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EVS vs VD

It is officially on.

Ethan Van Sciver‏@EthanVanSciver
Next guest interview is with Alt Hero creator and my new arch enemy Vox Day.  Monday at 7 PM.  Trailer is coming.

In order to allow us to focus on EVS’s questions on Monday, let me get a few of those posed by his Twitter followers out of the way.

Ask him why he’s so obsessed with Jews in the negative sense and why he believes non-white people are inherently chaos bringers and can’t be a part of western civilization.

I’m not obsessed with Jews in any sense. Being pro-Christian, pro-American and pro-Western civilization, I am opposed to everyone who seeks to fundamentally alter either the American nation or Western civilization, no matter who they are or what their reasons might be. Non-Westerners are not, by definition, part of Western civilization, they have their own civilizations, customs, and traditions which they quite naturally prefer, and to quote a VP reader quoting Horace, they change their sky, not their souls, who cross the sea.

In other words, they don’t bring chaos, they merely bring civilizational changes which often result in chaos. Exactly as European whites did to American Indian civilization. But the fact that the invasion and subsequent changes may be well-merited from a karmic perspective doesn’t actually make it desirable for anyone who values America and the West.

Ask him if he still believes N.K. Jemisin is a half savage, and those of her ethnic heritage shouldn’t write sci-fi.

Yes, I still believe NK Jemisin is “an educated, but ignorant half-savage, with little more understanding of what it took to build a new literature by ‘a bunch of beardy old middle-class middle-American guys’ than an illiterate Igbotu tribesman has of how to build a jet engine.” Those of her ethnic heritage are certainly welcome to write science fiction if they please, but Jemisin observably shouldn’t. Her two successive Hugo Awards for Best Novel are a more embarrassing indictment of the degraded state of so-called science fiction than the nominations of “Alien Stripper Boned From Behind By The T-Rex” and “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” combined.

Damn good question

The God-Emperor points out an obvious flaw in the latest attempt at immigration reform:

President Trump on Wednesday balked at an immigration deal that would include protections for people from Haiti and African countries, demanding to know at a White House meeting why he should accept immigrants from “shithole countries” rather than people from places like Norway, according to people with direct knowledge of the conversation.

Mr. Trump’s remarks left members of Congress attending the meeting in the Cabinet Room alarmed and mystified. They were there discussing an emerging bipartisan deal to give legal status to immigrants illegally brought to the United States as children, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity without authorization to discuss the explosive proceedings of the private meeting.

When Mr. Trump heard that Haitians were among those who would benefit, he asked if they could be left out of the plan, according to the people familiar with the conversation, asking, “Why do we want people from Haiti here?”

Of course they’re “mystified”. They can’t figure out why everyone doesn’t want to turn the USA into more of a shithole than it is already.

The USA is not magic dirt. Nations are people. If you want to live like Haiti, bring in Haitians. They won’t become Americans, they’ll just make America more like Haiti. Which, if you are honest with yourself, is exactly what all the Germans did too.

Do you really believe George Washington ever attended “kindergarten”? Or drank “Budweiser”?

Why socialism doesn’t work

The Hoover Institution publishes an unusually good casual explication of the real reason socialism not only does not work, but cannot work: the Impossibility of Socialist Calculation:

After gaining power a century ago and then holding onto it through a civil war, the Soviet communists were intent on building a socialist state that would overwhelm capitalism. State ownership and scientific planning would replace the anarchy of the market. Material benefits would accrue to the working class. An equitable economy would supplant capitalist exploitation and a new socialist man would rise, prioritizing social above private interests. A dictatorship of the proletariat would guarantee the interests of the working class. Instead of extracting surpluses from workers, the socialist state would take tribute from capitalists to finance the building of socialism.

The basics of the Soviet “horse” were in place by the early 1930s. Under this system, Stalin and his Politburo set general priorities for industrial ministries and a state planning commission. The ministers and planners worked in tandem to draw up economic plans. Managers of the hundreds of thousands of plants, factories, food stores, and even farms were obligated by law to fulfill the plans handed down by their superiors.

The Soviets launched their planned socialist economy as the capitalist world sank into depression, trade wars, and hyperinflation. Soviet authorities bragged of unprecedented rates of growth. New industrial complexes grew from scratch. Magazines featured contented workers lounging in comfortable resorts. The message: The West was failing, and the Soviet economic system was the way to the future.

As the competition between capitalism and Soviet socialism became more pronounced during the Cold War, serious scholarly study of the Soviet economy began. The overarching research agenda of Western scholars was “scientific planning”—the socialist belief that expert technocrats could manage an economy better than spontaneous market forces. After all, would not experts know better than buyers and sellers what, how, and for whom to produce?

It was the Austrian economists F. A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises who resisted this idea most forcefully. In their landmark critique laid out in a series of papers written from the 1920s through the 1940s, they concluded that socialism must fail. In modern economies, hundreds of thousands of enterprises produce millions of products. Even with the most sophisticated computer technology, managing such large numbers would be far too complex for an administrative body trying to allocate resources. Modern economies, therefore, are too complex to plan. Without markets and prices, decision-makers will not know what is scarce and what is abundant. If property belongs to all, what rules should those who manage assets for society follow?

The Soviets’ solution to the complexity and information problems was a national plan that spelled out production goals only for broad sectors, not for specific transactions. In other words, rather than mandate the delivery of 10 tons of steel cable by factory A to factory B, the planners set a target for the total number of tons of cable to be produced nationwide. Only a few specific goods—such as crude oil, aluminum ore, brown coal, electricity, and freight-car dispatches—could be planned as actual transactions. Everything else had to be planned in crude quantities, such as several million square meters of textile products. Product specifications, delivery plans, and payments were worked out at lower levels and often with disastrous results.

Soviet scientific planning, in fact, directed only a minuscule portion of products. In the early 1950s, central agencies drew up less than 10,000 planned indexes, while industrial products numbered more than 20 million. Central agencies drew up generalized plans for industrial ministries, which issued more detailed plans to “main administrations,” which prepared plans for enterprises. There never was a pretense that the top officials would plan the production of specific products.

To make matters even more complicated, virtually all plans were “drafts” that could be changed at any time by higher state and party officials. This constant intervention, called “petty tutelage,” was an irritant from the first to the last day of the Soviet system, but it was a key pillar of resource allocation.

If you want to read some truly artistic masterpieces of illogic, read a few socialist papers attempt to prove that socialist price-calculation is possible. The two primary papers, written first by Mises, then further articulated by Hayek, are two of the most conclusively devastating critiques of anything ever published. And the empirical evidence subsequently gathered over decades resoundingly supported their logical conclusion.

It’s not an accident that the Impossibility of Social Justice Convergence sounds a lot like the Mises-Hayek law.

Mailvox: moderates only shoot one way

From SJWs Always Lie:

Strategic Principle #7: Keep the moderates in check.

Moderates are the people who are nominally on your side but don’t have the courage to take on the enemy directly and never hesitate to offer advice and criticism to those who do. They generally mean well, but they have a tendency to believe that goodwill, hand-holding, and being open-minded will inspire even the most lunatic, hate-filled SJW to see sweet reason. Even worse, this belief often causes them to attack their putative allies in order to prevent their allies from attacking the enemy since attacking the enemy would get in the way of the rapprochement that the moderate is certain will happen with the very next concession.

Moderates are usually nice people who want to think well of everyone, and they make for very good ambassadors and diplomats. Unfortunately, they usually prefer appeasement to offense, and they are far more inclined to shoot at their own side than they are at the enemy. One of the readers at Vox Popoli, Civis Silas, described their unreliable tendencies in an amusing little dialogue describing a fictional duel of honor being refereed by a moderate.

Moderate: Okay, gentlemen, or rather, gentle cisgendered humans, you will take five paces, then turn and shoot. SJW has won the coin toss and he will shoot first. Understood?

SJW: Xir.

Moderate: What?

SJW: Xir is my pronoun of choice. Also, I identify as Otherkin. Specifically, a llama.

Moderate: Right. I do apologize, I certainly didn’t mean to offend you. Xir will shoot first.

Anti-SJW: Wait, how did he win the coin toss? He called heads AND tails!

Moderate: Xir!

SJW: smirks

Anti-SJW: Fine, whatever. It’s not like he could hit the broad side of a football stadium.

Moderate: Xir!

Anti-SJW: Seriously?

Moderate: It’s only polite. Very well. Are you both ready?

Anti-SJW: Sure.

SJW: Time to meet social justice, hatelord!

Moderate: One…

SJW: immediately turns and aims pistol at Anti-SJW’s back.

Moderate: looks at SJW disapprovingly. Two…

SJW: CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE! Fires and completely misses.

Anti-SJW: What the hell? turns around. You bastard!

SJW: How dare you turn around! That’s against the rules! Hey, he’s turning around!

Moderate: Anti! You must take three more paces before you may turn around and return fire!

Anti-SJW: incredulous. He shot at me after two!

SJW: Xir!

Moderate: Do not lower yourself to xir’s level! Winning the wrong way is worse than losing!

Anti-SJW: Are you out of your freaking mind? aims at SJW

SJW: cowers in fear and wets himself. Sorry, xirself.

Moderate: How dare you! draws pistol and aims it at Anti-SJW. If you do not turn around this very instant, I shall shoot you myself, you dishonorable cur!

This seemed appropos in light of this email from a reader chronicling the hypocrisy of Ethan Van Sciver, whose behavior has been almost textbook moderate since he first sensed the opportunity to virtue signal to the Comic-SJWs to whom he is nominally opposed.

I know you’ve been talking to Ethen Van Sciver recently, and that he’s made some youtube videos about it. I wanted to draw your attention to his hypocrisy, and how it essentially mirrors the behaviours you described in ‘SJWs always Lie’ where moderates hit the right much harder than they do to the left…

On a video Van Sciver made titled ‘The Comic Book Culture War is REAL and DELIBERATE!‘

Van Sciver was talking to a writer from Bleeding Cool, and his attitude to this writer who very explicitly states that comics are a cultural battleground in the culture war is so soft and conciliatory, especially when compared to how he talks about you and Alt*Hero.

At one point he tells us that the Bleeding Cool writer even said “This is a culture war battleground. This is a comic book culture war battleground, and if we give them this then it’s all over. They will have won.” – at no point does Van Sciver talk about these avowed hardline leftists in the same tone he uses about you in this video: ‘ETHAN VAN SCIVER vs VOX DAY, CYBERFROG RESERVOIR FROG #1 commentary, more goofy twitter SJWs’

  • at 19:40 Van Sciver agrees that he is a moderate.
  • at 20:02 he refers to this as “your culture war between SJSs and the extreme right.” he assigns ownership of it to you personally, as if you’re starting this conflict, when he has previously described to his audience in the other video how SJWs view comics as a battleground in the culture war.
  • at 19:50 he then paradoxically says that your comments about him and Diversity and Comics are making an assumption about some kind of culture war: “All of this presumes that there’s some kind of culture war going on that we all need to pick up sides in.” but he himself has already described how the left specifically told him theres an ongoing culture war.
  • At 21:10 he says of you that “being the other side of the coin” to SJWs as “not helpful, its hypocritical, and all it does is kind of cause conflict and drives readers away.” 

I found it interesting that he never voiced this belief when describing someone from the left specifically telling him how comics have become part of the culture war.

Van Sciver goes on to describe his friend Diversity and Comics  as being about “kicking out culture warriors from the industry, and the hobby that he loves, and that would include you.”

This seems at odds with Diversity and Comics actual attitude. He constantly talks about himself as being ‘very forgiving’ (whatever that means) and constantly giving far left wing writers more opportunities by continuing to buy their products. Take the title of this recent video from Diversity and Comics as an example: ‘Please Look Past Mark Waid’s Weird Online Antics And BUY This Excellent CAPTAIN AMERICA Comic‘

I can’t get worked up about this sort of behavior myself, because it is just what moderates do. They all do it and they all do it all the time. To get upset about it would be like being angry at fish for insisting on swimming. Note that SJWAL was published in 2015, long before I’d even thought about deconverging the comics industry or heard of either Van Sciver or Diversity and Comics.

Photo-preening is wrong and illegal

You can’t say that I haven’t repeatedly warned you about the negative consequences of photo-preening online at your children’s expense:

An Italian woman has been banned from posting images of her teenage son on social media, and threatened with a 10,000 euro fine if she defies it.

The 16-year-old had made a court complaint about his mother’s social media habits, which included posting pictures of him on Facebook without his consent.

A Rome family court dealing with the mother’s divorce from the teen’s father, ruled in the 16-year-old’s favour. The court ruled that as per Italian copyright law, the subject of the photographs owns the copyright and the mother was therefore in breach.

It’s natural to be proud of your children. But they do not exist to serve your ego, and as a parent, you should be far more concerned about protecting their privacy and their futures than in trying to demonstrate to everyone what a wonderful father or mother you are, or how fabulous your genetic legacy happens to be, or showing the distant relatives they barely know what they look like. That’s what Christmas cards are for.

Posting your children’s pictures online without their consent is obnoxious, self-serving, and potentially dangerous. It is also illegal in an increasing number of jurisdictions. Just don’t do it.

Pretty sure it won’t be

Ethan Van Sciver’s fourth video and counting about QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted #1: By the Book and me. Which, by the way, is still the #2 New Release in Kindle Comics & Graphics, just behind Marvel’s Darth Vader #10. I have no idea what he’s going on about now, as I didn’t bother watching it. But perhaps it will prove entertaining if this sort of thing amuses you.

The good news is that due to the unexpected success of our first release, I can announce that BOTH of Arkhaven’s first two digital comics will be released on a monthly schedule for the foreseeable future. RIGHT HO, JEEVES #1: A Binge at Brinkley will be out later this month and QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted #2: Zero Zero Tango, will be out in February. The first print editions are still expected to appear in February.

We will also be making an announcement about a second comics imprint soon. And about the ability to preorder the following.

Who needs truth?

A seriously converged professor attempts to square the circle by claiming that social justice warriors are the true defenders of free speech and open debate:

Do universities still educate their students or does political correctness hinder genuine intellectual development?

The political polarization that has divided the nation escalated last year on many campuses. Evergreen State in Washington witnessed a virtual campus takeover by left-wing student activists, leading to the departure of two prominent professors. NYU’s Jonathan Haidt argues that the leftist turn on campus, especially as expressed in the “social justice” orientation of the humanities and social sciences, poses as great a danger to society as the hyper-partisan politics of Fox News.

To Haidt’s point, a scandal erupted in the fall in Canada when Lindsay Shepherd, a graduate teaching assistant for an introductory communications course at Wilfrid Laurier University, played a video clip in which Jordan Peterson, a controversial professor, declared his refusal to address trans students by their preferred gender-neutral pronouns. Shepherd claims she was showing the video neutrally, just to start a debate about grammar usage, but she was reprimanded by her supervisors in a now-infamous meeting that she recorded and released to the media.

One prominent commentator, while decrying the seeming censorship evinced by Shepherd’s ordeal, likened Peterson’s challenge to current campus orthodoxies to the skepticism practiced by Socrates — just the kind of thing that should lead to increased knowledge. Indeed, many now insist that healthy skepticism and free inquiry, the supposed heart of the Socratic method and what Haidt labels the “disinterested pursuit of truth,” are in dire need of a revival in the academy.

I’m not so sure.

In fact, in important ways the social justice approach — which emphasizes the dynamics of power and oppression — that many fear has taken over the humanities and social sciences at its best is actually an improvement over the “disinterested pursuit of truth” and more in line with the Socratic method. In fact, rather than constituting an attack on knowledge, the social justice lens reflects new ideas generated by academic disciplines and experts within them, and generally encourages expanding our knowledge and opening up subjects to new perspectives, much like Socrates advocated.

Translation: we’ll write fiction, call it definitive, and you’ll like it, you outmoded relics with your outdated affection for “truth”, “history”, and “science”.

George Orwell would not have been even remotely surprised. SJW Konvergenzsprache is real-world Newspeak. And this namedropping appeal to “Socratic dialectic” is pure pseudodialectical rhetoric from the Aristotelian perspective.

As the old Italian admiral told me, in the end, it always comes down to Aristotle vs Plato.

They really don’t know who you are

The Internet is a big place. A very big place. So big, in fact, that you can go repeatedly through multiple rounds of “don’t they know… no, I guess they really don’t” no matter how much traffic you happen to build up the years.

And the one thing that I would point out here is that all those people named have HUGE platforms. IDK if Vox has a different avenue besides his bog, but only roughly 1000 people seem to read it, based off the number on the side.  That made me think that maybe he was alt right.  I understand the point tho.
– Capn Cummings

Yeah, that number on the side is just a little misleading. The actual pageviews today: 100,387. The actual pageviews yesterday: 105,373. That will work out to be about 2.8 million for the month, which is pretty much the new normal.

Blowing the lid off

An article entitled New Book Blows the Lid Off the Dark World of Child Sex Abuse in Sci-Fi Fandom is now trending on PJ Media.

Moira Greyland is the daughter of famous authors Marion Bradley Zimmer and Walter Breen. She has written a memoir about growing up in a “queer” family and suffering hideous child abuse. In The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon, Greyland details the horror of being a helpless child trapped in a far left fantasy world. The world constructed by her mother, author of The Mists of Avalon, and her father, author of Greek Love (a book literally detailing why pedophilia is fine and even good) was a dark and frightening world. Unfortunately, though many saw how unhappy Greyland and her siblings were, no one stepped in to stop it and, in fact, turned a blind eye.

Greyland’s description of her family’s philosophy is chilling. “All sex is always right no matter what.” This philosophy forced her to endure being raped by her father at the achingly innocent age of four and molested by her mother throughout her childhood. Both her parents insisted she was gay because they believed that every person is naturally homosexual and will be homosexual if not corrupted by heterosexual experiences. Through the exposure to two gay parents and relatives and their friends, Greyland developed a theory about homosexuality that is very unpopular.

“It is my belief that homosexuality is a matter of IMPRINTING, in the same way that BDSM fantasies are,” she explains in the book. “To the BDSM’er, continued practice of the fantasy is sexually exciting. To the gay person, naturally, the same. However, from what I have seen, neither one creates healing. My mother became a lesbian because she was raped by her father. My father was molested by a priest–and regarded it as being the only love he had ever experienced. There are a vanishingly few people who are exclusively gay, but far more who have relationships with people of BOTH genders, as my parents and other relatives did.”

This, of course, is not allowed to be discussed in the age of the Gaystappo, which must be praised at all times. But do we not owe it to the children raised in these environments to hear their experiences? Does the #MeToo craze include the children of gays who did not have idyllic experiences?

Read the whole thing. It’s a remarkably in-depth article about Moira Greyland’s The Last Closet.

Mailvox: 8 questions for the Alt-Right

Sargon of Akkad, a youtuber, recently made a video asking eight questions of the Alt-Right, and this caused me to wonder what you would consider the correct answers to be.

1: Are Jews Oppressing White people?

No. This is an exaggeration. Some elite Jews are suppressing non-Jews, for example, a very small number of Jews in elite university admissions offices are suppressing Asians and whites in the U.S. university system while aiding blacks, Hispanics, and other foreigners.

2. Should Interracial Couples be forced to separate?

No. People deserve to experience the consequences of their decisions and actions.

3. Should the government prevent citizens from leaving the country to preserve the race?

No. But it should not feel any responsibility to protect them, provide for them, or help them return when their hosts turn on them either.

4. Should the state control education?

No. It has done an abysmal job by every measure.

5. Should the state control the media?

No.

6. Should the State control the economy?

No. But it should control which parties are permitted, and are not permitted, to participate in the national economy. And it should always act to ensure that the nation benefits at the expense of foreign parties when those parties wish to participate.

7. Do the decisions of individual white people matter to the alt right’s goals?

No. Not even a little bit.

8. Should women have a role in public life? (or should they be home makers?)

The question is a false dichotomy. Being a homemaker is the most important role a woman can have in public life. They should be rewarded, encouraged and celebrated for doing so.

Of course, all these questions are loaded and amount to little more than a feeble attempt to discredit and disqualify the Alt Right. More importantly, they are irrelevant. The tactics and the strategies are not the objective; how you get there does not matter if the most important thing is to get there. We presently live in a lotus-eating society of freeloaders, which is why our society is going to collapse. And it should come as no surprise that the lotus-eating freeloaders are indignant at the observation that they are going to have to stop eating lotuses and freeloading if they wish to continue eating at all.