Author: VD

Bring it

I sincerely hope France, Germany, and the UK are dumb enough to listen to Obama’s ex-officials and call what they wrongly imagine is the God-Emperor’s bluff on the Iran deal:

Two former Obama administration officials suggested that America’s European allies should punish President Donald Trump for withdrawing from the Iran deal and levying additional sanctions on the Islamic republic.

The European Union and individual European countries are obligated to take aggressive steps to preserve the Iran deal, in order to avoid becoming Trump’s “doormat,” Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson argued in an op-ed that ran in The New York Times Thursday. Both Simon and Stevenson were directors on former President Barack Obama’s National Security Council (NSC).

“The European Union could, for instance, announce the withdrawal of member-states’ ambassadors from the United States. Isn’t this what states do when diplomatic partners breach solemn agreements, expose them to security risks and threaten to wreak havoc on their economies? That is, after all, what the administration is threatening to do by courting the risk of a Middle Eastern war and applying secondary sanctions to European companies,” they argued. “Depending on the American response, European capitals might even follow up with expulsion of American ambassadors.”

“It would be hard to fault these moves as irresponsible, given that they would not impair vital security functions like intelligence-sharing and law enforcement coordination. They would, however, symbolize a stark diplomatic breach that could extend to other areas in which the Trump administration needs allied support,” the former Obama officials wrote. “Thus, the White House would face the first hard choice in this whole process: a full-blown crisis in trans-Atlantic relations. If the administration’s next move were to impose secondary sanctions on Europe, the Europeans could slap its own penalties on American multinational corporations, which in turn would place additional pressure on the White House.”

It’s truly remarkable how these once-powerful bureaucrats simply don’t understand the power calculus involved. Or, as it should be phrased, the power addition. The US runs a big balance-of-trade deficit with Europe, so any such action on the part of the European governments would affect them much more severely than it would affect the United States.

We are rapidly coming to the end of the peaceful period when butter mattered more than guns. Which is why Europe is waning in influence as Russia, and particularly China, are waxing. What mattered more to the Syrian government, Germany’s cars or Russia’s anti-aircraft systems? What was more important to defeating the Islamic State, UK banking institutions or Iranian military advisors?

Any such move on the EU’s part will help break the illusion of its power and offer further encouragement to the rising nationalist movements seeking to free their peoples from the EU’s chains. In the meantime:

H.J.Ansari Zarif’s senior advisor: “If Europeans stop trading with Iran and don’t put pressure on US then we will reveal which western politicians and how much money they had received during nuclear negotiations to make #IranDeal happen.”

If Trump doesn’t already know them, he should offer the Iranians something to go public with those names.

So, that went well

The campaign for Michigan’s first Muslim candidate for governor is going about as well as one might expect:

Michigan’s first-ever Muslim candidate for governor, Dr. Abdul al-Sayed, took a shot at fellow gubernatorial candidate Patrick Colbeck on Thursday that some Republicans are saying was below the belt.

Colbeck, speaking at a candidate’s forum in East Lansing, expressed his concerns about Sharia law and the extremist Muslim Brotherhood’s tactic of civilization jihad. Colbeck took exception with an article he says was planted by Sayed supporters in the left-of-center website Buzzfeed,  which painted Colbeck as a fringe extremist using “unfounded conspiracy theories” against Sayed.

“What I have not heard is the Republicans on this panel, decisively and swiftly call out this kind of Islamophobia, this kind of racism, in the context that they are wanting to represent the state that has the highest per-capita number of Muslim Americans in the country. Now you may not hate Muslims, but I’ll tell you, Muslims definitely hate you!”

Remember, diversity is the USA’s strength! This should end well.

Pushback to the Peterson expose

Caffeine & Philosophy has written me an open letter to me, which I will quote in part:

I enjoy reading your work. But it is a different kind of amusement I experience than normal, reading your criticisms of Dr. Jordan Peterson. It’s not that your criticisms are inept, or even completely wrong, but they convey a misunderstanding that is tragically mirrored in the misunderstanding I see in my friends and family members to whom I try to explain your ideas.

I think the problem lies in communication style. You are, first and foremost, a dialectician. You may play the rhetorician, and you do it well, but anyone who has read both your debate books about The Existence of Gods and On the Question of Free Trade after having read your rhetorical works like SJWs Always Lie and Cuckservative can see that your heart is in the syllogism. I know this based on your minimal to absent tolerance for non-syllogistic thinking, in commenters or in virtually anyone else. You literally have to convert ordinary debate into pseudo-syllogisms (the enthymeme) to find it tolerable. This is not a criticism. Your subsequent precision is one of the reasons I enjoy your work so much.

Unfortunately, it’s also a reason why you are often misunderstood, dismissed as an asshole, or as ridiculous. It may also be why you have a hard time with intellectuals (or humans generally) who are not dialecticians.

Jordan B Peterson is not a syllogistic thinker. This, too, is not a criticism, and I suspect it is why you have a difficult time taking him seriously.

To the contrary, I take Jordan Peterson very seriously indeed. Yes, he is dishonest, incoherent, and hopelessly illogical, and but there is method and intent underlying the madness of Jordanetics. Still, Caffeine & Philosophy simply finds it hard to believe that Jordan Peterson is Approved Opposition, if not worse.

Jordan Peterson is being pushed by mainstream media as a “right-wing” intellectual so that he can gate-keep the Alt-Right.

Peterson never claimed to be of the right. He has sympathies for some right-wing positions (like respect for tradition as a starting place), but he has always claimed to be a classical liberal. This makes his opposition to the Alt-Right entirely normal.

But just because someone is being pushed by the mainstream doesn’t mean that they are necessarily serving their interests. When Hillary’s campaign information came out, we learned that she had donated to Trump’s primary campaign. Obviously, she had thought she could divide the candidates and hurt Cruz, thus increasing her chances of winning the general. But it didn’t turn out that way.

The mainstream outlets that are now pushing Peterson haven’t the faintest idea what it is they’re even supporting. To them, he’s just a popular guy with some edgy ideas. But he is telling people that the school system is corrupt and that the modern left is pathological. He’s telling men to be prepared to fight. It’s possible that the short-term effects of his advice will harm the Alt-Right, but because the identitarian position is the natural one for healthy and self-confident people, his practical advice for being assertive, combative, taking responsibility, and getting your own life in order will ultimately help the Alt-Right in the long-run.

 Yeah, so, about that.

Interestingly enough, the picture of Peterson in the mask at home in front of his Lenin portrait to which I linked yesterday has been disappeared. Meanwhile, even as the evidence of Peterson being the Mouth of Soros grows, a member of the ELoE group on Idka correctly notes that it doesn’t matter whether the globalist minions are card-carrying party members, constructs, or mere fellow travelers.

The global elites do create, and we’re all very familiar with false flags, fake news, and puppets like Shapiro. But they also manipulate and shape organic developments to their ends. Peterson probably did start out posting lectures and resenting pronoun laws. The Weinsteins likely did emerge from the Evergreen debacle. An element of common sense may well have taken Rubin from SJWism to Liberalism. What matters is that all of them can be used to serve globalist ends. In the current climate, civic nationalism is indistinguishable from globalism. I don’t mean in some “theoretical” formation, but in terms of their overall faith in human perfectibility, the people they oppose, and the alliances they form. The only real “left-right” distinction is between a globalist, atheist tyranny crouching behind a fig leaf of civic nationalism and the empirical, Christian, nationalist West. Who cares about gradients of twentieth-century political taxonomy?

The dog-whistler

A partial transcript of last night’s Darkstream.

Jordan Peterson is an absolutely shameless and filthy liar, but he is now tweeting about how angry and upset he is, and how pathetic Ari Feldman is, because Feldman is doing the same thing to Peterson that Peterson is doing to the Right. I didn’t like Peterson before. I thought that he was wrong and I thought that his philosophy was evil. I picked that up relatively quickly, but I didn’t really have anything against the guy personally. You know, I felt pity for him because he’s somebody who has clearly known a lot of suffering and tragedy in his life, but you know what, after I read those tweets where he was saying that you have no right to be proud of your culture, you have no right to be proud of your race, you have no right to be proud of your nation, you have no right to be proud of your tribe, you have no right to be proud of your people… you know what? Fuck him!

Anyone who is going tell me that I should not take pride in the tradition that my grandfather established for me, for my brothers, and for my children, can go to Hell. I have nothing but utter contempt for that attitude. You know, Petersen goes around saying “oh you should you should create your own standards and define your own truth and do your own thing” and all this kind of crap, that is not something that is going to preserve Western civilization, that is not something that is going to preserve the West’s traditions, and I’ll tell you something else. Jordan Peterson absolutely lies, because he says the goal of the far right is “to unjustly bathe in the glories of the past.”

That is totally false. What we on the right want to do is we want to be worthy of the glories of the past. When we look at the story of Leonidas and the 300 Spartans we want to be inspired by that, we want to be worthy of that. You do not develop courage on your own, you develop courage by seeing the example in others, and especially in others like you, especially in your family members.

Jordan Peterson is a man without honor. Jordan Peterson is a man without courage, and while I don’t think it’s true that Jordan Peterson is an anti-semite, I don’t think that it is true that Jordan Peterson is a dog-whistler, I think Jordan Peterson is scum. I think Jordan Peterson is a man without balls and I think Jordan Peterson is one of the very last people on Earth that anyone should be listening to. He is not going to teach young men to become men, he is not going to teach men, to become heroes. His path is the path of the rabbit.

“Ever to excel, to do better than others, and to bring glory to your forebears, who indeed were very great … This is my ancestry; this is the blood I am proud to inherit.”

– Homer, The Iliad

UPDATE: The new Darkstream which cites the newly exposed evidence that Jordan Peterson is a globalist snake in the grass is up.

I don’t… I won’t… I can’t even

I actually like the new Ladybaby single better than either of the two new Babymetal songs. And yes, the one doing the Ladybeard-style growl is actually Emiri, the girl with the pink hair. Just when you think Japan can’t possibly get any weirder or more awesome, they outdo themselves.

Meanwhile, Babymetal is getting too focused on narrative, over-the-top presentation, and English lyrics, and the music is suffering as a result. Do not like.

Interview with Jesse Peterson

Jess: I read that your previous you are a pretty smart guy you are a game designer, accomplished musician, and member of Mensa, a high IQ Society. Is that true, you’re really a smart guy?

Vox: Yes. I’m a National Merit semifinalist, which is actually considerably more difficult than Mensa.

Jesse: So were you born that way?

Vox: Yes.

Jesse: What is a high IQ?

Vox: Well, you know, IQ is best understood in terms of its standard deviation, so 100 IQ is normal, the Mensa level IQ is the top two percent of the population, so one in 50, that’s about 132, you know. I’m in the 3 to 4 standard deviation range, so I’m probably around the one in a thousand, one in 1500 level. There are plenty of people like me, but not a whole lot.

Jesse: Do you feel smart? I mean, how do you know that you’re that smart?

Vox:  I guess the easiest way for me to explain it is to put it in terms like this; I’m also slightly colorblind. There are some differentiations between orange and green that I literally cannot see. You can point it out to me, you can trace it, you can draw it, and I cannot see it, no matter what. Being highly intelligent tends to be like the other side of that, you know, you see things, and you think they’re obvious, and it’s very, very surprising to you that other people can’t see them. So, I would say that in terms of your day-to-day relationships with other people, it’s often just having to understand that other people can’t always see what you see, or they can’t always reach conclusions as quickly as you can.

Perhaps this exchange may help put the Jordan Peterson thing in perspective and explain why so many smart people managed to miss the insidious nature of his philosophy and his rules for life even if they happened to be in the unusual position of having actually read his books. For example, Peterson wrote some things that I immediately knew to be wrong in Maps of Meaning, mostly because I had previously been reading Umberto Eco quoting Aristotle and analyzing Aristotelian categorization in some detail the day before at the gym. Setting aside the small likelihood that the average person is going to read any of the relevant books without being paid a significant sum to do so, it was necessary to understand what Aristotle had written, understand what Eco was saying about what Aristotle had written, remember what Peterson had written, and also have understood that well enough to see the contradiction between the two on the one hand and the one on the other that rendered Peterson’s statements false. Anyone could be walked through that process, but it takes a relatively high level of cognitive processing power to understand all three elements well enough to immediately connect them even when there is no obvious connection, since Peterson never refers directly to Aristotle. Or, for that matter, to Eco.

An eminent person

/pol/ is onto the Jordanetics fraud.

UPDATE: The 8chan thread already got nuked, so it has been reposted at 4chan, and has also been archived.

Jordan B. Peterson worked on the UN Secretary General’s High Level Panel on Sustainable Development, editing a document that was released in 2013 entitled ‘A NEW GLOBAL PARTNERSHIP: ERADICATE POVERTY AND TRANSFORM ECONOMIES THROUGH SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT’. One of the panel members of this UN High Council was none other than skippy himself, John Podesta.

A NEW GLOBAL PARTNERSHIP:ERADICATE POVERTY AND TRANSFORM ECONOMIES THROUGH SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
The Report of the High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda

In July 2012, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced the 27 members of a High-level Panel to advise on the global development framework beyond 2015, the target date for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The Panel was part of the Secretary-General’s post-2015 initiative mandated by the 2010 MDG Summit. UN Member States have called for open, inclusive consultations involving civil society, the private sector, academia and research institutions from all regions, in addition to the UN system, to advance the development framework beyond 2015.

There is a global ethic for a globalised world, based on our common humanity, the Rio principles and the shared ethos of all traditions: “do as you would be done by.”  

Look what it says on page 18 under the heading ‘Global Impact by 2030’:

International Migration:

The universal human rights and fundamental freedoms of migrants must be respected. These migrants make a positive economic contribution to their host countries, by building up their labour force.

From the report: The  deliberations  of  the  Panel  were  informed  by  the  broad  consultative  process  conducted  by  the  United  Nations,  as  directed  by  the  Secretary-General  in  our  terms  of reference. This includes national and global thematic consultations under the aegis of the United Nations Development Group (UNDG), regional consultations undertaken by  the  Regional  Commissions,  consultations  with  businesses  around  the  world  under  the guidance of the UN Global Compact, and the views of the scientific and academic community as conveyed through the Sustainable Development Solutions Network. We are grateful for the perspective these extensive consultations provided.

Some initially doubted that Peterson was actually involved with this UN agenda, since he is not listed among the 27 members of the panel. However, in an interview with The Dark Room Podcast in October 2016, Peterson openly declared that he was not merely involved with the UN HLP report, but actually wrote the underlying narrative for it.

I’m a media whore, you know…. I’m a professor at the University of Toronto so far. I’m a clinical psychologist, I have a clinical practice, I’m a business consultant, I do executive coaching, mostly for senior partners of big law firms. I run a testing business for the world’s biggest early-stage technology incubator in California, called the Founder Institute. They’ve started 2,000 business in the past five years and I’ve screened all 30,000 of their entrants because I know how to predict entrepreneurial ability. I designed a program called Future Authoring that has helped more than 7,000 university students improve their grades by 25 percent and decrease their dropout by about the same amount. I worked on the UN Secretary-General’s High Panel for Sustainability Report that was delivered, I believe, in 2013, and rewrote the underlying narrative to strip out most of the ideological claptrap.

His involvement with the UN was also confirmed in his bio at Moses Znaimer’s conference, Ideacity:

Dr. Jordan Peterson has been a dishwasher, gas jockey, bartender, beekeeper, and railway line worker. He’s taught mythology to lawyers, doctors and businessmen, consulted for the UN Secretary General’s High Level Panel on Sustainable Development, helped his clinical clients manage depression, OCD, anxiety, and schizophrenia, and lectured extensively internationally. Dr. Peterson has published more than 100 scientific papers, and revolutionized the psychology of religion with his book Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. As a Harvard professor, he was nominated for the prestigious Levinson Teaching Prize. His YouTube channel’s videos have over 8,000,000 views, and his lectures on mythology were turned into a popular 13-part series on TVO. Dr. Peterson’s online self-help program, The Self Authoring Suite, has been featured in Oprah Magazine, CBC Radio and NPR, and has helped over 100,000 people resolve the problems of their past and radically improve their future.

I can’t say I’m even a little bit surprised to learn that Peterson is NWO, given that one of his stated motives is to dissuade young men from opposing the neo-liberal world order. But Peterson’s involvement in writing that particular document is interesting in light of how, in Maps of Meaning, he explicitly observes that immigrating foreigners have been considered a source of chaos dating back to the classical era. That would put the imperative for the Hero to “slay the Dragon of Chaos” into a new perspective, would it not? In other words, there is now very good reason to believe that Peterson actually knows the extent of the philosophical evil he is advocating; he is not some sort of naive, accidental Pied Piper.

It is clear that Peterson is not, and never has been, what he presents himself as being. Once I finished the first chapter of Maps of Meaning, a thought struck me – which I will later explicate, as it is relevant to demonstrating what an intellectual fraud he is and how wholly ignorant of the Western canon – and I predicted to a companion that there would be less than FIVE references to Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Augustine in the entire 714-page book.

Then I did a search. There were two references to Aristotle. TWO! That was all. My companion was duly impressed, especially when I contrasted that lack of references with the vast number of references to Jung, Freud, and Plato. Now, here is the punchline: both references to Aristotle were contained in a single quotation by “the eminent theologist Reinhold Niebuhr”. Peterson never once refers to Aristotle himself, or any of the great philosopher’s many works.

I had been wondering how Peterson could produce some of the stupid and obviously false statements he had made about history, such as medieval people not being familiar with rhetoric, or the ancients not knowing how to think empirically. But apparently he really is that ignorant, because he’s never actually read most of the classics, he has only read about them, third- or even fourth-hand.

Forget his being buddy-buddy with Ben Shapiro. That’s bad enough, but this guy de-platformed Faith Goldy for her associations… and he’s connected to John freaking Podesta!

“Fueling the Alt Right”

Intellectual Dark Web member Dave Rubin fails to understand WHY the Alt-Right is inevitable:

@clairlemon
NYC’s Hunter College has coursework in “the abolition of whiteness.” Stanford the “abolishing whiteness as a cultural identity.” Classes at Grinnell & UW-Madison confront “the problem of whiteness.” St. John’s College takes on the “depravity of whiteness”

Dave Rubin @RubinReport
Classes like these are fueling the Alt Right, not conversations with mathematicians like @EricRWeinstein, biologists like @BretWeinstein, neuroscientists like @SamHarrisOrg, believers like @benshapiro and non-believers like @michaelshermer…

It’s somewhat amusing to watch both the SJWs and the Official Fake Opposition staunchly failing Sun Tzu 101. They love to talk about the Alt Right, and yet they put all their effort into stubbornly refusing to even begin to understand what it is and why it is steadily growing in popularity, power, and influence around the world.

The truth is that both the SJW classes and the absurd falsities put forth by the Weinsteins, the Harrises, the Shapiros, and the Shermers of the world are fueling our growth. Because we speak the uncomfortable truths, the unspeakable truths, the impermissible truths and the undeniable truths about the many failures of the neo-liberal world order they are trying to defend.

Every single time they speak, they utter falsehoods. Sometimes knowingly, sometimes not. But they do so every single time. And we can prove it. Every single time.

SJW shenanigans at Marvel

A Marvel insider reports that Mark Waid has gone off the deep end again:

I work at Marvel; some information for you guys

Waid was ordered to delete fucking everything social media-wise by Cebulski. Cebulski got some VERY angry emails from Antarctica Press. Lawsuit threatening letters in terms of Waid explicitly using Marvel’s name when he threatened them to dropping “Jawbreakers”. Along with threats of physical violence being committed against people at Antartica Press, if they did not do what Waid ordered.

Cebulski called Waid and basically demanded he kill all of his social media profiles and basically go off the grid. Basically, he’s in an internet time out which he has zero choice but to honor, lest he get blackballed from ever working at Marvel again.

As it stands, Waid’s career at Marvel is pretty much dead now. Not even Waid’s chief protector (Brevoort) can save him, since Cebulski is beyond the pale angry. Cebulski gave Waid one final chance when he took over. Don’t expect Waid to be writing any more comics from Marvel at least as long as Cebulski is in charge.

It did seem bizarre that Avalanche dropped Jawbreakers when they had already published Magademia and Barack Panther. But this simply goes to show that even the most SJW-converged company will eventually find itself having to eject its most extreme SJWs or risk imploding.

Of course, the fact that Marvel didn’t simply fire Waid for this behavior illustrates that its management is still in denial and is afraid to address the fact that it has the corporate version of cancer.

Suicide of the West: a review

The Z-man reviews Jonah Goldberg’s Suicide of the West:

I decided to give the book a read and write a review, fully expecting to use it as a segue into some points about Burnham, Buchanan and the state of the Right. The rest of the book’s title sums up the entire neocon argument since Trump came down the escalator.The rather mild push-back against cosmopolitan globalism we have seen the last two years has been treated like the end of the world. My assumption going in was that it was going to be the long play version of every Weekly Standard editorial since 2016.

I was wrong. This book is terrible in ways that I did not expect. The terribleness starts in the introduction, which is written in the jocular style you would expect from a short blog post about a television show or a movie. In fact, he relies on quotes from movies to make his points. When you pick up a book with the pretentious title “Suicide of the West” it better read like a serious book. I was reminded of the German word fremdschämen, which loosely means the shame you feel when seeing someone humiliated or embarrassed.

Added to that is a superficiality that you see when someone is uncomfortable with the material. The introduction is a rambling and shallow discussion of religion and human nature, which somehow veers into a discussion of the movie The Godfather. When he gets into his discussion of human nature, it’s obvious that he is way out of his depth and he knows it. Frankly, it reads like something submitted by a freshman coed. If he had dotted his i’s with little hearts, it would have been more authentic.

The book is really three books. The first part is just rambling nonsense about human nature that would embarrass anyone on our side of the great divide. The second part is a grammar school social studies book. The third part feels like it was written by a committee of people not on speaking terms with one another. Big chunks of it undermine his claim that the revolt against cosmopolitan globalism is the end of the world. Even accounting for my own deep skepticism about his motives, it is a surprisingly weak argument.

I was planning to read it when I was distracted by the unexpected need to read Jordan Peterson’s books. Now, I’m not sure I’ll bother. It’s a strange title, though, considering that Goldberg, through the societally destructive policies he endorses, is cheering on the very suicide of which he writes. It is not “the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics” that is “Destroying American Democracy”, it is women’s suffrage, immigration, and secularism that have already destroyed America.

Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, Identity Politics, and Christianity are the only way America will be restored.