Category: Uncategorized

In Defense of Garden Gnomes

It’s not an argument that I’d hitherto contemplated, but anything that defends garden gnomes while attacking modern art is obviously correct in my book.

It was only with the rise of the Avant Garde and specifically subsidies for those artists that this magical category of “Kitsch” comes about in which all the folk arts and lower-class aesthetic sensibilities as dismissed not by an aristocracy that feels noblesse oblige, but by ethnic and class enemies who need to discredit and exclude the productive national majority ethnicity from their own institutions, so that they, the capturing ethnicity and interests, might extract the tax dollars and institutional prestige the productive classes themselves generate.

Now you might say “that’s cute but do you really care about Garden Gnomes and dogs playing poker that much?”

No but I REALLY care about realistic historical depictions in art, and the national character and mythologization of my people. And the SECOND you let these parasites get in and declare the national majority’s folk art is somehow illegitimate or aesthetically bankrupt, something they’d never say about the absolute WORST minority art (No black, jewish, muslim, latino, queer, lesbian, communist, or any other EVER gets accused of kitsch no matter how inept, propagandistic, or downright dumb their art is), the second you give them that power, they use it in every single instance against any work that might moralize, uplift, or express the values of the ethnic majority or middle-class.

This is the reason your architecture is ugly, this is the reason sculptures only depict sexual degeneracy or political corruption, not heroism, this is the reason every approved artwork that isn’t a legacy holdover (which their paid activists destroy) exists in some way to actively offend, “challenge”, or “discomfort” the productive classes who actually make society run.

When’s the last time a museum curator proudly said they’re displaying a work to “Challenge” the black community? To “discomfort” the Jews? That offending the queer community is necessary to start a dialogue?

Never.

Because the purpose of art is not “contemplation” or “challenging assumptions” it’s aesthetic warfare to moralize or demoralize enemy peoples and communicate the dominance hierarchy, either through aesthetic mogging or humiliation.

That being said, I’ve never been a fan of that 70s macrame home art one would sometimes see on displayed on wooden walls or the classic velvet Elvis. But the idea that Thomas Kincaid’s pretty paintings are somehow less artistically worthy than Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs is obviously and intrinsically false.

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Slay Your Darlings

The Guardian finally breaks down and mentions that its darling Neil Gaiman might just have maybe done something just a little bit naughty.

Neil Gaiman screen adaptations halted after allegations of sexual misconduct
Netflix’s Dead Boy Detectives has been cancelled and productions by Amazon and Disney have been put on hold amid reports about the Coraline author

Three screen adaptations of Neil Gaiman’s works have been cancelled or had their production paused amid reports accusing the author of Coraline and The Sandman of sexual misconduct.

Netflix’s Dead Boy Detectives, based on characters created for DC Comics by Gaiman and Matt Wagner, has been cancelled after one season. Production of the third and final season of Amazon drama Good Omens, based on the 1990 novel by Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, has been paused, according to US website Deadline.

Meanwhile, development of a Disney film adaptation of Gaiman’s 2008 young adult novel The Graveyard Book has been put on hold. None of the streaming services has confirmed that these decisions were taken because of the allegations, but Gaiman apparently offered to step back from his involvement in Good Omens, according to Deadline.

Gaiman’s representatives declined to comment on the decisions taken by the streaming services.

In July, an investigation by Tortoise media reported allegations by two women of sexual misconduct against Gaiman, including sexual abuse and coercive behaviour. Gaiman has strongly denied any unlawful conduct. One woman, whose first name is Scarlett, alleged that Gaiman performed sexual acts on her without her consent when she was working as a nanny for the author’s family in New Zealand. Gaiman said they only engaged in consensual acts. A second woman, identified only by the initial K, alleged that Gaiman penetrated her without consent; Gaiman denied any unlawful behaviour.

Further allegations have been made since Tortoise’s original report, including by Caroline Wallner, who alleged that Gaiman pressured her to have sex with him in return for letting her live at his property in upstate New York, and made her sign a non-disclosure agreement in return for a $275,000 payment. Gaiman has said that the relationship had been entirely consensual.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. No mention of the other two women. Even worse, there is no disclosure that Neil Gaiman is a contributor to The Guardian, most recently three days AFTER the initial Tortoise Media podcast was released that broke the news of what The Guardian calls his “sexual misconduct”. And no mention of the fact that The Guardian regularly publishes articles about Neil Gaiman per month, including three in August 2024 long after the accusations were made public.

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Sad Puppy Stupidity

Conservatives are nothing more than a posturing, cowardly ignorazzi. Consider Sarah Hoyt’s latest retarderies on the Haitian invasion.

  • The truth is that the left howls racist or white supremacist because — as usual — they confuse race with culture. 
  • Race means nothing. Culture means everything.
  • In fact, things have been bad for so long in Ohio that even attempts at turning it around are impossible. 
  • They [the Haitians] could be salvaged, and if there’s a place they might have hope, it’s the US.
  • Their kids would be okay-ish, and their grandkids would be American.
  • Look, again, race is bullshit.

Race is a subset of genetics. And nations are a subset of race. To claim that “race means nothing” necessarily means asserting that genetics are nothing and nation means nothing. The claim is therefore a) false, b) dishonest, c) scientifically ignorant, d) logically inept, and e) cowardly. And, of course, self-interested, coming as it does from one who is herself an immigrant with no historic connection to the New World.

It is certainly possible for an amalgamation of peoples to become a nation over time. And history suggests, given the various genetic, linguistic, and cultural components involved, this process requires about 1,000 years. Note that “black Americans” are, on average, genetically 18 percent European, and yet after 400 years, they still remain a very distinct and self-aware people with their own culture and even their own national anthem.

It doesn’t matter what example you choose. Have the European immigrants to Palestine become proper well-adjusted Palestinian nationals in the 127 years since the first Zionist Congress? Has the Röstigraben disappeared since the first French-speaking canton joined the Schweizerische Eidgenossenschaft in 1481?

Conservatives can never be part of the solution. They are an intrinsic element of the problem; they always have been and they always will be. Reject conservative retardery and all its cowardly pomposities.

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Hypergamouse Lives!

They can deplatform. They can demonetize. They can cancel our campaigns. But they can’t stop Lacey from drawing. In Episode 112, Dag finds himself summoned to HR.

UPDATE: Fandom Pulse has published an article observing some of the interesting facets of BackerKit’s subjective application of its Community Guidelines. Sure, it might sound like a stretch, but that’s the point about the extremely expansive language that was utilized against Hypergamouse. I mean, how many creators there have an “association” of some kind with Neil Gaiman, who is credibly accused of serial off-platform harassment dating back to 1986.

The irony of the post banning a project for “association” is that BackerKit hosts a myriad of projects, and a cursory look into the creators could reveal some questionable associations.

Brandon Sanderson recently crowdfunded a book on their platform, for instance. Tor Books published Sanderson, and Tor Books had a problem in 2013 with an employee accused of sexual harassment. Under these guidelines, Brandon Sanderson would be “associated” with something that violates their Community Guidelines as per the below paragraph’s listing of off-platform “harassment” as part of their stated terms of service.

BackerKit has not reached out to ban Brandon Sanderson as of this writing.

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Putin Gives Clear Warning

If NATO assists in any long-range attacks on Russia, Russia will strike NATO directly. The problem is that the neoclowns desperately want the war between Russia and NATO to go hot because it’s the only path that might give them sufficient cover to permit them to escape the inevitable wrath of the West that they have abused and misruled for the last 40 years.

Some very consequential statements and movements today. The biggest — and most alarming — comes from Vladimir Putin. He minces no words — any attack inside Russia with Western precision missiles will be treated as an act of war and Russia will respond accordingly.

This should be setting off alarm bells at the Pentagon and USEUCOM (US European Command) and NATO. But, I think that the military lightweights infesting these various commands have persuaded themselves that Moscow is just blowing hot air. This is the kind of miscalculation that can lead to reckless decisions on the part of NATO and Ukraine.

While Putin is leaving no doubt about the position of Russia if such weapons are used, the reality on the ground in Ukraine is turning more dire for Ukraine with each passing day. Russia is announcing the capture of at least three settlements a day in the Donbass and is moving forward with determined lethality in the Kursk region. There is nothing that Ukraine can do, even with support from NATO, to alter the path to defeat

It’s not that the military lightweights in command have persuaded themselves, it’s the clowns giving them their orders who have told them that Putin wouldn’t dare to attack the NATO countries waging war on Russia. The fact that these are the exact same people who said Putin wouldn’t dare to attack Ukraine, that he was going to be thrown out of power, run out of ammunition, and die of cancer tends to strongly suggest that they are wrong.

Putin’s precise words were as follows:

“There is an attempt to substitute concepts. Because we are not talking about allowing or prohibiting the Kiev regime to strike at Russian territory. It is already striking with the help of unmanned aerial vehicles and other means. But when it comes to using high–precision long-range Western-made weapons, it’s a completely different story. The fact is that, as I have already said, and any experts will confirm this (both here and in the West), the Ukrainian army is not able to strike with modern high-precision long-range systems of Western production. It can’t do that. This is possible only with the use of satellite data, which Ukraine does not have — this is data only from satellites of either the European Union or the United States, in general, from NATO satellites. This is the first one. 

“The second, and very important, perhaps key, is that flight missions to these missile systems can, in fact, only be carried out by military personnel of NATO countries. Ukrainian servicemen cannot do this. And therefore, it is not a question of allowing the Ukrainian regime to strike Russia with these weapons or not to allow it. It’s about deciding whether NATO countries are directly involved in a military conflict or not. If this decision is made, it will mean nothing more than the direct participation of NATO countries, the United States, and European countries in the war in Ukraine. This is their direct involvement.

“And this, of course, significantly changes the very essence, the very nature of the conflict. This will mean that NATO countries, the United States, and European countries are at war with Russia. And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the very essence of this conflict, we will make appropriate decisions based on the threats that will be created to us.”

It’s clear that Putin and the rest of Clown World’s enemies are waiting for something. Russia, China, Iran, and Hezbollah are all being very patient and passing up numerous justifiable opportunities to respond to various provocation after provocation by the clowns. The Narrative insists that they are all afraid of the mighty US Navy and the IDF, but that doesn’t make any sense in light of what we’ve been witnessing for the last two years.

To me, it’s looking more like one of two things. Either they are waiting for something to happen within Clown World, such as a structural collapse or some sort of palace coup that they support, or they are going to hit in one massive simultaneous multi-front offensive that will cause Clown World to collapse in shock. It might even be a case of Plan A and Plan B; it would be very surprising if astute Sigma leaders like Xi and Putin did not have contingency plans, and contingency plans for those contingency plans, already agreed upon and in place.

Fortunately for those of us who are in, but not of, Clown World, it’s clear that both the Russian and Chinese leaders view military force as a last resort, and not a first one. Which is a good thing, because the Ukrainian strategy, such as it is, is total fucking amateur hour.

The West must guarantee to be prepared to get more involved by sending ground troops to certain parts of Ukraine to free up Ukraine’s manpower which could be sent to the front lines. Zelensky believes after this campaign Russia would be forced to retreat, at some point Putin’s leadership would be destabilized and replaced, with the new leadership signing a peace deal.

As I have repeatedly pointed out, any military strategy that relies upon the enemy leadership being “destabilized and replaced” is retarded, wrong, inept, and historically ignorant. It simply doesn’t happen in real warfare. The proposed victory condition is intrinsically expeditionary, and falls within the realm of spycraft, not war. What we’re seeing now is the difference between real war conducted by well-schooled general staff and expeditionary war conducted by intelligence agencies.

Zelensky said that in two days he will present Joe Biden with a “plan for victory over Russia.” The latecomer said the plan would be, in particular, psychological and political in nature.

In times of war, being clever with the word spells and the psychobabble is no substitute for industrial capacity.

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The Minestrippers

It’s not just big established companies that are being managed into irrelevance and eventual extinction. A good article on the “mismanagerial class” doesn’t quite get down to the roots of the structural problem with the US corpocracy:

The problem of companies being enthusiastically managed into irrelevance is often simplified to blaming MBAs, but this doesn’t tell the whole story. Although Intel’s Otellini and Boeing’s McNerney were MBAs, Sony’s Idei was just a career manager who went to college in Japan. Jeff Immelt, an MBA, presided over the precipitous decline of General Electric from 2001 to 2017. Yet his notorious predecessor for twenty years, Jack Welch, is often held equally responsible—and he had a PhD in chemical engineering. Westinghouse, once an American industrial conglomerate with a major line of business in building nuclear reactors, undertook a seemingly absurd and ultimately fatal pivot into becoming a media company in the 1990s. The man who led that change, Michael H. Jordan, was a chemical engineer by training too—though also a former McKinsey partner.

Rather, the problem seems to stem from a particular way of thinking about what a company even is, what its goals are, and what measures are or are not appropriate to achieve those goals. In simplified terms, we can think of companies as organized to create value and sustain themselves by capturing a portion of the created value as financial profit. When executives, board members, and major investors manage companies by and for the bottom line, they operate on a theory of the company as a vehicle solely for capturing profit. When this happens, the difficult and holistic question of creating value in the first place—a question unique for every company—simply goes unaddressed. It is treated as a permanently solved, one-time problem that no longer merits attention or resources; at Boeing, for instance, senior engineers were reportedly told they were no longer needed because Boeing’s products were “mature,” as if it was impossible for further progress in airplanes to ever be made. The focus is instead on raising profit margins and share prices through cost-cutting and various other attempts to improve efficiency or appeal to investors. This school of thought appears to be the dominant one in the influential U.S. financial sector and might be termed “shareholder capitalism.”

Outside of software and the few domains where former software entrepreneurs have already founded new market entrants, creating more unique and tangible value is at best a secondary concern after capturing more profit or contributing to the intangible value of a society with socially conscious firms.

This implies that much of the modern economy is not even trying to undertake productive economic activity as it is commonly understood. Though surprising, this conclusion seems to provide a satisfying and elegant explanation for many contemporary socioeconomic mysteries. Though MBAs, financiers, managers, or accountants are perhaps more inclined to view a company as a vehicle for capturing profits or intangibly contributing to society, there is nothing preventing trained engineers from inclining toward the same views as well. After all, engineers are formally trained in engineering, not in an alternative theory of business management.

From startup to giant government-supported effective monopoly, the core concept of the “company” has changed. Until the 1980s, a company was understood to be an organization that existed in order to profitably provide goods and services to its customers. But with the onset of financialization, a company became seen as a vehicle for the transfer of money from the government, from venture capitalists, or from Wall Street to the primary stakeholders. The customers were secondary, the goods and services tertiary. The existing businesses and customer bases are nothing more than mines to be stripped of all their assets, then abandoned, barren and empty.

This is why deplatforming – unthinkable in “the customer is always right era” – is now very common and the quality of the goods being produced and the services being provided is in free fall. The convergence of the corporations is rendering them totally incapable of fulfilling their nominal core functions, and combined with the financialization of the corporate sector, means they’re not even incentivized to attempt to fulfill those functions.

If Lockheed Martin can arrange to get a government contract paying $100 billion for a single jet fighter that cannot even fly, that’s great business by today’s standards. If a startup can receive $1 billion in venture capital without ever generating a single dime of income, that’s a home run by today’s standards. And yet, there is no actual economic activity. There is nothing being produced and no services provided.

In other words, it’s a fragile system with a foundation that isn’t built on sand, but thin air. Which is why it is vital for those who wish to survive, and perhaps even thrive, amidst the system’s inevitable ruins to ignore the way business is done today and focus on the age-old principles of providing genuine value to actual customers.

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BackerKit is Converged

Apparently it was a bad idea to consider utilizing BackerKit’s new crowdfunding platform. The SJWs in their Trust and Safety department refused to approve the HYPERGAMOUS Volume 1 campaign.

Subject: Important Message from BackerKit Trust & Safety
Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2024 18:17:14 +0000
From: BackerKit Trust & Safety trustandsafety@backerkit.com
Reply-To: trustandsafety@backerkit.com

Hello,

We are writing to inform you that after a thorough review of your project submission, BackerKit will not be able to approve your project “Hypergamouse Volume 1” for launch on our platform. This decision is based on documented association with content that violate our platform’s Crowdfunding Rules and Community Guidelines.

Specifically, BackerKit prohibits offensive material, both on-platform and off-platform, including hate speech, content promoting harm, discrimination, bigotry, or intolerance toward any marginalized or protected groups. Our guidelines state that we do not permit content or creators that engage in personal attacks, harassment, or the promotion of harmful ideologies, including those that may be seen as discriminatory.

This decision is final. If you have further questions, you may submit an inquiry at trustandsafety@backerkit.com or in an email response here.

Regards,

—
Dave Alvarez-Villalpando
Head of Trust & Safety @ BackerKit

We should have simply stuck with Kickstarter, which has gotten considerably more pragmatic over the years since getting rid of a number of thought police who had been running its Trust & Safety police. And so the culture wars continue…

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Radical Optimism

Original Castalia Library subscribers may find this anecdote from Dua Lupa to be amusing.

The pop icon also revealed that she knew what the title of her album was going to be from the very beginning. ‘I knew the title for ‘Radical Optimism’. It was a term that my friend told me, I was doing an interview with him, and he was like, “You know what the world needs? Is radical optimism.” ‘And I lived with that thought for so long, and it just became more and more prevalent as time went on.’

Radical, relentless…

But speaking of music, check out Spotify!

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The Pragmatic Phase

The smarter clowns are now fully aware that history did not, in fact, end, and that the pendulum is rapidly swinging back in their faces. So they’re attempting to recapture all the centrists and conservatives that their globalist overreach cost them and stave off a complete collapse of their “neoliberal rules-based world order” by switching to their phase they describe as “pragmatic realism”.

The American public deserves a sober and realistic debate about the nature and salience of the U.S. interests at stake in Ukraine. The American electorate also deserves to be told the truth: that Ukraine is highly unlikely to succeed in expelling Russian forces from its territory, even with the continuation of strong support from the West. Trump’s readiness to seek a negotiated settlement is not capitulation: it is pragmatism.

Trump’s skepticism toward nation building and the promotion of democracy abroad also resonates with the isolationist posture of early America. To be sure, Americans from the founding era onward believed that they were embarking on a unique experiment in building republican government, an experiment that they were ultimately destined to share with the rest of the world. Yet the founders and their successors were appropriately doubtful of the United States’ ability to engineer political change abroad and therefore understood that they needed to spread democracy primarily by example. As then Secretary of State John Quincy Adams famously stated in 1821, the United States “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”

So, too, did successive U.S. presidents appreciate the need to operate in the world as it is, working with democracies and nondemocracies alike in the pursuit of U.S. interests. Even as President James Monroe warned Europe’s great powers in 1823 against any “future colonization” in the Western Hemisphere, he acknowledged and accepted Europe’s political preferences. It was the policy of the United States, he asserted, “not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers; to consider the government de facto as the legitimate government for us; to cultivate friendly relations with it.”

Trump took this ideological variant of isolationism too far during his presidency, exhibiting a fondness for autocrats such as Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jung Un while giving a cold shoulder to the leaders of allied democracies. But Trump’s approach to grand strategy does exhibit due caution to the promotion of democracy abroad. He correctly traced the United States’ overreach in the Middle East to the “dangerous idea that we could make Western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interests in becoming a Western democracy.”

Trump’s brand of U.S. statecraft has deep roots in the American experience and, like the original version of isolationism, has something for almost everyone, giving it broad appeal across the American electorate. Democrats dismiss his “America first” agenda as strategic delusion at their own peril. Instead, they should preempt it by embracing its best elements.

Democrats need to find the middle ground between an expansive liberal internationalism that is no longer sustainable at home or abroad and the dangerous isolationist excesses that would likely accompany Trump’s return to the presidency. That middle ground entails standing by Biden’s multilateralism and his investment in old alliances and new partnerships, moves that have resuscitated U.S.-led collective action and restored the nation’s image as a team player. At the same time, the United States must avoid the bouts of strategic overreach, such as in Afghanistan and Iraq, that encourage the electorate to gravitate toward isolationist alternatives.

In Ukraine, that middle ground requires working to broker a cease-fire and focusing on ensuring that the 80 percent of the country still under Kyiv’s control is secure, prosperous, and stable. With Ukraine up against relentless aggression from a much larger neighbor, that outcome would qualify as a success by any reasonable measure. In the Middle East, Washington should seek to end the violence in Gaza and then lay out a pathway to Palestinian self-determination and normalization of Israel’s relationships with its neighbors. The United States should stand up to Chinese ambition, but also avoid unnecessary provocations that could lead to an irreversible geopolitical rupture. Washington should work intently to cooperate with Beijing to tame rivalry and advance joint efforts to tackle global challenges.

The United States cannot afford to run away from the world, as it did during the long era of isolationism. But it can no longer seek to run the world, which it has neither the power nor the domestic consensus to do. Instead, Americans need to learn to live in a world of ideological diversity and multiple conceptions of order, working alongside other centers of power, democracies and nondemocracies alike. Pragmatic realism should guide U.S. statecraft.

Clown World always seeks to control the entire debate. So, now that events have escaped their control, they’re resetting the boundaries of the public discourse in an attempt to permit the less dangerous ideas entry while continuing to prevent any comprehensive discussion of the real causes, problems, and potential solutions.

Notice, in particular, the assumption that Americans “need to learn” whatever it is that Clown World is preaching at the moment. Thirty years ago, Americans “needed to learn” that they had a responsibility for pushing democracy, free movement, and independent central banks everywhere around the world. Now, they are being told that they “need to learn” the limits of what they can do.

But what Americans really need to learn is that they are not free and that they do not need any foreign rulers telling them what to do.

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