Author: VD

No substitute for effort

Peter King relates an interesting story that explains Bruce Springsteen’s unusual work ethic:

“Have you read the Springsteen book?” Garrett said the other day in a lengthy conversation before practice. (“Born To Run,” an autobiography, 2016, Simon & Schuster.) “He’s 20 years old, everybody at the Jersey Shore loves him, but he’s unknown nationally, and a good friend and adviser tells him, ‘If you really want to be great, you’ve got to get off the Jersey Shore.’ And so they pile everything in a couple vehicles and head west to this sort of open mike night in San Francisco.

As Springsteen wrote, the band was part of a four-band showcase; one band would get the chance to move on and perhaps get a recording contract. The Jersey guys went third and thought they killed it. The fourth band, though not as energetic, was very good. Via “Born To Run:”

“They got the gig. We lost out. After the word came down, all the other guys were complaining we’d gotten ripped off. The guy running the joint didn’t know what he was doing, blah, blah, blah.”


That night, Springsteen reflected, sleeping on a couch in his transplanted parents’ home in the Bay Area. “My confidence was mildly shaken, and I had to make room for a rather unpleasant thought. We were not going to be the big dogs we were back in our little hometown. We were going to be one of the many very competent, very creative musical groups fighting over a very small bone. Reality check. I was good, very good, but maybe not quite as good or exceptional as I’d gotten used to people telling me, or as I thought … I was fast, but like the old gunslingers knew, there’s always somebody faster, and if you can do it better than me, you earn my respect and admiration, and you inspire me to work harder. I was not a natural genius. I would have to use every ounce of what was in me—my cunning, my musical skills, my showmanship, my intellect, my heart, my willingness—night after night, to push myself harder, to work with more intensity than the next guy just to survive untended in the world I lived in.”

That’s how we approach publishing at Castalia. Yes, we may be smart. Yes, we’ve got some advantages, and, of course, some disadvantages as well. But the one thing we absolutely know is that no one in the publishing industry is going to outwork us.

I was particularly satisfied this weekend, although I was turning in even later than I normally do – I’m usually irritated with myself when that first glow of sunrise is beginning to appear and I realize that I’ve stayed up too late again – because I managed to complete the edits on two books that night, both of which will be published this month.

I very much appreciate the near-fanatic levels of support we receive from you guys. It is an integral part of Castalia’s success. And you can rest assured that we will never take it for granted or coast on our past accomplishments.

People of no particular religion do NOT control the media

And if you suggest they do, they will terminate your career in the media.

Sunday Times Ireland columnist Kevin Myers will not write again for the paper, a spokesman said. The newspaper said it abhorred anti-Semitism after Mr Myers noted that two of the best-paid female presenters at the BBC, Claudia Winkleman and Vanessa Feltz, were Jewish in an article on the corporation’s gender pay gap. Sunday Times editor Martin Ivens has apologised personally to the two women for these ‘unacceptable comments both to Jewish people and to women in the workplace’.

Let me see if I understand this. Disparate impact is a terrible injustice and is not only policed by various government agencies, but requires financial redress to underrepresented minorities and special rules to ensure their advancement when whites are statistically overrepresented, but to even notice disparate impact is anti-Semitism and cause for immediate termination when people of a particular religion that shall not be mentioned are observed to be statistically overrepresented.

After all, of the 65,640,000 people in the UK, 269,568 of them are people whose religion shall not be mentioned at all, so doesn’t it only make sense that two of them would be the two highest paid women in British broadcasting? I mean, the odds against that happening are only 0.0041 squared, or if you prefer, a one in 59,488 chance.

That’s perfectly reasonable, right? Why on Earth would that strike anyone as unusual?

Thank goodness the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism was there to demand that Mr. Myers should “no longer work as a journalist at any decent publication”!

It is clear that the column breached clauses 12(i) and 12(ii) of the Independent Press Standards Organisation’s Editors’ Code by making discriminatory comments about Jews and also mentioning the religion of the Jewish BBC presenters at all. We have called on the Independent Press Standards Organisation to require the Sunday Times to prominently print apologies in the next edition; investigate the editorial process that allowed this column to be printed in the first place; and recommend that Kevin Myers no longer be employed by any newspaper as a columnist or journalist.


Frankly, I don’t think that mere permanent disemployment and expulsion from the industry is going far enough, as justice obviously demands that Mr. Myers be run over with a bulldozer before his family home is demolished. Also, the entire editorial staff of the Sunday Times should be fired and replaced by people of no particular religion that shall be mentioned at all.

Civic Nationalism fail

Dear White Civic Nationalists,

What do you think these New Americans  U.S. citizens are going to do to Mt Rushmore when they outnumber you? What do you think they will do to the U.S. Constitution? And what do you think they will do to your children and grandchildren?

They are not here to assimilate. They are not here to become Americans. They are here to conquer and dispossess you and your posterity.

Love,
The Alt-Right

(with apologies to Fash McQween)

The war against God

It’s good to see that even the cucks at National Review are not interested in adopting the New Atheists subsequent to their rejection and no-platforming by the Left:

Why must ardent secularists from the Islamic world like Ayaan Hirsi Ali — the type of people the Left looks to for inspiration in the history of Western secularism — be deemed bigots, while Sharia-supporting conspiracy theorists like Linda Sarsour are cherished? Why has criticizing Islam caused the New Atheists to cross a red line in the progressive imagination?

These positions make no sense if one thinks of the Left as seriously secular, convinced of the need to end the reign of superstition. But American liberals profess neither the passionate skepticism of Hume nor the honest, urgent atheism of Nietzsche. They prefer to embrace a shallow, culture-war atheism instead.

This culture-war atheism provides “evidence,” quick and easy, to support the proposition that America is split into two camps: the intelligent, sophisticated, urbane, righteous liberals and the idiotic, gullible, backward, bigoted conservatives. The former are atheists and the latter are believers, flattering one side and bludgeoning the other. In fact, it is this type of thinking that made progressives fall in love with the New Atheists in the first place.

New Atheism pleased the Left as long as it stuck to criticizing “God,” who was associated with the beliefs of President George W. Bush and his supporters. It was thus fun, rather than offensive, for Bill Maher to call “religion” ridiculous, because he was assumed to be talking about Christianity. Christopher Hitchens could call God a “dictator” and Heaven a “celestial North Korea,” and the Left would laugh. Berkeley students would not think to disinvite Richard Dawkins when he was saying “Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion.”

Truth be told, New Atheism was always fundamentally unserious.

The Left rejects the New Atheists because it was never truly atheist or secular. It is merely anti-Christian and anti-Western. The Left embraces Islam because it presently serves as a more effective anti-Christian weapon than the atheism or secular humanism upon which it previously relied.

The heart of the Left is Neo-Babelism, which is inherently globalist and Satanic in nature. All of its various ideologies, from communism to feminism to neo-liberalism to progressivism, are nothing more than the skinsuits it wears in its endless war against God. But unlike the New Atheists, the Neo-Babelists are not warring against the idea of God, much less questioning His existence. They are actually at war with the Almighty Himself, and His son, Jesus Christ.

Meme of the Week

The Meme Warriors have spoken. An solid win for Deus Vult with nearly 700 votes cast. Interestingly enough, however, it was this week’s two least popular memes that racked up the most impressions on Twitter.

  1. 32.0% Deus Vult
  2. 22.8% Save the Planet
  3. 20.8% Weasel John McCuck
  4. 19.3% Dogs are Racist
  5. 05.1% AIPAC vs America
To get a vote and receive fresh daily memes guaranteed to trigger the SJWs in your life, sign up for the Daily Meme Wars. Regular meme service will resume on Monday.

And not only Britain

Peter Brimelow isn’t mourning the societies we have lost. He wants revenge:

In 1940, my father, already in the British Army in which he was to spend 6½ years, was stationed on the English Channel at Folkstone, looking right at Dunkirk. Years later, reading about the German plans for Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of England, I realized he was right where paratroopers were to land and asked him what kind of resistance his unit would have been able to mount.

He said: “They would have had to give us rifles.”

The Germans never came—but Britain was invaded anyway. By 1990, when my father died, he was bitterly in agreement with Pringle’s interviewees: it wasn’t worth it.

My considered reaction to Dunkirk: People should be hung from lampposts—they should be burned alive—for what they’ve done to Britain.

God send, if only for the sake of my three little daughters, born almost exactly 100 years after my father, that America can be saved from this terrible fate.

I could not possibly agree more. And I have no doubt that there will be a reckoning one day, hopefully in the not-too-distant future.

In a day when young girls are raped, not once, but twice, by the non-Western immigrants that are culturally enriching our societies, it is absolutely astonishing that the men of the West continue to meekly endure these daily atrocities.

Vox Day on vid.me

I’ve created a new channel for my videos on Vid.Me. I’m not certain that we’ll be using it for the forthcoming Voxiversity yet, but if nothing else it is a good place for selected Darkstreams. I’m not sure why the Darkstreams uploaded to YouTube by Judeo Christ appear to be of lower video quality than those uploaded by Open Mind, but hopefully we will sort that out.

Anyhow, I need 36 more followers before I can get verified, so if you’re signed up there and you don’t mind, please follow. I spoke with one of the Vid.Me guys on Twitter today; unlike YouTube, they have a way of limiting content to paid subscribers, the problem is that they don’t yet have a way of allowing the creator to provide paid subscriber access to unpaid subscribers who are supporting the creator through another method like Kickstarter or Patreon.

They also appear to be less converged than YouTube, which is a pretty low bar, of course, but is one reason to utilize them in preference to the current industry standard.

Now, obviously, there will be plenty of free general content for everyone, which will go on the YouTube Voxiversity channel as well as my Vid.Me channel. But if anyone has any ideas on the ideal way to distribute premium video content that is limited to patrons, please feel free to share them.

DO WE NEED GOD now in audiobook

To know how to live, do we need God and religion, or does religion only produce wars, hatred, intolerance, and unhappiness? Does giving up God mean giving up morality, or can we finally live a peaceful and fulfilling life as atheists by following science and reason instead


Anthropologist Christopher Hallpike has spent a lifetime’s research on the morality and religion of different cultures around the world and shows that trying to base a moral life on atheism and science actually has some very nasty surprises in store for us.

Narrated by Jon Mollison. 7 hours and 27 minutes.

From the reviews:

  • This book is a tremendous overview and discussion of one of the most important philosophical questions there are. It covers not only philosophy, but history, religion, anthropology, and biology in a broad-ranging discussion of the various aspects of the question. I learned a lot by reading it.
  • Hallpike delivers here an intellectually rigorous work that shows how common atheist strains of thought such as the meaninglessness of the universe and the denial of free will do not justify any of western atheists’ professed liberal beliefs, even when such beliefs are otherwise worthy.
  • A remarkably fresh take on an old question. Hallpike brings his years of experience as an anthropologist to the bigger questions of what religion is, and how only some kind of religious-based metaphysic can really one to speak meaningfully of “good”, “evil”, and “morality”.
  • A valuable, learned and intelligent contribution to the debate about God, coming to the matter from an unusual but productive base discipline. 
  • Probably the best refutation of evolutionary psychology and sociobiological claims about “human nature”. A must read.
I highly, highly recommend DO WE NEED GOD TO BE GOOD? After reading it, I thought so highly of it that we arranged to buy the rights to the book from its original publisher. If you are a fan of either The Irrational Atheist or On the Existence of Gods, you really should either read or listen to this book. There is a reason that both Stickwick and I have become fans of Dr. Hallpike.

Target USA

The mainland USA is now in range of a North Korean ICBM:

North Korea fired a missile on Friday that experts said was capable of striking Los Angeles and other U.S. cities and the United States and South Korea responded by staging a joint missile exercise, the South Korean news agency Yonhap said.

The Trump administration, which has branded North Korea the “most urgent and dangerous threat to peace,” condemned the launch as reckless.

“By threatening the world, these weapons and tests further isolate North Korea, weaken its economy, and deprive its people,” President Donald Trump said in a statement. “The United States will take all necessary steps to ensure the security of the American homeland and protect our allies in the region.”

The unusual late-night launch added to exasperation in Washington, Seoul and Tokyo over Pyongyang’s continuing development of nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Friday’s test prompted U.S. and South Korean military officials to discuss military response options…. The launch from North Korea’s northern Jangang province took place at 11:41 p.m. (1441 GMT), an official at South Korea’s Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said.

Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said the missile flew for about 45 minutes before apparently landing in the waters of Japan’s exclusive economic zone.

Japanese broadcaster NHK, citing a military official, said the missile reached an altitude of more than 3,000 km (1,860 miles). The South Korean military said the missile was believed to be an ICBM-class, flying more than 1,000 km (620 miles) and reaching an altitude of 3,700 km (2,300 miles). In Washington, the Pentagon also said it had assessed that the missile was an ICBM.

U.S. officials said the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Pentagon spy agency, has determined that North Korea will be able to field a reliable nuclear-capable ICBM by next year, earlier than previously thought.

Jeffrey Lewis of the California-based Middlebury Institute of International Studies said the launch showed Los Angeles was within range of a North Korean missile, with Chicago, New York and Washington, just out of reach.

“They may not have demonstrated the full range. The computer models suggest it can hit all of those targets,” he said.

The U.S.-based Union of Concerned Scientists said its calculations showed the missile could have been capable of going as far into the United States as Denver and Chicago.

The potential cost of dealing with a nuclear North Korea is only going to go up from here. The question is, are Russia and China on board with a US attempt to remove the North Korean threat or is a nuclear North Korea simply something that the world will have to accept, as it has accepted a nuclear Pakistan, Israel, and Iran.

There are no good options here, only varying degress of slightly less bad. I don’t know if Trump will actually dare to grasp the nettle, but I think he’s much more likely to do so than Bush, Clinton, or Obama were.

Preibus is out

Cernovich, Jack Posobiec, and others have reported that the God-Emperor has finally axed the GOP Establishment Chief of Staff. He’ll be replaced by General John Kelly.

Let the games begin….