Author: VD

Always. Use. Cash.

If you’re not using cash every chance you get, you’re literally part of the problem:

Sainsbury’s is battling a major IT meltdown on one of the busiest shopping days of the week and has left customers fuming after suffering an ‘error with an overnight software update’ that has prevented the supermarket from being able to fulfil online orders or accept contactless payments at the tills.

Stores across the UK are battling a major ‘technical issue’ that has left customers ‘disappointed’ and forced to turn to rival Tesco to complete their Saturday shop.

Frustrated customers say they cannot pay at the tills, while company bosses admit the firm is ‘experiencing issues with contactless payments’ and also ‘will not be able to fulfil the vast majority of today’s Groceries Online deliveries’.

Look, there are many situations that one simply has to use electronic payments, such as when one is not in a face-to-face transaction. But this recent payment failure at Sainsbury’s illustrates the absolute need for cash, which is why it is incumbent upon everyone to insist on cash transactions for all of your face-to-face transactions.

I don’t even have a debit card, much less one of those smartphone app payment methods. And this isn’t because I’m a Boomer who hates and fears newfangled technology, but because I understand exactly where all this “contactless” electronic payment tech is ultimately heading.

Don’t help pave the way for the Mark of the Beast. Don’t participate in it. Don’t make it easier for them.

DISCUSS ON SG

Against Free Speech

Andrew Torba appears to have belatedly come around on the problematic nature of free speech, even if he has not yet accepted the historical fact of its essentially evil nature:

The Previous Policy: Focus on Individual Content Removal

For a long time Gab relied on a policy that focused on removing individual pieces of content that violated our community guidelines. This approach often involved issuing warnings to users before taking action on specific posts or comments. However, this strategy has shown limitations, as some users continued to engage in threatening, spammy, and harassing behavior even after multiple warnings. This led to the ongoing presence of toxic elements within the community, which often drove good and decent users away.

The New Policy: Removal of Entire Accounts

In response to these challenges, Gab has decided to take a more proactive approach by removing entire accounts that engage in threatening, harassing, or spamming behavior. This shift in policy is a direct response to the shortcomings of the previous approach, which failed to effectively deter users from engaging in problematic activities. By removing entire accounts instead of just individual pieces of content, Gab aims to send a clear message that such behavior will not be tolerated and will ultimately lead to account termination.

We are giving no quarter to subversive accounts that exist for one reason and one reason only: to destroy Gab and our amazing community.

In order to strike the right balance between protecting free speech and ensuring the safety of our community, we must continually assess and refine our approach to content moderation. This involves ongoing discussions with users, legal experts, and other stakeholders to ensure that our policies remain both effective and fair.

Ultimately, our goal is to create a platform where individuals can freely express themselves while also feeling safe and protected from subversive freaks who want to scare them off the platform with violent threats and make Gab look bad.

As we continue to evolve and grow as a platform, we remain committed to the principles of free speech and community protection. By working together with our users and partners, we believe that we can create a space where individuals can engage in healthy and productive dialogue while also not facing a barrage of threats and harassment from subversive people who want to destroy Gab.

We’re cleaning up Gab and it’s long overdue.

This is a wise step forward, but an incoherent policy. Because “the principles of free speech” are inherently and always opposed to “community protection”. The very purpose of free speech is subversive and blasphemous; as we have learned, the primary advocates of free speech are the very first to criminalize and penalize it as soon as they attain sufficient power.

But I understand. It’s very hard to not only abandon, but actively turn against the very rhetoric that once inspired you. Most people are never able to slaughter their formerly sacred cows. At least Torba and company have recognized the poison in the false promises and are now taking practical steps against it, even though they are still paying lip service to the conceptual problem.

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The Trauma of Russian Independence

Clown World cannot abide Russia because Russia has escaped the satanic chains that bound her, while her European diplomats have lost the art of diplomacy for which they were once famous:

Dominic Lieven, a fine British scholar of the Russian Empire’s origins, wrote that the Russians were the only people Western Europeans had to deal with who were capable of fighting for their special, independent niche in the modern world with boundless courage, perseverance, and self-sacrifice.

Consider these words – we are the only civilization against which the West has attempted to act aggressively, and failed to achieve its goals. All the rest – the Great Empire of China, the ancient civilization of India, and many others – were unable to withstand the decisive thrust of the West, which for 500 years had been expanding the frontiers of its power by fire and sword. They were beaten, even if they were able to restore their statehood after some time.

Our country was never defeated. But let’s try to put ourselves in the Western Europeans’ shoes and understand their emotional state. For centuries, they have been living with a trauma called ‘an independent Russia’. However, we ourselves have never had the opportunity to understand what it is like to have a permanent enemy that can never be conquered.

So, when the USSR suddenly collapsed in 1991 and the unified state disintegrated, Western Europe found itself in a situation it had never experienced before. Overnight, the most unfulfilled wish of generations of European politicians and military leaders came true. All by itself, without a decisive military clash, and with the Russians’ full of desire to join the ‘European family’, even as pupils. Such a shock could not pass without serious consequences for the psyche of the statesmen and ordinary citizens of these Western European states.

Their entire foreign policy culture was based on the fact that Russia would never be pushed around or told what to do. Suddenly, the West felt it had won the Cold War without firing a single shot. In a state of fantastic emotional upheaval, the Western Europeans began to build relations with Russia as if it had finally been defeated. For several years, Moscow accepted the rules of the game that the West imposed. It took into account the wishes of the Western Europeans in the economic sphere and developed its foreign relations with an eye to how this would affect the main goal – which was gradual ‘integration’ with the EU.

In the new circumstances, the bloc found itself in the position of a demanding teacher, offering numerous ‘partnership’ programs with two simple objectives. First, to secure the interests of Western European business and make the Russian market even more open to it. Second, to ensure that Moscow was complying with its instructions.

European diplomats became equally demanding teachers. For several generations of EU ambassadors in Moscow, the main task was to monitor how well Russia was honoring its many commitments. As part of this ‘honorable’ mission, a tradition of communication with Russians at various levels has developed. And while there have been talks at the level of heads of state or foreign ministers, there has been no trace of normal diplomacy below that level.

EU ambassadors did not simply become the executors of the will of their masters back home (which is perfectly normal) – they gradually became technical workers entrusted with the task of observing Russia and pointing out errors in its behavior.

And the level of their intellectual ability was no longer measured by their competency in playing a subtle diplomatic game. The main measure was the degree of hysteria with which they pushed through a very simple agenda. All the more so as their individual will and intelligence were increasingly integrated into the system of rules and requirements common to all NATO and EU representatives abroad.

As a philosopher wrote in the last century, “in any collective, individual agency becomes the servant of the collective interest.” And gradually, we should add, it disappears in the sense that is a sign of agency in the first place – the ability to analyze a situation independently and to make decisions. This problem has become so total for Western European diplomacy and politics that it has gradually ceased to be noticed.

All the more so because European politics was also changing rapidly. Having found themselves, through no fault of their own, in the position of ‘winners of the Cold War’, Western Europeans felt a deep sense of moral superiority over the whole world around them. Except, of course, towards the Americans, who they are simply afraid of. We have repeatedly seen examples of the European Union interfering in the purely internal affairs of key partners such as China, or the still-very-friendly India. Not to mention states of lesser size and importance. Last year, for example, French President Emmanuel Macron made a scene with the Brazilians over their treatment of their forests.

The behavior of European leaders like Macron, Merkel, and Boris Johnson does often strike one as significantly out-of-touch with basic reality. When they talk about “defeating Russia” or “sanctioning China”, it makes one seriously wonder if they are even capable of basic math, let alone capable of understanding that the balance of power is no longer in their favor.

What the author gets wrong is that while Russia was never defeated by the West, it was defeated by a foreign power when the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, by the same power that rules over Ukraine and is at war with Russia today.

UPDATE: This recent demand by the European Parliament should serve to demonstrate the cartoonish extent to which the European leaders are overestimating their influence.

On Thursday, the European Parliament adopted a resolution calling on Moscow to send back 91.5 metric tons of gold and cultural artifacts that were exported to the Russian Empire in 1916-1917 by Romania.

I’m a little disappointed that the Russians merely rolled their eyes and told them, explicitly, “to fuck off”. I think it would have been much more amusing if they’d simply pointed out that the sanctions being applied by the European governments render any such transaction impossible.

DISCUSS ON SG

No Honor in the US Military

One can’t complain they haven’t made it very clear that the US Army officer corps is no long concerned with duty, honor, or least of all, country.

The U.S. Military Academy at West Point has made the decision to remove the “Duty, Honor, Country” motto from its mission statement.

As we have done nine times in the past century, we have updated our mission statement to now include the Army values [of] loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, integrity and personal courage,” Army Col. Terence Kelley, a West Point spokesman, told Fox News. Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth and Army Chief of Staff Randy George both approved the change, according to Gilland.

“Our updated mission statement focuses on the mission essential tasks of Build, Educate, Train, and Inspire the Corps of Cadets to be commissioned leaders of character, with the explicit purpose of being committed to the Army Values and Ready for a lifetime of service,” Gilland explained.

Evil always tells you what it’s going to do, then tries to convince you that it doesn’t really mean what it just told you. Believe them when they tell you what they are, and what they stand for.

And it’s the third word that is the real target…

DISCUSS ON SG

An Army of Cheerleaders

The French military, perhaps intentionally, says the quiet part out loud, presumably because, unlike the French politicians, the French generals know better than to get involved in another land war with Russia, as Simplicius notes.

It’s come to light that according to sources from the French Marianne paper, Macron’s entire recent mental manqué resulted from a secret series of ‘assessments’ by the French military that not only provided an absolutely disastrous picture of the actual realities on the ground in Ukraine, but in no uncertain terms even concluded quite frankly that: “Ukraine cannot win this war militarily.”

But if the secret military report was damning to the AFU, it was even more damning to the uxorious petit caporal’s Grande Armée itself. You have to read it twice to believe it—excusing the infelicities of machine autotranslation. Yes, that’s the French military calling itself an army of cheerleaders in the face of the Russian army. “Who is this guy kidding, sending us to Ukraine?” they seem to protest.

Planning, imagined in Kiev and in the Western staffs has proved “disastrous”. “The planners thought that as soon as the first lines of defense of Russians would have taken place, the whole of the front would collapse […] These preliminary phases of the fundamental have been made without consideration of the moral forces of the enemy in defensive: that is to say, the will of the Russian soldier to cling to the ground,” notes the report referring to “the failure of the planning” of the western camp.

That’s called “underestimation”.

And riddle me why, exactly, did the West underestimate Russia so wantonly? Oh, that’s right—because all their projections and estimations were based on totally erroneously cooked data. When you have the SBU reporting 20 shot down Russian planes per week, and 500,000 Russian casualties—or whatever the absurdity is up to now—then, I’m sorry to say, that’s going to very unfavorably skew your expectations and mission planning.

The Clown World concept of war is as cartoonish as it is childish. It’s warplanning by women and Gamma males who have never even been punched in the face, and it’s supported by decades of evidence that is totally irrelevant to the matter at hand. Neither sending unmotivated draftees to die to no purpose in an Asian jungle nor carpet-bombing defenseless armor in the desert are adequate preparation for full-scale industrial warfare against a near-peer military.

This is the fundamental challenge faced by The Empire of Lies. Once you start lying, it’s not only very hard to stop, but it becomes almost impossible going forward to be able to distinguish between reality and the false web that you’ve woven from your systematic lies. And once you start making decisions based on your own falsehoods, you’re doomed to eventual failure.

Remember the core principle of convergence. Convergence prevents an institution from being able to perform its core purpose. Both the French and US militaries, being converged, are now entirely incapable of either fighting a real war or defending their nations. They are aptly described as “an army of cheerleaders” because rhetorical posturing, political blustering, and public cheerleading in the face of certain military defeat is all they can accomplish now.

And don’t think this observation has somehow escaped the military strategists of Russia, China, and Iran.

DISCUSS ON SG

The End of Liberalism

The satanic seeds of the Enlightenment have finally blossomed to the point that they are killing entire nations. We’ve already learned, much to our surprise, that Communism is less fatal to a nation than the financial capitalism, neo-liberalism, and globalism of Clown World, now we’re discovering that even the insane ideology of the Juche, the state ideology of North Korea, is observably better for a nation than the best that the modern West has to offer.

I think it’s so funny that Korean women are so done with Korean men that they’re literally just deciding to die out. Y’all heard of the 4B movement. I’m a big fan. The 4B movement stands for these four things. It’s basically Korean feminism which is cheaper and more efficient.

The 4B movement initially gained recognition on Twitter in 2019 because of course it did, through various feminist social media accounts and they are focused on envisioning a future without men because of course they are. The cornerstone of feminism is that everything is oppressive. The 4B movement had an Escape the Corset movement. The word corset is used here for the societal mechanisms that bind and repress women like toxic beauty standards. Just like in Western feminism, toxic means anything I don’t like. I need all of this from you but you need something from me, that’s toxic. Korean women literally just gave up on their men they’re like, they’re not going to change so we’re all going to go extinct.

That’s where she’s wrong. She says that Korean women are mad at Korean men, but they’re actually mad at God, and if you don’t like that word, just call it the universe or physics or whatever, it’s the same thing. This is a hierarchy of creation, it goes from God or the universe all the way down through man to woman to child to the natural world and all the way back up. It goes both ways. Basically the universe just is the way it is, you can’t get rid of gravity and men have to deal with that directly and build things from it, and we also give approval and attention and validation to women, who then provide nurturing to communities and children. Their role is to be the learners and they provide creativity and new ways in developing new things to do with the natural world, which is howwe get new things like the internet or different types of cheese or whatever, but in the same way that man cannot simply ignore the rules of gravity, women cannot simply ignore what men need from them either, otherwise we can’t do our jobs, that’s just how reality works.

S what these women are saying is I want resources and money and power and everything, I just don’t want to provide men with what they need in order to continue creating them. Usually what keeps this whole thing going is that men provide women with approval, attention, and validation, so basically if men don’t follow the rules of the universe, then they don’t get what they need from the universe. That’s just physically how life works, you need to know when to plant seeds and stuff, and usually when women don’t follow the rules made by men, and give men what they need, then men don’t provide women with what they need in return.

But now women have these cellphones that are providing them with all of this approval, attention, and validation, which makes them think “I don’t need men anymore” even though men are still making all the stuff, so because women are no longer providing this men are no longer providing that, which means no one can have any of these things and women are saying “okay we’d rather die”. that’s what quotes like this mean.

Rebellion is as the sin of Witchcraft because you have rejected the word of the Lord, He has also rejected you from being King. That means if you don’t do as the universe demands then you’re not going to get anything from it. So man has to build society according to the rules of reality and women have to fit into society according to the rules of society, and then children have get good grades or they don’t get the ice cream or whatever. It works the sameway. The Bible uses that word a lot, rebellious, and what that means is “I want the benefits but I’m not going to follow the rules,” that’s why this argument is so important. “I want you to provide me with things but I’m not going to provide anything back.”

Imagine if you were saying “I want food to grow, I’m just not going to do any farming,” that’s what this is illustrating. If you don’t do what you have to then you don’t get anything back, and if you don’t provide men with what they need in order to make food and fix buildings and stuff, then they’re not going to give you any of those things and then everyone die. I’m not saying that men don’t have work to do, I don’t know what’s going on in Korea, maybe the corset is too tight, maybe men need to start providing something new, but if it’s anything like American feminism, it’s probably all get-get-get and never “where are we getting this from” and every time you break that chain you just die off, which they literally are, by the way.

Korea has the lowest birthrates in the world but I just think that’s so funny… Korean as an ethnicity is about to go away. It works the same every time you fill your mind with entitlement, you blame somebody for what you don’t have, and then you use the government to take it away from them. When the government gives stuff to women for free, then women stop giving men support and men go “what’s the point” and then women go “what’s the point” and then well, bye-bye, Korea.

Except Korea will not die. The Korea that will survive is Best Korea. Scientific, evolutionarily-superior Korea. It’s very unlikely that South Korean women will be permitted to simply die off and end Korean civilization, the odds significantly favor them instead being enslaved and utilized by the North Koreans to ensure national survival. And the great irony is that these women will apparently be happier as slaves than as free women allowed to pursue any path they wanted, because, when given complete freedom to become anything they imagined, they consciously chose rebellion against their Creator and suicide.

Clown World is a satanic global fail.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Vampires’ Ball is Ending

And here you thought Midnight’s War was simply fiction.

For centuries, they got used to stuffing their stomachs with human flesh and their pockets with money. But they must realize that this ‘ball of vampires’ is coming to an end.
– Vladimir Putin

This sort of rhetoric isn’t accidental. Putin understands precisely with whom, and with what, his nation is at war. This is a spiritual war, it is the original war, it is quite literally a war between good and evil, even if the vast majority of those on the evil side have no idea how wicked their masters are.

But The Empire That Never Ended has already spent itself. It can’t hide in the shadows anymore and the its current host has been bled nearly dry. Clown World’s time to move on has already come and gone, the servants are already being thrown from the Black Rider’s high horse, and the purifying light of the rising sun is coming.

Neoclown Victoria Nuland is already out. Now it appears Netanyahu is next on the list.

Israel’s far-right cabinet led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could face serious challenges and be forced to step down due to flagging public support, the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has warned. In a report published on Monday, the ODNI noted that a “different, more moderate government” could take over the reins in the near future. The US intelligence agency concluded that “Netanyahu’s viability as leader as well as his governing coalition of far-right and ultraorthodox parties that pursued hardline policies on Palestinian and security issues may be in jeopardy.”

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A Significant Nexus

Some years ago, I predicted that Alpha Game would surpass Vox Popoli due to the fact that people are, on average, more interested in intersexual relations and the socio-sexual hierarchy than in the various esoterica that makes up the greater part of the posts here. That might have seemed unlikely, given the way in which VP grew to a daily pageview average of over 110,000 and the fact that I shut Alpha Game down entirely due to my lack of interest in people repeatedly asking what I refer to as The Incessant Inquiry.

The full poem will have to wait for the publication of my I novel to see the light, but it amounts to the simple, straightforward, and seemingly inescapable question: “what about me?” And it is tiresome in the extreme. What about you? Why are you asking me? I don’t care.

What’s interesting, perhaps only to me, is that the combination of the decline in VP’s pageviews that resulted from the move from voxday.blogspot.com to voxday.net with the spamalicious efficiency of Substack has unexpectedly resulted in Sigma Game traffic very nearly surpassing the Vox Popoli traffic yesterday, as Sigma Game hit 97.3 percent of the VP total. And given what I expect to be the popularity of today’s post on A Tale of the Two Heathers of the 1980s, I will not be even remotely surprised if Sigma Game ascends to the status I’d originally envisioned for Alpha Game before tomorrow.

Yeah, this one is going to do, as they say, numbers.

This is not a bad thing. You may note the aphorism that has been the philosophical foundation of this blog since its inception is relevant here.

Success comes most swiftly and completely not to the greatest or perhaps even to the ablest men, but to those whose gifts are most completely in harmony with the taste of their times.
– Dame Iris Margaret Origo, Marchesa Origo

And if this recent article by The New York Times is any guide, it appears my gifts may finally in harmony with the taste of our times.

Are you a “sigma”? Do you have “rizz”? The youngest generation is bamboozling its elders with terms all their own.

Sigma has something to do with wolves.

“Everyone in my grade, at least, says it in a way where they’re like the alpha of the pack,” Alta said. “If you’re trying to say you’re dominant and you’re the leader, you’ll call yourself ‘sigma.’”

Can You Understand Gen Alpha’s Slang?, THE NEW YORK TIMES, 11 November 2023

In any event, we’ll be scheduling the SSH and Hypergamouse crowdfund as soon as we get Midnight’s War Vol 1 and AH:Q out the door.

DISCUSS ON SG

Economics, Reconsidered

In which the Professor of Economics and International Affairs, Emeritus, at Princeton and 2015 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences begins to wonder if perhaps everything about the mainstream Neo-Samuelsonian economics he has been utilizing as his basic conceptual model is wrong:

Economics has achieved much; there are large bodies of often nonobvious theoretical understandings and of careful and sometimes compelling empirical evidence. The profession knows and understands many things. Yet today we are in some disarray. We did not collectively predict the financial crisis and, worse still, we may have contributed to it through an overenthusiastic belief in the efficacy of markets, especially financial markets whose structure and implications we understood less well than we thought…

Like many others, I have recently found myself changing my mind, a discomfiting process for someone who has been a practicing economist for more than half a century…

I am much more skeptical of the benefits of free trade to American workers and am even skeptical of the claim, which I and others have made in the past, that globalization was responsible for the vast reduction in global poverty over the past 30 years. I also no longer defend the idea that the harm done to working Americans by globalization was a reasonable price to pay for global poverty reduction because workers in America are so much better off than the global poor. I believe that the reduction in poverty in India had little to do with world trade. And poverty reduction in China could have happened with less damage to workers in rich countries if Chinese policies caused it to save less of its national income, allowing more of its manufacturing growth to be absorbed at home. I had also seriously underthought my ethical judgments about trade-offs between domestic and foreign workers. We certainly have a duty to aid those in distress, but we have additional obligations to our fellow citizens that we do not have to others.

I used to subscribe to the near consensus among economists that immigration to the US was a good thing, with great benefits to the migrants and little or no cost to domestic low-skilled workers. I no longer think so. Economists’ beliefs are not unanimous on this but are shaped by econometric designs that may be credible but often rest on short-term outcomes. Longer-term analysis over the past century and a half tells a different story. Inequality was high when America was open, was much lower when the borders were closed, and rose again post Hart-Celler (the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965) as the fraction of foreign-born people rose back to its levels in the Gilded Age. It has also been plausibly argued that the Great Migration of millions of African Americans from the rural South to the factories in the North would not have happened if factory owners had been able to hire the European migrants they preferred.

Economists could benefit by greater engagement with the ideas of philosophers, historians, and sociologists, just as Adam Smith once did. The philosophers, historians, and sociologists would likely benefit too.

I can’t cast too many stones in the eminent Prof. Deaton’s direction. I, too, once believed that free trade was economically beneficial to both nations involved in the trade. I, too, once believed that the free movement of peoples was a net benefit to the economy and the well-being of the peoples involved. And while I was always deeply skeptical of, and completely opposed to, globalization, it wasn’t until fairly recently that I recognized the satanic thread that runs through and inevitably connects liberty, democracy, the liberal Enlightenment values, and economic liberalism to obvious evils like globalism, imperialism, techno-authoritarianism, and Clown World.

But the lies, some of them centuries-old, are shattering. They are being broken apart by finally being tested against real-world consequences. And in the aftermath of their discrediting, an entirely new economics, one that is not based on a false model of a perfectly rational economic man, will be constructed.

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