Category: Uncategorized

Mailvox: the utility of the framework

MS appreciates the perspective provided the Social-Sexual Hierarchy’s framework of behavioral patterns.

I’ve been doing a little historical reading and it seems to me that most of the very famous betrayals in history were by Gamma types. I know you’ve repeatedly made the point that Gammas can’t be trusted precisely because they’ll turn on others when they feel slighted, but being able to think of well-known examples of treachery and then comparing what is known of the traitor with the Gamma profile has been quite enlightening.

This is a useful observation. One common theme in betrayals is the way in which the betrayer acts because he feels that he has been insufficiently valued, respected, or rewarded. “I was a big fan of X, but then he went too far” is more than just an old rhetorical device used by the media and political fundraising organizations as long as I can remember, in a personal context it is a very clear sign that the turncoat is a gamma.

Which, of course, is why the same logic that dictates turncoats cannot be trusted tends to suggest that gammas should not be trusted. Envy is the great sin of the Gamma, so as long as there is someone in the organization of whom he may feel envious, the potential for betrayal will be there.

It can be difficult, particularly for those who can sincerely use the assistance, to turn down much-needed offers of support from enthusiastic supporters who only seem to want to help. But the costs of their assistance usually turns out to be several orders of magnitude larger than the benefits. This is why you should never volunteer to help any individual or organization if you suspect you would ever be unable to simply walk away from the situation in silence if things don’t happen to work out to your satisfaction.

We may have to start Unauthorized News

It looks as if the Republican Establishment is making a run at OANN:

Allies of President Trump are pursuing an effort to acquire right-leaning news channel One America News Network, according to people familiar with the matter, in a bid to shake up a conservative media market that has been dominated by Fox News. The investment firm Hicks Equity Partners is looking to acquire the channel and is pitching other wealthy GOP donors to arrange a bid of roughly $250 million for the channel’s parent company, the people said. The firm is owned by the family of Thomas Hicks Jr., co-chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Because that’s just what we need, one more outlet repeating the mainstream narrative. The RNC group – who almost certainly are not genuine “allies of President Trump” – say they want to buy OANN to “compete” with Fox News. Which is precisely the opposite of their intentions. The next step would be a merger with Fox, or a sale to Warner or the Devil Mouse.

This is all about control, not competition.

The Z-man doubles down

The ZmanVerified Account@TheZBlog

His blunder was in making claims that can be independently verified. That and picking a fight with the Zoomers. They dug into his various claims because they have time on their hands and they like mixing it up on-line.

A friend said to me that he has become the old man stomping on the flaming bag of poop while shouting into the darkness.

It was entertaining for a while, but I’m bored with it now.

Except, of course, there was never any blunder. My claims were correct and theirs were not. The few “independently verified” claims that appear to have been verified are both inaccurate and irrelevant. If the Z-man wasn’t technologically illiterate, he would understand how ludicrous their claims have always been. No one, including us, has ever run anything on the scale of Unauthorized using a $75 Premium account on Vimeo.

Do keep in mind the actual claims that were made. Even I am not that brilliant.

And the Z-man is now a proven liar. As everyone involved already knows, and as everyone else will learn soon enough, the Z-Man has conclusively and publicly demonstrated that he is not only a liar, but a particularly lazy and stupid one at that. He does nothing and he has accomplished nothing beyond emanating envy of those who take the time to actually produce things, construct projects, and build communities.

I understand it is going to be very, very amusing for those who are in the know and for those who trust me to rub their retarded little noses in their own bullshit as the facts gradually become apparent to even the most wilfully ignorant. Nevertheless, resist the temptation. The more time that passes, the more they double down and insist upon the correctness of their statements, the more amusing it will be.

Uncle John’s Band put it rather well on SocialGalactic: The success of UA has been the snake revealer. The sort of scum who would rather cry in their permitted corners of the status quo than see the change they pretend to want.

Adios again, Oakland

The Raidess are no longer the Oakland Raiders:

The Raiders are no longer the Oakland Raiders. They’re not the Las Vegas Raiders either.

For now, they’re just the Raiders.

The franchise made a change to all of its social media accounts, dropping Oakland. It will not add Las Vegas to its handle until the new league year starts in March, according to Josh Dubow of the Associated Press.

The NFL already made the switch, listing the Raiders as just the Raiders with no city attached in its releases last week to announce the 2020 draft order and 2020 opponents of each team.

Perhaps they should become an itinerant pirate team, playing all of its games away all season. That might actually work….

But Las Vegas does appear to be a fitting home for them.

Too short and too dishonest for the ride

People often ask me to work with, or publish, or link to, or otherwise support various individuals who are more or less on the ideological Right. And, of course, that has been something that we’ve tried repeatedly to do since we founded Castalia House. The problem, as we have learned over time, is that most people are simply too stupid, too short-sighted, too narcissistic, too independent, or too dishonest to be worth assisting.

The Z-man is not entirely devoid of ideas, and I have occasionally linked to his more insightful posts, but the following comment should suffice to demonstrate why he’s simply not someone that anyone can take seriously as an intellectual or even a commentator. Keep in mind that this is a comment on a post dedicated to declaring that he is the one pure soul worthy of support in a dissident swamp of grifters.

thezman
There was never a lawsuit against Indiegogo. Court filings are public records. For starters, in such a dispute the attorney will look at the contract you signed. He will see there is a dispute resolution process and ask you if you initiated that process. If not, then you will need to do that first. Once that is done and you are not satisfied, he will tell you that the next step is arbitration. Getting a judge to set aside an arbitration clause in a contract is extremely difficult and mostly pointless.

The bottom line is Indiegogo canceled the project, gave the people their money back and that was it. There was no lawsuit. No class action. No arbitration. Nothing.

The combination of ignorance, stupidity, envy, and gamma posturing would be difficult to top without resorting to the visual medium of YouTube. It doesn’t even rise to the level of a clueless mainstream political reporter. Nevertheless, don’t correct him. Don’t set the record straight. Don’t provide him with any proof of what actually happened at all – and I know that literally hundreds of you have it in your possession. Just let his statement stand for the record.

And keep it in mind the next time you ask me why I regard right-wing mediocrities like the Z-man with undisguised contempt and refuse to have anything to do with his kind. Many, if not most, of the so-called “grifters” he decries are not only smarter and harder-working than he is, they are more accomplished and far more worthy of your trust.

Meanwhile, it’s good to see that others on the Right are discovering lawfare can be an effective way to strike back at the weaponized media:

Peter Brimelow, an anti-immigration activist who hosts a website that has published the writings of white supremacists, is suing The New York Times for $5 million for labeling him an “open white nationalist” in an article last year.

The characterization of Brimelow that triggered the libel lawsuit appeared in a Jan. 15, 2019 article by Times political reporter Trip Gabriel that offered a chronology of racist and inflammatory comments by Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa)….

“We stand by the story and will vigorously defend,” Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy said.

One of these days, we’re going to have to put together a class action against Wikipedia and other media sites used to seed the never-ending slander and libel. This is a good time to go after the media because they no longer have the resources to defend themselves as both their circulations and their revenues are declining.

UPDATE: This response by a Z-maniac is more than a little amusing, considering our complete lack of interest in what any of them happen to think about me or anything else:

This is how a cult leader reassures the faithful: Denigrate the faithless to instill self-righteous superiority within the cult so that they dismiss any counterclaims without thought. Real evidence is no longer necessary. A measured response is to link to evidence or acknowledge that a sealed arbitration leaves room for skepticism.

Notice how the gammas always love to theorize and posture in the complete absence of information. They project their own lack of knowledge as well as their inability to not blurt out everything they know to everyone else. The idea that someone who genuinely possesses the conclusive evidence might not care what they believe is simply beyond their imagination. Sometimes the cult’s superiority is real. And as cults go, it’s quite affordable.

I just thought this was an excellent opportunity to demonstrate to everyone who is in the know that an occasional anklebiter is both a fool and a liar. There is no need to prove it to those who are dumb enough to take him seriously; they will simply move the goalposts anyhow. If they mattered, we’d prove it to them. But they don’t.

Google demonetizes Nick Fuentes

It’s not right, of course, but I can’t say I’m going to shed copious tears over Nick Fuentes being demonetized by Google:

Nicholas Fuentes, who gained headlines earlier this year, has been banned from streaming on YouTube, demonetized, and likely will be banned outright soon.

Now I suppose we’ll find out if he’s genuinely a fighter or if he’s just another ex-YouTuber playing victim. Either way, it’s a great time to go after YouTube, as the parent organization’s top-flight legal chief is currently exiting Alphabet:

The changing of the guard at Alphabet  continues. Roughly one month after Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin announced they’d be stepping down as the CEO and president of the search giant’s parent company, one of their top lieutenants, Alphabet’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, told employees that he is also leaving the company.

I understand he is retiring in order to spend more time making new families.

The former employee with whom he shares a child, Jennifer Blakely, published a post on Medium last summer in which she described Drummond as a serial philanderer who left his wife for her, then left her and the son that he fathered with her for another now-former Google employee.

Blakely also claimed Drummond had had “an affair with his ‘personal assistant’ who he moved into one of his new homes.”

One day later, Drummond issued a statement of his own, acknowledging his relationship with Blakely and their “difficult break-up 10 years ago.” He went on to state that, “Other than Jennifer, I never started a relationship with anyone else who was working at Google or Alphabet. Any suggestion otherwise is simply untrue.”

Days after issuing the statement, Drummond married a Google employee he’d been dating.

Subscribe to Unauthorized, because no one knows how much longer the Darkstream will be on YouTube.

Epstein didn’t delete the video

But someone did:

The surveillance video taken from outside Jeffrey Epstein’s jail cell on the day of his first apparent suicide attempt has been permanently deleted, federal prosecutors said Thursday.

Epstein, the disgraced financier who was facing federal sex-trafficking charges, was found semiconscious in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, or MCC, in New York around 1:27 a.m. on July 23.

But that video is now gone because MCC officials mistakenly saved video from a different floor of the federal detention facility, prosecutors said in a court filing. The MCC “inadvertently preserved video from the wrong tier within the MCC and as a result, video from outside the defendant’s cell on July 22-23, 2019 no longer exists,” the court papers say.

It’s time to outlaw the surveillance state. The cameras quite obviously don’t work well enough to permit it to function at all.

Patreon trolls for new creators

The Quartering, previously banned by Patreon, receives an invitation to join Patreon and disrespectfully declines.

Hi Jeremy,

My name’s Tom and I work on the Creator Partnerships team at Patreon. We help creators build long-term creative businesses by investing in a direct relationship with their fans.

I’m reaching out to you to see if you’re interested in discussing what Patreon membership could look like for you. We’ve previously partnered with creators like Tolarian Community College, Strictly Better Mtg and Dungeon Dudes to help them launch on Patreon. We’d love to see if something similar could be a fit, especially given the recent COPPA ruling which has unexpectedly impacted channels despite their content not being for kids.

Are you free this week?

Best,
Tom

Unlike the December 20th TOS change, which was a direct reaction to the Legal Legion’s actions, I very much doubt this had anything to do with Patreon changing its policies or its attitude towards creators it had previously banned. We already know that Patreon’s processes are shockingly amateurish and disorganized, and that people in one team have no idea what the people in another team are doing.

So, it’s much more likely that Tom and the others in Creator Partnerships is working from a list of creators with a good-sized audience that has never been compared with the list of creators that Sydney and the others in Trust & Safety have banned.

One of the interesting things Jeremy observes is that Patreon processes about $1 billion per year. Since they take about 4 percent after the processing fees, that means their annual revenue is only around $40 million. Which, of course, means that they are even more fragile than we had originally calculated.

Mailvox: the anklebiter’s perspective

ihateowenbenjamin writes:

Haha nothing has happened and never will. You bald idiot loser. You really think you are smart yet won’t go and have a legitimate test. You are a fool. Your dad was a fool. All your work is plagiarised, copied off of successful versions.

You are a literal nobody. You act smart to compensate for your zero accomplishments.

You really think that notifying a company about legitimate violations of users is interference? ahahhaha. You are really so dumb. Owen blatantly violated Patreon TOS you idiot. You talk nonstop about TI yet have zero understanding of how it works. Like your dad you try to take the law into your own hands and think you are smarter than you are.

A dumb old loser. We laugh so much so thank you. other than a few weird losers who watch your show, nobody cares. Nobody believes you. You are not a serious person.

Prove you are in Mensa. Prove a single aarticle of evidence of any of your fake lawsuits.

Patreon/Google etc just laugh at you. You really think they care hahaha. You are an “anklebiter” to them. They don’t care lol. They think you are a nerd loser. You work with Owen Benjamin who is a well known lolcow who does exactly the things you cry about daily. He is a serial defamer and liar.

We all laugh. You are such a bad liar. Total idiot. Good job teaming up with Owen Benjamin and losing any of the credibility you had( you had none anyways).

We’re dealing with some real rocket scientists here. They’re going to be dealing with some serious cases of cognitive dissonance once things start to go public. Of course, there is no point proving anything to a gamma, because the moment that you do, he will define the very conclusive proof he demanded as irrelevant and continue sniping as if he never placed any value on it in the first place.

The doctrine of unconscionability

Just a little light reading that has occupied a few members of the Legion of late:

“The doctrine of unconscionability ‘ “ ‘refers to “ ‘an absence of meaningful choice on the part of one of the parties together with contract terms which are unreasonably favorable to the other party.’ ” ’ ” ’  [Citations.]  There is both a procedural and substantive aspect of unconscionability; the former focuses on ‘oppression’ or ‘surprise’ due to unequal bargaining power, the latter on ‘overly harsh’ or ‘one-sided’ results.  [Citation.]

‘ “Both procedural and substantive unconscionability must be present for the court to refuse to enforce a contract under the doctrine of unconscionability although ‘ “they need not be present in the same degree.” ’  [Citation.]  Essentially the court applies a sliding scale to the determination:  ‘ “[T]he more substantively oppressive the contract term, the less evidence of procedural unconscionability is required to come to the conclusion that the term is unenforceable, and vice versa.” ’ ” ’  [Citation.]  Absent conflicting evidence, the trial court’s unconscionability determination is a question of law subject to de novo review.  [Citations.]”  (Ramos v. Superior Court (2018) 28 Cal.App.5th 1042, 1063 (Ramos); see also Armendariz v. Foundation Health Psychcare Services, Inc. (2000) 24 Cal.4th 83, 113–114 (Armendariz).)

Everything up to now has just been prelude. The Death Star is now fully operational. If you’re both a Rubble Bouncer and a Replatformer, be ready for the green light.

UPDATE: You will know things are well underway when Patreon revises its TOS again and removes the restrictions it inserted on December 20th before February 6th.