Author: VD

Darkstream: ComicsGate vs Marvel

From the transcript of the Darkstream:

The interesting thing about this particular lawsuit is that number one, the defamation claim is ridiculous. It is very, very hard to win a defamation claim in the United States. If this was in England or in a couple other legal jurisdictions maybe there’s a decent chance, but not in the States, with a few specific state-based exceptions. However, the tortious interference claim is quite possibly serious and it is quite possibly legitimate. We don’t know, however, because we do not know what went into Antarctic Press’s decision-making.

Now the circumstantial evidence does tend to indicate that Mark Waid’s call to them and the contract subsequently being withdrawn was causal, that there was a causal relationship between those two things, but for all we know at the moment it’s just circumstantial evidence. This is why there is a part of the legal process called discovery, when you get to interview the other side under oath, take affadavits, and then of course request any and all communications that were related to that decision. And so you know, again, we don’t know! Antarctic has very publicly stated that Mark Waid’s phone call had nothing to do with their decision, but of course they might be lying. They can say whatever they want and it’s totally meaningless at this point in time. Given their obvious desire to stay in with the comics industry mainstream, I don’t think that their word can be taken seriously, and so we’ll find out down the road.

I don’t think if this will ever go to trial. I think that if discovery reveals that Mark Waid’s interference did cause Antarctic to break their contract with Richard Meyer, then Waid is going to be advised to settle, and given that he may not even be paying for his lawyer himself, he may not have a whole lot to say about it. So here’s the thing: at this point in time I don’t think that either Richard Meyer and his attorney, or Mark Waid and his attorney, actually know what the truth is. The only people who really know what the truth is are not party to the lawsuit, and they are the people at Antarctic Press.

That being said, a lot of the stuff that people are talking about and what people are saying about the whole lawsuit is totally ridiculous. You know, they’re they’re trying to bring up stuff related to past comments that Richards made, they’re trying to bring up comments that Mark Waid has made, and all that sort of thing. What you have to understand is that none of that matters. You can check this out on InfoGalactic to confirm it, but there are six elements to a claim of tortious interference. Now if you listen, you’ll notice that all of the self-appointed legal experts on sites like Bounding Into Comics and Bleeding Cool and whatever, they’re not even addressing the relevant points.

So the six points. First, the existence of a contractual relationship or beneficial business relationship between the two parties, was there one between Richard Meier and Antarctic Press? Yes, there was a contract. Number two, knowledge of that relationship by a third party, there was knowledge of that? Mark Waid knew about it. Three, intent of the third party to induce a party to the relationship to breach the relationship. Did Mark Waid have that intent? Yes, we know he had that intent, he publicly stated it. Four, lack of any privilege on the part of the third party to induce such a breach. Obviously as a freelancer working for Marvel, Waid had nothing to do with either company, so four is also confirmed. Five, the contractual relationship is breached. Was it breached? Yes it was, that’s also yes. And then six, damage to the party against whom the breach occurs. Now that’s the one area that might be the weak link for Richard Meyers’s case.

(Note that it is NOT necessarily required to conclusively demonstrate causality between the interference and the breach. It can be sufficient to demonstrate that the interference was intentional, improper, and the desired breach subsequently took place. The legal focus is on the improper nature of the interference, not establishing that the interference was the sole or primary cause of the breach.)

You know, it is somewhat troubling that he is saying things that are manifestly not true, saying, “well I couldn’t get it published by any other publisher.” I can’t speak for any other publisher, but all I know is that we never heard from Richard Meyers. Dark Legion never heard from Richard Meyers. Arkhaven Comics would not have published him, but Dark Legion might have, and so if he didn’t talk to us, then he probably didn’t talk to Top Cow, he probably didn’t talk to DC, he probably didn’t talk to IDW, or to Image. I don’t know who he talked to, but to claim that you could not be published by any other publisher when at least one other publisher knows that you never contacted them… I think that you need to be careful about making obviously false claims like that. If you make a false claim, if you make a claim that everybody knows is false, it’s going to be shot down.

Now that doesn’t mean that Richard Meyers hasn’t been damaged. I think that you can probably make a pretty good case that his reputation was damaged considering the level of the incendiary attacks and so forth on him. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like the guy. I don’t know the guy, literally the only thing I know about the guy is that he does nothing but badmouth me and Arkhaven and Dark Legion and everything to do with us, so as far as I’m concerned we’re definitely not standing with him. We’re also definitely not standing with Mark Waid, we’re just sitting here watching this from the sidelines and learning as much as we can about the industry.

But what I can also say is that if the lawyers who finally contacted me about the ComicsGate trademark via email are responsible for Richard Meyers’s case, he’s going to lose. Because if they are so dumb, if they are so lazy and incapable of doing their homework, as to send me personally a cease-and-desist email for something that I haven’t done and to which I am not even a relevant party, then there is absolutely no way they are going to win a case against a top-notch lawyer like Mark Zaid. That’s my perspective, you can take it or leave it, but the fact of the matter is that when you see incompetence and ineptitude of the sort that we’ve witnessed from some of the legal folks surrounding the ComicsGate people, I don’t think that it’s likely that they’re going to be very successful even if they have a pretty good case.

In further support of my observations, a Darkstream viewer commented:

You make a good point about the lawyers. I was arguing with Rekieta Law about the trademark thing and he didn’t realize the burden of proof is on the plaintiff not the defendant. This is something I found from 15-30 min of internet research so how he got it wrong boggle the mind. Just shows he didn’t bother to research it. It doesn’t surprise me he didn’t even bother to consider that maybe you sue the company, not management or the figurehead.

UPDATE:  I dug out the “cease-and-desist” email from 2VS’s attorneys and can confirm they are a Pennsylvania law firm that is not the same as the Texas firm that is handling Meyers’s case. So, perhaps the Texas lawyers are more on the ball.

I can also confirm that I am in no way sponsored by, approved by, or affiliated with Two-Face Van Sciver or ComicsGate. I most certainly am none of those things. At this point, who the hell would want to be?

America has been remade

Patrick J. Buchanan observes that what now calls itself “America” is not, in fact, American at all:

America has been remade. Not only has Christianity, and all its symbols and expressions of faith and belief, been removed, but also a purge is underway of monuments and statues of the explorers, colonists and statesmen who, believing in the superiority of their religion, culture and civilization, set out to create the county we inherited.

And William Frey, resident demographer at the Brookings Institution, writes about how America is being changed — without the consent of the people.

“Since 2000, the white population under the age of 18 has shrunk by seven million, and declines are projected among white 20-somethings and 30-somethings over the next two decades and beyond. This is … a trend that is not likely to change despite Mr. Trump’s wish for more immigrants from Norway.

“The likely source of future gains among the nation’s population of children, teenagers and young working adults is minorities — Hispanics, Asians, blacks and others.”

When we are all minorities, and all behave as minorities, making our separate demands upon the country, what then holds America together?

In Federalist 2, John Jay famously wrote:

“Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people — a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion … very similar in their manners and customs…

“This country and this people seem to have been made for each other, and it appears as if it was the design of Providence, that an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest ties, should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous, and alien sovereignties.”

Yet, each decade, less and less are we descended from the same ancestors. Less and less do we speak the same language, profess the same religion, share the same manners, customs, traditions, history, heroes and holidays.

Does America look today like the “band of brethren united to each other” of which Jay wrote, and we seemed to be as late as 1960?

Or does not the acrimony attendant to the nomination of Judge Kavanaugh suggest that we have already become a land “split into a number of unsocial, jealous and alien sovereignties.”

The historical revisionists who falsely talk about “our Judeo-Christian heritage” are inadvertently telling an important truth. America has an Anglo-Saxon Christian heritage. It is post-1965 Fake America that has a Judeo-Christian foundation and is less and less European, and less and less Christian, with every year that passes.

It is not just “liberals” who are to blame for this. It is not just the Jewish and Irish immigrants who struck the fatal legislative blow who are to blame for this. It is the civic nationalists who believed, and continue to believe, the lies of Magic Dirt and Equality, who pride themselves on their refusal to defend their own people and boast of their treason to their own nation.

Because civic nationalism is not just globalism lite, it is the elevation of loyalty to the political state above loyalty to the actual nation.

EXCERPT: Ship of Fools

From SHIP OF FOOLS: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense About Primitive Society by C.R. Hallpike.

Those who have no idea about any of this and want to speculate about early man or human nature in general simply assume that the lives of primitive peoples are basically like ours. For example, someone (Curtis 2013) has recently proposed that “The first, and most ancient function of manners is to solve the problem of how to be social without getting sick [from other people’s germs].” The picture of life in the background of this theory is obviously something like modern London, of dense crowds packed into buses and the Tube and breathing each other’s germs, shaking hands and kissing, using public lavatories, picking up things other people have handled in shops, and so on. Hunter-gatherer life, by contrast is very healthy: very small populations that cannot support epidemic diseases like measles and small-pox; no domestic animals, especially birds, from which humans can catch a whole range of infections; no clothes or houses which are notorious breeding grounds for a variety of parasites and their diseases; poor communications with other groups and their diseases; and a life in the sun and open air which are powerful antiseptics. If there was a “first and most ancient function of manners” it would actually have been to reduce social friction among small groups of people like this who have to live and get along with one another, not to avoid the largely imaginary dangers from communicable diseases.

Carrier and Morgan (2014) claim that men’s faces and jaws are more robust than women’s because for millions of years men have engaged in fist fights just like pub brawls in our society. First of all, in order for natural selection to have produced this result fist fights would have had to be lethal, and we know from bare-knuckle boxing in modern times that they aren’t. (Well-known instances of men being killed by a single punch are not the result of the punch but of falling and hitting their heads.) Indeed, where boxing is a social custom it is typically intended as a non-lethal form of competition, like wrestling. On the other hand, we know from anthropological studies that when hunter-gatherers (and everyone else) intend serious harm to one another they typically use weapons like clubs, spears, or rocks because they are so much more effective than trying to use one’s bare hands, which usually ends up in ineffectual scuffling unless people have been trained in martial arts.

Sex at Dawn (Ryan and Jetha 2010), by a psychologist and his wife, has been extremely well received by the general public. It claims that until 10,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers lived in communities where there was no such thing as marriage, but simply a sexual free-for-all. (They shared everything else, so why not each other?) Then, with the beginning of farming, there also came private property, and this meant that men started to worry about identifying heirs to whom they could pass on their land. This, in turn, produced monogamy and the regulation of our sexual impulses. First of all, it is generally accepted by physical anthropologists that pair-bonding is a key feature of human behavior which separates our species from all other primates, and must go back at least to Homo erectus. The elimination of female estrus allowed frequent sexual activity that cemented pair-bonding, and also “reduced the potential for [male] competition and safeguarded the alliances of hunter males” (Wilson 2004: 140-41). Secondly, if their theory were true we would expect to find a sexual free-for-all among existing hunter-gatherers, but marriage is actually a well-attested institution among them—primitive sexual free-for-alls are actually a Victorian myth. And thirdly, farming itself does not normally produce private property, but rather the communal rights of kin-groups over their land, and monogamy, at least as a norm, is far less frequent than polygamy. So, rather a disappointment for the polyamorists the book was intended to encourage.

But evolutionary psychologists have probably produced more fanciful theories about early Man than anyone else.

Evolutionary psychologists have always been fascinated by religion, and discussion of it usually begins something like this: “The propensity for religious belief may be innate because it is found in societies around the world. Innate behaviours are shaped by natural selection because they confer some advantage in the struggle for survival. But if religion is innate, what could that advantage have been?” (Wade 2007: 164).

“Religion” is not, in fact, some simple disposition that could possibly be either innate or learned. It is a highly complex phenomenon both psychologically and culturally, and there are major differences between the forms of religion found in primitive societies and the world religions with which we are familiar, as I have described in detail elsewhere (Hallpike 1977: 254-74; 2008a: 266-87; 2008b: 288-388; 2016: 62-88). But studying all these ethnographic facts is time-consuming and boring, and it is much more fun to assume that we all know what we mean by “religion”—something like “faith in spiritual beings”—and get on with constructing imaginative explanations about how it must have been adaptive for early man.

“No one”, continues Wade, “can describe with certainty the specific needs of hunter-gatherer societies that religion evolved to satisfy. But a strong possibility is that religion co-evolved with language, because language can be used to deceive, and religion is a safeguard against deception. Religion began as a mechanism for a community [wait for it!] to exclude those who could not be trusted” [my emphasis] (ibid., 164). And how exactly is this supposed to have worked? The answer is apparently the basic vulnerability of all societies to those freeloaders who are always poised like vultures to take advantage of the system. “Unless freeloaders can be curbed, a society may disintegrate, since membership loses its advantages. With the advent of language, freeloaders gained a great weapon, the power to deceive. Religion could have evolved as a means of defense against freeloading. Those who committed themselves in public ritual to the sacred truth were armed against the lie by knowing that they could trust one another” (ibid., 165).

Now since ritual, myth, and symbolism are fundamental elements of religion in all societies, it is indeed perfectly true that, as embodiments of meaning, they all need some form of linguistic expression in order to be shared in a common culture. For example, the celebrated Hohlenstein-Stadel carving of the Lion Man, a standing male figure with a lion’s head, has been dated to 40,000 years BP, and it has been estimated that it took about 400 hours to carve (Cook 2013: 33). It seems inconceivable that anyone could have done this unless he could also have given some explanation of what he was doing to his companions that they would have understood, and this would have obviously required a reasonably well-developed language.

To this extent Wade is therefore quite correct to claim that “religion” could not have developed without language, but participation in religious ritual has nothing whatever to do with commitment to truth or security against lying. The Konso believed that Waqa, the Sky God, sent rain, indeed that he almost was rain: Waqa irobini, “Waqa is raining” was a very common phrase I heard whenever rain fell. He was also believed to withhold rain from villages where there was too much quarrelling, and could strike dead those who lied under a sacred oath. But a crucial difference between the Konso and ourselves is that we are fundamentally aware of the possibility of unbelief, of the denial of anything beyond the purely material, so that the assertion of belief in God as true in our society is not like the belief of the Konso in Waqa. In their culture there is no real awareness of the possibility of not believing in Waqa, and his reality is simply taken for granted. When Wade says that “religious truths are accepted not as mere statements of fact but as sacred truths, something that it would be morally wrong to doubt” (ibid., 164) this may have some relevance to modern religion, but it has none to the forms of religion in primitive society.

The other selective advantage of religion, according to Wade, is that “It was then co-opted by the rulers of settled societies as a way of solidifying their authority and justifying their privileged position” (ibid., 164). The cynical ruler, smirking behind his hand at the simplicity of the peasants who thought him divine, is actually an invention of the Enlightenment.

In fact, in primitive society authority itself attracts sacred status, so that in the traditional society of the Tauade when a Big Man died his body would be put into a specially built enclosure which women were not allowed to enter. Pigs were then slaughtered inside the enclosure and the sacred bull-roarer was whirled, away from the gaze of the women. If enough boys were available they would be kept inside the enclosure in a little hut for several months where they could imbibe the vitality of the dead chief and were taught by adult men to be tough and aggressive. The Big Man’s corpse, meanwhile, had been put on a special platform in his hamlet where it was allowed to rot, and it was thought that people absorbed the powers of the Big Man in the smell. Big Men also had a special association with certain birds of prey and sacred oaks, and were believed to be essential for the general health and well being of the group. But these folk beliefs were certainly not “invented” by the Big Men to drum up support.

Yes, let’s investigate

Something about this additional investigation tends to remind me of Bre’r Rabbit:

The White House has authorized the F.B.I. to expand its abbreviated investigation into sexual misconduct allegations against Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh by interviewing anyone it deems necessary as long the review is finished by the end of the week, two people briefed on the matter said on Monday.

The new directive came in the past 24 hours after a backlash from Democrats, who criticized the White House for limiting the scope of the bureau’s investigation into President Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court. The F.B.I. has already completed interviews with the four witnesses its agents were originally asked to talk to, the people said.

Mr. Trump said on Monday that he favored a “comprehensive” F.B.I. investigation and had no problem if the bureau wanted to question Judge Kavanaugh or even a third accuser who was left off the initial witness list if she seemed credible.

Look, we all know Ford was lying. I’ve heard more credible tall tales from children with cookie crumbs smeared all over their faces. All this expanded abbreviated investigation is going to do is to remove the ritualistic respect that the Senate hearing endowed upon the Deep State’s trigger-woman.

Virtue-signal fail

Shockingly, despite all his furious denouncings of everything to the ideological Right of George Bush, Richard Meyer has entirely failed to win over the SJWs of the comics industry. His tortious interference lawsuit against Mark Waid of Marvel hasn’t exactly been greeted with open arms by the comic artist pros.

After news broke of Richard Meyer’s lawsuit against Mark Waid for tortious interference and defamation, a number of comic book industry professionals rallied around the DC Comics and Marvel Comics veteran writer.

I have no dog in that particular fight. Both men appear to be rather nasty pieces of work, if their Twitter accounts are reliable indicators. That being said, the timeline of events does appear to suggest that Waid may be guilty of interfering with Meyer’s contract with Antarctica Press, although I’d like Meyer’s chances a lot better if he wasn’t relying upon an inept nobody from outstate Minnesota as his lawyer.

As a general rule, when your lawyer is prone to spouting off in complete ignorance of events, it’s not a good sign. The thing that was most amusing about this Rekieta guy posturing and babbling on and on about how I was probably wrong about my supposed violation of 2VS’s trademark claim is that at no point did he ever take the trouble to ascertain if I was even a relevant party concerning the subject before publicly commenting on it. As it happens, I was not. So, if his handling of Meyer’s case against Waid is anywhere nearly as incompetent as his approach to 2VS’s against me was, he’s going to get his head handed to him by the big guns that Marvel will bring in.

Don’t get me wrong. The white-shoe-wearing big guns can be beaten. I’ve seen it done and I’ve done it. But they are seldom beaten by clueless, careless, posturing loudmouths. We didn’t bother to blow the guy’s feeble non-case apart because I didn’t want anything to do with ComicsGate after discovering that it is nothing more than 2VS’s fan club. But I tend to doubt Waid and his attorneys will do the same.

Converging physics

Science is now sexist. Even physics:

The European nuclear research center known as CERN has banned Professor Alessandro Strumia of Pisa University after he gave a slide presentation at a conference that discussed male/female differences in career outcomes in the field of physics. Professor Strumia’s presentation — which is archived here — was removed from CERN’s website, and the center issued a statement calling it “highly offensive” and “unacceptable.”

Professor Strumia had been invited to speak at the conference last week, which focused on “issues of gender and equal opportunities in the field” of “theoretical high energy physics and cosmology.”

“[E]ach day talks and panel discussions will be dedicated to research on gender in academia, with an aim to further the development and implementation of action plans to support women and other minorities in physics,” CERN said in announcing the conference. “Since any positive change needs the support of the whole community we encourage everyone, men and women, junior and senior scientists, to participate in this workshop.” Professor Strumia’s presentation, however, was apparently not what CERN officials had expected when they invited him.

Professor Strumia criticized the “mainstream” theory — i.e., that the lack of equality (“symmetry”) between men and women in the field of physics is due to sexist bias — calling it “cultural Marxism.” He cited evidence that, in attempting to create greater opportunities for women, the field has in recent years begun discriminating against male scientists. He cited research showing that apparently natural differences between men and women’s interests “play a critical role in gendered occupational choices and gender disparity in the STEM fields.”

The more that feminists and SJWs argue that more women need to be involved in STEM, the more obvious it becomes that science, technology, and civilization are not going to survive without the return of some form of patriarchy.

There is nothing, literally nothing, that some women and their male enablers will not blithely set about destroying because they find the idea of their intrinsic inferiority at it to be infuriating.

The alternatives are inevitable

Alt-Right, Alt-Hero, Alt-Germany, the trend is perfectly clear. When the mainstream fails as completely and comprehensively as it has failed, whether it is the American conservative movement, the Big Two of comics, or the grand coalition of the SPD, CDU, and CSU, popular alternatives are inevitably going to rise up to replace the institutional failures that have proven they are no longer capable of performing their primary functions.

Despite charges from mainstream politicians that it is “fascist,” the right-wing Alternative to Germany party is now polling second, ahead of the left-wing Social Democrat Party. The party’s growing popularity may be due to its strong stand against Chancellor Angela Merkel’s lax immigration policies. Or, it could be because it offers a clear alternative to the oddball coalition cobbled together by Merkel of Social Democrats and the chancellor’s CDU party.

Since it has proven necessary in the past, allow me to be perfectly clear. The “Alt” in Alt★Hero also does not stand for Alternative für Deutschland.

Those dratted liberals!

As always, the cuckservatives continue to dishonestly point to ideological differences when the real problem is one of identity and immigration. 

Today, flying back from New York, I ran into someone in the Charlotte airport, a Christian pastor I’d met at an event last year. We spent about an hour talking about the rancor and distrust in our country. He’s involved in reconciliation ministry, which is to say, bringing people together across boundaries of distrust, and teaching them how to talk to each other.

I mentioned to him that I’d have conversations over the past few months with friends who broadly share my worldview and demographic characteristics (white, conservative, Christian, middle-aged), and I was surprised by how many of them say that they have deliberately chosen to socialize only with people like themselves. It’s not at all because they don’t want to talk to anybody who disagrees. It’s because they are afraid.

Afraid of what? They’re afraid that if they say something that offends a liberal, there will be hell to pay. Whether it was something genuinely offensive that they said thoughtlessly, and are willing to apologize for, or whether it was something harmless that nevertheless caused offense to the liberal, they are afraid that they will be condemned as a hater. They are afraid that the aggrieved liberal will spread a tale of their wickedness on social media, and they will be left to defend themselves in a world in which their demographic qualities (race, religion, politics, social class, etc.) will be taken as dispositive evidence of their guilt. They are afraid that in the best-case scenario, the sort of thing that in earlier times would have been something people could discuss, even argue over, while remaining friends would now cause a social conflagration that would cost people friendships — and in the worst-case scenario, one error, real or imagined, could bring everything in their lives crashing down.

I said to the pastor that I don’t know how we escape this, given that social media is never going away. Somebody’s reputation can be destroyed with remarkable ease.

Liberals? Really? I don’t know ANYONE who is afraid of offending liberals for their liberalism. What white Americans of all ideological stripes are afraid of is being accused of offending blacks, Jews, gays, women, Muslims, Asians, Hispanics, and non-European immigrants, in that order.

American liberals have been around for over a century. While they can, and should, be held responsible for a panoply of social and political ills, they obviously cannot be responsible for a current state of being that is observably new and different from before. What has changed, and the reason for the state of fear on the part of conservatives, cuckservatives, and moderates alike is the fact that the nation has been invaded and adulterated over the last 50 years, and the identity demographics have consequently changed.

Intellectual cowards like Rod Dreher lament the end of a trusting society, but they are too dishonest, and too frightened, to even address the reason it happened. And if you’re afraid to speak your mind freely and fearlessly in front of your friends and family, then you would be well-advised to eject them from your life without hesitation or remorse.

SHIP OF FOOLS by C.R. Hallpike

Dr. Hallpike spent his first ten years as an anthropologist living with mountain tribes in Ethiopia and Papua New Guinea and writing up his research for publication. He learned that primitive societies are very different from our modern industrialised societies and that it takes a considerable amount study to understand how they work.

But since all Man’s ancestors used to live in a similar manner, understanding these societies is essential to understanding the human race itself, especially when speculating about our prehistoric ancestors in East Africa. Unfortunately a wide variety of journalists and science writers, historians, linguists, biologists, and especially evolutionary psychologists erroneously believe they are qualified to write about primitive societies without knowing much about them.

The result is that many of their superficial speculations have about as much scientific credibility as The Flintstones. The various critical studies contained in Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense About Primitive Society examine some of the most popular of these speculations and evaluate their scientific merit.

Among the learned fools whose works are critiqued are:

  • Yuval Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
  • Emma Byrne’s Swearing is Good For You
  • René Girard’s theory of learned behavior
  • William Arens’s The Man-Eating Myth
  • Noam Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar
No one systematically and structurally demolishes the pseudoscientific work of charlatans more comprehensively than Dr. Hallpike.  Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense About Primitive Society is a must-read for any educated individual who regularly finds himself coming into contact with intellectual poseurs who make a habit of quoting learned fools.

And if you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend Hallpike’s Do We Need God to Be Good: An Anthropologist Considers the Evidence, which is the only takedown of evolutionary psychology you will ever need. If you thought TIA did a reasonable job dissecting the arguments of the New Atheists, then you will truly appreciate both of Hallpike’s books.