Author: VD

Voxiversity update

First of all, thanks very much to everyone who is backing Voxiversity. It is much appreciated and we are genuinely stoked about what you have made possible.

Second, I am still in the process of acquiring the required equipment, which is not quite as accessible here as one might like it to be. I have the Lavalier microphone, which works well, but I need a little adapter in order to get the better quality that will entail from going through the FocusRite amplifier I already have instead of going directly into the PC’s mic-in input. The light is ordered and is en route, but we’re still trying to find a place that can provide the stand and diffusor.

None of this is a pressing problem, however, as my producer is presently occupied with finishing the video for Alt⭐️Hero, which I can already testify is awesome and more Professional Comics in appearance than I was expecting. Note to self: we’re going to need a Castalia House Comics logo. Or is that Castalia Comics? We’ll figure it out later. While we’re getting set up for Voxiversity 001: Immigration and War, he’s going to release a few more one-minute trailers akin to Know Thyself, in part because they’ve proven to be popular, but also because it is an ideal way for us to experiment with different ideas before getting in too deep to something that doesn’t work.

In the meantime, I’ll continue to do Darkstreams, including tonight’s on the NFL protests, and I’ll also be doing an interview with Cernovich Media tomorrow on the subject. But mostly, I’ll be finishing SJWADD, which comes out in 15 days. Once that is out, I’ll be focusing on Voxiversity and on getting the extended edition of A Sea of Skulls out in time for Christmas. I can also promise that we will be completing Jerry Pournelle’s There Will Be War series this year, with Volumes VII and VIII being released this fall.

NFL Week Three

Not a lot to say, except I’m not watching this week. The players understand this is about the cultural war. So does the President. I’m not sure what percentage of the NFL-watching public does, but it does appear to be statistically significant if Twitter is any guide.

This sort of calculated and specific disrespect is not incidental. It is intentional. Apparently all the Steelers but one boycotted the anthem. Yes, it’s just symbolism, but symbolism matters. The Right used to understand this. Bud Grant’s Vikings used to practice standing for the national anthem.

American football stars drop to their knees during national anthem at Wembley in protest defying Donald Trump after he said sportsman who ‘disrespect America’ should be SACKED. Players from Jacksonville Jaguars and the Baltimore Ravens dropped to their knees as national anthem played. No players were kneeling during the playing of ‘God Save The Queen’, which followed the US national anthem. 

Regardless, discuss either the protests or the weekend action, as you see fit.

How awesome would it be if Steelers owner Art Rooney released his entire team tomorrow, except for Alejandro Villanueva? Talk about making a statement! They could go winless for the next three years, and they’d still wind up ahead on the merchandise sales alone.

Skol Vikings! I am reliably informed that Minnesota Vikings are the only team to not have a single player kneel for the anthem thus far. The legacy of Bud Grant remains strong.

Meme of the Week

As it turns out, the weekly vote has reliably lined up with the more objective measure of Twitter impressions. DACA Families was the weekly winner, with 32,631 impressions. The least popular was Hotel Catalonia, with only 11,316.

To become a #DailyMemeWarrior and receive the Meme of the Day in your email every weekday morning, sign up here. I have a feeling that tomorrow’s Meme of the Day is going to exceed 50k impressions, quite possibly 100k. This is not it. But it’s good to know the NFL is embracing the fullness of free speech at its games.

And keep this in mind when you consider their mutual responses to President Trump.

SportsCenter‏ @SportsCenter
Roger Goodell and DeMaurice Smith spent part of Saturday discussing how to best handle President Trump’s statements.

Apparently they should have spent more of it. And then kept their mouths shut.

UPDATE: This is an interesting rumor floating around the chans from a purported NFL employee.

Some NFL teams have been looking into firing players who are pulling this protest shit. But their lawyers have all told them, while they can do it, the fired players could then take them to court and win. The 49ers were among these teams, who have consulted their lawyers; hence why CK never got fired. Their lawyers told them it was cheaper to just let him do his bullshit.

Goodell knows he has fucked up big time, but can’t do anything except tacitly let the teams blacklist players who pull this shit. Goodell and most of the coaches know that the players throwing these tantrums have them by the balls.

I think they’re about to find out that not firing them will prove to be considerably more expensive.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin discusses the NFL situation.

We’re seeing drops in attendance.  We’re seeing drops everywhere, in advertising as well and that’s because there’s no business enterprise that is ever going to survive by insulting and trashing its own customer base…

Based on recent events, it would appear far fewer people understand this basic fact of business than you might imagine.

Ideas must be sold

The Z-man observes that too many ideologues resist accepting the fact that their ideas have to be sold rather than simply accepted as holy writ from on high:

Good salesmen never lose sight of reality. That’s the problem with outsider political movements. They allow themselves to be trapped in narrow ideological ruts so any sales effort, that deviates in the slightest from dogma, results in civil war. The only pitchmen the ideologues accept are the guys waving around the severed hand, talking about how their product is great at cleaning blood stains. Any concession to public sensibilities is treated like heresy. The result is a self-ghettoization of the movement.

This has always been the problem with the libertarians. You can get a large audience in favor of limiting state regulation of commerce, but you are never getting a critical mass around the idea of abandoning paper money. You can talk people into loosening up marijuana laws, but no one is signing up for legal meth sales. That’s why the limit on libertarians is to have some of their language appropriated by Buckleyites. Otherwise, they are seen as a collection of eccentric weirdos.

That’s what’s happening with the alt-right and its fellow travelers. The core believers refuse to give in on basic tactics, like banning Nazi gear or minimizing the JQ stuff. The result is anyone that tries to soften the image is attacked as a traitor. That’s what you see with the Stormies. Anglin can’t accept even the token compromises at a site like Gab, so he goes to war with it. This ensures that his followers never stray from the ghetto that he has created for them. It also means potential recruits have a reason to ignore him.

This does not mean the alt-right is condemned to having fat guys in their tighty-whities, dancing around at their events. To avoid that fate, they need to produce leaders with the credibility to swat down guys like Anglin, when he gets out of control, but also aware of the fact that growing the movement means appealing to the general public. That means softening the pitch and making some compromises. They don’t have anyone capable of doing that at he moment, but they better find some.

He’s absolutely right. That’s why I reluctantly accepted the need to move into video despite the existence of Castalia House; I realized that we will never reach the non-literate majority through the medium of books. We have to speak their language and meet them on their ground. We need to accept that our preferences are irrelevant in this regard.

This is always difficult. The literate don’t want to deal with non-literate media. The dialectic-speakers don’t want to deal with rhetoric. The non-aggressive don’t want to deal with aggression. The socialists don’t want to deal with subjective value. The pagans don’t want to deal with the Christian roots of the West.

But regardless of who we are and what we desire, we have to take reality as it is, not as we wish it to be.

Milo back at Berkeley

There has been a lot of talk about whether Milo would return to Berkeley and whether #FreeSpeechWeek would take place there. But yes, he is back and it is on. Team Milo has even prepared a little gift for everyone for the occasion. It’s called The Antifa Handbook (PDF), and, as it happens, it is almost entirely unlike the 4GW Handbook.

Fire the anthem-protesters

Donald Trump comes out hard against the NFL players protesting during the national anthem:

“We’re proud of our country. We respect our flag,” Trump said to loud applause at a campaign event in Alabama. “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now’? He’s fired! He’s fired!”

Trump said an NFL owner who releases a player would instantly gain broad support across America.

“Some owner’s gonna do that. He’s gonna say, ‘That guy that disrespects our flag? He’s fired. And that owner . . . they’ll be the most popular person in this country. Because that’s total disrespect of our heritage. That’s total disrespect of everything we stand for,” Trump said.

Trump added that he believes fans should walk out if players don’t stand for the anthem.

“If you see it, even if it’s one player,” Trump said, “Leave the stadium.”

It’s a perfectly reasonable stance. We all know that the NFL wouldn’t hesitate to act if players started throwing Nazi salutes; they already come down hard on the expression of any opinion that is negative about homosexuality.

The Rubicon has been decisively crossed, so it’s time to start cracking down on “speech” Americans don’t like.

Always play by the rules that are actually in place, not by the rules that you wish were in place. I won’t say that I’ve entirely given up on the NFL, but I did not buy Game Pass this year and I have yet to watch a single game. I don’t think I will start this weekend either.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s response:

The NFL and our players are at our best when we help create a sense of unity in our country and our culture,” Goodell said. “There is no better example than the amazing response from our clubs and players to the terrible natural disasters we’ve experienced over the last month. Divisive comments like these demonstrate an unfortunate lack of respect for the NFL, our great game and all of our players, and a failure to understand the overwhelming force for good our clubs and players represent in our communities.”

I hope one of the NFL players calls out Goodell on this by kneeling while holding up a middle finger or a Nazi salute. It would be amusing to see how fast Red Roger would do an immediate 180.

CORROSION now in audiobook

Galactic society is ruled by algorithms. From interstellar travel and planetary terraforming to artificial intelligence and agriculture, every human endeavor has become completely dependent upon the hypercomplex equations that optimize the activities making life possible across hundreds of inhabited worlds. Throughout the galaxy, Man has become dependent upon the reliable operation of ten million different automated systems.

And when things begin to go wrong and mysterious accidents begin to happen no one has any idea what is happening, except for a sentient medical drone and the First Technocrat of Continox. But their ability to even begin to try fixing the unthinkably complicated problem of galaxy-wide algorithmic decay is made considerably more difficult by the fact the former is an outlaw and the latter is facing a death sentence.

Narrated by Jon Mollison, The Corroding Empire Book One: Corrosion, is 7 hours and 3 minutes long.

I’m also looking for 10 reviewers of Jerry Pournelle’s There Will Be War Volume VII. Email with V7 in the subject if you’re interested and can review on Amazon.

US-Russia conflict in Syria

This doesn’t strike me as a positive development. The Saker contemplates the significance of a Russian special forces operation in Syria.

Something rather unprecedented just happened in Syria: US backed “good terrorist” forces attempted a surprise attack against Syrian government forces stationed to the north and northeast of the city of Hama. What makes this attack unique is that it took place inside a so-called “de-escalation zone” and that it appears that one of the key goals of the attack was to encircle in a pincer-movement and subsequently capture a platoon of Russian military police officers deployed to monitor and enforce the special status of this zone. The Russian military police forces, composed mainly of soldiers from the Caucasus region, fought against a much larger enemy force and had to call for assistance. For the first time, at least officially, Russian special operations forces were deployed to rescue and extract their comrades. At the same time, the Russians sent in a number of close air support aircraft who reportedly killed several hundred “good” terrorists and beat back the attack (Russian sources speak of the destruction of 850 fighters, 11 tanks, three infantry fighting vehicles, 46 armed pickup trucks, five mortars, 20 freighter trucks and 38 ammo supply points; you can see photos of the destroyed personnel and equipment here). What also makes this event unique is the official reaction of the Russians to this event.

Head of the Main Operations Department at Russia’s General Staff Colonel General Sergei Rudskoi declared that:

“Despite agreements signed in Astana on September 15, gunmen of Jabhat al-Nusra and joining them units that don’t want to comply with the cessation of hostilities terms, launched a large-scale offensive against positions of government troops north and northeast of Hama in Idlib de-escalation zone from 8 am on September 19 (…) According to available data, the offensive was initiated by American intelligence services to stop a successful advance of government troops east of Deir ez-Zor“.

Today, other Russian officials have added a not-so-veiled threat to this accusation. The Russian Defense Ministry’s spokesman, Major General Igor Konashenkov has declared that:

Russia unequivocally told the commanders of US forces in Al Udeid Airbase (Qatar) that it will not tolerate any shelling from the areas where the SDF are stationed (…) Fire from positions in regions [controlled by the SDF] will be suppressed by all means necessary.

This is unprecedented on many levels. First, the Russians clearly believe that this attempt to kill or capture a platoon of the Russian military police was planned by the United States. The fact that they are making this accusation officially shows the degree of irritation felt by the Russians about the duplicity of the Americans. Second, this is the first time, at least to my knowledge, that Russian Spetsnaz forces had to be sent in to rescue a surrounded Russian subunit. All Spetsnaz operators survived, but three of them were wounded in the operation (the Russians are not saying how badly). The close air support by very low flying SU-25 aircraft was obviously coordinated by Spetsnaz forward air controllers and probably saved the day. In other words, this was a close call and things could have ended much more badly (just imagine what the Takfiri crazies would have done, on video, to any captured Russian serviceman!). Finally, a US-organized attack on what was supposed to be a “de-confliction” zone combined with an attempt to capture Russian soldiers raises the bar for American duplicity to a totally new level.

It’s time to get US troops out of Iraq and Syria. Iran and Russia succeeded where the US failed, and now the US presence there is only likely to lead to trouble that the Trump administration cannot afford in light of the Korean situation.

Always focus on fighting on one front at a time unless one has absolutely no ability to avoid it. To do otherwise is not merely foolish, but risks disaster.

SJW tactics

I want to be sure that I didn’t forget any of them in the chapter of SJWADD devoted to them. I’m talking about the specific tactics, such as the “bait-and-report”, rather than the larger tendencies such as those described by the Three Laws of Social Justice.

If anything occurs to you, throw it out. I want to be as comprehensive as possible.