Author: VD

AH:Q Exclusive at BIC

Bounding Into Comics has an exclusive on FIVE complete pages from Alt-Hero: Q. Check them out!

Arkhaven Comics is currently running an IndieGoGo crowdfunding campaign for their upcoming Alt-Hero: Q series by Bane co-creator Chuck Dixon and artist Hélix Haze. Colors are provided by Arklight Studios. The series will be released in individual issues and ultimately collected into a graphic novel. There will be six total issues and each issue will be 24 pages long. The story will be set in the Alt-Hero universe alongside Vox Day’s Alt-Hero series and Chuck Dixon’s Avalon.

The series finds inspiration from the QAnon phenomenon and will have a focus on “ordinary men and women who make the choice to become extraordinary through their selfless actions to save others.” If you are unfamiliar with the QAnon phenomenon, Chuck Dixon told us “this will be an intro, at least in a fictional sense to what it’s all about and what its mission is.”

Arkhaven Comics’ Publisher Vox Day hinted at what we can expect from this story:

“It’s going to be our answer to the question that everyone is asking: “who is Q”. Everyone has a different theory, everyone has a different explanation. Since we’re setting this in the world of Alt-Hero, that allows us to throw out some outlandish ideas about what’s really going on underneath all the various conspiracy theories. We’ll be launching it as soon as we have the sample pages to show the potential backers, so in about two weeks. It’s an awesome script and people are going to love it.”

Chuck Dixon gave us some more key details keying in on the series main protagonist Roland Dane:

“What we’re presenting is an action/thriller hero that I’m really excited to be creating. We’ll be inserting him into stories of global cabals and dark conspiracies that threaten not only world peace but the basic human rights of the individual. Our guy, Roland Dane, is an experienced law enforcement professional who has to drop out of the system to act as an operative for the mysterious organization he knows only as Q. Roland is a little rough around the edges and his methods are often direct but he’s one man trying to make a difference for all of us.”

Take a look at the first five pages:

I was going to post all five pages here by the end of the weekend, but when BIC asked for the exclusive, I could hardly say no. So, go see them, and comment on them, there.

The most pyrrhic victory in history

Coraline Ada Ehmke@CoralineAda
40,000 open source projects, including Linux, Rails, Golang, and everything OSS produced by Google, Microsoft, and Apple have adopted my code of conduct. You can make me have a bad day, but it doesn’t change the fact that we have won and you have lost.

Wanna bet? I just wish xir could convince Marvel and DC and IDW and Dark Horse to adopt xir’s code of conduct too. The more completely an organization converges, the faster they will collapse.

This isn’t a defeat for us, this is a vast horizon of opportunity being handed to us on a platter.

Right, but wrong. Again.

ESR is an intelligent man, but he is fundamentally handicapped by his stubborn commitment to irreligion and his left-liberalism, which is why his diagnoses of the Left’s evils tend to be accurate, but his predictions and prescriptions are reliably off-target:

One of the clearest lessons of recent times (exemplified not just by kaffiyeh-wearing western leftists but by Hamas’s recent clobbering of al-Fatah in the first Palestinian elections) is that po-mo leftism is weaker than liberal individualism in one important respect; it has only the weakest defenses against absolutist fervor. Brittingham tellingly notes po-mo philosopher Richard Rorty’s realization that when the babble of conflicting tribal narratives collapses in exhaustion, the only thing left is the will to power.

Again, this is by design. Lenin and Stalin wanted classical-liberal individualism replaced with something less able to resist totalitarianism, not more. Volk-Marxist fantasy and postmodern nihilism served their purposes; the emergence of an adhesive counter-ideology would not have. Thus, the Chomskys and Moores and Fisks are running a program carefully designed to dead-end at nothing.

Religions are good at filling that kind of nothing. Accordingly, if transnational progressivism actually succeeds in smothering liberal individualism, its reward will be to be put to the sword by some flavor of jihadi. Whether the eventual winners are Muslims or Mormons, the future is not going to look like the fuzzy multicultural ecotopia of modern left fantasy. The death of that dream is being written in European banlieus by angry Muslim youths under the light of burning cars.

In the banlieus and elsewhere, Islamist pressure makes it certain that sooner or later the West is going to vomit Stalin’s memes out of its body politic. The worst way would be through a reflex development of Western absolutism — Christian chauvinism, nativism and militarism melding into something like Francoite fascism. The self-panicking leftists who think they see that in today’s Republicans are comically wrong (as witnessed by the fact that they aren’t being systematically jailed and executed), but it is quite a plausible future for the demographically-collapsing nations of Europe.

That’s not the worst way, it is the only way. If you want Western civilization to survive, then militant Christian nationalism is the only way that is going to happen. Period. Fools decry Franco, but he was one of the greatest leaders of the 20th century simply because he a) prevented his people from falling into the hands of the Communists, and, b) kept his nation out of World War II. Spain lost 4,500 soldiers from the Spanish Blue Division serving with the German Army in the USSR and promptly withdrew them. That was it. Italy, by contrast, lost 500,000 soldiers and civilians.

ESR notes that he and the Left were wrong about the past and that the Right was essentially correct. But note that this essay on suicidalism was written 12 years ago, and it’s already obvious that he was totally wrong to again put his faith in the liberal Left’s ability to control its extremists.

I remain more optimistic than this. I think there is still an excellent chance that the West can recover from suicidalism without going through a fevered fascist episode and waging a genocidal war. But to do so, we have to do more than recognize Stalin’s memes; we have to reject them. We have to eject postmodern leftism from our universities, transnational progressivism from our politics, and volk-Marxism from our media.

The process won’t be pretty. But I fear that if the rest of us don’t hound the po-mo Left and its useful idiots out of public life with attack and ridicule and shunning, the hard Right will sooner or later get the power to do it by means that include a lot of killing. I don’t want to live in that future, and I don’t think any of my readers do, either. If we want to save a liberal, tolerant civilization for our children, we’d better get to work.

The cure for suicidalism is not suicidalism lite. There is no saving “a liberal, tolerant civilization” because liberal tolerant civilizations are intrinsically suicidal. Most tolerant, civilized liberals can’t even bother to have children, let alone seek to save Western civilization for them.

Darkstream: No “Blue Wave” in 2018

From the transcript of the Darkstream:

These diversity candidates that are very hard left are completely unappealing to white Democrats across the country. White Democrats are gradually beginning to wake up to the fact that their party has no use for them, that their party actually hates them and it’s definitely not going to govern in their interest, and so if you look at if you look at what the media is trying to do, what they’re trying to claim, it’s very clear that their narrative is entirely false. In fact, it would not surprise me in the slightest if not only was there not a blue wave, it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if Republicans considerably overperformed again, especially because we’re starting to see the early indications of that. In Texas there was just a special election for Congress, it was a seat that’s been held by Democrats for 139 years and it went for Hillary by something like 12 points, and it just went Republican.

Now can you imagine what would happen how the media would report it if a seat that had been Republican for 139 years, that Donald Trump had won by 12 points, suddenly turned Democrat? You know we’d be hearing, “oh this is this is absolute proof the blue wave is inevitable” and so forth, but where we actually have what may be reliable information, we actually have the actual evidence – it is scanty – but what there is actually indicates that if there is a wave, it’s going to be in the Republican’s favor, especially when you look at the generic party identification where the Republican identification has actually increased by a point and the Democratic identification has fallen by four points. That’s a five-point swing right there,  and so you know when you look at the actual situation instead of the fake polls and the fake news pushed by the SJW media, you immediately see that the situation is not at all what they think it is. It’s not at all what they claim it to be.

And so what people need to stop doing is stop paying attention to people who have reliably proved themselves to be unreliable. I can’t tell you how many people on the blog say “oh I’m worried about this, I’m concerned about that.” You know, you’re actually working towards making what you fear happen. Why are you needlessly,  pointlessly, groundlessly demoralizing people when all the actual evidence is actually quite positive in the in the short-term political sense?

Somebody points out we were told down-ballot Republicans were all going to lose in 2016 and Trump would cause Republicans to lose Congress. Did that happen? No, the exact opposite happened and the same thing is going to be true in 2018. Look, I’ve been predicting a Trumpslide in 2020. There was not a Trumpslide in 2016, Trump won but it was relatively close. So how are we going to get from a narrow victory in 2016 to a Trumpslide in 2020 with Democrats over performing in 2018? That’s not going to happen, but the Trumpslide is going to happen, and so I think that it is is very, very obvious that the media narrative is false and the Republican doomsayers are wrong again.

Vote until you get it right

The EU never changes its totalitarian tactics:

EU leaders sparked a backlash last night after calling for a second referendum to allow voters to ‘change their view’ on Brexit. In separate interventions, the leaders of the Czech Republic and Malta urged Theresa May to drop her opposition to a second referendum.

Their comments prompted an angry response in the UK, with Mrs May responding: ‘There will be no second referendum.’

Maltese PM Joseph Muscat, who has been dogged by questions about a corruption scandal, claimed EU leaders were ‘almost unanimous’ in wanting Britain to change its mind…. The EU has a long history of ignoring inconvenient referendum results or forcing countries to vote again. The most famous example is Ireland’s rejection of the Lisbon Treaty in 2008, which was overturned in a second referendum after intense pressure from Brussels.

But Mrs May has repeatedly said she will not countenance a second referendum – a message she repeated to EU leaders ‘very firmly’ at a dinner in Salzburg on Wednesday night.

Fortunately, the fallout from this typical tone-deafness should be strong enough to let Britain simply Brexit without any deal, which is the best possible path forward and will save it more than $40 billion in an exit tax.

Brexiteers and Remainers today declared Theresa May’s Chequers plan dead after it was brutally savaged by the EU at a crucial summit.

The Prime Minister made a plea to European leaders to compromise as she desperately tries to get a deal agreed with less than two months to go in negotiations.

But leaders across the EU lined up to savage her plans in a series of scathing press conferences at the Salzburg summit today.

EU council chief Donald Tusk insisted her Chequers proposal ‘will not work’ while German Chancellor Angela Merkel said ‘substantial progress’ is still needed.

A visibly angry Mrs May hit back at the EU – insisting that her plan remains the only serious and credible proposal on the table. But she was hit with a fresh onslaught by her own MPs in Britain who said the damning verdict has killed off her Brexit blueprint.

Tory MP and leading Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg said: ‘I think Chequers now has no supporters at all. I doubt even the Downing Street cat is any longer backing the Chequers plan. ‘I think the time has come for Mrs May to say “This is not going to work”.’

And fellow Conservative and arch Remainer Anna Soubry said: ‘Having been nailed to its perch this Chequers parrot is no more, it is bereft of life, it rests in peace, it is indeed an ex parrot.

Now it is time for Italy and Hungary to arrange their own escapes from the Fifth Reich.

The excuses start early

The media is already planting the seeds for explaining away the mysterious absence of the Democrats much-predicted “Blue Wave” in November:

Many Texas Democrats were demoralized Tuesday, when Republican Pete Flores defeated Democrat Pete Gallego in a runoff special election for the Texas Senate seat vacated in June by the resignation of Democrat Carlos Uresti.

They should be demoralized. It was a potentially consequential loss. Democrats have no one but themselves to blame for it. Flores’ victory doesn’t necessarily suggest that a “red wave” is coming to Texas in this year’s midterm elections, as many Republicans were quick to claim. But the Texas Democratic Party’s response to Gallego’s defeat does not augur well for their prospects of competing successfully.

I have said before, and I will say again, there will be no “Blue Wave” in November. I don’t know if I am more amused or disappointed in those of you who – again – insist on falling for the mainstream media narrative.

Have you truly not figured out yet that they cannot be trusted? Do you truly not realize that they knowingly speak falsehoods, hoping to transform those falsehoods into truth by convincing you to accept their false narrative?

Even when the economy is not doing well, even when the Democrats are not nominating their most left-wing, most diverse, most unelectable candidates, the average Republican midterm loss is only 11 seats. This would reduce the Republican majority from 43 seats to 32 seats. Hardly a cause for panic.

UN backs Soros

The UN and the EU are desperately trying to get nationalist Hungary to back down and accept foreign invasion before more countries are inspired to defend themselves against the globalist evil:

Hungary’s Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has accused the UN human rights watchdog of “spreading lies” about his country, saying that immigration was not a “fundamental human right.”
The official took aim at the “independent experts” with the UN Human Rights Council, stating they “should not be independent from the truth.”

“Recently, unfortunately, some UN officials started to spread lies against and about my country,” Szijjarto told the UN body’s meeting on Wednesday.

Such officials would like to “force on us impossible things,” namely allowing illegal migrants into the country, Szijjarto stated. “They say that migration is a fundamental human right, which is a lie,” he stressed.

The harsh statement of the foreign minister came as a response to criticism against Hungarian anti-immigration policies. Last week, the UN rights body blasted the so-called ‘Stop Soros’ law, adopted by the country’s government back in July. The UN paper said Hungary “attacks against civil society, migrants, refugees and asylum seekers” with the law, adding that it’s against the international human rights law and poses a threat to the “values” of the whole European Union.

It added that it targets the critical “civil society” and fuels “hostility, xenophobia and … discrimination against migrants, asylum seekers, refugees and all those trying to provide them support.”

The ‘Stop Soros’ law has imposed restrictions on foreign NGOs, which work with migrants, obliging them to seek licenses from the government. It also criminalized aiding migrants, namely “providing financial or property benefit” to them or simply informing them about the asylum-seeking procedures. Those who do so could now face 12 months in jail.

Hungary is nationalist because Hungary understands the long-term costs of being invaded much better than most nations do. The Hungarian leadership is doing what the Right far too often fails to do, which is go on the offensive against its enemies. If all you do is play defense, you will lose. It’s guaranteed. Every party of the Right, from Myanmar to the USA, would be well advised to start aggressively pushing for laws banning the principles, funding, activities, and organizations of the Left.

So-called “freedom of speech” was always a trap. As others have noted, they simply define your speech as violence even as they define their violence as speech.

Mediocre author denies authorial intent

One of the reasons John Scalzi has never been able to lift himself out of mediocrity except by coloring Robert Heinlein by the numbers is that he doesn’t understand the first thing about understand and creating characters. Or, apparently, self-contradiction.

“I created Bert,” says Frank Oz. “I know what and who he is.” And no, he isn’t gay.

John Scalzi
Frank Oz says that Bert’s not gay and he should know because he created him. I mean, Frank, a lot of parents feel the same, but then their kids come out anyway.

John Scalzi
To the folks who are asserting that fictional characters don’t have genders, or orientations, or have physical sex: I think you may be doing fiction wrong.

Mark Kern
Okay Scalzi, all your characters in all your novels are Trump loving, cis, Republicans. I demand you acknowledge that. You too, JK Rowling. I don’t care if you created them.

McRapey is so dumb that he doesn’t even understand the intrinsic self-contradiction of his expressed positions. First, Frank Oz is correct; the creator defines the character. If we can unilaterally declare, ex post facto, that Bert and Ernie are gay, then we can also declare that Darth Vader is not Luke’s father, but rather, Luke’s Sigma Chi fraternity brother, that Gimli is not a Dwarf, but a short, bearded Elf, and that Dumbledore is a pedophile who repeatedly abused Harry Potter.

Actually, it might not be long before JK Rowling, in her enthusiasm for all things LGBTP, self-righteously announces the latter. It would explain a lot about those tedious novels.

In any event, the idea that fictional characters have genders, orientations, and engage in sex, but that their characteristics and behaviors are not established by their creators is not only self-contradictory, it is as intrinsically nonsensical as claiming that a man is really a woman.

Of course, if Scalzi’s monovocal dialogue is any guide, all of his characters, male and female, human and alien, are actually himself. Which may explain his incompetence with regards to these matters.