Category: Uncategorized

The GitHub purchase

It’s not as if GitHub isn’t already moderately converged, but the Microsoft acquisition of it is unlikely to make things any less subject to converged policing:

AFTER A WEEKEND of rumors, Microsoft officially announced Monday that it will acquire the code repository site GitHub for $7.5 billion in stock. The platform is an important resource for some 28 million developers and home to billions of lines of open source code. It’s in many ways a natural fit for Microsoft, which has in recent years warmed up to open source.

But the beloved developer platform may also introduce moderation headaches. Microsoft will soon need to formally decide what will happen to the many GitHub repositories that conflict with its own interests. The tech giant will face similar content moderations challenges that peers like Facebook and Google have, but with code instead of speech.

Created over a decade ago, GitHub is where developers at nearly every major software organization, from Google to NASA, collaborate. It hosts projects as diverse as Bitcoin’s code and all of the German government’s laws and regulations. The platform functions as a kind of social network for coders; their contributions to the site can serve as a stand-in for a traditional resume. Anyone can publish open source code to GitHub for free; the platform makes money by charging individuals and corporations to keep their code private.

GitHub’s 85 million repositories help to make it one of the world’s most popular websites. They include, however, projects that GitHub’s new owner might take issue with…. “GitHub isn’t a perfect defender of censorship, but they still host Tiananmen Square stuff. That’s likely to disappear under Microsoft,” says Rob Graham, CEO of Errata Security, who helped trace the 2015 DDOS attack to China. GitHub has also been censored in a number of other countries where Microsoft has business interests, including Russia and India.

This is one of the challenges facing Alt-Tech. The conventional startup objective of selling out to a tech company for billions conflicts with the objective of creating something that is not subject to corpocracy and convergence. On the plus side, it should mean that there will tend to be fewer Silicon Valley snake oil salesmen pushing their sites on the Right.

Mailvox: there is no error

Peter Gent refuses to back down:

You are totally and absolutely wrong. I am neither a liar or a deceiver, but I am someone who challenged you accurately on your biblical error, which is important as you stand publicly for Jesus Christ.

You are intelligent, educated, experienced, and knowledgeable in many things, but theologically and biblically you are sometimes problematic and your lack in this area sometimes shows. Everything I said was sound orthodox theology and relevant to the situation. I am sorry if it didn’t fit in with your argument or seemed to invalidate your position, but it appeared that you could not deal with the actual argument, which is too bad, since it is true both biblically and has been accepted within the Church since the beginning.

It is your blog and you do what you want. But know this. In this you are wrong. I am calling you on it. Scream at me all you want but that doesn’t change the facts. You are wrong.

To which I replied:

You are persistent in your stupidity. You simply refuse to accept that there is a difference between a FACT: Jesus broke the law, and a JUSTIFICATION: Jesus was right to do so.

All of your blathering is irrelevant, because all of your blathering is focused on the justification rather than the fact. The claim was that Jesus never broke any law. That claim is conclusively false. Whether he was justified in breaking those laws or not is totally irrelevant.

Nevertheless, he persisted:

Then there are few who are, since I am 142 and have been a Christian for 45 years, am theologically trained, and have been in the wars standing for the faith for a long time. I have never been a churchian as you put it. I am about as far the opposite from that as a professing, believing Christian can be.

Re: Theology has NOTHING to do with straightforward factual claims.

It does when informs the underlying meaning of those factual claims and there is a category error being expressed.

For example: factual claim – Jesus broke some of the prevailing Jewish religious laws of his time. True. But his argument for doing so was that the laws he broke were invalid due to the fact they where not God’s law but accretions (traditions) that had been added to God’s law that destroyed the original intent. In addition, as pertaining breaking the Sabbath, he was the Son of God and as such was Lord of the Sabbath. Those are theological argumenst. So was Peter’s argument before the Sanhedrin about who they should listen to. As a result, Jesus’ actions can only be used to justify breaking laws today if they are in opposition to or violate God’s law. Romans 12 makes this very clear. To use Jesus’ example as a pretext for the breaking of any human law without that qualification is a serious error.  A theological error.

This is amusing. He just admitted what I have been pointing out all along: “Jesus broke some of the prevailing Jewish religious laws of his time.”

There is no theological error. There has never been any “biblical error”. Gent is arguing, irrelevantly, against a strawman of his own concoction. I am not saying that we are justified in breaking any laws we feel like breaking because Jesus Christ was a lawbreaker. I have never said that. I merely pointed out that the gentleman who claimed that “Jesus broke no law in his day” was absolutely, observably, and factually wrong.

I did not offer any argument on the basis of that observation.

Mailvox: the day she figured it out

Kudos and all, but the frightening thing about this email is the fact that this women genuinely and legitimately believed, for decades, that she was physically capable of going toe-to-toe with men. Thanks, Hollywood!

The day I figured it out

Not a natural athlete, but I did devote 7 years to martial arts back in my 30s.  3 to 4 times a week, excellent conditioning, but to be frank, I was horrible at sparring.  Think Barney Fife, vibrating and completely ineffective.  I hung in there, spurred on by too many martial arts movies and the media myth that a 120 lb. trained woman could take on a man in a fight.  And it was light touch sparring because of Insurance Risk.

So, there was one last special class to make that dark-colored belt; Punching/Kicking Class.  An all-day seminar where you were paired off with someone your size, they would hold a 6-inch-thick pad and you full contact punched and kicked them …then you would hold the pad and they would punch and kick.  Heady stuff, my Gi was snapping, there was a satisfying “thwack” sound, I was quite proud and kinda hoping for some bloody knuckles and a need to “tape up”.  Then it came time for me to hold the bag.  Now mind you, I was paired off with a small man, a short skinny ex-navy grunt, just my size.  He pulled off one full force punch and I was on my butt and there were tears on my face.  I got back up, took a deeper stance, and once again was back on the floor.  I kept trying but it was obvious to me I wasn’t helping this guy practice his punching and kicking at all.  So, I asked the instructor if I could just do the punching kicking practice but not hold the bag.  He took me for a walk outside the studio.  I have since learned that is a Bad Sign.  He explained to me the point of the class was being able to take the punching and kicking, the point was to be able to hold the bag, to be able to take the punch.  And I suddenly understood, it was basic physics really.  In my head, it was a scene out of a Beautiful Mind, with Vectors, Force Lines, and Angles appearing in red.  But it was just me with my mouth open going, “Huh”

Men are stronger than women.  Go figure.  It is basic physics; the bones are denser and the muscles are heavier.  And I realized this whole time, I had been a minnow swimming with sharks.  That most men could take out most women with a punch or two.  Heck, most men can take out another man with a sucker punch, but I am talking a face front fight; guy wins most every time.  And especially bigger men.  The fact I was so shocked told me a bunch about how naive I was and how much the media lied about this.  I suddenly had this whole new respect for most men; most of them were walking around with the ability to take down smaller folks; and they don’t.  They just plain don’t.  They hold doors open and walk on the dangerous side of the sidewalk and go out to check night time noises.  Basically IMHO most of guys in America are heroes.

I firmly believe that everyone, male and female, would benefit greatly from being physically beaten down at least once in their lives before their 18th birthday. It is a salutary experience.

Back in my fighting days, a girl I was dating joined our dojo for a while. After doing a drill that involved getting kicked repeatedly in the stomach, she was a bit wide-eyed and excited, and exclaimed, “I’ve never been hit in the stomach before!”

“Have you ever been hit in the face?” I asked her.

“No,” she said. So, I hit her in the chin with a backfist hard enough to snap her head back, but not hard enough to knock her down.

“What did you do that for!” she demanded about 15 seconds later, once she stopped staggering around and got over the usual shock.

“Did you feel that disorientation, the way you couldn’t quite believe that someone actually hit you in the face?”

“Well, yeah!” A mere two syllables, but spoken with deep passion and accompanied by an intense and narrow-eyed glare.

“See, that’s normal. Everyone feels like that the first time they take a good shot to the head. Now you know what it feels like. Next time you get hit, you’ll be ready for it, and you can fight your way through it.”

She wasn’t quite as appreciative of the lesson as I expected. It was strange, but the way she used to tell the story made me sound kind of like a psycho.

St. George shrugged

I was amused to hear about these two English gentlemen, who simply walked away and left a strong independent woman to fend for herself on the London Underground.

Tamara Cincik, founder and CEO of Fashion Roundtable, attacked on busy Tube. Mother-of-one kicked and threatened by an ‘unwell’ 6ft man as passengers fled. She has slammed two ‘white middle class men’ who left her to defend herself.

The fashion CEO is keen to stress she does not blame this man, who she believes needs medical help but said the incident was ‘terrifying’. Instead she is upset that two men she describes as ‘white and middle class’ chose not to help and moved to another carriage. 

Ms Cincik said: ‘Children were crying and women were crying, it was awful. I wasn’t crying I was in shock. I remain more angry with those white middle class men who left me to it. As fathers, husbands and sons they should be ashamed of themselves.’

Why should they be ashamed? They did nothing of which to be ashamed. She isn’t their daughter, wife, or mother. They had no obligation to risk being injured or having the polish on their shoes scuffed for her. She’s lucky that they didn’t simply sit there and laugh at her, as the younger generation of white men are increasingly inclined to do. Women have spent the last fifty years telling white men that everything is their fault and that they are both unneeded and unwanted. Women broke the socio-sexual contract, which is why many white men quite reasonably feel absolutely no duty to look out for women, children, or anyone else for whom they are not directly responsible.

Of course, African and Asian men never have. Isn’t it wonderful that white women have successfully convinced white men to adopt non-European cultural values! Diversity truly is a wonder.

Given her subsequent reaction, those two men were absolutely right to leave this woman to take her beating. She’s a typical left-wing idiot, blaming the men who had no obligation to her but letting the man who actually attacked her off the hook. Had they done anything, she probably would have screamed at them for hurting the poor, harmless crazy man.

Melinda Gates is another white woman for whom no self-respecting white man will ever lift a finger.

I am specifically looking at funds who over-index on women-led and minority-led businesses. I’m asking a lot of business questions about how they will go about their funding, how they will over-index on women’s businesses, and how they will hold themselves accountable for a great return.

Some of these big firms often believe in the white guy in a hoodie disrupting a whole industry. So we’re going to disrupt it by making sure we’re indexing for women and minorities because they’ve got great ideas.

Many of them think if they have one female at the table, they’ve done their job. Another big one is when they say that they have trouble finding women. Those are just excuses. They don’t know what investing in these areas looks like until they get several women who are partners in their firm.

Meanwhile, her husband’s former company is now an Indian concern, thanks in part to “over-indexing”, which is the approved new pseudonym for “affirmative action”.

The war on Russia

Philip Giraldi points out that the primary source of the recent, inexplicable anti-Russian antipathy is the fact that the (((neocons))) finally lost control of its government after more than 80 years.

I have long believed that the core hatred of Russia comes from the neocons and is to a large extent tribal or, if you prefer, ethno-religious based. Why? Because if the neoconservatives were actually foreign policy realists there is no good reason to express any visceral dislike of Russia or its government. The allegations that Moscow interfered in the 2016 presidential election in the U.S. are clearly a sham, just as are the tales of the alleged Russian poisoning of the Skripals in Winchester England and, most recently, the claimed assassination of journalist Arkady Babchenko in Kiev which turned out to be a false flag. Even the most cursory examination of the past decade’s developments in Georgia and Ukraine reveal that Russia was reacting to legitimate major security threats engineered by the United States with a little help from Israel and others. Russia has not since the Cold War ended threatened the United States and its ability to re-acquire its former Eastern European satellites is a fantasy. So why the hatred?

In fact, the neocons got along quite well with Russia when they and their overwhelmingly Jewish oligarchs and international commodity thieves cum financier friends were looting the resources of the old Soviet Union under the hapless Boris Yeltsin during the 1990s. Alarms about the alleged Russian threat only re-emerged in the neocon dominated media and think tanks when old fashioned nationalist Vladimir Putin took office and made it a principal goal of his government to turn off the money tap.

With the looting stopped by Putin, the neocons and friends no longer had any reason to play nice, so they used their considerable resources in the media and within the halls of power in places like Washington, London and Paris to turn on Moscow. And they also might have perceived that there was a worse threat looming. The Putin government appeared to be resurrecting what the neocons might perceive as pogrom-plagued Holy Russia! Old churches razed by the Bolsheviks were being rebuilt and people were again going to mass and claiming belief in Jesus Christ. The former Red Square now hosts a Christmas market while the nearby tomb of Lenin is only open one morning in the week and attracts few visitors.

This should give considerable hope to Americans, as AIPAC’s influence over the three branches of the US government is considerably more tenuous than the Bolsheviks’ historical control of the Russian government was.

Fortunately, the responsibility of actually governing their own land is fundamentally transforming the Israeli perspective and making smart men like Netanyahu more aware of the intrinsic dangers of attempting to interfere in the internal affairs of other nations. That’s why he is openly encouraging the Diasporans to come home rather than act as a fifth column.

Giraldi is certainly correct in at least one regard. If the neocons were simply foreign-policy realists, we’d hear them talking incessantly about China, and to a lesser extent, India, not Russia.

The warriors

It’s rather amusing to see conservatives falling all over themselves to be the first to denounce the reported SWATting of David Hogg. Remember, these are the same people who claim that they will actually shoot and kill police and other lawful authorities should said authorities ever come to disarm them, but they are denouncing a much milder response to someone actively attempting to lay the foundation for those confiscations.

Let me make a prediction: if anyone does violently resist having their guns forcibly confiscated, conservatives will be the very first to denounce that resistance.

Conservatives simply don’t have the backbone to fight for anything. Not their nation, not their guns, not their families, not even their persons. At this point, I tend to doubt they would have the wherewithal to do more than write a wordy complaint citing the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Gettysburg Address to protest being rounded up en masse and sent to concentration camps.

Adios, Miss America

There is literally nothing SJWs won’t destroy if given half a chance:

You won’t see any more swimsuits on the Miss America stage.

Gretchen Carlson, the new head of the organization’s board of directors, revealed  that Miss America will no longer judge women based on their physical appearance.

‘We are no longer a pageant,’ Carlson told Good Morning America on Tuesday. ‘We are a competition.’

The decision comes months after internal emails revealed former CEO Sam Haskell and board members frequently demeaned the physical appearance, intellect, and personal lives of former pageant winners, including Carlson.

I’m guessing the TV ratings are going to prove him right.

The next religion

Is going to be a false globalist one with the trappings of Christianity. And Jordan Peterson is its UN-anointed prophet.

Leftism is the religion that says that Activists are called to save the victims of the world by politics. That is to say, by force.

I say it is a false religion.

But nothing is going to change until we come up with something better that would persuade the hearts and minds of Good Little Liberal Boys and Good Little Liberal Girls to take down their #WeBelieve yard signs. We need a new religion that will lead to Jonah’s new “moral consensus”…

So we need a new religion for the People of the Creative Self, one that celebrates creativity without declaring war on the deplorable middle class. The best thing would be to celebrate both creativity and responsibility while still caring for the traditionally marginalized and exploited.

Did you know that there is a chap out there who wrote a book about this, that the highest and best human was the sacrificial, creative hero exploring courageously on the border between order and chaos, bringing the dangerous unknown world into the known world? As opposed to the lefty creative activist and his gospel of force. And this guy has also written a best-seller about getting responsible and cleaning up your room.

What is interesting about this man is that he risked his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor — or as we say now: his career, his pension, and his reputation — as a sacrificial hero opposing the Canadian C-16 law about transgender pronouns.

To the left, Jordan Peterson is obviously the anti-activist. But alt-righter Vox Day calls him a charlatan. That’s the thing about prophets. They are all charlatans until they aren’t.

So what’s going to happen? Solway’s revolution, Vox Day’s reactive nationalism, or Jonah’s new “moral consensus?” My guess is all of the above.

The key is the moral consensus.

My take is that a fake religion constructed by a suicidal charlatan and a false moral non-consensus have absolutely no hope of surviving against a resurgent nationalism supported by a return to unabashed Scripturally-sound Christianity. Because the truth lasts while falsehood has to constantly mutate just to remain credible.

I care nothing for consensus. To quote Captain America when he actually was the real Captain America:

When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world, “No, YOU move.” 

Mailvox: unorthodox or enemy?

JD doesn’t understand why I identify Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro as enemies rather than unorthodox allies:

I’ve read your blog and watched your videos related to Jordan Peterson with a great deal of interest. One of the members of a book club I’m in picked 12 Rules and we have been reading it and discussing it. (Everybody in the club seems to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff.)  My adult sons have enthusiastically sent me several videos featuring JP debating various people and my kids see JP as a valuable Culture Warrior and I tend to agree.

My question is, how do we draw the boundaries between who is orthodox and who is heterodox when it comes to the Culture Wars? When does heterodoxy become heresy and the person is now an enemy?

For example, within Christianity, historically the non-negotiable is the Word of God- the Living and the Written. To be a Christian, one must believe and follow Jesus Christ as God in the flesh, co-equal and co-eternal with God the Father. The Bible must be viewed as authored by God and authoritative. We have Scripture and creeds that have more or less defined the boundaries of what can be legitimately defined as “Christian.”

This, of course, doesn’t mean that Christians don’t disagree about a variety of things doctrinally, in church polity, and personal practice. This reality, however, doesn’t mean it is a free for all and we cannot employ terms like “orthodox,” “heterodox,” and even “heretic.”

Is there similar boundary defining principles and nomenclature in the Culture War? When does someone’s beliefs or practices move them from the Ally list to the Enemy list?

Back to Jordan Peterson. I don’t believe he is a Christian. I disagree with all of the Jungian psychobabble. I agree that he seems to be unstable in his own mental health and has some delusions of grandeur. (I know for a fact that he is a terrible writer.)

I won’t be a bit surprised if “something” comes out about him in the future and the wheels come off the wagon, but for now, I see him as being on “our side” of the Culture War- he is anti-political correctness, anti-identity politics, he believes in biological gender and traditional gender roles, he believes in meritocracy and personal freedom and responsibility, also, he generally makes the right people angry. Is this guy not an ally?

I remain unconvinced that he is an enemy based upon his not knowing the nuances of Jewish IQ studies or the conspiracy theory type arguments put forth about globalism or supporting pedophilia or any of the “controlled opposition” theorizing. Much of that seems tenuous at best- especially when compared to the black and white areas of agreement I do have with Jordan Peterson.

Why isn’t it enough to say, “I agree with JP here and here and here, but I disagree with him here and here and here, but hey, he is on our side”? What crosses the line into heresy? (I feel similarly about Ben Shapiro- I get the “chickenhawk” stuff and I wish he supported Trump, but the guy isn’t he doing great work in the Culture Wars?)

What makes your Enemy Status for people like JP and Shapiro even more confusing is the people that you don’t distance yourself from- I’ll take Shapiro over Milo any day in the Culture Wars, and if JP is a nut-job snake oil salesman, Alex Jones is every bit a nut-job who sells literal snake oil on his website. I don’t get it.

How do you determine who is orthodox and heterodox, who is an ally and who is a heretic? How much uniformity of belief is necessary for unity in the Culture War?

To which I responded:

You and your kids are totally wrong. Jordan Peterson is a paid up, committed professional globalist. His objectives are directly opposed to the survival of America and the West.

If someone was trying to fix Nazism, you wouldn’t say that he’s a Jewish ally. If someone was trying to fix Communism, you wouldn’t say that he is a capitalist ally. Jordan Peterson is trying to fix globalism. He is trying to destroy nationalism, your nation, and your people.

He is not an ally of any kind.

The fact that you would take Ben Shapiro over Milo just indicates how utterly clueless you are about these things. I’m sorry to be so direct, but it’s absolutely true. Shapiro, Peterson, et al are 100 percent enemies. There is literally nothing good about them or their objectives.

And further to which:

A civic nationalist is a heterodox ally. They are, for the most part, merely mistaken, deluded, naive, or ignorant rather than evil. A globalist, an imperialist, or a tribalist who seeks the destruction of the West or any Western nation is an enemy, especially if they wear the false cloak of a civic nationalist to conceal their true objectives. Donald Trump, Alex Jones, Milo, and Mike Cernovich are all pro-American civic nationalists and therefore allies of the nationalist Right even though their nationalism is not orthodox nationalism. Jordan Peterson and George Soros are both globalists who are self-avowed enemies of nationalism. Richard Spencer and Andrew Anglin are left-wing racial imperialists and therefore enemies of the Right and of nationalism. Ben Shapiro, Jonah Goldberg, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and a whole host of commentators both “liberal” and “conservative” are tribalists who are seeking to, at best, take advantage of, and at worst, destroy America and the West for the benefit of their particular tribes.

Just as there are Christian non-negotiables, there are nationalist non-negotiables. Anyone who subscribes to any variant of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s claim that “the contemporary U.S. belongs to all nations” is an enemy of America and the West, no matter how much they claim to love either of them. Our side is not against identity politics. Our side is against having to play identity politics in the first place, but once multiple and competing identities have been permitted to establish themselves in a polity, identity politics are the new reality and playing according to their well-established rules is an absolute necessity. Those who claim to be against identity politics at this point are nothing more than outdated and irrelevant posers.

Binary thinkers tend to have a serious problem recognizing that just because X criticizes the way Y is going about achieving his objectives, that does not mean that X is opposed to either Y or Y’s objectives. For example, Lenin tried to fix the economic failures of communism with his New Economic Policy of 1922, which instituted “a free market and capitalism, both subject to state control while socialized state enterprises were to operate on a profit basis”, but that did not make him either an enemy of communism or a capitalist ally.

Take a hike, Eagles

The Philadelphia Eagles have to go back:

President Trump on Monday abruptly rescinded an invitation to host the Eagles at the White House, citing the “smaller delegation” that was planning to attend and again stoking a national debate by insisting that players “proudly stand for the National Anthem, hand on heart.”

“The Philadelphia Eagles are unable to come to the White House with their full team to be celebrated tomorrow,” Trump said in a statement released late Monday. “They disagree with their President because he insists that they proudly stand for the National Anthem, hand on heart, in honor of the great men and women of our military and the people of our country. The Eagles wanted to send a smaller delegation, but the 1,000 fans planning to attend the event deserve better.

“These fans are still invited to the White House to be part of a different type of ceremony — one that will honor our great country, pay tribute to the heroes who fight to protect it, and loudly and proudly play the National Anthem. I will be there at 3:00 p.m. with the United States Marine Band and the United States Army Chorus to celebrate America.”

The Eagles were scheduled to be honored by Trump at 3 p.m. on the South Lawn. Fewer than 10 players planned to attend, a team source told the Inquirer and Daily News.

It would certainly be amusing if Trump ordered tax audits for all the Eagle players, ala Clinton. But on a more serious note, this is another demonstration that the USA is no longer a nation-state, it is a multinational, multiethnic, multilingual, multireligious empire of diverse peoples battling for power and influence over their rivals.