Author: VD

Superconverged

DC is racing Marvel in a contest of who can completely converge their film and TV properties first. I’d say DC has taken the lead at the moment. The bad news is that they actually added a white character to Supergirl. The good news is that she is a he.

The panel named transgender activist Nicole Maines (Royal Pains, The Trans List, Becoming Nicole book) joining the show in the series regular role of Nia Nal, aka Dreamer. The newest addition to the CatCo reporting team, she is described as a soulful young transgender woman with a fierce drive to protect others, Nia’s journey this season means fulfilling her destiny as the superhero Dreamer (much like Kara came into her own as Supergirl).

In addition,  the series will be joined by series regular April Parker Jones (Jericho, The Last Ship) as Colonel Haley, a hardline career military woman who lives and dies by the orders of her commanding officers. Dedicated to her country, she always acts in its best interest — even if it’s not her own.

And David Ajala (Doctor Who, Nightflyers, The Dark Knight), who will recur as Manchester Black, based on the DC character created by Joe Kelly, described as the type of guy who brings a knife to a gunfight and still walks away the winner. With a dark past, he easily deflects the brutality of his mission with his charm and sense of humor.

More negroes! More wimmins! More trannies! Hurrah! But where are the gay Jewish pedos in wheelchairs? It’s not true diversity without gay Jewish pedos in wheelchairs! Progress is love is love on wheels!

Reprisal is not hypocrisy

One of the nice things about being an ex-libertarian is that one no longer finds oneself lumped in with the professional cucks at Reason.

The Walt Disney Company has fired filmmaker James Gunn, director of the Marvel franchise Guardians of the Galaxy films, due to revelations that he—gasp—said some very offensive things on Twitter many years ago.

It’s no accident these tweets were suddenly discovered; right-wing bloggers including Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec (with an assist from Breitbart and The Daily Caller) went digging after Gunn made negative remarks about conservative writer Ben Shapiro on Twitter. Ironically, Gunn was actually offering a very qualified defense of liberal actor and director Mark Duplass for saying Ben Shapiro was someone the left should engage.

Gunn’s tweets reference violence and sexual assault against children. They are gross. But he says they were intended as jokes, and there’s really no reason to suspect otherwise. While many have implied that the tweets include a link to child pornography, this is false—the link in question is harmless.

Gunn said he was a very different person when he wrote those tweets, and had previously apologized.

“I viewed myself as a provocateur, making movies and telling jokes that were outrageous and taboo,” he said in a statement. “In the past, I have apologized for humor of mine that hurt people. I truly felt sorry and meant every word of my apologies.”

This really ought to have been enough. But we live in an era where both the left and the right are eager to collect the scalps of people who offend them. Conservatives who participated in the lynch mob against Gunn are hypocrites, since they have often scolded the left for doing this exact same thing.

Cuckservatives are very unhappy when anyone does anything more effective than protest in a feeble and futile manner. To the Left, an apology is nothing more than an admission of guilt and justification for prosecution, and their apologies should be treated accordingly. Cerno and Jack are doing exactly what everyone on the Right should be doing to the Left, and that is holding them accountable to their own rules.

If you want to win the cultural war, you have to fight. Feckless posturing about how “we should be better than that” is not fighting, it is surrendering.

Sunk ships save lives

None of these people would have drowned if the European navies had simply sunk the ships that initially sparked the invasion:

Over 600 migrants, including babies and young children, have drowned in the Mediterranean in the past month, in the wake of Italy’s ban on rescue boats, two major charities claim. More people have drowned trying to cross the sea from northern Africa to Europe in the past four weeks than in the entire first five months of 2018, according Doctors Without Borders (MSF). The MSF blames the deaths on the fact that there had been no charity rescue boats active in the central Mediterranean, as they have been banned from docking in Italy.

Salvini wants to reduce the number of migrants leaving North Africa to reduce the arrivals in Europe and deaths in the Mediterranean along the way. He says that will reduce tensions among European nations over their internal borders.

‘Obviously, if you drastically reduce the departures and arrivals, the problems inside the EU among individual countries will also be reduced,’ he said.

He said he hoped Europe as a whole will continue to recognize the ‘minority’ of people who deserve asylum because they are fleeing war, but not the others. ‘We hope that finally the European Union resumes defending its borders and the right to security of 500 million European citizens who in recent years have been put at risk,’ Salvini said.

No true humanitarian would have permitted anyone to embark upon such an obviously dangerous and illegal course of action.

The Chickenhawk squared

Some of the newer Ilk are learning to trust my instincts:

I doubted Vox when he predicted that Shapiro would eventually come out in defense of Jewish Hollywood rapists. But here we are.

It’s really not that difficult. Everything a tribalist does will be in defense of his tribe, even if that requires declaring that 1+1=2 one minute, then turning around and declaring that 1+1=fuchsia the next. I have known that Ben Shapiro was a dishonest little snake since 2005.

When are you all going to understand that you can NEVER give a snake a pass just because he happens to mouth a few words that you like every now and then? NEVER! Once someone reveals their snakish character, that means you cannot trust a single word that he wrote, said, or implied, either in the past or in the future.

That’s how I knew Jordan Peterson was an evil and corrupting influence before I’d watched any of his videos or read either of his books. That’s why I have never had any respect or regard for Ben Shapiro, even before his star ascended in the usual conservative circles and the New York Times anointed him a leading figure of the Approved Opposition. It’s just a matter of time before pictures of both of them with black eyes appear.

The following are the words of a snake. Compare and contrast the two statements.

I think @JamesGunn is an a**hole, as my exchange with him earlier this week made clear. I also think that firing him for vile old joke tweets is bad precedent and a mistake. There is no limiting principle to the outrage mob.
– Ben Shapiro

Of course there are legitimate racists and we should target them, We should find them and we should hurt their careers because racism is unacceptable.
– Ben Shapiro

So, racism is unacceptable, but pedophilia is just fine with the Littlest Chickenhawk. Quelle surprise…. Anyhow, it’s beyond stupid to claim that any “precedent” is being set here. There is no dearth of well-established precedent for people being fired for a single tweet, let alone dozens of seriously sketchy ones.

A reader points out another snakish juxtaposition.

And by the way, I don’t give a good damn about the so-called “browning of America.
– Ben Shapiro

If Germans, who had a centuries-old connection to the newly created Polish territory, could be expelled, then surely Palestinians, whose claim to Judea, Samaria and Gaza is dubious at best, can be expelled. It’s time to stop being squeamish.
– Ben Shapiro

The Palestinians have a much stronger historical claim to Judea, Samaria, and Gaza than the Jews do to any land from Maine to California. Shall we take this to mean that Ben Shapiro would support the expulsion of the Jewish people from the USA?

Peaceful multicultural societies don’t exist

Even the Dutch have figured this out:

Peaceful multicultural societies don’t exist and the EU won’t be able to force “equal” migrant distribution on Eastern Europe, where people of color are beaten to a pulp, the Dutch FM said according to a leaked video.

The explosive comments were delivered by Dutch Foreign Minister Stef Blok during a private meeting attended by some 80 people working for the Netherlands’ international organizations. Footage of Blok speaking to the audience via video link was leaked to the current affairs program Zembla on Wednesday, and the inflammatory remarks promptly spread through the Dutch media.

“I have asked my ministry this and I will pose the question here as well,” Blok can be heard saying in the video. “Give me an example of a multi-ethnic or a multi-cultural society, in which the original population still lives, and where there is a peaceful cohabitation. I don’t know one.”

The minister went further and said it might be all fun and games to go to a “Turkish bakery on Sunday” if you live in a well-off part of a city, but a “number of side effects” promptly become tangible if one lives in a migrant-packed neighborhood. You very quickly reach the limits of what a society can take,” Blok stated.

One of the event goers gave Suriname as an example of a peaceful multicultural society. Bok, however, brushed off the claim, branding the former Dutch colony “a failed state.”

“And that is largely to do with the ethnic divisions,” Blok said.

It’s going to be an interesting contest between which ideology was more objectively insane and which was the most harmful between a) communism, b) feminism, and c) multiculturalism. At this point, I’d say it’s a two-horse race between (b) and (c). Even 70 years of murderous communism left most nations more or less intact.

Disney fires director

Exiting. It’s the same as being fired, but when you’re a well-known leftie, the media will make it sound nicer for you.

James Gunn is exiting Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.

The move comes after conservative personalities resurfaced old tweets Thursday in which the filmmaker joked about controversial topics such as pedophelia and rape. Gunn has been an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump.

“The offensive attitudes and statements discovered on James’ Twitter feed are indefensible and inconsistent with our studio’s values, and we have severed our business relationship with him,” Walt Disney Studios chairman Alan Horn said in a statement Friday.

Of course, given that it’s Disney and all, one has to wonder if the problem was that the jokes were being told at the pedos’ expense.

The disgusting tweets were brought to light by journalists Mike Cernovich, Jack Posobiec, and director Gabe Hoffman

Journalists… and Castalia House authors. Good work, gentlemen.

Darkstream: white nationalism and other fictions

From the transcript of the Darkstream:

What a lot of people don’t realize is that pan nationalism is simply a form of ethnic imperialism. It is a category error to mistake the broader racial category for the national or ethnic category, so for example, when you look at the continent of Europe there are literally dozens of nations in there. You have the Russian nation which is distinct from the Swedish nation which is distinct from the Finnish nation which is distinct from the Scottish nation which is distinct from the English and the Welsh nations, and you could also theoretically argue that there is a Cornish nation. So when you start talking about white nationalism and you try to lump all of these nations into a single category and call them white, that’s where you get into nonsensical imperialism. Which nation is the dominant culture?

I speak some German, I speak some Italian, I speak some French, I even speak a bit of Japanese, and I can assure you that all of those races, all of those nations which have been considered to be white in  some way shape or form, all of those nations are very, very different. All of those nations have different cultural values, they have different historical traditions, most of them have different languages, and many of them have different religious focuses. They might all be Christian, but they are fundamentally different, so how do you build a nation around all these nations?

Well, you do it the same way that the Romans did it, you do it the same way that the Chinese did it and that is constructing an empire. Now what you have to understand is that this has been done before, for example in the 1950s, 1960s, and into the 1970s the biggest pan-national movement
was actually in the Middle East.  Gamal Abdel Nasser was the president, leader, I don’t know exactly what his title was, but he was the leader of Egypt and he was the center of what was called the pan-Arab nationalist movement and they actually went so far as to merge several different countries. It was called the United Arab Republic I think it was Egypt and Syria, and it was a complete failure.

It was an absolutely complete failure, and so the the idea that different European nations are going to band together and ignore all their differences in a manner that is even more tightly and intimately bound than the present European Union presently is an utter absurdity. It is not going to happen. Pan African nationalism failed, pan-Arabian nationalism failed, the European Union was so aware that this was going to fail that they didn’t even dare attempt to do it openly; they denied that they were even going to create a political entity much less tried to merge the nations.

White nationalism is a complete non-starter. White nationalism does not exist; the only place that any form of it exists is in the United States and that’s why you see a lot of very stupid things being said by Americans trying to talk about Europe and trying to talk about European nations. What people tend to forget is that the only reason that the United States has been held together is by military force.

More senior FBI “retirements”

Well, this is certainly unexpected!

Three of the top cybersecurity officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation are retiring from government service, according to people familiar with the matter—departures that come as cyberattacks are a major concern for the country’s security agencies.

Senior U.S. intelligence officials warn that the country is at a “critical point” facing unprecedented cyberthreats, including Russia’s ongoing attacks on the American political system. The retirements also come as the FBI is facing regular criticism from President Donald Trump and his supporters, and is working to attract and retain top cyber talent.

Scott Smith, the assistant FBI director who runs the Bureau’s cyber division, is leaving this month. His deputy, Howard Marshall, also left in recent weeks. Mr. Marshall has accepted a job at Accenture , a consulting firm that is expanding its cybersecurity portfolio. Mr. Smith is also expected to move to the private sector.

David Resch, executive assistant director of the FBI’s criminal, cyber, response and services branch, is departing the bureau as well. Mr. Resch, who was named to his senior post by FBI Director Christopher Wray in April, supervised Mr. Smith and Mr. Marshall.

Additionally, Carl Ghattas, executive assistant director of the FBI’s national security branch, has decided to leave for the private sector. And Jeffrey Tricoli, a senior FBI cyber agent who oversaw a Bureau task force addressing Russian attempts to meddle in U.S. elections, left last month for a senior vice president position at Charles Schwab Corp. , the Journal reported last week.

The FBI confirmed the departures. One U.S. official said more people are expected to leave soon, declining to provide additional names.

I wonder why they are departing now, just when their skills and experience are so desperately required?

SJWs devour their own

Few things are more amusing than SJW autophagy. Better make that turn flawlessly with the school of fish or it will turn on you!

Paramount says it has fired the head of its television division for making unspecified comments that drew complaints from employees.

Paramount Pictures CEO Jim Gianopulos wrote in a memo Thursday that Amy Powell had been fired for making comments that were ‘inconsistent with company values.’ The memo did not elaborate on the nature of the statements or where they were made, beyond stating they were said in a ‘professional setting.’

A source told Variety that the comments were ‘racially charged’ in nature.

Powell allegedly made an insensitive remark about the television adaptation of the 1996 movie First Wives Club. During a conference call with producers of the show, Powell made a comment about black women being angry. This prompted an African-American assistant who was on the call to complain.

That will certainly show her that black women are not angry! At this point, you have to be utterly shortsighted or totally clueless to celebrate diversity. Diversity is corporate cancer and it’s just a matter of time before it blows up on you.

NOW ON THE MMQB: Jenny Vrentas on the rise of powerful women in NFL ownership circles 

What football fans don’t want to read more about the rise of powerful women? Only all of them. Moreover, even if you don’t do or say anything even remotely objectionable, they will manufacture a thoughtcrime if necessary.

“Back To Eden Bakery” says that according to its own surveillance video, a black woman named “Lillian”, who is well known in the area as a “professional equity activist”, entered at 9:06 p.m., after the bakery’s closing time. Employees had also turned off the “Open” sign, but several customers (all white) who had already ordered were still inside. Two other white women who went to the bakery two minutes before “Lillian”, were also informed that the business was closed for the night.

The bakery says “Lillian” left the store briefly and began recording video.

The bakery’s statement says that even though it does not consider the employees to be racist and that they were following the business’s protocol of closing at 9 p.m., they were fired because “sometimes impact outweighs intent.”

Think they would have tried this stunt at a bakery where the Confederate flag was flying high and proudly?

A passion for social justice

Batwoman, queer and converged:

The CW has put in development a Batwoman series for 2019 consideration. It hails from former The Vampire Diaries executive producer Caroline Dries and the architect of the CW Arrowverse, Greg Berlanti.

In Batwoman, written by Dries based on the DC characters, armed with a passion for social justice and a flair for speaking her mind, Kate Kane soars onto the streets of Gotham as Batwoman, an out lesbian and highly trained street fighter primed to snuff out the failing city’s criminal resurgence. But don’t call her a hero yet. In a city desperate for a savior, Kate must overcome her own demons before embracing the call to be Gotham’s symbol of hope.

Batwoman already has been a trailblazer for LGBTQ+ representation in comics. After a long hiatus, she was reintroduced to the DC comic universe in 2006 when she was established as a Jewish lesbian, becoming the first-ever lesbian superhero title DC character. Now Batwoman would become the first gay lead character — male or female — of a live-action superhero series.

A passion for social justice! A flair for speaking her mind! Kee-rikey. At this point, all we are going to have to do is show up. And while I can’t share any details of Castalia’s coming foray into movies AND television yet, things are looking increasingly optimistic. We’re also going to hold a Brainstorm about the comic store campaign next week.