Author: VD

Recognize Good Rhetoric

A Forbes writer “sparks fury” by coining a remarkably effective phrase:

Forbes has been met with fierce criticism over a recent opinion piece about two Bridgerton characters being in a ‘mixed-weight romance’ – suggesting that the world is ‘still not ready’ to see two people of different body types dating on-screen.

The piece, which was written by Virgie Tovar, a ‘leading expert on weight bias’, focused on the relationship between fictional characters Penelope Featherington, played by Nicola Coughlan, and Colin Bridgerton, played by Luke Newton. Tovar said that the on-screen relationship between the two characters ‘defied romance plotline convention’, seemingly because Nicola is ‘larger’ than Luke.

But Tovar’s use of the phrase ‘mixed-weight romance’ has sparked a bitter backlash from readers, with many questioning why the need to call attention to their size was ever necessary. Fans of the Shonda Rhimes series took to X, formerly known as Twitter, in their droves to slam the writer and the publication, furiously mocking the use of the ‘mixed-weight’ phrasing.

Savage. Absolutely and beautifully savage. And really, what’s wrong with a mixed-weight relationship? You aren’t some kind of hateful fattist or something, are you?

You know a term is rhetorically effective when its mere existence triggers the susceptible.

If you really want to eviscerate a man, compliment him on his open-mindedness…

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The Fourth Front

It appears the fourth front of WWIII will not be Africa, but the Korean Peninsula:

South Korea said Thursday that it would consider sending arms to Ukraine, a major policy change that was suggested after Russia and North Korea rattled the region and beyond by signing a pact to come to each other’s defense in the event of war.

The comments from a senior presidential official came hours after North Korea’s state media released the details of the agreement, which observers said could mark the strongest connection between Moscow and Pyongyang since the end of the Cold War. It comes at a time when Russia faces growing isolation over the war in Ukraine and both countries face escalating standoffs with the West.

According to the text of the deal published by North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency, or KCNA, if either country gets invaded and is pushed into a state of war, the other must deploy “all means at its disposal without delay” to provide “military and other assistance.”

I had my suspicions about things heating up on the Korean Peninsula once it became obvious that the USA was going to try to substitute South Korean and Japanese ship-building for its own lack of ship-building capacity. The amount of Clown World interest and investment in both countries has noticeably appreciated (see the previous post on investments into the comics industry) and therefore a counter-move by the BRICSIA alliance was inevitable.

I was a little surprised that it was Russia that made the overtures to the North Koreans and not the Chinese, except that it’s now clear that Russia is playing bad cop while China whistles innocently and pretends to not be directly involved. What will truly shake things up, however, is if an invitation to join BRICSIA is offered to North Korea, as that would truly be a formidable gauntlet to cast before the G7.

It shouldn’t be too long before Clown World realizes that it is no position to sanction anyone, and to the contrary, the rest of the world is effectively sanctioning it.

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The Last Comics Publisher

It’s probably apparent to a fair number of you why Arkhaven matters, and why a non-comics leather book snob like myself nevertheless troubles to do what I can to keep independent comics infrastructure alive. The decline and ongoing collapse of DC and Marvel and IDW has been well-chronicled, after all. But what you may not know is that the same forces, indeed, in one case, the exact same corporate vehicle, is now targeting the two alternatives to the mainstream comics industry for destruction.

First, Japanese manga:

Blackstone launched a 275.8 billion yen ($1.74 billion) bid to take Japanese digital comic distributor Infocom, including a tender offer for a per-share price of 6,060 yen, Infocom said on Tuesday. The tender offer will amount to 141.4 billion yen, Infocom said. The company’s current parent Teijin said it will sell all of its 58% stake in Infocom for 134.4 billion yen in a share buyback after the buyout is completed. Infocom operates digital comic site Mecha Comic, which is among Japan’s largest, according to its website.

Second, Webtoons:

Webtoon Entertainment, which describes itself as the world’s largest web comic platform, has set its market value at $2.67bn (£2.11bn) ahead of its US listing. Its shares are due to start trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange on 27 June at $21 each, the top end of their marketed range. The Los Angeles-based company is owned by South Korean technology giant Naver, which has been boosted by the growing online popularity of Korean and Japanese comics. Webtoon says it has 170 million monthly active users in more than 150 countries around the world. The company is aiming to sell 15 million shares and raise $315m in the initial public offering (IPO).

The world’s largest fund manager BlackRock has expressed interest in buying up to $50m of shares.

BlackRock is Disney’s second-largest shareholder, controls several seats on its executive board, and owns about 78 million shares in the company, or the equivalent of $9.5 billion.

It’s really fascinating to see the massive amount of money suddenly being pumped into converging these culture war vehicles, especially in light of the obvious superiority of the best that Arktoons has to offer vs the best that Webtoons has on display. Below is a comparison between the #1 most popular Webtoon which is apparently about lesbian furries vs the recently updated Silenziosa:

So, in the coming months, you can expect to see a number of changes and improvements at Arkhaven, including subscriptions to specific comics, comments, and other features. The best way to support this right now is simply to subscribe for free to the Arkhaven Substack, where we’ve recently launched a daily serialization of Alt★Hero that begins with The Gods of Peaceful Sleep.

Now, of course, it’s easy to say “I’m not a comics guy, what do I care?” But do you really think the clowns running BlackRock and Blackstone care about comics, much less manga? It’s not about money either. They will never make their money back by driving these things into the ground. It’s about complete control of the cultural space, control that our community will never cede them.

We’ve also modified our approach to text serializations on Arktoons based on what we’ve learned from the substacks. Instead of running an episode once a week, we’re going to run them straight through, every day, with the exception of Quantum Mortis: A Mind Programmed, which will run on weekends. Since Chuck Dixon’s Snakehand ends today with Episode 56, Sidewinders will continue with the second novel in the series, La Gringa.

We’re looking for more volunteers to help chop up comics into Arktoons-presentable episodes, so if you’re willing and able, please get in touch. And authors who want to serialize their published novels are welcome to join the party too.

UPDATE: JDA’s more informed take on Fandom Pulse isn’t any more optimistic:

Manga fans have largely mocked American comic fans for years, calling American comics “dead” and laughing at the fans as Marvel and DC Comics circled the drain and slowly killed their content. Even superhero manga like My Hero Academia blew away the competition from Marvel and DC in American markets, which should have given the companies a signal something was drastically wrong…

Blackstone has already announced its plans to focus on female-centric content by focusing on genres with that target audience in mind. This means manga fans are likely to see a rampant feminization of their content out of the gate.

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The USA Already Lost WWIII

As I’ve been banging repeatedly on since 2004, warfare since 1940 has primarily concerned industrial capacity. Of course, the Clown World establishment doesn’t listen to me, so they’re genuinely confused and afraid now that it’s clear that both China and North Korea are formally allied with Russia, giving the sovereign nations a 100x advantage over the post-industrial financialized economies of Clown World.

Remember when the narrative was that it was Russia totally reliant on Western-supplied parts in its weaponry? Here an American general literally admits the entire U.S. military structure would collapse in a day if China issued an embargo against them:

‘If we were in a war with China and it stopped providing parts, we wouldn’t be able to build the planes and weapons we needed,’ he said.

A startling report released earlier this year revealed Chinese firms have a stranglehold across 12 critical technologies that are vital to US national security, including nuclear modernization, hypersonic and space technologies.

The study, which was carried out by defense software firm Govini, delivered a damning indictment on the American armaments industry.

‘U.S. domestic production capacity is a shriveled shadow of its former self,’ the report said. ‘Crucial categories of industry for U.S. national defense are no longer built in any of the 50 states.’

Remember when it was Russia using Western chips in all of its missiles?

Perhaps most worryingly, Govini found that more than 40 per cent of the semiconductors that sustain Department of Defense (DoD) weapons systems are now sourced from China.

How the tides have turned.

It seems the West is slowly coming to its awakening moment: it stands no chance in a long term conflict against the manufacturing powerhouse of the Russia-China-North Korea-Iran bloc.

The central problem is that the strategic geniuses of Clown World are neocons like the Kagan clan, who understand nothing of military history. Their expertise is in subjective rhetoric and subversion, not objective logic and reality. They’re like the bad guys in a Hollywood horror flick, where all that is necessary to defeat them is to refuse to believe in them and proceed as if they don’t even exist.

The astonishing thing is that the corpocracy is still exporting manufacturing capacity abroad. Just yesterday, John Deere announced that it was moving its factories to Mexico. So US manufacturing capacity is actually shrinking, just as European energy production is shrinking, while Russia, China, and North Korea are all ramping up their production of everything from ammunition to tanks.

Clown World should surrender now. But they won’t, because they don’t deal in objective reality. They never have.

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AI Fraud and Fakery

It’s abundantly clear that “AI” is the current, and possibly last, bubble that the Clown World economy has inflated in order to let the vulture capitalists continue to feed upon the tattered remains of the US corpocracy:

Unless you are one of a tiny handful of businesses who know exactly what they’re going to use AI for, you do not need AI for anything – or rather, you do not need to do anything to reap the benefits. Artificial intelligence, as it exists and is useful now, is probably already baked into your businesses software supply chain. Your managed security provider is probably using some algorithms baked up in a lab software to detect anomalous traffic, and here’s a secret, they didn’t do much AI work either, they bought software from the tiny sector of the market that actually does need to do employ data scientists. I know you want to be the next Steve Jobs, and this requires you to get on stages and talk about your innovative prowess, but none of this will allow you to pull off a turtle neck, and even if it did, you would need to replace your sweaters with fullplate to survive my onslaught.

Consider the fact that most companies are unable to successfully develop and deploy the simplest of CRUD applications on time and under budget. This is a solved problem – with smart people who can collaborate and provide reasonable requirements, a competent team will knock this out of the park every single time, admittedly with some amount of frustration. The clients I work with now are all like this – even if they are totally non-technical, we have a mutual respect for the other party’s intelligence, and then we do this crazy thing where we solve problems together. I may not know anything about the nuance of building analytics systems for drug rehabilitation research, but through the power of talking to each other like adults, we somehow solve problems.

But most companies can’t do this, because they are operationally and culturally crippled. The median stay for an engineer will be something between one to two years, so the organization suffers from institutional retrograde amnesia. Every so often, some dickhead says something like “Maybe we should revoke the engineering team’s remote work privile – whoa, wait, why did all the best engineers leave?”. Whenever there is a ransomware attack, it is revealed with clockwork precision that no one has tested the backups for six months and half the legacy systems cannot be resuscitated – something that I have personally seen twice in four fucking years. Do you know how insane that is?

Most organizations cannot ship the most basic applications imaginable with any consistency, and you’re out here saying that the best way to remain competitive is to roll out experimental technology that is an order of magnitude more sophisticated than anything else your I.T department runs, which you have no experience hiring for, when the organization has never used a GPU for anything other than junior engineers playing video games with their camera off during standup, and even if you do that all right there is a chance that the problem is simply unsolvable due to the characteristics of your data and business? This isn’t a recipe for disaster, it’s a cookbook for someone looking to prepare a twelve course fucking catastrophe.

How about you remain competitive by fixing your shit? I’ve met a lead data scientist with access to hundreds of thousands of sensitive customer records who is allowed to keep their password in a text file on their desktop, and you’re worried that customers are best served by using AI to improve security through some mechanism that you haven’t even come up with yet?

A friend of mine was invited by a FAANG organization to visit the U.S a few years ago. Many of the talks were technical demos of impressive artificial intelligence products. Being a software engineer, he got to spend a little bit of time backstage with the developers, whereupon they revealed that most of the demos were faked. The products didn’t work. They just hadn’t solved some minor issues, such as actually predicting the thing that they’re supposed to predict. 

It’s really remarkable how much shameless fakery is taking place in the tech sector these days. It makes the dot com boom look relatively restrained by comparison. At this point, I’d almost be willing to believe that Suno is actually a collection of semi-talented musicians in India who rapidly record two-minute clips in response to the user’s prompts.

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Macron Raus

France is finally beginning to realize that the mainstream political-media complex is far worse for the French than the “extreme right” of which it is always warning, as the rest of the continent moves steadily toward a nationalist revival.

The French right-wing National Rally (RN) party and its allies have secured the lead in the first round of snap parliamentary elections, winning over 33% of the vote, according to final results published by the Interior Ministry on Monday.

President Emmanuel Macron called early parliamentary elections after the RN’s strong performance in last month’s vote for the European Parliament. The force formerly led by Marine Le Pen and now by Jordan Bardella won 30 of the 81 French seats in the EU legislature.

In the latest poll following the first round of voting in France on Sunday, the newly-created left-wing New Popular Front (NFP) finished second with 28%, while Macron’s centrist Ensemble bloc won 20% of the vote. The RN and NFP have secured 37 and 32 seats respectively in the 577-strong legislature, while Macron’s party has received just two. A candidate needs to receive over half of the vote to win in the first round. If none does, any candidate who reaches the 12.5% threshold enters a run-off which will be held on June 7.

The next challenge for the French will be to prevent the RN from turning around and embracing more war and more immigration like Meloni did in Italy. But whether the RN embraces their duty or not, it is clear that the people of Europe are done with the decades of multiculti propaganda and the pendulum is beginning to swing back with a vengeance.

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The Clowntardery of Color Revolutions

If your grand strategy for winning wars relies entirely upon political regime change unseating a singular individual, you are almost certainly guaranteed to lose. Contra the historical propaganda about WWI and WWII, nations do not engage in all-out industrial warfare because one individual seeks war. China will not become more or less militarily capable whether Xi is in charge or not; it invaded Cambodia to drive out the North Vietnamese under Deng, the much-lauded “Westernizer”.

And China’s insistence on the One-China policy not only long predates Xi, it will long survive him regardless of whether he succeeds in the reunification of Taiwan island with the mainland or not.

Thus is the mechanism behind the simplistic information attack: Destabilize Russia under the scheme of exaggerated panic in order to sow social unrest and dissatisfaction with the leadership’s responses. Make it seem like Putin is “losing grip” on the situation, and that the brewing ‘instability’ is a result of society rising up, a narrative that will naturally be chained along and amplified by the Western corporate press. It’s a very run-of-the-mill psyop technology package.

The great irony here is that it is not the nationalist leaders who are losing their grip on the situation, nor is it the nationalist leaders who are increasingly unpopular in their own nations, but rather, the servants of Clown World and its fake “democracies”.

The psyops that worked on unstable, militarily-negligible countries with fragile regimes when the US President was the unquestioned “Leader of the Free World” don’t work anymore. Not only does everyone now know how they work and by whom they are funded, but the decreasing influence of the global media means that fewer and fewer people around the world even take them seriously, much less accept them at face value. There is no longer anyone anywhere on the planet who believes the demented walking corpse of “Joe Biden” is a more credible head of state than any of Clown World’s current targets for regime change.

And if a lack of popularity hasn’t caused the governments of Trudeau, Macron, Sunak, Netanyahu, or the Five Bidens to collapse, then why would it cause the governments of Putin and Xi to collapse, even if they were unpopular, which they aren’t.

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Che Cosa?

We knew the Azzurri were mediocre, but we didn’t know they were this bad.

Switzerland 2, Italy 0

Both Swiss goals were quality. And the Swiss back 5 were excellent. But the combination of Scamacca for the Italians and Embolo for the Swiss may have been the worst pair of opposing strikers that I’ve ever seen at this level.

I sent a text to one of my Italian friends, asking what’s up with the Azzurri. His response was six – no less than six – facepalms.

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Atheists Discover Consequences

It’s always mildly amusing to recall that they used to call themselves “brights” because they genuinely believed that they were smarter than Christians. Never mind that the island nation that developed a world-spanning empire under Christendom now can’t even offer token resistance to the imperial dar al-Islam:

I am getting scared of the rise of Islam in the UK and Europe. I study philosophy at university in England…. Oh boy my homeland is being overrun by Islam.

One guy legit told me the other day on a Friday that “I should be at the mosque” and shouted at me for not being so. I know plenty of Christians, and whilst I myself am atheist, none have ever tried to convert me or call me a heretic- whilst the only homophobes I know have been Muslim. Someone also said my degree, philosophy was “devil worship because asking questions about the universe and truth is evil-this is especially true because I focus in logic and game theory. They said it was not “real” and satanic…

What scares me most is that the left (of which I am a part of) seems to protect Islam by way of calling all who support it islamaphobic….when I said I supported Israel as it’s the only safe space for LGBT guys in the entire Middle East, and a democracy, someone spat at me and called me a “devil”.

It is psychotic. Do you think the west will fall to Islam? Sorry for the vent: I’ve come to the conclusion that I am very inclusive, but I cannot be inclusive to those who hate inclusion because fictional sky dad said no.

The fascinating thing is that even when they are in terror for their lives and their lifestyles, they still do not have the intellectual flexibility to admit that they were wrong, that inclusivity is evil and destructive, and that a nation that ceases to be a Christian nation will soon cease to be a nation at all.

If you accept diversity, equality, and inclusivity as ideals, then you have already lost the war. It’s just a matter of time before those who correctly reject those concepts as being intrinsically false overrun you.

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Joe Must Go

The New York Times reads from the script to shut down the Fake Biden administration:

Mr. Biden has said that he is the candidate with the best chance of taking on this threat of tyranny and defeating it. His argument rests largely on the fact that he beat Mr. Trump in 2020. That is no longer a sufficient rationale for why Mr. Biden should be the Democratic nominee this year.

At Thursday’s debate, the president needed to convince the American public that he was equal to the formidable demands of the office he is seeking to hold for another term. Voters, however, cannot be expected to ignore what was instead plain to see: Mr. Biden is not the man he was four years ago.

The president appeared on Thursday night as the shadow of a great public servant. He struggled to explain what he would accomplish in a second term. He struggled to respond to Mr. Trump’s provocations. He struggled to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his lies, his failures and his chilling plans. More than once, he struggled to make it to the end of a sentence.

Mr. Biden has been an admirable president. Under his leadership, the nation has prospered and begun to address a range of long-term challenges, and the wounds ripped open by Mr. Trump have begun to heal. But the greatest public service Mr. Biden can now perform is to announce that he will not continue to run for re-election.

Isn’t it fascinating how Clown World will often come right out and tell you the truth, but do so in a way in which you naturally assume a less-insidious interpretation?

Mr. Biden is not the man he was four years ago.

They expect you to take it as a metaphor. But it isn’t. That’s the literal truth. That dotard on the stage was Biden #4. I doubt Biden #1 is even alive now.

Anyhow, the signals are being sent out. And all the various schools of SJWs, liberals, and progressives will dutifully change their course in perfect formation now that the elite media are broadcasting the new Narrative.

UPDATE: The Uniparty is in one accord on the matter.

Joe Biden should be replaced as US president, having shown he is “not up to the task” during his debate with Donald Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has said.

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