Now that Castalia House is free to sell our audiobooks our own way, we’re going to be putting up extended audio samples on the Darkstream for your listening pleasure. In, today’s case, it’s a pair of particularly funny chapters that appear in succession in the extended audio sample of The Promethean by Owen Stanley. Rather than simple putting up the prologue or the first chapter, we’re seeking to provide a discrete element of the book that can be enjoyed in its own right, even if the listener doesn’t proceed to purchase the entire book in one form or another.
Category: Uncategorized
No party for white men
The Democratic Party is rapidly approaching its final destiny as the Diversity Party:
Of the nine candidates officially running in the Democratic presidential primary, only one is a heterosexual white man. And that guy, former Rep. John Delaney, generally polls somewhere between zero and 1 percent.
But of the 17 Democrats reportedly still pondering a presidential bid, all but one is a straight white man. It’s hard to chalk that up to coincidence. Clearly, the women and minority candidates sensed that the water is warm for them, and the straight white men appear to be worried that this is just not their year.
CNN’s demographic number cruncher Ron Brownstein noted recently that the percentage of the Democratic primary electorate who are women, nonwhite voters and—“the most liberal component” of the party—college-educated white voters are all on the rise. The 2016 Democratic primary electorate was 58 percent women, 38 percent nonwhite voters and 37 percent college-educated white voters, all numbers that could be bigger in 2020, and strongly suggest a hospitable environment for candidates who embody a diverse America.
The problem, of course, is that the Republican Party is actively resisting embracing what logic, game theory, and simple arithmetic dictate is the correct strategy: become the White Party, stop trying to win diversity votes, and focus solely on advancing white interests. Even the cucks and virtue signalers will be won over in time, once they finally grasp their only choice is between flush toilets and full refrigerators versus fleeing unarmed from starving socialists who are desperate to rape, kill, and eat them.
The importance of morale
It would be unwise to count out the Catalonian bid for independence yet. They have a long history of being tenacious in defeat. From A History of the Peninsular War:
Thus six months had elapsed between the fall of Lerida and the commencement of the next stage of the French advance in Eastern Spain. If it is asked why the delay was so long, the answer is easy: it was due not, as some have maintained, to Suchet’s slowness or to Macdonald’s caution, but solely to the splendid activity displayed by Henry O’Donnell, a general often beaten but never dismayed, and to the tenacity of the Catalans, who never gave up hope, and were still to hold their own, after a hundred disasters, till the tide of success in the Peninsula at last turned back in 1812-13.
And clearly Henry O’Donnell was no gamma. Failure is never to be feared. It may be disappointing, but it should be viewed as nothing more than a stepping stone – and sometimes a necessary one – to ultimate success.
There is a lot to love
According to CatholicAnarchist Bear, Jordan Peterson is still going on about me in New Zealand.
Pretty funny how JP is giving you free publicity on live NZ live TV, this time he said you are a man completely in love with his own intelligence.
Jordan Peterson: I think the tactics to describe what I’m doing are generally reprehensible, but that’s not surprising, it’s part and parcel of the way political discourse is conducted today. A lot of epithets and namecalling, none of which is justified in my estimation.
Hayley Holt: And a lot of pendulum-swinging. You’re not a friend of the radical left, so people may assume you are a friend of the radical right, but that’s not true is it?
Jordan Peterson: No the radical right is not very fond of me. There is a book written recently by a man named Vox Day called Jordanetics which is a criticism of what I’m doing from the radical right perspective. It’s a particularly low-blow book, I would say, written by someone who is dreadfully in love with his own intelligence, um, but its fine as far as I’m concerned. It’s a good thing because I’m not a fan of collectivists on the right either. I think it’s a mistake to make your primary identity your group, it doesn’t matter if it’s a nationalist perspective, or an ethnic or racial perspective, or a sexual perspective, it’s a fundamental error and an extraordinarily dangerous one.
That’s like saying Owen Benjamin is a man who is dreadfully in love with his own height. I may enjoy being highly intelligent, and I may rely upon having more cognitive firepower at my disposal than most on a not-infrequent basis, but this is the sort of comment that is made by someone who knows nothing of the experience himself. What those of lesser intelligence fail to realize about the UHIQ or the subject savant is that we actually have a tendency to take our intellectual gifts for granted; we are far less obsessed with them than our observers and critics are.
In other words, it’s not that we think we are so special, it’s that we find it very hard to believe that other people can’t do what we do. My father, the designer of various military and aeronautic technologies who did his doctoral work at MIT, genuinely could not believe that anyone was even remotely puzzled by math. “What’s there to be confused about?” he would ask in disbelief. “It’s all literally right there!” It’s like imagining a Frenchman to be impressed by the fact that he speaks French. Of course he does, it’s part of what makes him who and what he is!
Anyhow, it’s clear that Peterson is attempting to accomplish two things here. First, he’s trying to rhetorically disqualify a book that is significantly damaging him with his fan club by discrediting the author with epithets and namecalling. Second, he’s attempting to use my criticism as a way of positioning himself as a centrist and a victim. And, of course, because he is a habitual liar, he doesn’t even hesitate to lie about the book, about the author, and about himself.
All you really need to know about Peterson can be seen in this one interview, especially the way he so readily resorts to the rhetorical tactics he declares to be reprehensible in lieu of substantive responses? I invite you to count the number of lies and deceptions he tells in that last paragraph alone. Without bothering to do so myself and based only on an initial read, I’ll put the over/under at seven.
Too little, too late?
Q is back and is still going on about how careful this and cautious that. I have to admit, whether there is any substance there or not, I stopped paying attention a while ago:
Q !!mG7VJxZNCI ID: 7390a9 No.5271872 ?
Feb 19 2019 18:43:38 (EST)
The DECLASSIFICATION of all requested documents (+ more) will occur.
This is not a game.
Do not let personal (emotional) desires (“do it now””now””what is taking so long””NOW!”) take over.
Logical thinking and strategy should always be applied.
Game-Theory.
WE ALL WANT TO SEE EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER THE LAW.
NEW THREATS (investigations by [SDNY], [AS], [MW] in an effort to delay/prevent release (‘insurance extension’) WILL FAIL.
TRANSPARENCY is the only way forward.
Here is some logical thinking: act while the window of opportunity is open. People are disappointed, bored, and if they haven’t already lost interest in the topic, are rapidly doing so in light of the series of what look like ongoing retreats on the part of President.
My perspective is that if it happens, great. But I’m not interested in actively following along anymore. I’m certainly not with the black-pillers, who are always looking to justify their hopelessness no matter what happens, just so they can say they were right to never believe in anything. I still hope that the God-Emperor is willing and able to take action to at least try to save the American nation from the global evil that is seeking to destroy it.
But if transparency is the only way forward, then be transparent. Stop listening to all the dire warnings of so-called allies and experts, declassify everything, and let the chips fall where they may. This stage management was working beautifully for a while, but what was once a morale booster has become an irrelevance.
Q is still an entertaining concept, and AH:Q is going to be great. But it’s too bad that it appears the comic will become material reality sooner than the inspiration.
A legend has left us
I used to wear Karl Lagerfeld’s signature cologne back in the day and it is still one of my favorites. The late fashion legend was also ruthlessly hysterical. Some of his classic quotes:
- Kate Middleton has a nice silhouette and she is the right girl for that boy. I like that kind of woman, I like romantic beauties. On the other hand, her sister struggles. I don’t like the sister’s face. She should only show her back.
- I hate ugly people. They are very depressing.
- Sweatpants are a sign of defeat. You lost control of your life so you bought some sweatpants.
- We cannot talk about suffering. People buy dresses to be happy, not to hear about somebody who suffered over a piece of taffeta.
- I have a sort of Alzheimer’s for my own work, which I think is a very good thing. Today too many people remember what they did — just forget it all and start again.
- I am very much down to earth. Just not this earth.
- Women can be short, but for men it is impossible. It is something that they will not forgive in life… they are mean and they want to kill you.
Owen Benjamin would approve.
Mailvox: too short for the ride
Deceivers are always going to attempt to deceive. Especially after they find themselves getting caught out. A reader emails to note that Richard Spencer is still trying to dig himself out.
At 1 hour and 49 minutes in this video Richard Spencer claims he misused a term , and you jumped on him, but he claims he didn’t mean what you thought he did. He goes on to explain his vision of pan nationalism and says omni-nationalism is naive and wouldn’t work because larger powers would easily control them.
Sounds to me exactly what you said he said but maybe I’m wrong. I don’t know what he is talking about half the time. Not very articulate and sounds, like you said, a leftist. I thought I would pass this on to you so next time his name or position comes up, you would have his “clarified” current statement on his stance.
Richard Spencer is a midwit leftist and racial imperialist who is totally incapable of articulating a coherent case for any political program going forward, let alone a credible one. He’s a fame whore about as intellectually serious as Ben Shapiro.
Pan-nationalism did not work for Arabs or Africans. It will not work for Europeans or for US whites. The high-water mark of civic nationalism, a very artificial, watered-down, and surreptitious form of pan-nationalism, was the 1950s in the USA, and as we have witnessed, it carried within itself the seeds of its own destruction.
Dissecting the failed coup
Historian Victor Davis Hanson summarizes the failed Deep State coup directed at President Donald Trump and calls for prosecuting those who staged it:
Weaponizing the Deep State
During the 2016 election, the Obama Department of Justice warped the Clinton email scandal investigation, from Bill Clinton’s secret meeting on an airport tarmac with Attorney General Loretta Lynch, to unethical immunity given to the unveracious Clinton aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, to James Comey’s convoluted predetermined treatment of “likely winner” Clinton, and to DOJ’s Bruce Ohr’s flagrant conflict of interests in relation to Fusion GPS.
About a dozen FBI and DOJ grandees have now resigned, retired, been fired, or reassigned for unethical and likely illegal behavior—and yet have not faced criminal indictments. The reputation of the FBI as venerable agency is all but wrecked. Its administrators variously have libeled the Trump voters, expressed hatred for Trump, talked of “insurance policies” in ending the Trump candidacy, and inserted informants into the Trump campaign.
The former Obama directors of the CIA and National Intelligence, with security clearances intact, hit the television airways as paid “consultants” and almost daily accused the sitting president of Russian collusion and treason—without cross-examination or notice that both previously had lied under oath to Congress (and did so without subsequent legal exposure), and both were likely knee-deep in the dissemination of the Steele dossier among Obama administration officials.
John Brennan’s CIA likely helped to spread the Fusion GPS dossier among elected and administrative state officials. Some in the NSC in massive and unprecedented fashion requested the unmasking of surveilled names of Trump subordinates, and then illegally leaked them to the press.
The FISA courts, fairly or not, are now mostly discredited, given they either were willingly or naively hoodwinked by FBI and DOJ officials who submitted as chief evidence for surveillance on American citizens, an unverified dossier—without disclosure that the bought campaign hit-piece was paid for by Hillary Clinton, authored by a discredited has-been British agent, relied on murky purchased Russian sources, and used in circular fashion to seed news accounts of supposed Trump misbehavior.
What is strange, however, is that despite being at the height of his popularity and all-but-cleared of the false charges of the failed Deep State coup, Trump appears – appears – to be submitting to the neocons. Is it possible that this submission is what brought the attempted coup to a close? Or is he simply playing rope-a-dope again prior to throwing a few knockout punches?
Always be cautious about concluding that anyone is finished, be it the creatures of the Deep State or the God-Emperor.
The intrinsic limits on power
I’ve been reading the third volume of Oman’s excellent A History of the Peninsular War, and a particular passage on the solid reasoning that lay behind Napoleon’s self-obstructive and objectively suboptimal decision to refuse to appoint a proper unitary command to execute the invasion of Portugal and the attack on Wellington’s British army while simultaneously maintaining the Spanish occupation caused me to reflect on the limits imposed on evil by its own nature.
As has been shown above, from his own words, he [Napoleon] was conscious that he was too far from the scene of operation, and that mere ordinary directions to his lieutenants might not be carried out with zeal. ‘Je donne l’ordre. L’exécutera-t-on? De si loin obéit qui veut.’ But if this were so, it was surely necessary either that he should go to Spain in person, or else—the more obvious alternative—that he should appoint a real Commander-in-Chief in the Peninsula, who should have authority to order all the other marshals and generals to obey his directions, without malingering or appeals to Paris. Napoleon had deliberately created a divided authority beyond the Pyrenees when he set up his military governments, and instructed Suchet, Kellermann, and the other governors to report directly to himself, and to pay no attention to commands emanating from Madrid. King Joseph, as a central source of orders, had been reduced to a nullity by this ill-conceived decree. Even over the troops not included in the new viceroyalties he had no practical authority. Not he and his chief of the staff, but Masséna, ought to have been entrusted with a full and autocratic power of command over all the armies of Spain, if a true unity of purpose was to be achieved.
This necessary arrangement the Emperor utterly refused to carry out: he sent rebukes to Drouet for hesitating to obey the orders of the Prince of Essling, and he jested at the absurd conduct of Ney and Junot in conducting themselves like independent generals. But these officers were in command of troops definitely allotted to the Army of Portugal. Over the other generals of Spain he refused to allow Masséna any control, and he continued to send them his own ever-tardy instructions, which had often ceased to be appropriate long before the dispatch had reached its destination. If we seek the reasons of this unwise persistence in his old methods, we find that they were two.
The first was his secret, but only half-disguised, intention to annex all the Spanish provinces north of the Ebro to France, an insane resolve which led him to keep Suchet and Macdonald in Aragon and Catalonia, as well as the governors of Navarre and Biscay, out of the control of any central authority that he might set up in Spain. The second was his jealousy of entrusting the vast army south of the Ebro, far more than 250,000 men at the moment, to any single commander. He remembered Soult’s absurd strivings after royalty in Portugal; he knew that Masséna, though the best of soldiers, was false, selfish, and ambitious; and he refused to hand over to either of them a full control over the whole of the forces in the Peninsula. It was even better, in his estimation, to leave King Joseph a shadow of power, than to take the risk of giving overmuch authority to one of the two able, but not wholly trustworthy, marshals to whom he must otherwise have entrusted it.
Napoleon made a conscious choice to reduce the probabilities of defeating Wellington and conquering Portugal in order to reduce the risk of creating a powerful rival power on the Peninsula. He knew he couldn’t trust Soult or Masséna to remain loyal to him if either of them found themselves victorious and in command of an army capable of rivalling his own forces, so he refused to take the step that was absolutely required in order to win the war.
This is one of the fundamental weaknesses of evil, however strong it appears, however much potential force it has at its disposal. Self-interest imposes an intrinsic limit on evil’s ability to bring its power to bear, because it always has to worry about its forces fragmenting and pursuing their own goals instead of the obediently pursuing the goals set by the leadership. This, of course, is why evil puts so much effort into creating social pressures and false narratives its NPCs will blindly follow, and to ensuring that its NPCs never dare to think independently or in a critical manner.
Owen Stanley in audiobook+
Both The Missionaries and The Promethean are now available in audiobook+ at the Arkhaven store. You might suspect that I am exaggerating when I say that they are two of the funniest satirical novels ever published. And you would be absolutely and utterly wrong. Narrator Gabrielle Miller also does a wonderful job of conveying the literary humor in her unique Australian accent.
From The Promethean:
They went off in Fortescue’s Range Rover to The Drunken Badger, an old pub nearby with a mouldy green thatched roof that was the local meeting spot and had been kept for years by the genial Ken with fat Shirley his wife. Fortescue offered to stand Harry a pint of beer, but when Harry surveyed the range of drinks available, his heart sank. There was no prosecco, no white wine, indeed, no wine of any kind, as the pub had for generations stocked only local ales, the favourite of which was Old Stinker. However different palates were known to prefer Smoking Dog, Swine Snout, Wife Beater, or even Holy Terror, the most alcoholic.
This was made from a traditional recipe inherited from the local monks before Henry VIII destroyed their abbey nearby, and was notable for producing some very unmonkish behaviour. The label of Swine Snout depicted a farmyard dominated by a large manure pile, in which assorted pigs were busily rooting, and Smoking Dog was advertised by a hairy monster with very large teeth smoking a pipe. Wife Beater is perhaps best left undescribed. As he surveyed these relics of the Dark Ages, Harry groaned inwardly. Was an ice-cold Budweiser really too much for a civilised man to expect in a presumably industrialised nation?
Shirley informed Ken that the American gentleman was asking about Budweiser. Ken scratched his head and said he thought he had seen a can somewhere only recently.
“I know you was rummaging around in your shed looking for rat poison the other day,” said Shirley. “Could it have been there?”
Ken went off to look and came back with a filthy old can that had been put up on a shelf with the weedkiller and lawn fertiliser in the garden shed long ago. Ken washed it off under the tap in the bar.
“Not in a very good state, I’m afraid. Must’ve been there for years, ever since Don used to run this place. We had some Americans stationed at the airfield back then. But you’re welcome to it. Glad it’s found an ’ome at last,” pouring it into a glass. “We won’t charge you for that. On the ’ouse.”
Harry pretended to be grateful for the warm and rather odd-tasting relic of the Budweiser brewery and thought that Swine Snout might have been preferable. A local inhabitant, dressed in what looked like greased sacking, had just brought his old, wet, and shaggy dog in with him, which was now sitting under the table. Harry noticed the brown stains on the grubby carpet and wondered if they had any connection with the rather unpleasant odour that seemed to be coming from the direction of the dog.
Charles asked Harry what he would like for lunch, and Ken passed them the menu, a sheet of greasy plastic covering a crudely typed list of local delicacies. At the top of the list were pigs’ trotters and then tripe and onions, blackbird pie, jellied eels, boiled calf’s head, deep-fried pigs’ ears, brains in white sauce, ox tail fritters, and bull’s testicle soup as the pièce-de-résistance. Everything, apparently, came with chips and gravy, except the bull’s testicle soup which had mushy peas as a side order.
Shuddering, Harry asked what tripe might be.
“Ah, that’s real delicious,” said Shirley, “a nice tender piece of sheep’s stomach—more flavour than cow’s stomach—but the pigs’ ears are very tasty as well.”
Despair seized him, and for a moment he actually found himself wishing for a McDonald’s. But then, like an island of sanity in a sea of madness, Harry suddenly noticed pork pie at the bottom of the menu and said he would really like some of that.
“A very good choice,” said Ken. “That’ll be old Percy. We only slaughtered’n t’other day. If you’d’a been ’ere then, you’d’ve ’eard’n squealin’. Summat terribul t’were. Still, ’e makes a right tasty pie, no mistake about that.”
Good God, was there no end to these rural horrors, thought Harry.