Author: VD

Overheard

At the post-dinner table:
Vox: The expression on the face of someone coming out of a Japanese toilet is 40 percent “I think I’ve just been raped”, 40 percent “I’ve never felt this clean in my life”, and 20 percent “I’m not sure if I liked that or not.”
Lucy: That sounds like my average Saturday night.

Sebastian Gorka resigns

Another MAGA figure leaves the Trump administration:

Sebastian Gorka, the brusque national security aide to President Donald Trump, reportedly resigned his post as deputy assistant to the president late Friday.
The Federalist reports Gorka wrote a scathing resignation letter that sharply criticized the president’s newly unveiled strategy for the war in Afghanistan, and savaging White House rivals who he claims oppose the Trump agenda.
“[G]iven recent events, it is clear to me that forces that do not support the MAGA promise are – for now – ascendant within the White House,” Gorka wrote. “As a result, the best and most effective way I can support you, Mr. President, is from outside the People’s House.”
“Regrettably, outside of yourself, the individuals who most embodied and represented the policies that will ‘Make America Great Again,’ have been internally countered, systematically removed, or undermined in recent months.”

It’s disappointing to see Trump surrounded by the same sort of anti-American politicos that made up the bulk of the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama administrations. But – and I cannot stress this enough – do not make the mistake of counting the God-Emperor out. Things are not always as they seem, and like Chesty Puller, Trump is at his best when he is surrounded by his enemies.
They can’t get away from him now.

Why they spy

The Dark Triad Man explains the nature of government power, and why the techno-corporate state has erected the panopticon, in an excerpt from The Nine Laws:

Men rarely understand the nature of military power in the hands of governments.
The idiot believes that it is there to protect him, to enforce justice.
The common man thinks that it is used according to the law, sheltered within the principles of the culture.
The wise man assumes that human beings are fallible and their choices often self-serving; that the best interests and plans often reluctantly settle into the expedient and the tawdry.
The Dark Triad Man knows the truth:
State power is the tool of men with ruthless ambition, remorseless intention and brutal capacity who do not hesitate to shed blood, hide graves and rewrite history in their favor.
Concealment of capacity is among the most crucial components of freedom. For freedom exists in the dark world within a fearsome gradient, between the polarities of anarchy and totalitarianism, and at every spot between them the shade is merely a different hue of blood.
Thus concealment of plans from the organs of the State is vital to the preservation of freedom.
Concealment of networks from the agents of the State is the hypervigilant task of the insurgent.
Concealment of physical power from the intelligence of the State is the fearsome task of free men.
Do not trust the ruling power.
The ruling power always has more resources, more intelligence, more ruthlessness and more cruelty than you can imagine. And your survival depends upon concealment until the moment of decision.
The fool believes that his vote is a determining factor in the policies of the State.
The common man thinks that parties and coalitions and alliances represent his interests.
The wise man assumes that history and culture place boundaries on the system, which rights itself.
The Dark Triad Man accepts the truth: There is always a Caesar waiting with grim and immortal ambition, nestled in the heart of the nation, who seeks to rise to total power and views blood and atrocity and horror as mere laurels of valid drama upon his entitled brow.

Americans have been fortunate in the relatively mild nature of their ruling elite, which generously embraced the principle of noblesse oblige. But that elite has changed greatly in the last 60 years, and has largely abandoned that principle, which means Americans are unlikely to remain so fortunate for long.

A presidential pardon

President Trump Pardons Sheriff Joe Arpaio
Today, President Donald J. Trump granted a Presidential pardon to Joe Arpaio, former Sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona. Arpaio’s life and career, which began at the age of 18 when he enlisted in the military after the outbreak of the Korean War, exemplify selfless public service. After serving in the Army, Arpaio became a police officer in Washington, D.C. and Las Vegas NV and later served as a Special Agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), formerly the Bureau of Narcotics. After 25 years of admirable service, Arpaio went on to lead the DEA’s branch in Arizona.
In 1992, the problems facing his community pulled Arpaio out of retirement to return to law enforcement. He ran and won a campaign to become Sheriff of Maricopa County. Throughout his time as Sheriff, Arpaio confirmed his life’s work of protecting the public from the scourges of crime and illegal immigration. Sheriff Joe Arpaio is now eighty-five years old, and after more than fifty years of admirable service to our Nation, he is worthy candidate for a Presidential pardon.

Good on the God-Emperor. This sends an important signal to the pro-American movement.

What say you, supporters

I like to think that I know my own supporters’ minds better than the average individual, but I could be wrong. What say you?

Vikfield‏ @vikfield
This was a really bad idea. You are dividing the right by forcing this meme. Please re-think this.
Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
You can’t divide the Right by pointing out who is not, and has never been, of the Right. We tried this with the neocons, remember?
Vikfield‏ @vikfield  55m55 minutes ago
Btw, check out the RT and Like stats on this Meme vs your other #DailyMemeWars What you are doing is not popular with your own people
Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
It wasn’t popular when I predicted the 2008 financial crisis either. I don’t give a quantum rat’s ass about popularity. I never have.
Vikfield‏ @vikfield
I’m not talking about popularity with the masses but within your own supporters. What you are doing is illogical and we can see that.

Vikfield is a genuine supporter of two years duration. So, I’m willing to hear him out and at least entertain the possibility that his assertion is correct. Here is the meme and the statistics compared to other recent #DailyMemeWars tweets. The tweet in question is italicized.

Aug 25:  9,747 Impressions, 152 Likes, 136 Retweets
Aug 24: 26,215 Impressions, 200 Likes, 143 Retweets
Aug 23: 21,539 Impressions, 271 Likes, 200 Retweets
Aug 22: 37,030 Impressions, 428 Likes, 305 Retweets
I have to admit, it’s not a spectacularly successful meme – far too wordy and rather esoteric – but I think it would be stretching it somewhat to claim that it is “not popular” with my own people. I am not going to back down on anything I’ve said, but I’m quite willing to hear your opinions concerning my take on the Fake Right.
Speaking of which, you’d think they’d learn. But they never do.

Supreme Dark Lord @voxday
I don’t do rallies. Or events. Or conventions. I reject all speaking invitations and I have for 16 years.
Jason Kessler‏ @TheMadDimension
Is that because of your stutter?
Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
No, it’s because of your face. Your soft, pasty-white, terrified face with tears running down it as a girl tackled you.

The crackdown cometh

Google is amping up and automating its YouTube crackdown:

Starting on Thursday, Google will police YouTube like it never has before, adding warnings and disabling advertising on videos that the company determines crosses its new threshold for offensive content.
YouTube isn’t removing the selected videos, but is instead setting new restrictions on viewing, sharing and making money on them. A note detailing the changes will go to producers of the affected videos on Thursday, according to a spokeswoman for the Alphabet Inc. company.
Google outlined these moves in June, but the implementation comes as debate about extremism and political speech is front-and-center in the national spotlight — and when tech giants like Google and Facebook Inc. face deeper scrutiny over how they moderate information distributed through their digital services.
“These videos will have less engagement and be harder to find,” Kent Walker, Google’s general counsel, wrote about the plans in a June blog post. “This strikes the right balance between free expression and access to information without promoting extremely offensive viewpoints.” A Google spokeswoman declined to comment further on the changes.
The new restrictions, which target what Walker called “inflammatory religious or supremacist content,” are expected to hit a small fraction of videos, according to person familiar with the company. YouTube says it uploads over 400 hours of video a minute. Videos tagged by its new policy won’t be able to run ads or have comments posted, and won’t appear in any recommended lists on the video site. A warning screen will also appear before the videos, which will not be able to play when embedded on external websites.

I’ve already seen reports that videos that even contain the word “SJW” in the video, not merely in the title or description, have been demonetized. So, it’s not exactly hard to know which elements within Google are behind this.
So far, the saner elements are not prevailing.
This will, of course, have precisely zero effect on our plans for Voxiversity. We anticipated this and more.

Winning the rhetorical battle

This successful memetic campaign is an object lesson to every dialectic speaker tempted to show off how smart and righteous he is by sperging about someone else’s rhetorical sally.

Far-right activists are using fake Twitter accounts and images of battered women to smear anti-fascist groups in the US, an online investigation has revealed. The online campaign is using fake Antifa (an umbrella term for anti-fascist protestors) Twitter accounts to claim anti-fascists promote physically abusing women who support US President Donald Trump or white supremacy.
Researcher Eliot Higgins of website Bellingcat found evidence that the campaign is being orchestrated on internet messageboard 4Chan by far-right sympathisers.
One image shows the slogan “53% of white women voted for Trump, 53% of white women should look like this”, above a photograph of a woman with a bruised and cut face and an anti-fascist symbol. The woman pictured is actually British actress Anna Friel and the photograph was taken for a Women’s Aid anti-domestic violence campaign in 2007.
The images first started circulating on social media late on 23 August with hashtags #PunchNazis, #MakeRacistsAfraidAgain and #BashTheFash. Accounts appearing to belong to anti-fascist groups tweeted the memes, calling on activists to physically attack women who voted for Trump.

I retweeted one of the memes, which met with the following responses. First, from Antifa sympathizers crying foul, which is a sure sign of a meme’s effectiveness.

Antifa LI‏ @RefuseFascismNY
its also fake. Notice how these battered women memes are ONLY showing up on alt-righty accounts? No attribution. Just a fake logo.
Far Right Watch‏ @Far_Right_Watch
Various US based Far Right Groups are creating both fake #AntiFa accounts and memes as their latest weapon. Few are fooled.
Taz Wake‏ @tazwake
If you have to fake an account to make your point, your point is probably wrong.
Patrick‏ @TrickFreee
Here’s another Daily Stormer troll waging information warfare on the United States. Literal information warfare, no one doing anything.

Second, from dialectic-speaking spergs, who, despite more than 2,400 years of evidence to the contrary, continue to cling to the belief that “credibility” is the key to successful persuasion. Which, of course, is a little ironic, considering that the appeal to authority is a well-known logical fallacy. And it demonstrates, again, why dialectic-inclined spergs really need to learn to SHUT. THE. HELL. UP. when they happen to encounter rhetoric in the wild. You do not criticize a football coach’s play-calling by appealing to the rules of baseball. It is a category error.

Spritz‏ @Halfamish
This is fake, from 4chan. They already do enough shit that we don’t have to spread lies. That only weakens our credibility.
goth vampire daddy‏ @admirableism
you’d think having to straight up lie about the opposition would make one realize their cause is shit. and yet here we are

And third, from rhetoric speakers who grasp the brilliance of the 4chan campaign and the way that it simultaneously undermines Antifa’s rhetoric as well as reframes them in a manner that most third parties will find incredibly distasteful.

Malt‏ @maltsphere
Confirmation for top tier memeing is when BBC write an article “exposing” it as a 4chan troll. Ignoring that this is what punch a nazi means
Jay 5.1@notjayfivekille
Replying to @voxday
This is a brilliant satire of Antifa and the savagery of alt-left politics.

Remember, the most effective rhetoric communicates truth without necessarily being literally truthful in the details. It persuades through emotion, not reason, which is why it cannot be analyzed in the same way as a logical syllogism. Today’s #DailyMemeWars meme took the 4chan meme and went one level deeper, using nothing more than actual quotes from Antifa and Antifa-sympathetic media, for maximum memetic effect.
As always, we see that the Left is far better on the offensive than they are on defense. Which is why it is preferable for us to always seize the initiative and simply ignore their rhetorical attacks. The irony of people who constantly lie about their opponents complaining that they are not being portrayed accurately is significant, and is why their protests, even backed as they are by all the biggest media organs, are useless in the face of the rhetorical meme magic. And if you want to force-multiply these increasingly effective efforts, sign up for the Daily Meme Wars here.

Senior officials are why we can’t have America back

The God-Emperor really needs to step up his White House-cleaning:

The same emphasis on tax cuts for the elite before immigration reform for voters was also cited by Axios on August 20, in an article which claimed to explain why top staff chose to stay in the White House amid elite hatred of his populist, wage-boosting, pro-American priorities. Axios reported:
We talked to a half dozen senior administration officials, who range from dismayed but certain to stay, to disgusted and likely soon to leave. They all work closely with Trump and his senior team so, of course, wouldn’t talk on the record. Instead, they agreed to let us distill their thinking/rationale:

“You have no idea how much crazy stuff we kill”: The most common response centers on the urgent importance of having smart, sane people around Trump to fight his worst impulses. If they weren’t there, they say, we would have a trade war with China, massive deportations, and a government shutdown to force construction of a Southern wall.

“General Mattis needs us”: Many talk about their reluctance to bolt on their friends and colleagues who are fighting the good fight to force better Trump behavior/decisions. They rightly point out that together, they have learned how to ignore Trump’s rhetoric and, at times, collectively steer him to more conventional policy responses.

Massive deportations, a government shutdown, and a big beautiful Wall? Sounds pretty damned good to me!
What is wrong, I wonder, with presidents who get elected on the basis of a few key issues, then allow themselves to get talked out of their campaign promises despite having seen how exactly the same process has never worked out for any previous president?
Deportations and a big border wall are what Americans want. The God-Emperor must listen to them, and not the elitist morons who supposedly work for him. If I were him, I’d fire every single senior administration official who advised against building the wall immediately.
He’s a man who understands the importance of loyalty, but the flip side of rewarding loyalty is being unmerciless to the disloyal.

Priming is confirmed fake science

It’s sometimes a pity that science doesn’t have a simple “that’s obvious BS” card. Because I absolutely would have played it when the hypothesis of “priming” was not merely hypothesized, but asserted to be solid scientific fact:

In 2011, Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman published a popular book, “Thinking Fast and Slow”, about an important finding in social psychology.
In the same year, questions about the trustworthiness of social psychology were raised.  A Dutch social psychologist had fabricated data. Eventually over 50 of his articles would be retracted.  Another social psychologist published results that appeared to demonstrate the ability to foresee random future events (Bem, 2011). Few researchers believed these results and statistical analysis suggested that the results were not trustworthy (Francis, 2012; Schimmack, 2012).  Psychologists started to openly question the credibility of published results.
In the beginning of 2012, Doyen and colleagues published a failure to replicate a prominent study by John Bargh that was featured in Daniel Kahneman’s book.  A few month later, Daniel Kahneman distanced himself from Bargh’s research in an open email addressed to John Bargh (Young, 2012):
“As all of you know, of course, questions have been raised about the robustness of priming results…. your field is now the poster child for doubts about the integrity of psychological research… people have now attached a question mark to the field, and it is your responsibility to remove it… all I have personally at stake is that I recently wrote a book that emphasizes priming research as a new approach to the study of associative memory…Count me as a general believer… My reason for writing this letter is that I see a train wreck looming.”
Five years later, Kahneman’s concerns have been largely confirmed. Major studies in social priming research have failed to replicate and the replicability of results in social psychology is estimated to be only 25% (OSC, 2015).
Looking back, it is difficult to understand the uncritical acceptance of social priming as a fact.  In “Thinking Fast and Slow” Kahneman wrote “disbelief is not an option. The results are not made up, nor are they statistical flukes. You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true.”
Yet, Kahneman could have seen the train wreck coming. In 1971, he co-authored an article about scientists’ “exaggerated confidence in the validity of conclusions based on small samples” (Tversky & Kahneman, 1971, p. 105).  Yet, many of the studies described in Kahneman’s book had small samples.  For example, Bargh’s priming study used only 30 undergraduate students to demonstrate the effect.

I pay very little attention to “studies show” science for this reason.