives warned that disclosing the incident would likely trigger “immediate regulatory interest” and invite comparisons to Facebook’s leak of user information to data firm Cambridge Analytica.

And for all the libertarians this offends, remember, a corporation is a government entity. Trading elected government rule for unelected corporate rule is not an improvement.

Mailvox: rethinking Jordan Peterson

Sometimes it just takes people a little while to catch up.

Longtime reader, and the first time I had ever considered dropping off my visits to the blog were when you began going after Jordan Peterson. IIRC, you began with his denial of Jewish IQ numbers and denunciation of any discussion of it being Evil Alt-Right, and it made sense to push back against him for that. However, it began to seem like another Scalzi was emerging and I couldn’t accept him being put into that basket. I have derived plenty of value from his basic messages of taking care of oneself, and as a Canadian, his opposition to Bill C-16 was badly needed and with our insane speech regulations and Rights Commissions/Tribunals, he was brave to do it.

Then the meat and salt diet, extracts from Maps of Meaning and other stuff just couldn’t be justified. Now with the Kavanaugh tweet he has completed his self-immolation even for those like myself who are likely too generous and held his positive messages in such regard as to outweigh the insanity. Also, pairing up for his tour to “debate” with Sam Harris, one of those contemptible creatures in existence, was a massive signal and I came back to reading the blog daily when I saw it. Reflecting now, if I have the idea right about genetic fallacy, I am still happy for the bits I got out of him that I have benefited from, but he is on the whole indefensible at this point. I am writing so you know there are plenty like myself who couldn’t go along with you at first (same with other topics I suppose), and now have caught up and appreciate you going out on a limb to speak the truth.

You must get a lot of hate in the daily inbox, so I hope this one thank you serves some purpose to let you know your work is appreciated.

It’s always encouraging to see people breaking free of the hold that Jordanetics has on their minds. As for retaining the beneficial bits, well, if a cult leader didn’t have something genuine to offer people, no one would follow him. One can find aspects and elements of the truth even in the biggest, most shameless charlatans.

The fact that Jordan Peterson is a crazy intellectual con man pushing an evil globalist philosophy doesn’t mean that every thing he has ever said is wrong. I won’t pretend to understand why some people need to be told to take care of themselves, or why anyone would ever consider it to be a profound truth in the non-Darwinian sense, but if they do, so be it.

But they should keep in mind that you don’t go to your dentist for heart surgery or automotive repairs just because his advice about brushing your teeth every day worked out so well for you.

Darkstream: Why no one believed Blasey

From the transcript of the Darkstream:

One thing that I haven’t seen much discussion of despite all the jibber and jabber and rambling on about the various implications of the Kavanagh confirmation, and whether he was going to be confirmed or not, is the fact that nobody – and I mean nobody – believed Christine Blasey Ford. And so the interesting question is, why not? You know, people talk about these things, and the giveaway during the discussion of the allegations and so forth, the term that that people always used, was, “well she’s credible.” She’s credible. Now, think about it. When someone asks you if somebody else is telling the truth, and you say, “well, they’re credible,” what does that actually mean? All it means is that I don’t believe them but they’re not observably crazy, you know, their accusations are at least modestly plausible.

It was possible for Kavanagh to have misbehaved in the way that Blasey Ford was saying. It was not plausible to believe that he was involved as part of a regular gang rape machine that was taking place. So the thing is that when all these people were saying “she’s credible,” for example,  even Trump initially said that Blasey Ford was credible, yeah, we all knew he didn’t believe a word she was saying. Most of the people who were on her side, most of the people who voted against Kavanagh because she gave them an excuse to do so,  did not believe her either. Whenever you see people saying, “yeah, well, I believe victims” and that sort of thing, that means they don’t believe this particular alleged victim. You didn’t have people there saying “look what’s wrong with you people, she’s obviously telling the truth,” because she obviously wasn’t She was obviously lying,  but why was her lying so obvious? Why was it so readily apparent to so many people right away?

Duly noted

BobbyDazzler@RobertLinder1
I listened to the whole debate Ethan clearly and deliberately said he did not like voxday, that he viewed voxday as anti-comicsgate.

I didn’t listen to the 2VS-Deathray debate; it would be hard to imagine anything that would be of less interest to me given that I have little-to-no respect for either participant or the moderator. But assuming the tweet is accurate, this sort of statement is precisely why I labeled him 2VS. Had Ethan simply made that dislike clear from the start, instead of talking to me about working together and so forth, I would have cheerfully ignored him in exactly the same way I have ignored every other illustrator or colorist who makes a habit of spouting off on the Internet. Remember, by his own admission, Ethan was always the one watching me and Arkhaven, not the other way around. He’s not a genuine leader, he’s the sort of dishonest political animal who watches where the crowd is going, then jumps in front of it and declares himself to be leading the parade.

As the people at DC discovered, as a number of people in the comics industry have discovered, Ethan Van Sciver is shamelessly two-faced and self-interested. His fans in the ComicsGate movement will eventually discover this too, much to their future chagrin. Now, even many of my critics, even many of my self-professed enemies will concede that I do not lie in public. What is 2VS’s reputation for honesty and personal integrity? And what do you really think are the chances that, on this one occasion, I chose to sacrifice my reputation for ruthless honesty… and for what did I sacrifice it?

But here is the more important question: what is ComicsGate, that I should be against it?