One wonders what they imagined the likely outcome was going to be:
Rare.us, the viral content site launched by Cox Media in 2013 to take on the ever-evolving digital landscape from a right of center lens, will shut down at the end of the month, according to Facebook posts by its top editors.
Why it matters: It’s another example of a viral website built on Facebook traffic that is shutting down after Facebook announced it would be making changes to its News Feed algorithm to weed out publisher content.
Rare has amassed 2.3 million Facebook fans since launch. The site’s traffic peaked in 2014 at around 22.5 million global unique visitors, according to Quantcast. The site’s global traffic had fallen to 5.5 million global unique visitors in February of 2018.
Last week, LittleThings, a 4-year-old publisher which built an audience by sharing happy stories on Facebook, also shut down, citing Facebook News Feed changes.
It’s heads they win, tails you lose. No matter what you do, they’re not going to let you win. No matter how big you get, they won’t hesitate to cut off their own nose if that’s what it takes to trip you up. So don’t play their game!
Know your enemy. ALWAYS know your enemy. And build your own platforms.
The Left’s assault on Free Speech in the US–outside of the Universities–has really only just begun. Most of the public recoils from these repressive excesses. At present, the Right has the considerable political virtue of being pro-free speech. That is a powerful moral and political weapon against the Left. It is an important reason why the ranks of the Right are growing.
But if you try to fight fire with fire by arguing that since the Left does censors speech, we should do it, too, then you have sacrificed the moral high ground in the eyes of the broad public. The Right will then be no better on this defining issue than the Left, and will have given up one of the main reasons why fast growing numbers of people prefer the Right to the Left.
If the Right becomes hostile to free speech, then it will drastically weaken its moral standing in the eyes of the broad public, thereby diminishing its political appeal.
Every bad argument has its roots in false foundations. Can you identify the false foundations here?
It’s amusing that he thinks “moral standing” is relevant in a political environment in which basic, fundamental concepts such as “male” and “illegal” are treated as variable, and traditional definitions are designated as outdated and immoral. It’s understandable, though just as incorrect, to claim that free speech is a moral issue. It is not. In fact, the pro-blasphemy position is actually the observably immoral position.
But his biggest mistake is to claim that “the moral high ground” is why one side wins. This is simply more conservative posturing that reliably leads them into disaster. The center is not abandoning the Left because the Left has abandoned a moral high ground that it never held, it is being abandoned by a Left that moves ever deeper into madness.
Those who believe in a path to victory through “the moral high ground” inevitably find themselves outflanked by those who are willing to surrender even more nobly. That is why no successful strategist in history has ever designed a strategy that relies upon moral posturing. And appealing to the moral sense of an immoral people whose morality is constantly in flux is neither a rational strategy nor a winning one.
Listening to a conservative talk about strategy is like listening to a blind man’s advice on how to drive a Formula One race car. They are reliable counter indicators.
“In terms of speech, the Left would reword it: “Say what thou wilt.” And to preserve their natural right to expression–whether it’s pornography, vulgarity, blatant or tongue-in-cheek anti-Christian propaganda–the Left has enacted the Strange Doctrine, happily bludgeoning their enemies on the Right, and this has been going on for quite some time.”
Hey, let’s just censor them, then. Why the hell not?
It’s only going to make the Right much less popular, because it will needlessly sacrifice one of the main positive values that increasingly differentiates the Right from the Left in the public mind.
But when you have people out there who are saying whatever they want–including many mean things about the Right, and even about Christians–it’s obviously far more important to shut them down than it is to prevail politically over the long term.
Let’s just do to them what they do to us, without any consideration of the strategic consequences at all.
We already know what the strategic consequences of relying on the moral high ground are, which is decades of consistent defeat. Not only have we considered the strategic consequences, we have done so and we have found the conservative strategy of “hold the moral high ground and win” to be entirely wanting.
HUNGRY HEARTS is the second issue in the RIGHT HO, JEEVES series, which tells of the travails of the inimitable Bertie Wooster, who is summoned from the comforts of #3A Berkley Mansions, London to Brinkley Manor by his imperious Aunt Dahlia. Love is in the air and Wodehousian shenanigans are afoot, as Wooster’s well-meaning attempts to help out his friends sort out their romantic difficulties only leads to one disaster after another.
Adapted from the classic Wodehouse novel by comics legend Chuck Dixon and drawn by SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN illustrator Gary Kwapisz, RIGHT HO, JEEVES #2: HUNGRY HEARTS is issue #2 of 6 in the series.
On a related note, as you may already be aware, RIGHT HO, JEEVES #1: A Binge at Brinkley is now available in Kindle and in print. But that’s not all. During the Alt★Hero campaign, we were asked to offer a discussion forum as a stretch reward, which we duly offered and was subsequently funded. The stretch reward was originally conceived as follows:
Commenting on the Alt★Hero site will be limited to campaign backers and site subscribers in order to reduce the amount of SJW vandalism. Site Heroes will receive a subscription to the website, the ability to create new topics, the ability to edit the wiki (subject to moderator approval and discipline), a series of special icons available only to them, and a dedicated forum. Please note that SJWs who use this Reward to infiltrate the site for the purposes of vandalism, politics, or social justice will be identified and stripped of both their backer and Site Hero status.
Last week, a special online meeting was held with the Site Heroes to introduce the new Alt★Hero site, which is now live. After a discussion in which a variety of ideas were kicked around, we collectively decided to make some changes to the original conception. First, no subscriptions to read the site will be necessary, at least for now. Second, all APPROVED (not registered) users can comment on the forums, although certain closed forums are accessible only by Alt★Hero Backers and Artists, respectively. Approval will initially be limited to those two groups. Third, the wiki will utilize an Infogalactic frame, but is not yet operative and only Backers will have the ability to modify it. Fourth, we have established separate sections for discussing Books and Games, as well as separate subforums for discussing comics published by Marvel, DC, and the major independents. And fifth, we set up several volunteers as site moderators, who will police the forums and keep the commenting under control.
Anyone can register, but please read the site guidelines before commenting. Because we anticipate a number of younger readers, we will be much more strict on policing language and content there than I am here. Only Alt★Hero Backers and Artists will initially be approved for commenting, so if you are a backer, please email me with your backer number and new username in the subject after you register. Please note that you will know that you have been approved, have Backer status, and can access the Backer’s Only subforum when your username turns green. Artist status is limited to industry professionals and the Arkhaven/Dark Legion team.
Once the Alt★Hero Backers who have registered are all approved, we’ll move on to approving Voxiversity backers, Brainstorm members, and Will Caligan campaign backers for general commenting. Please be patient, as this process could take as long as a week since not everyone reads this blog every day.
UPDATE:
#1 in Books > Comics & Graphic Novels > Graphic Novels > Adaptations #1 in Kindle Store >Comics & Graphic Novels > Historical & Literary > Literary
Like all SJWs, Peter King reveals that he is not fit to live as a citizen in American society.
The AR-15 is a killing machine, and it will continue to be a money-making machine for gun companies unless our elected officials make it illegal to privately own. That has to happen. If you’re in favor of private ownership of the gun, you can say whatever you want to justify it, but you value a murderous weapon over the lives of Americans, and certainly over the lives of 17 children. Second Amendment, schmecond amendment.
He seriously wants to take YOUR unalienable right to self-defense away. He does not respect your Second Amendment rights. At all.
So, why should we respect his First Amendment rights? We should not, as NN Taleb advises in his excellent new book Skin in the Game.
Start by being nice to everyone person you meet. But if someone tries to exercise power over you, exercise power over him. This philosophy means that every individual who attempts to infringe on our Second Amendment rights, in any way, has lost any claim to our consideration for their First Amendment rights.
Italy deals a serious blow to the globofascists of the EU:
Italy entered a period of political instability on Monday after national elections boosted populists but failed to produce a winner with enough support to patch together a parliamentary majority. With about 95{a298dadb698b5d9f7b1e1aa14f0e41ed4811cd67f55ba9a1b19c355a24d2c8ed} of votes counted early Monday, the antiestablishment 5 Star Movement was projected to win 32{a298dadb698b5d9f7b1e1aa14f0e41ed4811cd67f55ba9a1b19c355a24d2c8ed} of the vote—exceeding expectations and emerging as Italy’s largest party.
The 5 Star Movement, which has won a large following by denouncing Italy’s conventional politicians as corrupt, has long been hostile to the idea of forming governing pacts with other parties. Despite some signs of greater flexibility recently, many observers believe a government led by the movement will be difficult to assemble.
“Nobody can govern without the 5 Star,” Riccardo Fraccaro, a leading party member, told a news conference after the vote.
On paper, the 5 Star could form a government with another populist group, the anti-immigrant League. Such a populist coalition, which would shock Italy’s and Europe’s establishment and possibly challenge European Union rules on economic policy, faces political hurdles, however, given major differences between the parties’ ideology and political strategies up to now.
The conservative coalition that includes the Forza Italia party of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was projected to win about 37{a298dadb698b5d9f7b1e1aa14f0e41ed4811cd67f55ba9a1b19c355a24d2c8ed} of the vote, falling short of a majority in either chamber of parliament. Forza Italia itself emerged as one of the big losers on the night, getting 14{a298dadb698b5d9f7b1e1aa14f0e41ed4811cd67f55ba9a1b19c355a24d2c8ed} the vote, about four points less than its main ally, the League.
The center-left Democratic Party, mainstay of Italy’s government in recent years, suffered worse-than-expected losses and was projected to win only around 19{a298dadb698b5d9f7b1e1aa14f0e41ed4811cd67f55ba9a1b19c355a24d2c8ed}.
Movimento Cinque Stelle makes the establishment nervous, because they are unpredictable. But it is Matteo Salvini and La Lega that really scares them, as you can see by the way The Wall Street Journal doesn’t even directly mention the fact that they got 20 percent of the vote, more than the so-called “mainstream” Democratic Party.
I, for one, would love to see a Cinque Stelle / La Lega government. Stop the migration, deport the migrants, get out of the Euro, get out of the EU. Those should be the first four government policies and both parties should be able to agree on them. This is particularly important since the idiot Germans just assured themselves a fourth term of Merkel’s disastrous and destructive regime. Salvini has rejected the idea of a populist coalition, but it is still very early days and the final results haven’t even been announced.
Free traders always talk a big game. They love to name drop Ricardo and pretend that the false syllogisms of an 18th century con artist still has relevance to economics today, but their arguments are nothing more than outdated theory that will not stand up to two centuries of evidence-based criticism anymore and they know it. Consider the following email exchange with a reader.
I was discussing free trade with a Macroeconomics Professor at George Mason University named Garett Jones. I brought up your debate with Dr. Miller and he didn’t have kind words for your work. I brought up Steve Keen and he didn’t have kind words for him either. I @ Steve Keen a request to debate this guy and I said maybe you would be willing to host it. Prof Keen said he would be willing to do that. I am sure you have Steve Keen’s email. This would be a great debate because George Mason University is one of the better libertarian economic departments in the country. We’ll see.
Sure, we can do a 500-seat Brainstorm. Let me know, I’ll host and see if the guy will show.
the professor backed out after talking you know what on twitter. He said he has too many deadlines. He spends hours on twitter so that’s a nonsense excuse. I told him it would probably only be around an hour but if he doesn’t want to back up his rhetoric then that’s fine. You and Steve would destroy this guy so it’s no wonder he didn’t want to debate. Free traders only want to show up on corporate media to shill. This is my surprised face….
Sounds rather like the professor spent a few hours poking around here and Steve Keen’s site and belatedly realized that he was volunteering for the sort of treatment one normally only experiences in prison washrooms when the guards aren’t around.
The truth is that the free traders have NO DEFENSE WHATSOEVER against my labor mobility argument. The best they can do is offer up a lame “nations don’t matter” protest that renders their precious free trade abhorrent to 99.9 percent of the population.
Writing in the pages of The New York Times, conservative commentator David Brooks closes out a column with this striking kicker:
Conservatives have zero cultural power, but they have immense political power. Even today, voters trust Republicans on the gun issue more than Democrats. If you exile 40 percent of the country from respectable society they will mount a political backlash that will make Donald Trump look like Adlai Stevenson.
It’s audacious, really. I mean sure, non-leftists have been steadily filtered out of education, academia, journalism, publishing, Hollywood, and the arts for so long that most people can’t even imagine it being any different. But zero? Really?
It takes a special sort of ignorance to embrace such a position. Even the residual power of Tarzan, Cthulhu, Middle Earth, and Conan remains a potent force, even in a marketplace flooded with both bastardized derivatives and hostile critiques. Smarmy elites dismissed the staunchly Catholic Tolkien in his lifetime and declared heroic fantasy bad for us from every platform they could manage to subdue. And yet he outlasted all of his detractors to become Author of the Century. And right at this very moment, Jordan Peterson’s number one international bestselling book is a sensation precisely because it is making the timeless wisdom that infuses the Bible accessible to a generation that is starving for answers and common sense.
The reason the ideological Right has limited cultural power these days is because the Left, with (((David Brooks))) and his nation in the vanguard, have worked very hard for at least four generations at attempting to eradicate everything from the culture that betrays any sign of Christian influence or Western tradition.
And the reason that they are failing despite their near-complete control of the cultural high ground is because they have literally nothing to offer in its place. All they ever had to offer was reaction, negation, ugliness, filth, and snark. Sure, you can adulterate Christmas, and you can substitute Silver Bells, shopping, Santa, and Seasons Greetings for Silent Night, Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Scrooge, and We Wish You a Merry Christmas, but at the end of the day, either you come up with a substitute or your efforts will eventually prove futile.
What did they come up with in over a century of frantic effort? Festivus, the Hannukah Aardvark, and horrible movies that are bad even by Seth Rogen’s standards. Hardly an attractive exchange for even the most godless pagan.
We not only can win this cultural war, we cannot lose it so long as we continue to create things that are good, beautiful, and true, and continue to refuse entrance to the infiltrating wormtongues who are always there with their helpful blandishments and seductive offers to sell your creative soul to Mammon.
So let them turn Elsa of the Crowleyesque anthem into a lesbian. Let them transform Superman into an SJW superhero fighting for global migration, one-world government, and AIPAC. Let them continue to preen and posture and sneer and snark in futility. It will avail them nothing. Like their Father the Devil, they cannot create, they can only corrupt. And that is why the greatness of Tolkien, of Howard, of Lovecraft, and of Wright will continue to be recognized over time despite the Left’s best efforts to denigrate and diminish it.
Here are three more shots in the cultural war for the West. Another will be fired tomorrow.
After one strike was removed earlier in the week, YouTube hit the Alex Jones Channel with a third strike for a video that had already been appealed and restored.
In the video, Jones clearly explains how the victims of the Parkland shooting were not “crisis actors”.
YouTube’s flagging system is clearly being abused in a flagrant effort to shut down Infowars following a public campaign by CNN.
This sets a horrific precedent for free expression and the First Amendment and YouTube is in direct violation of the Communications Decency Act in adopting this approach.
Protest! Shock! Horror! Unfair! Come on, now. The inevitability of these deplatforming actions is why I have been repeatedly and relentlessly advising people to build their own platforms. There is little point in building up a highly fragile operation on your enemy’s turf that they can literally take out at will without warning.
The high-profile men and women of the Right absolutely need to stop thinking about maximizing their short-term benefit and start looking to support the platforms that are not going to a) silence them, b) sell them out, or, c) leave them completely exposed to their enemies. And they also need to stop “fighting for free speech”. Free speech is little more than anti-Christian Enlightenment propaganda, which very few of its self-appointed defenders seem to know.
In case you haven’t noticed, it is utterly useless to appeal to the ideological purists who run these Big Social platforms. No amount of reason is going to sway them. So stop relying upon them! If you notice, I used Freestartr instead of Kickstarter and Bitchute instead of Youtube for Voxiversity. If even 10 percent of the Right would stop bitching and wailing and whining about their inevitable ill-treatment at the hands of the Left and publicly support the alternative platforms instead, we would have a fully functional Alt-Tech ecosystem before the end of 2018.
Stefan Molyneux clearly gets it. One hopes that others will before it’s already too late.
UPDATE: This again. I had a feeling someone was going to leap in to “call me out” for “hypocrisy” sooner or later. At least this was friendly concern.
This post being made on a Google-owned property, is at best hypocritical (which is fucking horrible to your credibility). Please take a look at platforms like Steemit, Minds, etc. because Goolag can bring the ban-hammer down on Vox Populi in a nanosecond. You’re a sonofabitch, but you’re an excellent sonofabitch, and I do not want to see you banned or discredited.
First, I was reliably informed that my credibility was destroyed back in 2001. So, who cares about that. Second, do you really think I am not prepared for Google to take down the blog without warning for no reason, or that Google does not know that? And third, Blogger is not a critical platform. It is merely a delivery vehicle for text on a screen and literally no one is dependent upon it.
It would have been preferable to see it end sooner, but the main thing is that America’s worst political dynasty is coming to an end:
George P Bush is the young, half-Hispanic, grandson of the 41st president, nephew of the 43rd and son of a former Florida governor. When he was elected Texas land commissioner four years ago, that background gave him a significant advantage as a fledgling Republican candidate seemingly on a fast track to stardom. Now, with conservative politics turned on its head by Trumpism, Bush is facing a tough primary election that threatens to doom his political career – and with it, bring to a close his family’s 70-year political dynasty.
The land commissioner job – which manages state-owned land – was perceived to be a stepping stone to higher office, but the evisceration of his father, Jeb, in the 2016 Republican presidential primary showed that as it lurched to the right and was seduced by sound and fury, the GOP was no longer in the market for a quiet moderate named Bush.
Though he has far more campaign cash than his rivals and has reportedly spent $2m in the past month, Bush has run an anaemic – one might say low-energy – campaign, with scant media availability and no events listed on his website. He is still the favourite, but if he fails to get above 50{659c2545de464f2fcd65f128ea682d8067e3e2248213357d1602012fc3b5a78c} of the vote on 6 March – when Texas holds the country’s first primaries ahead of the 2018 midterms – he will face a potentially dangerous runoff.
“It’s quite possible that the Bush political dynasty, at least for this generation, could end in the spring of 2018 because if George P Bush fails to win the GOP nomination for land commissioner it’s tough to see him coming back from that any time soon,” said Mark Jones, a political scientist at Rice University. The dynasty began with Prescott Bush – George P’s great-grandfather – becoming senator for Connecticut in 1952.
The Bushes have done more than enough harm to the nation. About the last thing that America – what is left of it – needs is a watered-down fourth-generation edition to deal with the damage meted out by his ancestors.
Mr. Kühnert, who at 28 runs the youth wing of Germany’s center-left Social Democratic Party, has been touring the country to convince fellow party members to vote down a coalition deal that would keep Ms. Merkel in power for another four years — and his own party in place as the junior partner to her Christian Democrats.
Three months ago, few people had heard of Mr. Kühnert. Now, his boyish face with its rebellious cowlick is ubiquitous. He is a regular on prime time talk shows and routinely described as a rising star of German politics.
But he is also an enfant terrible for Europe’s political elites, who breathed a sigh of relief when Ms. Merkel announced last month that she had secured a governing deal, seemingly ending five months of political limbo in Europe’s most important capital.
But that left one major obstacle, and partly because of Mr. Kühnert’s spirited campaign it has been growing taller by the day: The grass roots of the Social Democracts still need to approve the deal.
The result of the vote will be announced Sunday. If the 463,000 members reject the coalition, Germany faces the prospect of an unstable minority government or new elections or both. In any case, it would likely spell the end of the Merkel era.
Merkel müss weg, as they say in Germany. At this point, she’s only the second-worst Reichskanzler the Germans have ever known. But give her more time, and she might manage to accomplish what even Caesar, Stalin, and Hitler failed to do.
No matter what your ideology is, no matter what your political instincts are, stopping a politician who is hell-bent on destroying your nation by turning the country over to immigrants should always be the first political priority.
It was interesting to watch The Godfather II recently, given the way it can be not unreasonably viewed as an extended lesson in the way immigrants, even intelligent, hard-working immigrants who bravely serve their new country’s military, can corrupt a nation from the bottom to the very top.
