Category: Uncategorized

Never trust the moderates

They will sell out you and their previously professed principles in favor of their new friends on the other side in a heartbeat, as the True Finns learned the hard way.

The Finns Party, formerly called “True Finns”, rose from obscurity during the euro zone debt crisis with an anti-EU platform, complicating the bloc’s bailout talks with troubled states. It expanded into the second-biggest parliamentary party in 2015 and joined the government, but then saw its support drop due to compromises in the three-party coalition.

This June, the party picked a new hard-line leadership and got kicked out of the government, while more than half of its lawmakers left the party and formed a new group to keep their government seats.

Huhtasaari, 38, who was picked as deputy party leader in June, said voters were still confused after the split-up but that the party would eventually bounce back.

“The game is really brutal. The biggest parties want us to disappear from the political map. No one is in politics looking for friends.”

The Finns party ranks fifth in polls with a support of 9 percent, down from 17.7 percent in 2015 parliamentary election, while the new “Blue Reform” group, which has five ministers, is backed by only 1-2 percent.

This is why moderates can only be permitted in support positions and should never be allowed in positions of leadership, policy-making, or personnel. They love to talk about principles for the reason that they don’t actually have any, and use these nonexistent principles as an excuse to break promises and commit betrayals whenever it suits them.

It’s not necessary, and it’s not possible, to spurn them entirely. There are enough of them that they have to be accepted. And this is fine, this is not a problem, so long as they are not allowed into any positions of power or influence despite their best efforts.

That being said, it won’t be surprising if the True Finns end up outperforming their 2015 results, while their short-sighted sell-outs vanish from the political scene.

Denying the faith

The Churchian cucks destroying their families with their virtue-signaling little know the evil they are doing:

I heard of a very good, decent family who regularly shared how they were called to have “an open house.” They hosted events, had people over for lunch, and enjoyed great discussions around the table with interesting people. All decent things to do.

Yet their desire to be hospitable went farther than it should have. They also rented a room to a foreign college student (they viewed this as a ministry opportunity), took in homeless men and let people in need stay in their home for months or even years at a time.

And their children paid for it. One of the sons was deliberately exposed to homosexual pornography as a young teenager thanks to their international renter (who, after leaving the house, came out as gay much to the Christian family’s surprise). Another of the family’s daughters left home early since she was uncomfortable with how one of the homeless men the parents helped had a habit of showing up in the yard outside her bedroom window.

Another time I heard the story of a Christian family who allowed a Russian exchange student to stay with them as a chance to “witness.” The night before he returned to Russia, he raped their teenage daughter.

Yet another Christian parent sent his young brain-damaged daughter to a special school program where she was raped by two boys who rode with her on the bus.

With tears in his eyes, he “forgave them.”

To hell with that.

The Bible is very clear that a man’s responsibility is to his family first, then to his ministry. That’s why Paul praised those with the gift of celibacy, because they are able to prioritize their service to God. But one is not doing right, or serving God, by putting one’s ministry ahead of one’s family. As Lee Jackson reminds us, those doing so are actually denying the faith.

One more thing. It is not your place to forgive a crime committed against your child. To the contrary, you should be begging forgiveness for your failure to protect them.

The Deep State and degeneracy

Anonymous Conservative sees a connection between The Last Closet and Pizzagate:

The media conglomerates formed because someone realized that if the microwave company owned the TV Station, they would get free mentions for their microwave, and sell more and make more profit, and then they would get the profits from the TV Station too. It was win-win, times a hundred.

Soon, the media company formed as TV stations bought radio outlets, publishing houses, movie production companies, and magazines. It could put mentions in books, magazines, in news stories on the radio station, in news broadcasts on TV stations, and on and on. Wasted airspace in the news show was now producing income because of stories about products the media company sold. The softdrinks in the concessions at the theme parks could be in paper cups with the latest movie’s graphics, while the soft drink company bought advertising on the TV station that featured the movie’s actors promoting their movie in the softdrink ad. It is all one giant corporate advertising circle-jerk, which will drown out any smaller business beneath the tsunami of free mentions for the big company’s products. Use things like hypnotic techniques and market analysis to optimize the return on advertising effort and investment, and nothing could stop the machine.

The media companies either formed or bought publishing houses because it was easy money. Take something cheap to produce and utterly moronic like Fifty Shades, and promote it for free on your media platform with news stories and puff pieces, and you can reap hundreds of millions from the books, movies, and whatever else. Licensed sex toys, clothing, posters, and on and on. And as Fifty Shades takes off, you use it to build actors and talent that can promote other stuff, and mention products in the movies which you want mentioned for other profits elsewhere. Even the first book promoted the second and third, which themselves promoted other stuff. It was the world’s biggest corporate advertising circle-jerk.

Of course the Deep State has its tentacles in the machine too. Where there is power and money there is control, and Deep State made sure it owned the key players in that machine, so it could control the machine.

One does wonder how so many broken, damaged, dysfunctional people seem to somehow keep winding up on top, no matter how often they underperform or fail. It’s almost as if someone, somewhere, wants those sort of people running things.

But then, it is always wise to remember that when Satan offered Jesus Christ all the kingdoms of the world, Jesus didn’t see fit to dispute whether the offer was a genuine one.

“an extraordinarily important book”

Peter Grant, who as priest and soldier has witnessed more things that should not be seen than most of us will see in 100 lifetimes, expresses his thoughts on Moira Greyland’s new book:

I’ve written more than once about child sexual abuse, particularly in the context of the Catholic Church’s clergy crisis.  I also had not inconsiderable contact with child molesters and abusers as a prison chaplain.  I wrote about some cases in my memoir of prison ministry.

However, nothing can capture the agony of child abuse, mental, spiritual and physical, like the recollections of an abused child.  Moira Greyland is one such person….

I think this is an extraordinarily important book.  I believe we all need to understand the horrifying impact of child sexual abuse on its victims.  Most of them can’t speak for themselves.  I commend and applaud Ms. Greyland’s courage in speaking out, not just for herself, but on their behalf, too.

On a personal note, I find this book a ghastly reminder of why I took the stand I did when the Catholic Church hierarchy signally failed (and has continued to fail to this day) to address the issue of clergy sexual abuse in any meaningful way. I don’t think the bishops, archbishops and cardinals in general have any idea of just how horrifying is the reality of child sex abuse. If they did, I can’t believe they would have allowed their neglect of the situation to continue for so long. Nevertheless, they did . . . and the result for the Church has been catastrophic.  By their wrong actions and deliberate inaction, they have destroyed the faith of millions – their faith in the Church, certainly, and in tragically many cases, their faith in God too. That destruction will be weighed in the scales against them when they come to the Judgment we all must face. I would not like to be in their shoes when that happens.

I can only suggest most strongly that you read Ms. Greyland’s book for yourself.

From the first reviews of THE LAST CLOSET: The Dark Side of Avalon:

  • This is a painful book to read, especially if you have children or loved ones. Doubly so if you have the latter who have suffered sexual abuse. Nevertheless, it is a book which absolutely has to be read. I feel almost embarrassed to add it also is an excellent guide to the inner workings of the science fiction circles of 70s and 80s as well but it is. This is a painful book to read about some bizarre grotesques but the sad fact is the very human Alice in her distorted terrible Wonderland was forced to keep much of this secret until now. 
  • A hard book to read, not because of the writing, but because of the subject. But this is a book that should be read. If it can inspire more victims to speak out and educate people to the hidden-in-plain-sight depredations that surround them then it will be worth the struggle of the author to put her life out for all to see.
  • I obtained this book through the Kindle Unlimited program. Here’s how important it was to me: I had a backlog of 9 books to read and review, 9 books by 9 good authors, that I expect to enjoy reading. THIS book was just released today, and I grabbed it up, and started reading immediately. Because it was important. It IS important. I just finished about 30 minutes ago; and I found myself being continually astounded that this person is ALIVE, much less strong enough to speak out. 
  • This is an important book. A book of horror and redemption. A book that needed deep courage to write and deep courage to publish. A book that churns the unchurnable stomach. A book that needs bravery to read, bravery to acknowledge the horror, the deep evil, that exists in our fallen world.
  • I didn’t mean to even start it, but now that I have, I can’t put it down – no matter how much I want to. It is a VERY important book. Astounding.
Today’s #DailyMemeWars

SJW as far as the eye can see

One of the most SJW-converged corporations on the planet just extended its tentacles even further:

Disney on Thursday announced a deal to acquire many parts of Twenty-First Century Fox for $52.4 billion in stock. The company will get Fox’s movie studios, network Nat Geo, Asian pay-TV operator Star TV, stakes in Sky and Hulu and regional sports networks. The acquisition bolsters Disney’s plans to become a dominant streaming service platform, making it a bigger threat to Netflix.

“The more desirable content they have, the better they will be able to compete in terms of trying to sell a subscription offering at a time there’s so much competition for subscription-based services,” said eMarketer senior analyst Paul Verna.

Bob Iger will remain Disney’s chairman and CEO through the end of 2021, at the request of the board of directors of both companies. Disney emphasized the importance of Iger to integrate the acquisition, saying in a statement that “extending his tenure is in the best interests of our company and our shareholders.”

On the plus side, there isn’t much at Fox to ruin. On the downside, this acquisition puts the SJWs in an even stronger position in the cultural war.

This is why it is so important to start and support independent endeavors such as Castalia House and Alt★Hero. Because if we don’t, there will be no alternative to the converged content being piped directly into everyone’s brains like a metaphorical Matrix.

Speaking of which, we need ten more beta testers. If you’re a gamer and you’re interested, please email with ELVETEKA in the subject. Old school Karateka-style arcade action.

Amazon goes after fake reviewers

Amanda at Mad Genius Club alerts us to a major change in policy at Amazon:

Since Amazon first opened its virtual doors, there have been concerns about reviews. Not just for books but for all the products sold through its site. It is no secret that authors have paid for reviews — and some still do. Or that there have been fake accounts set up to give sock puppet reviews. There have been stories about sellers and manufacturers planting fake reviews as well, all in the hopes of bolstering their product rankings and ratings. From time to time, Amazon has taken steps to combat this trend. One of the last times they did it, they brought in a weighted review system. This one differentiates between “verified purchasers” and those who did not buy the product viz Amazon. Now there is a new policy in place, once that should help — at least until a new way around it is found.

Simply put, Amazon now requires you to purchase a minimum of $50 worth of books or other products before you can leave a review or answer questions about a product. These purchases, and it looks like it is a cumulative amount, must be purchased via credit card or debit card — gift cards won’t count. This means someone can’t set up a fake account, buy themselves a gift card and use it to get around the policy.

Eligibility
To contribute to Customer Reviews or Customer Answers, Spark, or to follow other contributors, you must have spent at least $50 on Amazon.com using a valid credit or debit card. Prime subscriptions and promotional discounts don’t qualify towards the $50 minimum. In addition, to contribute to Spark you must also have a paid Prime subscription (free trials do no qualify). You do not need to meet this requirement to read content posted by other contributors or post Customer Questions, create or modify Profile pages, Lists, or Registries

Whether this change will work in the long run, I don’t know. But, for now, I welcome it.

As a frequent target of fake reviewers, I think this is fantastic. It should work brilliantly, because fake reviewers almost invariably try to hide their identities. Now that reviews will be tied to actual Amazon accounts, it’s very easy for Amazon to see whether the reviewer has a pattern of reviewing books that he has actually bought or not as well as giving Amazon the ability to deny the fake reviewer future access to Amazon’s retail channel if he makes a habit of regularly posting fake reviews or is the recipient of a large number of complaints about abusive reviews.

It was pretty clear that Amazon was already beginning to target fake reviews earlier this year. One SJW who left a fake review of SJWAL back in June even complained about his previous fake review being removed by Amazon.

Interesting that VD presents himself as an enemy of the “thought police”–he has already had my review taken down once, simply because it was negative. SAD!

First, I did not take the review down, Amazon did. And they did so, not because it was negative, but because it was obviously fake. Demonstrating, once more, that SJWs always lie. And given that SJWADD, published in October, has no fake reviews while the most recent fake reviews for SJWAL and ATOB are both from October 2017, I conclude that it was Amazon’s more aggressive policing of fake reviews this fall that led to this new policy. I also think Amanda’s wish for Kindle Unlimited subscribers to be permitted to post reviews is unwise because in my experience, I have already seen how some KU subscribers will download a book they have no intention of reading in order to be able to post a fake review that is marked as a Verified Purchase.

Since Amazon can see exactly how many pages a KU subscriber has read of the book he nominally reviewed, I have no doubt that they saw enough reviews being posted by KU non-readers to decide that KU subscribers cannot be trusted to post honest reviews. Amazon also appears to understand how permitting KU subscribers to post reviews creates a disincentive for authors to put their books in Kindle Select.

Amazon’s decision is an excellent application of Taleb’s “skin in the game” and I expect it will significantly improve the quality of Amazon’s reviews.

Speaking of Amazon, now that I’m able to return to finishing a certain extended edition, I’ve decided to celebrate by making A THRONE OF BONES free on Amazon tomorrow and the rest of this weekend. And if you’ve already read it, then perhaps you should consider getting the hardcover for your bookshelves.

Global Justice needs heroes!

The first Alt★Hero shirt is here! This one features a design that is very similar to the poster previously featured on Dangerous.

This one says, “The Struggle for Human EQUALITY and PROGRESS Needs Heroes Who Fight For GLOBAL JUSTICE”

Hey, we want to bring over all those Marvel and DC readers, right? Can’t hook them without bait.

More cracks in the EU

The Eastern European countries are not backing down now that they know the costs of the EU are higher than the promised benefits:

Last week, the EU moved to punish Poland over its refusal to accept refugees by taking away its voting powers in the European Council. But if the row escalates much further it could push Poland out of the bloc, according to Renata Mienkowska, a political scientist at the University of Warsaw.

Ms Mienkowska explained the EU is unlikely to be able to punish Poland, which has refused to accept refugees into the country since the refugee crisis began in 2015. It will need a unanimous vote by all other EU members to ban Poland from voting on the European Council. But the bloc is unlikely to achieve this, given the EU has also moved to punish Hungary and the Czech Republic for the same transgression, and the three nations are likely to back once another.

Ms Mienkowska told Die Zeit: “The EU has tried to intervene on several occasions, but too little and too late. Unanimity is needed for the withdrawal of the right to vote in the European Council – it does not exist because Hungary is on the side of Poland.”

‘Warszawo, walcz!’

Surrender, he cucked, cucklishly

Rod Dreher advises Christians to stop fighting the culture war, surrender, and hope that Democrats will be nice:

If we don’t stop it now, the Trumpist politics of “let’s tick off the liberals” is going to be devastating to religious liberty. The country as a whole is narrowly divided. As we saw last night in Alabama, it is possible to lose even safe Republican seats if what the party offers to voters is an embarrassing, bomb-throwing clown who only depresses Republican turnout and juices Democratic turnout. You simply cannot rely on the instincts of Republican voters to pull the lever for any yellow dog the party puts up. (And note well that it wasn’t the DC party that ran Roy Moore, but a plurality of Alabama Republican voters that put him in the race.) And you can’t live in such a bubble that you don’t pay attention to the effect your candidates have on incentivizing Democrats and Independents to vote against the GOP.

To repeat Lance Kinzer’s advice: Religious conservatives must be realistic about the fact that we are a minority in this country now, and that we face a very difficult political environment.

Almost makes you want to cheer for the lions, doesn’t it. No wonder young men want nothing to do with Churchianity and the Gospel of Judeo-Christ. I certainly don’t either.

Americans are a minority in the USA now too. But that doesn’t mean they are going to stay that way.

THE LAST CLOSET

Marion Zimmer Bradley was a bestselling science fiction author, a feminist icon, and was awarded the World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement. She was best known for the Arthurian fiction novel THE MISTS OF AVALON and for her very popular Darkover series.

She was also a monster.

THE LAST CLOSET: The Dark Side of Avalon is a brutal tale of a harrowing childhood. It is the true story of predatory adults preying on the innocence of children without shame, guilt, or remorse. It is an eyewitness account of how high-minded utopian intellectuals, unchecked by law, tradition, religion, or morality, can create a literal Hell on Earth.

THE LAST CLOSET is also an inspiring story of survival. It is a powerful testimony to courage, to hope, and to faith. It is the story of Moira Greyland, the only daughter of Marion Zimmer Bradley and convicted child molester Walter Breen, told in her own words.

In case you’ve been wondering why I haven’t been doing Darkstreams, finishing the extended edition of A Sea of Skulls, or wrapping up the first Voxiversity, well, this is why. To paraphrase the author, this is a difficult book to read, it was almost impossible to write, and it wasn’t exactly easy to edit or proofread either, which is why I am very grateful to the assistant editor and the two proofreaders for their invaluable assistance in this regard.

Moira asked me to write the foreword to The Last Closet. I will have more to add later, but for now, it will suffice as my public comment on the subject.

FOREWORD

I read four or five of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s books in high school. I started with The Heritage of Hastur, then read two or three more Darkover novels that caught my eye in the Arden Hills library. While I didn’t find them sufficiently entertaining to continue with the series, they were just interesting enough to inspire me to pick up a trade paperback of The Mists of Avalon not long after it was published by Del Rey in 1984. As it happens, I still have that much-ballyhooed monstrosity, its long-untouched pages now yellowing on a dusty bookshelf in the attic.

The Mists of Avalon was a massive 876-page bestseller heavily marketed as a feminist take on Camelot and the legends of King Arthur, and was critically hailed for being very different than the usual retellings of the classic tale. It was different, and in some ways, with its grim darkness and overt sexuality, The Mists of Avalon might even be considered a predecessor of sorts to George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. I found it to be too much of a soap opera myself, and certainly not a patch on Chrétien de Troyes, Thomas Malory, or even T.H. White, although there were a few salacious sections that did serve to liven up the book considerably.

But even as a red-blooded young man, some of those sections struck me as perhaps a little too salacious. While I can’t say that I had any inkling of what the author’s habits or home life were at the time, I did detect a slight sense of what I can only describe as a wrongness from the book. Arthur didn’t love Guinevere, but was pining away for his half-sister? Sir Lancelot was not only Galahad, but also Arthur’s bisexual cousin? Instead of being a tragic love triangle, Arthur, Launcelot, and Guinevere were a swinging threesome? And Mordred was not only Arthur’s son, but the product of incest knowingly orchestrated by Merlin for pagan purposes to boot?

Yeah, that’s not hot. That’s just weird and more than a little grotesque.

I don’t recall if I ever actually finished the novel or not, but I know I didn’t bother reading any of its many sequels. I felt that I had given this vaunted feminist author a fair shake and delved as deeply into Ms. Bradley’s strange psyche as I wished to go, little knowing that what I dismissed as freakish feminist literary antics were merely scratching the surface on what was actually an intergenerational psychosexual horror show.

Three decades later, despite being a science fiction author and editor myself, I found myself increasingly at odds with the creepy little community known as SF fandom, which can best be described as the cantina crowd from Star Wars, only depressed, overweight, and sexually confused. At the same time, I was also becoming increasingly aware of a wrongness that emanated from that community like a faint, but unmistakably foul odor.

There were rumors about the real reason behind science fiction grandmaster Arthur C. Clarke’s bizarre relocation from southern California to Sri Lanka. There was the arrest of David Asimov, son of science fiction legend Isaac Asimov, for the possession of the largest stash of child pornography the police had ever seen. There were the public defenses offered by many science fiction authors on behalf of the SFWA member and convicted child molester Ed Kramer. There was the naming of NAMBLA enthusiast and homo-horrorporn author Samuel Delaney as SFWA’s 2013 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master.

And then, of course, there was the historical Breendoggle, a fifty-year-old debate among science-fiction fandom concerning whether a child molester, Walter Breen, should have been permitted to attend the science-fiction convention known as Pacificon II or not. Believe it or not, the greater part of fandom at the time was outraged by the committee’s sensible decision to deny Breen permission to attend the 1964 convention; science-fiction fandom continued to cover for the notorious pedophile even after his death in 1993. In “Conspiracy of silence: fandom and Marion Zimmer Bradley”, Martin Wisse wrote:

Why indeed did it take until MZB was dead for her covering for convicted abuser Walter Breen to become public knowledge and not just whispered amongst in the know fans. Why in fact was Breen allowed to remain in fandom, being able to groom new victims? Breen after all was first convicted in 1954, yet could carry out his grooming almost unhindered at sf cons until the late nineties. And when the 1964 Worldcon did ban him, a large part of fandom got very upset at them for doing so.

The fact that fandom had been covering for pedophiles for decades was deeply troubling. And yet, we would soon learn that this wrongness in science fiction ran even deeper than the most cynical critics suspected.

On June 3, 2014, a writer named Deirdre Saorse Moen put up a post protesting the decision of Tor Books to posthumously honor Tor author and World Fantasy Award-winner Marion Zimmer Bradley, on the basis of Bradley’s 1998 testimony given in a legal deposition about her late husband. When Moen was called out by Bradley fans for supposedly misrepresenting Bradley, she reached out to someone she correctly felt would know the truth about the feminist icon: Moira Greyland, the daughter of Marion Zimmer Bradley and Walter Breen.

Little did Moen know how dark the truth about the famous award-winning feminist was. For when Moira responded a few days later, she confirmed Moen’s statement about Marion Zimmer Bradley knowing all about her pedophile husband’s behavior. However, Moira also added that her famous mother had been a child molester as well, and that in fact, Bradley had been far more violently abusive to both her and her brother than Breen!

I will not say more about the harrowing subject of this book because it is the author’s story to tell, not mine. But I will take this opportunity to say something about the author, whom I have come to admire for her courage, for her faith, and most of all, for her ability to survive an unthinkably brutal upbringing with both her sanity and her sense of humor intact.

Moira does not wallow in her victimhood. Nor does she paint her victimizers as soulless devils, indeed, her empathy for those who wronged her so deeply is more than astonishing, it is humbling. Her strength of character, her integrity, and her faith in a God she was raised to believe did not exist are almost inexplicable, particularly in an age where adult college students cannot face unintended microaggressions without the support of their university administrations, the campus police, and physician-prescribed pharmaceuticals.

Her story is more than a triumph of the human spirit, more than a tale of survival, and more than a devastating indictment of a seriously depraved community. It is an inspiration to everyone, particularly for anyone who has ever been subjected to abuse or ill-treatment as a child.

Moira’s message is clear: they can hurt you, they can harm you, and they can leave you with scars that last a lifetime, but they cannot touch your soul. Their sins are not your sins and their shame is not your shame. And there is a light that is always waiting to heal those who summon the strength to walk out of the last closet and turn their back on the darkness inside it.

UPDATE: Thank you for your strong support for the author.

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #392 Paid in Kindle Store
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