In other Arkhaven news, we expect to have QM:AMD #3 and Right Ho, Jeeves #3 available in print soon.
We have also released the regular logo edition of Alt-Hero #3: Reprisal, in which we have modified Rebel’s newly introduced outfit so that it cannot be interpreted as resembling a Confederate flag. Amazon policy forbids selling products featuring the Confederate flag and there is reason to suspect that some employees might attempt to apply the policy in the broadest possible sense to our comics, so we have elected to ensure that they are fully in compliance with Amazon’s policies.
Amazon recently took down Dark Legion Comics and Will Caligan’s Gun Ghoul issues. All four issues were blocked from Amazon’s store and unavailable to customers for a little over week. This block specifically applied to digital editions of the books. Print editions were not affected.
Amazon claimed the books might have had a possible copyright infringement. However, upon further review they discovered there was no copyright infringement and the books were once again available to be purchased.
This isn’t the first time that one of Vox Day’s publishing companies has had their books removed from Amazon. Vox Day tells us that Johan Kalsi’s Corrosion was unpublished multiple times when it was released in 2017. At the same time Gun Ghoul was taken down, Amazon also removed Corrosion from their store citing misleading information. However, that book has also been restored and is now available on Amazon.
If you’re targeted by SJWs, you have to expect there will inevitably be shenanigans. Don’t freak out, don’t worry, don’t be surprised, and don’t lose your temper. Often, upon investigation, the SJW will turn out to have crossed a line and even the most SJW-amenable authority will force them to retreat.
A witness to the abuses committed by Walter Breen, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and their evil coterie of sex criminals backs up the events chronicled by Moira Greyland in The Last Closet in an email sent to Moira.
I remember reading Mists of Avalon when it came out, and it was already known by all the kids what your family did. I remember lots of us kids reading that book in context, because we knew and were creeped out… I remember one thing about it that was ugly was that “a bunch of this is about being really mean to Dorothy”.
We didn’t like that about it. I remember wanting to tell authorities of some kind. The kids made damn sure I didn’t do that- they were afraid they’d be in trouble because they seduced these adults and got drugs from them.
The big thing was, that if we told, then you and your brother would end up in foster. The kids involved sexually and otherwise swore that they didn’t do this to their own kids, just other people’s, so it would be hurting you for no good reason. They didn’t think they were a good enough reason.
It’s all so sad, with that regret as far as I go. I could have told but absolutely nobody would have backed me up – I wasn’t “in it”, so I was useless as any sort of witness. I swear to anyone that disbelieves Moira, for whatever reason, that the scenario she speaks about is absolutely true, it really did happen, with a ton of people involved.
I can’t vouch for details, I wasn’t involved. Although I came close. I was put in uncomfortable sexual situations with the Breens and pals. I chickened out and and threatened to tell. Telling was NOT welcome, to say the least. I know many who did not chicken out, and even made fun of those who did. The kids being preyed on were more “grown up”, more cool, and in the scene.
Moira is telling the truth.
Keep this in mind if you ever find yourself thinking that reconciliation, negotiation, and compromise is a viable option, or that the situation isn’t actually worse than the conspiracy theorists tell you.
Our approach is best understood as a kind of reflexive ethnography—that is, we conducted a study of a peculiar academic culture by immersing ourselves within it, reflecting its output and modifying our understanding until we became “outsiders within” it.
Our objective was to learn about this culture and establish that we had become fluent in its language and customs by publishing peer-reviewed papers in its top journals, which usually only experts in the field are capable of doing. Because we came to conceptualize this project as a kind of reflexive ethnographic study in which we sought to understand the field and how it works by participating in it, obtaining peer reviewers’ comments about what we were doing right and what needed to change to make absurd theses acceptable was central to the project. Indeed, the reviewers’ comments are in many ways more revealing about the state of these fields than the acceptances themselves.
While our papers are all outlandish or intentionally broken in significant ways, it is important to recognize that they blend in almost perfectly with others in the disciplines under our consideration. To demonstrate this, we needed to get papers accepted, especially by significant and influential journals. Merely blending in couldn’t generate the depth necessary for our study, however. We also needed to write papers that took risks to test certain hypotheses such that the fact of their acceptance itself makes a statement about the problem we’re studying (see the Papers section, below). Consequently, although this study does not qualify as being particularly controlled, we did control one important variable: the big-picture methodology we used to write every paper.
Our paper-writing methodology always followed a specific pattern: it started with an idea that spoke to our epistemological or ethical concerns with the field and then sought to bend the existing scholarship to support it. The goal was always to use what the existing literature offered to get some little bit of lunacy or depravity to be acceptable at the highest levels of intellectual respectability within the field. Therefore, each paper began with something absurd or deeply unethical (or both) that we wanted to forward or conclude. We then made the existing peer-reviewed literature do our bidding in the attempt to get published in the academic canon.
This is the primary point of the project: What we just described is not knowledge production; it’s sophistry. That is, it’s a forgery of knowledge that should not be mistaken for the real thing. The biggest difference between us and the scholarship we are studying by emulation is that we know we made things up.
The papers they managed to get published are hilarious, including one that is literally a feminist rewrite of a chapter from Mein Kampf. One paper, Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon, even “gained special recognition for excellence from its journal, Gender, Place, and Culture, a highly ranked journal that leads the field of feminist geography. The journal honored it as one of twelve leading pieces in feminist geography as a part of the journal’s 25th anniversary celebration.”
Inspired by the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, the Z-man addresses the civic nationalists who have been distressed by this glimpse into the manners and customs of Post-America.
Think about all that has been said and written in favor of civil nationalism, yet, here we are anyway…. Look at the fruits of civic nationalism. The champions of the constitutional order and rule of law are all sitting on the Republican side, getting rolled by the non-white rage heads responsible for this circus. The professional civic nationalists have built out a well-financed system to promote your cause. Yet here they are getting clobbered again. If they can’t win this fight, what can they win?
Look. I get it. In your heart you know our side is right about “the race stuff.”. It’s why you moved to a neighborhood with good schools and a bad basketball team. It’s why you support Israel and oppose Islam. You know that only in a society run by white men can there be anything resembling civil order. You hate yourself for it so you have created all sorts of ways to show you’re not an anti-Semite or conceal your real feelings toward blacks. It’s hard to put down that steamer trunk of guilt you have been taught to carry.
I get it. All of us on this side of the great divide get it. All of us have made the journey you will have to make. It’s not easy to accept that all the stuff you have been taught about the constitution and patriotism was just a way to blind you to the approaching darkness. Now you have a chance to open your eyes and see what comes next if you don’t begin your journey to this side. That circus on your television is not going to just fade away. it is a glimpse into the future, of your children’s future and your grandchildren’s future.
Many civic nationalists can’t bear to face the truth about the transformation of the USA into Post-America due to their own identity complications. I understand that challenge very well, being identity-complicated myself.
But if you are willing to sell out your entire nation, your entire civilization, for the sake of your Chinese wife, your adopted black son, or your very nice, hard-working neighbor from Venezuela who loves football and just wants a better life for his extended family, then how are you any different than the businessman who was willing to sell the Soviets the rope with which they intended to hang him? How are you not a traitor to your family, your people, and your country, even by your own lofty principles?
If your definition of “America” requires denying the very existence of America as an actual, material, historical nation, if you deny that Americans are one united people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, and very similar in their manners and customs, then how can you possibly consider yourself to be a patriot or a loyal American at all?
And, regardless of your heritage, your ideological self-identification, or your position on optimal tax rates, how can you possibly consider yourself to be anything but a de facto member of the anti-American globalist Left?
Dr. Hallpike considers the evidence in a chapter on humanism. Available in ebook and audiobook.
Throughout recorded history there have been non-religious people who have believed that this life is the only life we have, that the universe is a natural phenomenon with no super-natural side, and that we can live ethical and fulfilling lives on the basis of reason and humanity. They have trusted to the scientific method, evidence, and reason to discover truths about the universe and have placed human welfare and happiness at the centre of their ethical decision making. – From the British Humanist Association website
Far from having been around ‘throughout recorded history’, the scientific method only developed with Galileo and his contemporaries; the ideas of the ancient atomists were forgotten for many centuries until revived by seventeenth-century chemists, and the general idea that ‘religion’ and ‘science’ have always been locked in conflict is simplistic and unhistorical. Religious thought has many strands; some of these have clearly been hostile to the scientific study of nature, but others have been much more favourable and we must also distinguish the personal faith of individuals from ‘religion’ in the form of official Churches, or equivalent bodies.
Religious explanations of nature are most obviously irrational and anti-scientific when they simply appeal to the will of a deity. For example, ‘Why does water expand when it freezes?’ ‘Because that is God’s will.’ No sense can be made of statements like this, which simply ‘explain’ one unknown by another. Religious traditions that emphasise the omnipotence of God at the expense of His rationality are clearly liable to fall into this category.
Some Indian thinkers, especially the Buddhists, thought that the picture of the physical world given by our senses is an illusion, maya, so that studying it could only be a waste of time. This profound devaluation of the whole of material existence, by comparison with the spiritual, could produce in any religion what Joseph Needham has called a ‘holy ignorance’ that stifled all intellectual enquiry into nature. Some took the view that even if the physical world is not an illusion, by comparison with eternity it is trivial and not worth serious attention. A more hostile view of the study of nature was that trying to understand its mysteries was not just idle curiosity that led to the sin of pride, but positively impious: ‘To pry into the mysteries of nature that God chose not to reveal…was to transgress the boundary of legitimate intellectual inquiry, to challenge God’s majesty, and to enter into the territory of forbidden knowledge.’
Even if there was religious interest in nature, as in the early Middle Ages, this might only consist in finding symbolic references to the divine. For example, The pelican, which was believed to nourish its young with its own blood, was the analogue of Christ who feeds mankind with his own blood. In such a world there was no thought of hiding behind a clump of reeds actually to observe the habits of a pelican. There would have been no point in it. Once one had grasped the spiritual meaning of the pelican, one lost interest in individual pelicans.
There has also been a tendency for religious leaders to regard secular explanations of the natural world as a challenge to their own intellectual authority. This raises the distinction between religion as the personal faith of individual believers, and religion as a social institution. Until well into the nineteenth century European scientists themselves were mostly believing Christians who saw nothing incompatible between science and religion; indeed, they regarded the Book of Nature as well as the Bible as God’s handiwork. The struggles that occurred were not so much between science and religion as between scientists and the authority of the Church.
On the other hand, there were a number of reasons why religion could foster serious scientific enquiry. In the first place the study of the heavenly bodies and the calendar was an integral aspect of religion from very early times, and this astrology laid the essential foundations of Greek astronomy, the first of the exact sciences. More generally, ancient religions were very interested in how the cosmos was formed by the gods. How things began, the emergence of the first humans, and so on, are standard themes in the myths of tribal societies and the ancient literate civilisations. These creation myths were therefore important sources from which the earliest rational speculation about the nature of things could develop, as we can see in the Pre-Socratic philosophers.
But undoubtedly the most important stimulus here came from those notions discussed in the previous chapter, of Logos, Bráhman, or Tao, with the whole idea that the universe makes sense at some deep level, and that it is governed by a unified body of rational laws given by a Supreme Being. This has been an essential belief for the development of natural science, and unless the Greeks, in particular, had been convinced of this they would never have persevered in the serious investigations of nature that they did, and the same is true of medieval and Renaissance science. It was through St. Augustine in particular that the ideas of ‘laws of nature’, that could be applied to the workings of the heavenly bodies, and to natural processes on earth, passed into Western thought, and provided the idea that the mind of God could be discovered in the book of nature as well as in the scriptures.
Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton, for example, were firmly in this tradition. As Joseph Needham says, ‘…historically the question remains whether natural science could ever have reached its present stage of development without passing through a “theological stage”’, that is, of a rational Creator giving laws to the natural world as well as to Man, and which Man could understand. The ancient idea that the scientific study of the natural world is to study the mind of God remained an extremely important motivation for genuinely scientific studies until well into the nineteenth century, and still survives.
But given the importance that Humanists ascribe to science, and the revolutionary claims of modern biology about the nature of Man, it is quite striking that the only interest they seem to have in biology is using it to attack religion, not to reflect on what it has to say about Man. Yet if one takes the claims of evolutionary biologists seriously, especially their denial of consciousness and free will, it is hard to see how the very idea of human agency and moral responsibility could survive at all. Although Humanists prefer to ignore these issues, in the words of Francis Crick, ‘tomorrow’s science is going to knock their culture right out from under them’, and they need to come to terms with the obvious incompatibility between their liberal Western values and a genuinely Darwinian view of Man.
The mayor of a small town in southern Italy that became a model for immigrant integration was placed under house arrest Tuesday for allegedly aiding illegal immigration, a move that brought a well-spring of support for the mayor.
Italian financial police arrested the mayor of Riace, Domenico Lucano, as part of an investigation into the allocation of a half-million euros in public funds to house refugees and asylum-seekers.
Authorities said the investigation also is examining allegations that fraudulent associations were set up so immigrants could take over trash disposal contracts and the arranging of marriages of convenience to help female immigrants remain in Italy.
Lucano’s companion, Tesfahun Lemlem, also was placed under investigation and risks losing her Italian residency.
Find a few of these cucks guilty of treason and the rest will suddenly develop a newfound concern for their nation.
Just because you would not think those words could be strung together meaningfully in a single phrase. Believe it or not, this does not stem from my being a devoted fan of Babymetal and Band-maid, but rather, the world music fan in the house. Senbonzakura! The whole thing is fantastic, and the fact that they actually built up to the climactic flute solo actually made me laugh out loud with pure delight.
They’re not at all bad live either. I would totally go see them in concert.
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. 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.