Author: VD

The bitter last Boomer breath

This column by Kurt Schlichter confused me at first:

With all the awful things happening now – the discord, the anger, the stupidity – at least those of my generation can rest easy knowing that the Millennials are going to suffer after we’re gone. Sure, I’m going to die a lot sooner than them – unless someone invents some sort of expensive life extension potion that I can buy but they can’t because they will still be paying off their degrees in Oppression Studies and Virtue Signaling Arts until the year 2083. But at least I’ll know that we left them a suitably terrible world, since they are a terrible generation.

Millennials are the spawn we deserve – annoying, posturing, and frequently pierced. They are utterly convinced of their own moral superiority, and yet they don’t even believe in morals. Well, that’s not quite true – they just confuse morals with the increasingly bizarre patchwork of taboos and fetishes of the social justice weirdos they use as their moral compasses. When you ask people, “What’s the world’s biggest problem,” and they answer, “The structural paradigm imposed by cisgender Western males,” and you reply, “How about, I dunno, ISIS?” and they answer “Well, who are we to judge their culture?” it’s slappin’ time.

We warned them to stay off our figurative lawns, and now it’s time to figuratively tackle them like Kentucky libertarians.

Wait, what? The Millennials aren’t our spawn. I don’t quite… oh.

I was born during the last week of the Baby Boom, making me…older than the Millennials. So I straddle that useless generation and the useless one that followed. It used to be called Generation X, but no one calls it that anymore because it made no lasting impression. Obama was in my generation. We’ll never live that down. In any case, I remember when calculators were newfangled, phones were attached to walls, and Showtime was the bomb.

Oh, I suspect Generation X will make an impression that will last a lot longer than the Baby Boomers self-celebrated world-changing ever did. We’re going to clean up the mess that the two preceding generations made, with Generation Zyklon providing the footsoldiers.

Yeah, we messed up, but you Millennials reading this on your smartphones, which you can see without glasses or squinting, shouldn’t act so high and mighty. You had a chance to fix all of this and instead you’ve chosen to never move out of your parents’ houses and to just sit around and invent new pronouns for genders that don’t exist. A couple decades down the road, when I’m dead from chronic bitterness and drinking too much expensive cabernet that I buy with the Social Security money you’ll be toiling to pay me, you won’t have families or careers. You’ll be my age and still making coffee for the next generation of ingrates, the children of the immigrants and super-religious Christians who represent the only portion of America still making babies. You’ll come home to your used Mitsubishi love robot named Olive, reheat some Sara Lee avocado toast sticks, and watch Saturday Night Live as it tries to make fun of President Donald Trump, Jr.

The saddest thing about the Baby Boomers is that they STILL can’t accept the fact that they are old and uncool. Decades ago, when they were freaking out about turning 40, Generation X used to joke about how the Boomers were going to try to pull off the 70 is the new 30. But we didn’t think they would actually do it. And then they did. They’re STILL trying to sell Jane Fonda as a sex symbol and she’s practically embalmed.

But while we’re still here together, with me owning stuff and you struggling to afford your daily kombucha smoothie, we face many shared challenges. There’s that giant debt, and there are those foreign people who want to kill us, and there is the terrifying fact that we are at each others’ throats here at home. We know how this plays out if we don’t fix it – bad for me, but super-bad for you. Maybe we should try and square things away. Maybe we should stop assuming the worst about each other, start thinking about what unites us instead of what divides us, and work together to make a better tomorrow. Maybe.

Just shut up. Seriously. While there are individual exceptions, the Baby Boomers, as a generation, have literally nothing to offer the world except their merciful extinction. Maybe – no, definitely – they should accept the fact that they were the stupidest, most destructive, most foolish grasshopper generation human history has ever recorded, stop trying to defend their utterly indefensible record, and do their best to exit the historical stage in suitably penitent humility.

They won’t. But they should.

Generation X knows better than to expect anything from them. We knew better than to expect anything from them even when our grandparents were still around. And it is all too typically Boomer to take solace in “revenge” upon a generation whose only crime is to be young by celebrating the fact that, unlike most previous generations, they have left the world a much worse place than they found it.

Mailvox: still not getting it

I’m getting very, very tired of this tedious line of woefully uninformed thought. This is neither the first time nor the one hundredth time I’ve heard the same clueless sentiment expressed:

Linguistic Kill Shots aka a New Lexicon

It strikes me that our language to describe the malice and evil the Marxist Left perpetrates is weak. For example, Social Justice Warrior actually sounds kind of cool and virtue signaling is vaguely academic.

While the language is accurate, none of it is persuasive. As part of meme war, I’d like to propose the re-branding of leftist actions to better convey the harm they cause, much like the left re-branded tea partiers “tea baggers.”

To get the ball rolling (although not that well. this begs to be crowd sourced):

Social Justice Warrior —>  Social Justice Parasite

Virtue Signaling —> Virtue Implants (as in fake, like breasts)

Scott Adams owes all of us an apology for convincing people that because they’ve read his blog and his book, they are suddenly masters of strategic persuasivery. Yes, let’s “rebrand” one of the most effective pejoratives coined in recent years and replace it with something obvious and utterly harmless that no one will ever use. All because conservatives are uptight about words and prone to sperging about dialectic. FFS, read the Social Justice series already!

From SJWAL:

The correct strategy is to fight dialectic with dialectic, expose pseudo-dialectic with dialectic, and fight rhetoric with rhetoric. And the most important thing about implementing that strategy is to understand that with rhetoric, the actual information content is largely irrelevant.

Rhetoric is all about what emotions you trigger in the other person; when SJWs talk to each other, they try to inflate themselves at the other’s expense in order to sort out their position in the SJW hierarchy. Of course, SJW metrics are all but unintelligible to normal, sane human beings, so it can be amusing as well as educational to watch them attempt to simultaneously exaggerate both their importance and their victimhood. The perfect Queen of the SJWs – and she would be a queen, never a king – would be a mixed-race lesbian Swedish immigrant who was abused as a child by a conservative white Republican politician and kept as a sex slave by neo-Nazis with Confederate-flag tattoos prior to writing a bestselling novel about a fictionalized version of her terrible experiences, appearing on Oprah, and starring on a science fiction TV show popular with white nerds.

The basic idea is that if you can make the other person feel small or angry, you are winning at SJW rhetoric. This is why SJWs are constantly accusing other people of being mad or upset; it’s just another way of them claiming to be winning the conversation. If you can make the other person submit, run away, or fall silent, then you have won the conversation, and you are higher in the SJW hierarchy than he is. So it doesn’t matter what you actually say, and in fact, resorting to straight-up namecalling, the more ridiculous the better, is often the fastest and most efficient way to get through the conversational process with an SJW. If he launches the usual “sexist, racist, homophobic, Nazi” line, don’t blink and don’t defend yourself. Just hit him right back with “racist, child molester, pedophile, monster” and watch him run. If you’re of a more delicate constitution and are not willing to go that far even when attacked unprovoked, try “creepy” and “stalker” on the men and “psycho” or “ugly” on the women. This will usually have much the same effect.

You will know your rhetoric is effective when they block you online, or in person if their eyes widen with shock and their jaw drops. And you have mastered the art of rhetoric when you can make an SJW retreat in tears or cause a room full of people to gasp in disbelief before bursting out laughing at the SJW.

Again, you must keep in mind that the actual information content is irrelevant. SJWs communicate in competitive emotion. If you’re not doing the same, then you’re not communicating with them, you’re doing little more than serving as a punching bag for their verbal strikes. I realize this probably doesn’t make sense, but that is because you are a normal, sane individual who thinks rather than feels. But keep in mind that just as their argument “X is Not X because feelbad” makes no sense to you, your argument that “X cannot be Not X due to the law of non-contradiction” makes no sense to an SJW.

Don’t try to work through the logic of it all. Just try it. It works. Chances are that you’ll be as surprised as I was to discover how effective it can be to speak in rhetoric to the rhetoric-speakers. When Milo Yiannopoulos destroyed a feminist on live television during a public debate concerning modern Britain’s hostility to men, it wasn’t his smooth recitation of relevant facts that left her reeling in shock and disarray; she blithely ignored all of that. It was his dismissive use of the word “darling” that literally muted her. Her wide, staring eyes and gaping mouth made it very clear how powerful a well-placed, well-timed rhetorical bomb can be.

Calling an SJW a “social justice parasite” or a “social justice whiner” doesn’t work. It will NEVER work. They know they are parasites and whiners. That doesn’t burn. But they WANT to think of themselves as warriors, and they know they are not. So, when they hear you calling them a “warrior”, they hear the sarcasm and contempt in your voice, and it burns.

Rhetoric follows a different logic than dialectic.

And before any self-appointed champions of Gab jump in to push their false narrative that I am being hypocritical due to my advice about ways to effectively respond to a verbal rhetorical attack, please trouble to note that context always matters, especially when it comes to the law. You will note that I have not changed the text of SJWAL in light of the subsequent situation nor do I have any need or reason to do so. SJWAL addresses the verities of rhetoric, not the vagaries of the law.

Moore will win

As long as Roy Moore doesn’t step down or apologize, he should have no trouble winning the Senate race in Alabama.

Tuesday, November 14
Alabama Senate Special Election – Moore vs. Jones FOX 10/Strategy Research
Moore 49, Jones 43 Moore +6

Translation: the full-press from the GOPe and the media dinged him a bit, but didn’t seriously hurt him. At this point, his best bet is to simply ignore any attempts to get him to address the manufactured Fake News, dismiss it as dirty tricks, and focus on running his campaign to MAGA.

The intriguing thing is that whereas a Moore win would have hurt the GOPe, a victory in the face of their open opposition has the potential to break them entirely.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, in the alternate reality where the GOPe still matters and conservativism conserved the ladies room, Moore  MUST DROP OUT NOW! BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!

Republican Roy Moore is trailing Democrat Doug Jones by 12 points in the Alabama special Senate election, according to a poll conducted by the National Republican Senatorial Committee after five women accused Moore of pursuing them as teenagers.

They asked 12 Republican senators, Paul Ryan, and a homeless guy who believes the fish killed JFK.

Happy Diversmas!

What puts the English into a better holiday spirit than a swarm of mudsharks on the TV? And what are the odds that the big UK retailers would just happen to feature exactly the same interracial combination? What, there are no Pakistanis in the UK? No Chinese? No French, Germans, or Romanians? No Swedes, Russians, or Belgians? Given the SJW convergence of the advertising industry there, it would appear that 100 percent was the correct answer. White Englishmen should simply refuse to do any holiday shopping at these stores, and make themselves as scarce there as they are in the commercials.

This is pure cultural war propaganda. As I’ve commented before, there are more married BM-WF interracial couples in British ads than actually exist in the British Isles. Seriously, if you believed the ads, at least 50 percent of all couples in Britain are African men with British women. And apparently for maximum diversity, almost every mixed-race kid sports the same sort of huge freaking afro that you never actually see in real life.

A lesson in corporate chaos

This is a fascinating clash of two tech CEOs on Twitter, both of whom are quite clearly unready for prime time and are perfectly willing to blow up their own enterprises in defense of their ideologies.

Vinay Gupta‏ @leashless
I don’t deny your right to do what you want with your own tools in your own time. But I’m telling you this, and I am not to be fucked with: most of us will not rest until we figure out how to fuck you if you colonize our platform. We are hostile to your goals. Be elsewhere.

Vinay Gupta‏ @leashless
If you try to twist our work into a weapon for your cultural war, it will damage our attempt to transform the global economy. You will be in our way, and we will fuck you. We are smart: in all probability it can be done without platform changes. Get your own toys. Get off ours.

Vinay Gupta‏ @leashless
Go and build your own infrastructure, you dumb motherfuckers.

You want to parasitize our hard work with your massively bigoted political project, and you expect us to just roll over?

Don’t be fucking stupid. We have backbone. We have will. We will fight back. Lots of Jews too.

Vinay Gupta‏ @leashless
We did this work, on Ethereum, to make a better world. If you force us to figure out how to defend our vision of a better world against people who try and use our own tools against is, we will find ways to fight back.

And we are the ones with the power here. Make your plans.

Vinay Gupta‏ @leashless
By all means, put your entire life’s work into the hands of people who hate a d oppose you at every level. You’ll find it goes as well as running a city when the power station staff go on strike. We do infrastructure. You depend on us.

We will find ways. Count on it.

Gab @getongab
Well folks this is how “open,” “decentralized,” and “inclusive” the Ethereum project is. If you’re thinking about building on top of it, think again.

Vinay Gupta‏ @leashless
I am proud that this has gone viral. I did not work on cryptography to empower racists, but normal, good people.

Ivan Throne‏ @DarkTriadMan
Why, it is almost as if @voxday had a point about from-the-ground-up vulnerabilities once, isn’t it?

At this point, I think one can make a very good case about social media potentially doing more harm than good for the average company. I wasn’t interested in using Etherium, but after seeing how these literal communists intend to use it to transform the global economy, I’ll go out of my way to support their competitors.

You have to be pretty stupid to go on Gab and volunteer yourself for the targeted harassment and libel that will be directed your way in the name of free speech. And you’d have to be an utter moron to even consider putting your livelihood in the hands of the out-of-control SJWs at Etherium. Both Gab and Etherium observably fail to grasp that providing confidence to the consumer is the single most important factor in corporate success.

Steep decline

The NFL appears to have crossed a tipping point. This is beginning to exceed the magnitude of the decline I expected, which I guessed would be on the order of 20 percent.

Week 10 year-on-year ratings
-24{88a02c37312b58984d480c9cf058b7b44c455fac6f8ac67f26e2263a33380048} Late DH
-22{88a02c37312b58984d480c9cf058b7b44c455fac6f8ac67f26e2263a33380048} SNF
-02{88a02c37312b58984d480c9cf058b7b44c455fac6f8ac67f26e2263a33380048} TNF
-22{88a02c37312b58984d480c9cf058b7b44c455fac6f8ac67f26e2263a33380048} Early DH
-10{88a02c37312b58984d480c9cf058b7b44c455fac6f8ac67f26e2263a33380048} Various single

A number of these were good games too, including Dallas-Atlanta, New England-Denver, and Minnesota-Washington. We may see numbers south of -30{88a02c37312b58984d480c9cf058b7b44c455fac6f8ac67f26e2263a33380048} before the end of the season, which would be truly shocking. No wonder the behavior of the owners and the league office is getting increasingly strange.

Problem or opportunity?

Allum Bokhari contemplates the corporate culture wars:

From coffee machine manufacturers to social media giants to the NFL, progressive virtue-signalling has infected every inch of global corporate culture. It is now the most dangerous opponent of freedom in the west, threatening both the Trump agenda and freedom of speech. How did it start? How can it end?

This week, the story is coffee machine maker Keurig, which pulled ads from Sean Hannity’s show at the prompting of Media Matters, and is now facing a conservative backlash of NFL-size proportions. But it isn’t just one or two companies engaging in virtue-signalling, it’s practically all of them. It’s Pepsi, which panders to antifa in its ads. Its Heineken, which salutes open borders in their adverts. It’s Twitter. It’s Starbucks. It’s KLM airlines. Despite vast differences in their products, services, and consumers, every industry seems to have the same virtue-signallers.

From the moment of Trump’s inauguration, corporations have been engaged in a frantic struggle to block his agenda. White House globalist-in-chief Gary Cohn, along with the now-disbanded CEO council, did everything they could to blunt the President’s trade policies and prevent him from exiting the Paris Climate Agreement. The same CEO council, along with Cohn, sought to pressure Trump with a series of resignations following his response to a combination of racist white nationalist and Antifa violence in Charlottesville.

And that’s corporations playing nice. When their values are threatened by people who do not sit in the Oval Office, they do far more than simply resign. Earlier this year, after being spooked by mainstream news articles claiming YouTube was a cesspit of terrorism and hate speech, corporations promptly yanked their ads from the platform en masse.

Revenues plummeted overnight, and YouTube quickly added stringent new systems that prevent even remotely controversial content from receiving ad revenue. Once, the platform was a place where bold, independent commentators could develop healthy incomes without answering to any old media gatekeeper. Now, even YouTube’s politest fast food reviewer is having trouble keeping his ad revenue, as the platform introduces ever-stricter language codes. One tantrum from corporations was all it took for free speech on one of the web’s most promising platforms to be all but snuffed out.

What this is doing is creating tremendous opportunities as big corporations intentionally cut themselves off from significant portions of their markets. We’re seeing it play out with Marvel/DC right now! This is not something to mourn, complain about, or fight, this is something to exploit.

More convergence in comics

G.I. JOE IS BACK! In the wake of IDW’s Revolution crossover event, G.I. JOE’s mission has become a global one–they aren’t just Real American Heroes, they’re Real Earth Heroes.

I know the physical standards for the U.S. military have been relaxed, but that’s just ridiculous. GI Joe is now selling less than 5k copies per month. Quelle surprise. And on a not entirely related note:

Yesterday, Bleeding Cool reported that the DC Rebirth ongoing titles would be moving to a plot-art-script production system rather than the more common plot-script-art system, in order to give the lead artists on titles a greater control over storytelling. It is often known as the “Marvel Method” after its adoption by Stan Lee to speed his work in the sixties, even though it is hardly used at Marvel Comics anymore. A Marvel insider tells Bleeding Cool.

The Marvel method can actually be more time-consuming if you are not used to it. And given DC’s penchant for editorial input, makes changes harder as they will be caught later in the pencils.

It means there must be a level of trust between writer, artist and editor. Everyone needs to be on the same page going in. Lots of discussion beforehand. And once you commit to a plot, the editor knows that the artist will, of course, add their own interpretation to things. The editor has to be a little more free-wheeling, knowing there will be less time for corrections.

This was used in the 70s to push through stories they knew would be controversial. Turn it in at the last minute and no one has time to make corrections. They’ll have to publish as it is or miss shipping.

So, DC has not only hired Marvel’s leading SJW, but has switched to a system that is known for its utility in pushing through stories they know will be controversial. This disruption is not only going to be glorious, it is going to be at least an order of magnitude bigger than anyone is currently anticipating.

UPDATE: DC is in disarray and it promises to get worse:

In the wake of the Batman group not having had a group editor for some time now, the DC New Age Of Heroes line being significantly delayed, the Superman group losing its head with no obvious replacement, and the holidays upon us, something at DC Comics is going to give. I am told to expect delays, cancellations, postponements in waves.

I get reports of increased stress, arguments, and an impending sense of doom within the company — tempered somewhat by the belief that DC did the right thing. There was plenty of objection towards Eddie internally within the company, as much as there were people who considered him a friend.

However, it may also be an opportunity for those who can to step up and prove themselves. Rebecca Taylor is now editing Metal rather than co-editing with Berganza, and no one doubts her ability to keep that event on the tracks. Others may seize upon the chance to show exactly what they can do, unburdened with the knowledge that certain creators won’t refuse to work for them.

Of course, if they were capable, they wouldn’t have needed old grabby hands to do the work for them in the first place.

A mercenary military

The Saker’s conclusion that the US military is in no shape to take on the Russian military these days is almost certainly correct:

The military is investigating whether two Navy SEALs strangled an Army Green Beret to death in Mali earlier this year, The New York Times reports. The Green Beret, Staff Sgt. Logan J. Melgar, was found dead on June 4 in his housing unit that he shared with other U.S. Special Operations troops. His death was ruled a homicide by strangulation, and the case was assigned last month to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. The two Navy SEALs, members of the elite Team 6, have since been placed on administrative leave.

It will be interesting to learn if these two Navy SEALs are Americans or Fake Americans. A lot of starry-eyed conservatives think that foreigners who serve in the U.S. military deserve citizenship, failing to realize that a nation that turns its military over to foreigners is usually in the late stages of societal decline and fall.

In light of Bergdahl’s unpunished desertion, it will be interesting to see what, if any, consequences befall these SEALs, who as yet remain unidentified.

Let it go to Hell

As I’ve told my children, Let It Go is an expression of pure Crowleyian evil; it doesn’t even rise to the less evil version of W. Somerset Maugham, as there is no due regard for civic mores. Dalrock and his readers have noticed too:

Anonymous Reader notes that Let it go is well loved by modern Christians:

I have not yet encountered a single churchgoing person in my social circle who has a problem with “Frozen” the movie or with “Let it go” the song. Not one. That includes a couple of families that are part of leadership. Pointing out the “no rules” part is like describing the color “purple” to someone who is blind. They literally can’t see anything wrong – perhaps because “It’s DISNEY” or something. I’ve gotten blank stares from people over 40 but also parents under 30. It’s bizarre.

I don’t think the messenger makes the message palatable.  It is the message itself that is loved.  Women and girls learning how to throw off all rules and inhibition is core to our new morality.  The song isn’t loved as a guilty pleasure;  it is loved as a bold moral declaration.  Stop trying to be a good girl and learn to worship yourself is a moral exhortation.  As Vox pointed out in The devil that is Disney:

Disney is run by literal satanists preaching Alastair Crowley’s “do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” to children. They are one of the primary engine’s of the West’s degeneracy and decline. It is not an accident that everything they touch, in every industry, turns into morally radioactive slime.

Children, including Christian children, understand this best of all.  They know what their parents worship, what their parents see as righteous (even if their parents fall short of living the ideal).  They know that Frozen and Let It Go is a morality tale that teaches them about our most sacred beliefs.

Perhaps the concept is a little easier to grasp when it isn’t a pretty cartoon character warbling, but Leo Moracchioli doing what is a more aesthetically honest version of the song. The only thing that would really improve upon the song is a video full of tattooed strippers on poles doing drugs that ends with snow falling upon a grave with a woman’s name and dates indicating that she died in her 20s.

Leo is now my favorite band. His covers are awesome. I love his version of Africa. And the six – SIX! – guitar solos in his Californication are simply epic. All six are great and fit perfectly within the song somehow, but Scallon’s solo on the eight-string is my favorite just for how he delivers it, expressionless, on an escalator. It reminded me a little of 808 State playing First Avenue with their backs to the crowd for the entire show. That transcended the very concept of cool.

One thing I will say for YouTube: it has totally transformed the way young guitarists learn to play their instruments. It is ASTONISHING how good they are.

UPDATE: Wow. That is all. Just wow.