Category: Uncategorized

Playing for the other side

National Review is confirmed to have been funded by Google:

Google CEO Sundar Pichai confirmed that the tech giant gave funds to the National Review Institute, the policy arm of establishment conservative magazine National Review — but there is a discrepancy in Pichai’s explanation of why the donation is not listed in the company’s annual transparency report. Pichai used his written answers to congressional questions to disclose his company’s donation to the National Review Institute, which was revealed by National Review senior editor Jonah Goldberg last year. The Google CEO confirmed the donation, stating that it was made in 2018 and would, therefore, be disclosed in the company’s next report.

And you wondered why they were drifting ever-leftward? Cuckservatives have no principles, they only pretend to do so. This may not be the nail in National Review’s coffin, but it should be.

Jordanetics is now an audiobook+

Having successfully extricated JORDANETICS: A Journey Into the Mind of Humanity’s Greatest Thinker from Kindle Select, we are now able to offer it as an audiobook+, which means that you can acquire both the audiobook and the ebook in two formats from Arkhaven for $14.99.

Two recent reviews by people who have actually read the book:

Systematic breakdown of Peterson’s core ideas and assessment of his character

Notice how the 1-star reviewers are claiming jealousy on Vox Day’s part in order to dismiss his systematic breakdown of Peterson, instead of pointing out any factual errors. They behave exactly like the very SJWs they criticize, who bring emotional accusations to logical conversations.

If you pay attention, reviews by verified purchases are almost unanimously 5-star, while the vast majority of bad reviews are by people who haven’t bought Jordanetics, much less read it. You can’t review something you’ve never read, because that’s not what the word ‘review’ means. But Peterson himself could very well argue, “Well, it depends on what you mean by review, eh”. So maybe this is the Petersonian tactic of redefining commonly used words to make a ludicrous position seem reasonable, which Vox Day exposes beautifully in Jordanetics.

Vox Day’s critiques of Peterson in Jordanetics are extremely methodical and clear, and peppered with a healthy dose of humor. He uses Peterson’s own words as the basis of his attack, analyzes the very sources that Peterson himself cites as the foundation for his claims, then shows you step-by-step how Peterson has twisted the original meaning of his sources to fit narratives that are wildly inconsistent with the sources themselves. And that’s just scratching the surface of what Vox Day breaks down throughout the book. Anyone who says Vox is making anything other than a clear, logic-based attack on Peterson, doesn’t see the obvious irony that Vox’s language and method is far more clear and concise than Peterson’s ambiguous and foggy ramblings.

Then again, should Peterson’s followers be expected to recognize such irony when they follow a man who claims to tell the truth, while arguing there is no such thing as objective truth? Who says Europeans should abandon basic in-group preference while defending the extremist in-group preference of another group? Who acts like a champion of free speech while de-platforming speakers like Faith Goldy? Who speaks against Communism while covering every wall in his house with realist paintings of Bolsheviks? Who says you should never cave to a Leftist mob, then at a critical moment in our Republic, says Kavanaugh should cave to a Leftist mob because of feelings? Who practices psychology while consuming psychotropic drugs for decades?

Well, it depends on what you mean by irony, bucko.

JBP has dreams…

I have to say, Jordan Peterson had me going for a while. I’d heard rumors and decided to dig a little deeper. I found this book, and jordan’s magic spell was broken. The troubling part was discovering how easily I was fooled. Here’s how:. Vox outlines how Jordan Peterson will give a title that sets the tone, and then go full into ” Baffle Garble” where he casts a myst of nonsense where he loses you…and because you’re desperately trying to find the point of what he is saying, you’ll project and “fill in the blanks” and make yourself feel content with the message “YOU heard.” This is why if you ask any of JBP’s fans to explain ANY of the rules in “12 rules for life” you’ll get a curious range of answers.

Vox sums up nicely that JBP mostly appeals to the “bottom of the barrel” and lures them into both Mediocrity and Compliance (See the chapter titled “Why Won’t You Just Take Your Damn Pills” in 12 Rules for Life). As a funny, yet disturbing bonus, we discover that Peterson has dreams about “ravishing” his female cousin, as well as his grandmother rubbing her vagina on his face….totally serious here…JBP is a real Loon. I hope you enjoy the wakeup call from Vox, and don’t shoot the messenger. Instead, do as I did and kick yourself for being lured in with Peterson’s nonsense.

Everything is falling into place

Now Disney is destroying the Marvel Comic Universe:

I previously wrote how Brie Larson is a huge gamble for Disney and Kevin Feige – especially following the failure of Star Wars: The Last Jedi – and now the Captain Marvel movie looks to be in big, big trouble, unfortunately.

Back in January, following the NCAA trailer, it was reported that Captain Marvel was projected to have a massive $160 million opening weekend with some estimates even offering $180 million.

However, the bad news for Kevin Feige and Captain Marvel is that those projections have now dropped upwards of $80 million (note: article has been updated to reflect million and not percent), as it is reported the flick may only open around $100 million.

The latest projections come from Deadline, with the site offering Captain Marvel will now open in line with other Marvel origin films, but won’t come anywhere near Black Panther’s $202 million. Interestingly enough, further evidence Captain Marvel is not as highly regarded among fans comes from the fact that Black Panther supporters have not supported the Captain Marvel gofundme to get girls to go see the movie.

There is also a huge problem with Brie Larson who has been spinning Captain Marvel as a feminist movie, essentially isolating the audience, and she even recently came out against white males for some reason. I’m actually surprised and disappointed in Kevin Feige that he is allowing Larson to destroy the MCU audience, and that Disney and CEO Bob Iger haven’t learned anything from Star Wars.

It’s mildly amusing to observe that the media simply can’t grasp that Disney WANTS to destroy Star Wars and Marvel and everything else that appeals to white men. That’s why they acquired it in the first place.

Digital gangsters

As an ex-libertarian, I am instinctively hostile to government regulation. But, as we have learned over the last decade, there are much worse things than regulation by nationalist governments.

Facebook deliberately broke privacy and competition law and should urgently be subject to statutory regulation, according to a devastating parliamentary report denouncing the company and its executives as “digital gangsters”.

The final report of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee’s 18-month investigation into disinformation and fake news accused Facebook of purposefully obstructing its inquiry and failing to tackle attempts by Russia to manipulate elections.

“Democracy is at risk from the malicious and relentless targeting of citizens with disinformation and personalised ‘dark adverts’ from unidentifiable sources, delivered through the major social media platforms we use every day,” warned the committee’s chairman, Damian Collins.

The report:

  • Accuses Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive, of contempt for parliament in refusing three separate demands for him to give evidence, instead sending junior employees unable to answer the committee’s questions.
  • Warns British electoral law is unfit for purpose and vulnerable to interference by hostile foreign actors, including agents of the Russian government attempting to discredit democracy.
  • Calls on the British government to establish an independent investigation into “foreign influence, disinformation, funding, voter manipulation and the sharing of data” in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, the 2016 EU referendum and the 2017 general election.
  • Labour moved quickly to endorse the committee’s findings, with the party’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, announcing: “Labour agrees with the committee’s ultimate conclusion – the era of self-regulation for tech companies must end immediately.

Highly regulated corporations are not known for their performance or their innovation. But let’s face it, Ma Bell and the various utilities have served the interests of the American people considerably better than Facebook and the other social media giants have. It’s time for the national governments around the world to crack the whip and take the international digital gangsters firmly in hand by turning them into utilities.

This is one issue upon which the Left and the Right should be able to find plenty of common ground.

The diminishing appeal of Harry Potter

I never, ever, thought the Harry Potter books were destined to become classics. This commenter at Castalia House gets it:

I started reading Harry Potter in 2004. I devoured the 5 books in less than 6 months, and followed the release of the last two books. Harry Potter was the fever of my teenage years. What I think made me like HP was not exactly the characters themselves, but the universe created by JKR. I liked to imagine myself inside that universe, being a witch like Harry and studying at Hogwarts.

Of course, as a teenager, I knew very little about other fantasy works and literary classics, so back then I really believed that Harry Potter was a genius story and JKR was the best writer in the world. Today I recognize that this is far from being true. JKR’s characters are mostly shallow, static and stereotyped. Voldemort is part of the villain trope I least like, an irremediable psychopath who was born evil and died evil, remaining eternally static, and without any trace of humor. There are villains who are irremediable but at least they have a vein of great humor, like Joker. Voldemort is nothing like that.

In addition, I think JKR made some bad decisions and wasted a lot of interesting characters on the books. I’ve always found it a shame she’d never delved into such treacherous characters as Wormtail / Peter and for example. Traitorous characters can make great stories, but instead of going into a story of redemption, she decides to put him in the shadows of the story with a death so irrelevant that it does not even appear in the film’s adaptation. Game of Thrones does a much better job with Theon Greyjoy for example, giving him more prominence and a arc of his own.

Talking about her bad decisions… I never liked JKR’s decision to make Ginny be Mrs. Potter. In a universe where we have unique and fantastic female characters like Luna and Hermione, why did JKR make Ginny the Mrs. Potter? The romance between Harry and Ginny was poorly written in the books, and extremely cringeworthy to watch in theaters. They make the most insipid and generic pair of literature, IMO. Luna Lovegood would was the best choice for Harry’s romantic pair, imo. Or if Harry finished the story with no one, it would not be bad either. I just think Ginny / Harry was hideous.

I’m not saying that the HP series is horrible and unimportant. Quite the contrary, it was part of my adolescence and in a way, it is nostalgic. The fact is… the Harry Potter books lose more and more appeal to me every time I revisit them, and today, I do not feel like reading them any more.

Rowling’s one skill was creating vivid and compelling characters. But that’s not enough to create a classic capable of withstanding the erosion of time.

A cause that unites

I think most of the human race is solidly behind the idea of Ricky Gervais’s assisted suicide:

Comedian Ricky Gervais, 57, says he in favour of assisted suicide as he launches new Netflix series about death and grief. He has notoriously joked about the most controversial of subjects – but Ricky Gervais is deadly serious about how he sees his own life ending. Speaking exclusively to Event magazine today, the creator of The Office and Extras reveals: ‘I am in favour of assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia.

‘I know that I’d want it. I hope when I’m ready to go you can just go to Boots and get something. I hope we get more advanced and more liberal, that there’s not all this hate for people who want to do it, all this going, ‘How dare you?’ That’s madness.’

His comments come ahead of After Life, his upcoming Netflix series about death and grief, which is said to be as black as comedy can be. Gervais, 57, reveals his latest TV character, a depressed journalist who dabbles with hard drugs and thoughts of suicide after his wife’s death from cancer, is his darkest by far and made him face up to his own mortality.

There are probably a lot of people who would pay rather well for the privilege of assisting Mr. Gervais. Perhaps he could approach it as a charity auction.

Failure is no hindrance

Not when you’re able to produce the answer “THE US MUST INVADE [Fill-in-the-blank]” on cue whenever called upon by the Fake News. Tucker Carlson shares a compelling selection from his recent book about two neocon mediocrities who keep being called upon for their opinions on military matters despite their collective track record of complete failure:

One thing that every late-stage ruling class has in common is a high tolerance for mediocrity. Standards decline, the edges fray, but nobody in charge seems to notice. They’re happy in their sinecures and getting richer. In a culture like this, there’s no penalty for being wrong. The talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, and breaking things along the way. It happened to the Ottomans. Max Boot is living proof that it’s happening in America.

Boot is a professional foreign policy expert, a job category that doesn’t exist outside of a select number of cities. Boot has degrees from Berkeley and Yale, and is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has written a number of books and countless newspaper columns on foreign affairs and military history. The International Institute for Strategic Studies, an influential British think tank, describes Boot as one of the “world’s leading authorities on armed conflict.”

None of this, it turns out, means anything. The professional requirements for being one ofthe world’s Leading Authorities on Armed Conflict do not include relevant experience with armed conflict. Leading authorities on the subject don’t need a track record of wise assessments or accurate predictions. All that’s required are the circular recommendations of fellow credential holders. If other Leading Authorities on Armed Conflict induct you into their ranks, you’re in.

Meanwhile, brilliant military historians and strategists like Martin van Creveld and William S. Lind are being ignored, to the cost of many thousands of lives.

Obvious hoax is hoax

To precisely no one’s surprise, the purported attack by MAGA-chanting white men on an attention-seeking black fame whore has been determined to be a hoax by the police:

On Saturday night, Chicago Police confirmed to PJ Media that the testimonies of two black men arrested in the case of Empire star Jussie Smollett have flipped the story. Rather than considering Smollett the victim of an attack, it appears that police may now see him as the perpetrator of a hoax.

“We can confirm that the information received from the individuals questioned by police earlier in the Empire case has in fact shifted the trajectory of the investigation,” Chicago Police chief communications officer Anthony Guglielmi told PJ Media. “We’ve reached out to the Empire cast member’s [sic] attorney to request a follow-up interview.”

Two law enforcement sources confirmed to CNN that police are considering the Jussie Smollett case a hoax. Police now think the two men they arrested last week — Olabinjo “Ola” Osundairo and his brother Abimbola “Abel” Osundairo — were paid by Smollett to attack him. Chicago Police believe the Empire star orchestrated the assault.

All of these sorts of attacks are always hoaxes. Because in a society that rewards victimhood, the victims manufacture themselves. And in a society dominated by Fake News, the news is reliably false.

UPDATE: The details are now being reported. And now we know the going rate for crisis actors. The imported ones, anyhow.

Jussie Smollett paid two brothers to stage an attack against him, directed them to buy items used in the alleged assault and actually rehearsed it with them, sources say.

Sources say at least one of the brothers bought the rope used in the incident at Smollett’s request. The sources also say the “Empire” actor paid for the rope, which was purchased at the Crafty Beaver Hardware Store in the Ravenswood neighborhood the weekend of Jan. 25.

The brothers, who were questioned by police this week before being released, were paid $3,500 before leaving for Nigeria and were promised an additional $500 upon their return. They left for Nigeria later in the day on Jan. 29, after the attack.

Cognitive catastrophe

A new book confirms and explains the cognitive collapse of the West:

Today we can confirm that hereditary intelligence has been declining. Dutton and Woodley summarize the evidence, which includes deterioration in simple reaction times, color discrimination, the use of “difficult” words, working memory, special perception, child developmental schedules and—most critically—frequency of macro-innovations. In 2017, an Icelandic study found the first direct genetic evidence that a set of alleles predictive of g has been declining in frequency in that country’s population. More such studies can be expected in the years ahead.

According to a 2015 meta-analysis of studies conducted since 1927, IQ in the USA and the UK appears to be declining at a rate of 0.39 points per decade. Declines are also reported in Russia and a number of non-Western countries.

The authors emphasize five reasons (besides improved public health) why this is happening: 1) naturally gifted people have a tendency to trade mating and parenting opportunities for the opportunity to develop their abilities, e. g., through higher education; 2) being forward-thinking, such people are likelier to use contraception; 3) the modern welfare state taxes the more successful in order to support single mothers, who can often increase their benefits by having more children; 4) the modern movement for sexual “equality” has encouraged the brightest women to pursue careers and postpone marriage, often until it is too late; 5) finally, and most unforgivably, Western elites are now deliberately sponsoring the colonization of our nations by vast numbers of low-IQ persons from Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Declining general intelligence has been masked during the Twentieth Century by the so-called Flynn effect, an improvement in specialized mental skills independent of g. This may be one factor which made possible the continued technological progress of the twentieth century. But there is good evidence that the Flynn effect has now done about all it can do, and lower genotypic intelligence will increasingly make itself felt.

I calculated this several years ago in Cuckservative. The affects of our cognitively-challenged societies are already beginning to make themselves felt. The Age of Progress is over.