Author: VD

Mailvox: the furrowed brow

As I pointed out in Cuckservative, it doesn’t matter which side the moderates say they are on. They will always, always, always prefer to virtue-signal by shooting at “their” side. Either you’re too impolite or you’re insufficiently inclusive or you’re too extreme or your bow tie is tied improperly. Regardless, they are always irrelevant and serve no purpose except as speedbumps for the side they nominally support.

A Castalia House blogger notes that the moderates have discovered Alt★Hero.

There’s another outraged blog post about Alt★Hero, this time from Kasimir Urbanski. He claims that what you’re doing is just like SJW Marvel. I read the post, and he behaves exactly as you said moderates do — they shoot at their own side, saying that we have to behave more civilized than the opposition, all in some attempt to avoid charges of being too mean instead of backing up people who actually take action. They expect to both fight the SJWs and follow the (im)moral standards SJWs set, standards the SJWs happily ignore.

Let’s see what this gentleman has to say:

And that’s what bothers me about Alt-Hero. We certainly could use someone coming along and making a new comics universe that was ABOUT THE COMICS in the same way the OSR is about the games. One that didn’t ignore politics completely, or shy from moral lessons, or push a leftist agenda, but that wasn’t just a facade for right-wing propagandism either.

 I would love to see a universe that had heroes that actually embodied heroism, that had moral values, that were patriotic, that believed in family, that stood up for classical Enlightenment values, who saluted the flag. And this would have the “Aleena Effect” of SJWs protesting against a hero in a US flag, and everyone who likes US flags abandoning the SJWs.

 But above all, that it would focus on the comics. Instead, Alt-hero has every appearance of being something that will involve someone who is fundamentally not really all that into comics (at least, not enough to value the subculture) injecting ideological propaganda into the medium of the comic, with the comics’ conventions being largely an afterthought to sledgehammering their political agenda.

 That means Alt-Hero looks like it’s going to be pretty much just like SJW Marvel.

That is pure textbook. One of the reliable marks of the moderate is his total inability to distinguish tactics from objectives. The ironic thing is that to ignore something like the SJW invasion of literally every aspect of society would be to inject ideological propaganda into the comics, as it is one of the most significant aspects of our society today. Omitting that, or immigration, would be like pretending the Cold War wasn’t happening during the 70s and 80s.

But this is good news, in my opinion. The more the moderates are concerned and even upset, the more likely it is that Alt★Hero is going to be effective.

An obligation

James Kirchick explains why Jews residing in America have an obligation “to pay it forward by supporting a liberal immigration regime” in an article entitled “Can American Jews Be White Nationalists?”

Nobody’s politics or worldview should be determined by their racial, ethnic, or religious background—certainly not in a country as big, diverse, and welcoming as America. But if there’s an issue that should be at least influenced by one’s American Jewish identity, it’s immigration. And that’s because America, quite simply, has been great for the Jews, whose forebears in the shtetls of Europe spoke about it as the goldene medina, a golden land. Enslaved, ghettoized and murdered throughout our history, Jews have been welcomed by America with open arms.

Of course, that has not always been the case. During the Jewish people’s most desperate hour, Franklin Delano Roosevelt slammed the door shut on migrants from Nazi Germany. And it wasn’t until the middle of the 20th century that institutional discrimination against Jews, in the forms of university quotas and the like, came to an end. But few other nations have been so hospitable to Jews as the United States. Indeed, it’s hard to think of any other minority group that has succeeded so much thanks to America’s generosity and openness. The American idea allowed us to flourish to the point where we are the most widely admired religious group in the country. That is not a condition, to say the least, with which Jews have been much familiar at any other point in our long and beleaguered history, anywhere else in the world.

American Jews, then, have something of a communal obligation to pay it forward by supporting a liberal immigration regime. And by and large we have: Jews and Jewish organizations are very pro-immigration. This implied social responsibility doesn’t necessarily entail support for open borders. Nor does it apply to other parts of the world; continued mass Muslim immigration from North Africa and the Middle East into Europe, for example, is a portentous development that will make Jewish life there, already difficult, increasingly so. But an American Jew calling for a drastic reduction in legal immigration to America is unseemly. 

Any group of U.S. residents whose first and foremost question is “is it good for our little group” rather than “is it good for America” is not permitted to use the phrase “fellow Americans”. Because they are nothing of the kind.

A man cannot serve two masters. And while a man can collect as much paperwork as he likes, he can never be member of two nations. Jesus Christ himself told Christians they were to be in, but not of, the world, which is why Christians have been considered a threat by governments everywhere since the days of the Emperor Augustus.

But a nation is neither a state nor a government. Much mischief has been committed, and much confusion has been sown, by those who insist on conflating the nation with the state.

Not one, but two

A number of people have asked for a way to buy Alt★Hero Novel #2, so we have created two new ways to do so as part of the Alt★Hero campaign. We have also found two of the three cosplay models for the promised photo shoot.

$5.00
Novel Ebook #2
This is to receive a copy of Alt★Hero novel #2, by Vox Day and Jon Del Arroz, in DRM-free EPUB and MOBI formats.

$35.00
Add-On: Digital Starter Kit
This is to receive the nine volumes of comics, the two ebooks, the cosplay photos, and, if the Stretch Goal is achieved, the city map of Avalon, all in digital format.

We have also added a new stretch goal which promises to be very cool. I have already selected the cartographer and he is excellent. My objective is to provide a beautiful map that will be more detailed than any of the maps of Gotham that are out there, in order to create a world that feels more real than anything in the DC or Marvel universes.

$120000.00
Map of Avalon
Castalia House will produce a detailed map of Avalon, the fictional city central to the Alt★Hero universe. The map will be created by Chuck Dixon in cooperation with an accomplished cartographer.

Dismantling Obama

The God-Emperor is systematically eradicating Obama’s bureaucratic and legislative legacies:

With each passing day, President Donald Trump unravels another piece of Barack Obama’s legacy. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The Paris climate accords. The Iran nuclear deal. Transgender people serving in the military. And, now, that most personal of policies for the former president: The Affordable Care Act.

And yet Obama watches from the sidelines, mostly silent, as Trump punches holes in the dry wall of his freshly finished legacy.

Sure, he’s living his best, most fabulous post-presidential life — jetting around the world, spending time with his family, spending time with the rich and famous, making millions to write books, making hundreds of thousands of dollars for the simple act of opening his mouth.

But Trump is ticking through each of Obama’s policy achievements — foreign and domestic — and trying to dismantle them. CNN’s Chris Cillizza wrote Friday that unraveling what Obama wrought seems to motivate just about everything Trump has done as President.

On a not-necessarily-entirely-unrelated note, one thought that occurs to me about the Weinstein situation is that the chans have been buzzing for weeks about an imminent, and decisive, move by the God-Emperor against the bi-factional ruling party and the deep bureaucracy. Now, this could be nothing more than wishful thinking on their part, but I had been already wondering what the true purpose of the NFL attack could be, other than shoring up his public support, since it was so obviously a major distraction for the media and the public alike. Now I’m wondering if it might have been to set the stage for the coming revelations that are said to be “beyond massive”.

An interesting consequence of the Weinstein case is the way in which it has prepared the public to find revelations an almost unthinkable degree of corruption and evil in powerful places to be credible. If the God-Emperor is going to go nuclear on his establishment enemies, the planets would appear to be in a favorable alignment.

The kind of girl you want to marry

This young woman pretty much defines it. She’s not only cute and relaxed about the unanticipated, but has genuine love in her heart.

The dog was coaxed back outside by guests, and with order now restored, the ceremony went forward with the actual bride in place. But as the couple read their vows, the furry wedding crasher returned.

“The dog entered and laid down to sleep on my veil,” Marília said. This time, no one had the heart to turn the dog back out into the storm — certainly not Marília. She was more than happy to share the spotlight, and a bit of her gown, with the sweet pup. “It was a very pleasant surprise for me, because I love animals,” she said. “I liked it very much.”

“We decided to adopt him because he is a street dog,” Marília said. “It took us a long time to find him again, but yesterday, we were contacted and told his whereabouts.” Before long, the couple reencountered the dog, whom they’ve named Snoop: “He came home, and I showered him,” Marília said. “He played a lot, ate, drank water. He is very happy and slept super good the first night.”

It’s always a good sign when a woman loves dogs and says things like “super good.” It is a fairly reliable sign that she’s both grounded and positive. One of reasons Spacebunny and I hit it off immediately was because we both had dogs. Most of our initial dates involved taking them for walks through the forests near one of our homes. Looking at her, surrounded by all the colors of the autumn leaves, calling after one dog or the other, I always felt as if I had somehow found myself in an Eddie Bauer ad.

Alt★Hero on Cernovich

I was interviewed by Andrew Meyer of Cerno News last night. We discussed Alt★Hero, the Hollywood scandal, and whether or not the startling revelation that the Pussycat Dolls were high-end prostitutes is a reflection of the scandal’s expansion into the music industry or not.

Speaking of Alt★Hero, we’ll be adding a new Reward and a new Goal later today. The Reward is Ebook Novel #2, which will be available for $5. The Goal is a detailed map of Avalon, created by Chuck Dixon and an excellent cartographer, which will unlock at $125K.

That was fast

Six years after women are permitted on British submarines, the top two officers on a sub have been cashiered, along with two female officers:

Five officers on board the submarine have threatened to quit amid the reports Stuart Armstrong, 41, commanding officer of the Vanguard-class submarine HMS Vigilant, was sexually involved with an officer. The incident came to light after a member of the crew alerted senior officials at the vessel’s base in Faslane, near Glasgow, and Armstrong has since been relieved of his duties.

The allegations sparked anger among crew members and when their boat completed its patrol and docked in the US, a source told The Times a handful wanted to hand in their notice.

Armstrong’s second-in-command Lieutenant Commander Michael Seal has also been suspended amid the claims, according to The Sun, who also named Sub-Lieutenant Edwards – Assistant Weapons Engineering Officer on HMS Vigilant – as one of the women involved.

HMS Vigilant is one of four British nuclear-armed Vanguard submarines on active patrol which provide protection to the UK in case of a nuclear war…. It was only six years ago that a ban preventing female officers serving on submarines was lifted.

As I mentioned in my interview with Cerno Media last night, permitting women entry destroys the integrity, the quality, and the status of every male institution. It doesn’t matter if it is academia, the church, the military, gaming guilds, comics, science fiction awards, or the Boy Scouts. In the immortal words of Bill Simmons, “the lesson, as always, is this: ‘women ruin everything.’”

If you don’t guard your borders, you will be overrun. It plays out the same way every single time. The main problem is not with the women, who are simply doing what women do and seeking out the alpha men – it’s not a coincidence that the two men involved are the Commander and the Lieutenant Commander – but rather, with the low-status white knights who are excited to have women around on a daily basis because they hope that they might improve their poor odds.

You’re not one of them

And also, you have to go back.

Hats, as Racked explored earlier this year, have historically signaled that the wearer is part of a team — and when is the desire to belong more acute than in middle school? Of course, teams don’t exist without opponents, and for some to feel like they’re on the inside, others need to be left out.

It was clear to one mother, who asked to remain anonymous, who fell into the latter category and who didn’t when she picked her son up from his middle-school trip to DC: “Our school district has a good amount of minorities in it, but we were all stunned. Every single white kid besides maybe one or two walked off the bus with a red hat on,” she said.

While she, her husband, and their children were all born in the United States, they are Muslim-American and not white, and the hats were just the most recent and most visible symbol of a racial divide that, she says, her son has seen escalate since November.

“I think 12-year-old boys use it as a form of bullying — identifying themselves as part of this group to the exclusion of others just for the fun of it. That’s what it seemed like to me,” she says. “Us over here with the red hats, and you over there… you’re not even an individual anymore. Now you’re just one of the brown kids and you’re not one of us.”

The God-Emperor’s winning never ends. The Red Hats are the sans cullottes of the 21st century. Never forget that homogeneous nations are usually derived from heterogeneous empires.

You may not like these developments. You may think that they are cruel, racist, and wrong. And your opinion of that matters about as much as your opinion of a melon striking the pavement after being dropped from 100 meters high. Civic nationalism has observably failed. The melting pot was always a propagandistic lie. Human nature did not change when the Declaration of Independence was written, and in any event, it was not written for the 80 million post-1965 invaders of America.

The company knew

 So much for the protestations of innocence.

Harvey’s brother and fellow co-founder Bob Weinstein, as well as the company’s president, David Glasser, had told concerned staff as recently as Tuesday that they were shocked and unaware of the confidential settlements made with various women.

However, according to a clause in his 2015 contract, if the movie mogul was charged with sexual harassment he was in charge of all legal payouts and had to pay an additional fine to the company.
‘You [Weinstein] will pay the company liquidated damages of $250,000 for the first such instance, $500,000 for the second such instance, $750,000 for the third such instance, and $1,000,000 for each additional instance,’ the contract reads.

According to the document, as long as Weinstein pays it constitutes a ‘cure’ for any misconduct and no further action can or will be taken.

In more simple terms, that means that no matter how many times he is sued – as long as he is willing to pay he won’t be fired.

If Weinstein were to ever be indicted for a crime the contract contains language that would allow the Board of Directors to fire him.

No, but you see, it was only “to cover consensual affairs.” Sure it was. Good luck trying to hold that line of defense.

UPDATE: And the knives are now out, now that it is clearly safe to declare opposition.

Hachette Book Group is disbanding the company’s Weinstein Books imprint, effective immediately.

“Going forward, titles currently under the Weinstein Books imprint will be published by our Hachette Books imprint, and the Weinstein Books imprint team will join Hachette Books,” the company said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter.

Perseus Books, which is part of Hachette, has had a co-publishing agreement with The Weinstein Co. that has produced about 10 books a year.

UPDATE: Ronan Farrow deserves all the credit he is getting, and then some. When NBC shut down his investigation, he kept it going on his own dime, then brought it to the New Yorker. Suffice it to say this is NOT normal journalistic behavior.

If you’re worried about story

One of the concerns that keeps being raised about Alt★Hero by people who are observably unfamiliar with the fact that I am a novelist is that the comic is going to be nothing more than anti-SJW preaching and attempts to trigger SJWs. But this is nothing more than confusing the advertisement with the product.

But consider the following review for one of my more recent novels, A Sea of Skulls:

Better then GOT

I read a lot of fiction. Vox’s writing skill is superb. He takes no shortcuts with weaving his tale. Explores many different approaches in his books. In throne of bones he spans the life of one character in one chapter. In another he tries his hand a describing a battle from many many different soldiers views as they fight and die. In sea of skulls he pulls back a bit on experimentation and instead explores each major race in his universe from their perspective. Each perspective is unique and masterfully done.

Now, you may well be dubious about the possibility that my Arts of Dark and Light series is genuinely better than A Song of Ice and Fire, especially if you haven’t read A Dance with Dragons. After all, HBO hasn’t even made a television series about it yet. But if you look at the reviews of both books over time, you’ll see how the initial comparisons to Martin begin to fade away and are replaced by comparisons – admittedly, unfavorable – to Tolkien.

This is not indicative of a writer who is unable to tell a story, create memorable characters, or is prone to sacrificing either in the interest of delivering dogmatic, heavy-handed lectures. I don’t believe in either cheap heroism or cheap villainry, as both are the product of mediocre writers with insufficient imagination. While I would consider Captain Europa to be a villain and the Global Justice Initiative to be evil, he most certainly does not.

Nor do I believe that my favored side must always win. After all, the ultimate heroism is self-sacrificial, and I am not even remotely hesistant to kill off even my favorite characters if the story’s logic demands it. (The fact that this also helps solve the fatal perspective-character-inflation problem is merely a fortunate side-effect.) Nor do I ever indulge in the storytelling fraud that is so often present in Martin, Marvel, and DC stories; there are few literary devices for which I have more contempt than “bringing back” an obviously dead character. It’s not only lame and fake drama, it is unnecessary for the sufficiently skilled writer.

Here’s the thing: EVERYTHING triggers SJWs. It’s not as if we have to go even remotely out of our way to set them off. We can focus 100 percent on telling excellent stories and we probably won’t even need to go back and add anything in order to have them REEEEEEing at frequencies higher than have ever been recorded at the Metropolitian opera. Not that I won’t insert the occasional shiv and twist, out of nothing more than the pure joy of it, but we simply don’t have to. In these forsaken days of the Forgettable Squirrel She-Thing, just having pretty women with attractive bodies is more than enough.

So, if you are genuinely concerned about the storytelling aspects of the new series, you can either read my novels or you can simply wait to see what sort of stories we deliver in Alt★Hero. As for me, all I can say is that I am enjoying the challenge of raising my storytelling game in order to keep pace with the legendary Chuck Dixon.

And that, I suspect, is the real concern of the comics SJWs. They’re not at all concerned about our prospective failure. They’re concerned about our prospective success.