Category: Uncategorized

Stay Prepared to Laugh

Even though you won’t. Owen takes a victory lap.

Check out this breakdown of joe rogans new special and how over the top and aggressively gay he is. It’s at 1.4 million views in under a week and climbing. I want to see the fear in the eyes of all the frauds who lie and ass kiss rogan and attack anyone who makes fun of him in any way. I want to see that moment when they realize everyone knows now and they can no longer gas light and ad hominem anyone who makes joe feel insecure or sad.

I want to see them slowly start saying more vague things about joes contribution to comedy. Maybe from “saving” all of comedy to “he’s not totally destroying it. I mean he’s a really nice guy when you get to know him.” I knew this day would come. Enjoy every minute of this

Joe routinely talks shit about me on his podcast for saying obviously true and hilarious things. Well. I’ve learned in farming that eventually the chickens all come home to roost. And on a level of feel for the guy. I don’t hate him. I’m not taking pleasure in his humiliation. It’s all the comics who know better and lie. I do take pleasure in watching them squirm knowing that they have to “pivot their position.” I don’t think joe is as aware of the situation as all the leaches and ass kissers around him. Those guys can be the most vicious and the most cowardly.

The critical breakdown of Rogan’s stand-up special is much, much funnier than the special itself.

Unfortunately now it sounds like the crowd’s initial excitement and enthusiasm is running on fumes as we’ve got our first real obvious awkward bomb of the night. The crowd goes completely silent and Joe just stands there like a deer in headlights, now I don’t know if this is from excitement and arousal or from nervousness and fear likely some combination but this is the moment Joe starts profusely sweating through the mustard blouse perhaps its nerves from some subconscious realization that his shadow is about to take the wheel and squirt out a major leak here. Pay attention to this region here and watch how it develops throughout the show and by the way oh oh man look at Chekov’s Stool behind him just teasing us back there. Stop teasing us Joe! He knows how to build suspense that’s for sure.

Seriously though these aren’t really jokes, this is all just his regular podcast banter he’s been doing for the past 5 years, just yelled on a stage in front of an audience, and the bombs are piling up… it’s clear that his heart isn’t in it anymore. This thing was just a Greatest Hits Montage of the worst era of this guy’s podcast condensed into an hour.

It’s a brutal and hilarious demolition.

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Of Course it Gets Worse

The part that the pro-refugee morons never stop to think through: what exactly do you think those refugees are going to do once they are embedded in your society. Do you think they are going to abide by your norms? No, they are not. Do you think they will engage in your business practices? No, they will not. Do you think they are going to abide by your laws? No, they are not.

The dirt is not magic. The business practices are not universal. The law is not substantive. And most importantly, the society is not immutable.

There is absolutely no way that American society can survive 100 million non-European immigrants and their descendants and survive, any more than American Indian society was able to survive five million European settlers and survive. None whatsoever.

Did Palestinian society survive the immigration of the Jewish settlers?

The same is true of the UK, of Sweden, of Germany, and every other European society that is being invaded by non-European peoples. One need not believe there is anything intrinsically wrong with African, Arab, or Chinese culture to grasp that they are all fundamentally different than the culture of each and every European society.

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Clown World Still in Denial

Foreign Affairs attempts to put a pro-Clown World spin on the way China’s support for Russia is supposedly weakening the world’s largest economy vis-a-vis the West:

A substantially more sanguine outlook dominates the discourse of China’s experts. They have noted that the Western response to the war has not produced the most catastrophic outcomes that many had predicted. The “most intense wave of sanctions [in] history,” scholars at Renmin University’s Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies concluded in a February 2024 report, “did not achieve the expected results, but instead brought a backlash and counter-sanctions” as Russia found lifelines for its currency and trade with China and other countries. Many Chinese analysts also contended that Putin has evaded truly damaging diplomatic isolation, citing his recent state visits to North Korea and Vietnam and that in July, he hosted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Moscow. As a headline from the Chinese edition of the Global Times trumpeted after Putin’s trip to Hanoi: “The West’s Isolation of Russia Has Been Broken.”

In this view, China has avoided paying any significant economic or diplomatic price for propping up Putin’s war efforts. Indeed, the war has created trends that may redound to China’s benefit. The Russian economy’s ability to weather Western sanctions has impressed many Chinese scholars. After a visit to Moscow in February 2024, Xu Poling, an expert on the Russian economy, remarked that the war in Ukraine “has injected a steroid shot into the lethargic Russian economy, making it stronger and more vigorous.” He even speculated that Putin “is not exactly in a hurry to end the conflict.” Other analysts have marveled at how the war has reanimated Russia’s languishing military-industrial complex, which, a Global Times analysis concluded, had been “in a state of insufficient investment and production.” Since February 2022, the analysis observed, it has “accelerated the acceptance of state investment and increased production capacity,” leading to a “comprehensive recovery of Russian military-industrial enterprises” and “significant progress” in the production of new tactical missiles, armored vehicles, and drones.

As the war drags on, Chinese analysts also believe that the West’s unity is fracturing. As Democrats and Republicans fight “fiercely against each other and as the [U.S. presidential] election approaches, [the] situation is getting more and more unfavorable for Ukraine,” the prominent Eurasian Studies expert Ding Xiaoxing wrote in February. Jin Canrong, a hawkish international relations scholar, predicted that a public “backlash” against support for Ukraine in European countries and the United States would eventually doom Kyiv’s ability to defend itself.

Many of these Chinese experts’ analyses are fair, even astute. But missing from the public-facing discussion in China is a true recognition of the costs Beijing has assumed as a result of its support for Putin’s war. Experts’ early assessments lingered on dramatic potential damage to China; now, they tend to ignore or underappreciate the serious costs Beijing has incurred. China’s relations with most European countries have degenerated, probably irrevocably. In the declaration following its July summit, NATO included an unprecedentedly sharp denunciation of Beijing’s behavior, calling China a “decisive enabler” of Russia’s war effort—language that would have been unthinkable before February 2022.

Frustration with China is not limited to European policymakers. Europeans who were recently very bullish on Chinese-European relations—especially those with business interests in China—now hold a much dimmer view. A May survey of European CEOs by the European Round Table for Industry found that only seven percent believed that Europe’s relations with China would improve in the next three years. More than 50 percent saw future deterioration. In a July survey by the European Council on Foreign Relations that polled nearly 20,000 people, 65 percent of respondents in 15 European countries agreed that China has played a “rather negative” or “very negative” role in the ongoing war in Ukraine.

Although Western sanctions have not broken the Russian economy, the war in Ukraine has spurred further global economic fragmentation. For decades, Beijing has worked to build economic self-sufficiency; Chinese government planners stepped up these efforts around 2018 as they sought to prepare China for the splintering of globalization and the fracturing of supply chains. But China was not ready for the degree to which the war in Ukraine—coupled with growing national security concerns in many countries about technological dependence on China—hastened this fragmentation, prompting U.S. and European governments, companies, and investors to reallocate capital away from China and other geopolitically exposed markets. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine intensified foreign investors’ concerns about the Chinese market as it raised fears that Beijing could also face sanctions or economic repercussions because of its alignment with Moscow and its saber rattling toward Taiwan.

The war in Ukraine, and particularly Beijing’s decision to strengthen its strategic partnership with Russia, is also exacerbating the rifts in an already fractious U.S.-Chinese relationship. The Biden administration has repeatedly warned Beijing that the economic, technological, and diplomatic lifeline China is extending to Moscow works at cross-purposes with its stated desire for a stable bilateral relationship with the United States. But Beijing has continued to double down on its Russian gamble, including by launching a recent joint patrol with Russian bombers in the airspace just off the Alaskan coast. In May, Washington sanctioned over a dozen Chinese companies for their direct support of Moscow’s war effort. More sanctions are likely to come irrespective of the outcome of the upcoming U.S. presidential election.

The true recognition of the costs? What costs? To the contrary, China, like Russia and a number of other countries both in and out of BRICS, are beginning to recognize the true costs of engagement with Clown World. They see the degeneracy, they observe the material decline in morals, wealth, native birth rates, average IQ, and population demographics, and they rightly don’t want any part of it. What Clown World calls “freedom” and “democracy” is actually a slow-motion societal suicide. No matter what economic costs they might face, or foreign investments they might lose, no price is too high in exchange for removing themselves from the baleful influence of the Clown World cancer.

It’s not China that is in denial, but rather, the clowns of Clown World.

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The Marketeer

As I’ve commented in the past, John Scalzi is an amazingly good self-marketer. I’m not being sarcastic here at all, he’s one of the best I’ve ever seen, and I spent some time in the tech-invest world which is absolutely overflowing with self-promoters and would-be self-promoters. Marc Rein of Epic is probably the best I’ve ever known, but the fact that Scalzi managed to transform his mediocre and purely imitative writing into very profitable and award-winning science fiction career borders on magic.

And in this piece, which is ostensibly about the sexual assault allegations aimed at Neil Gaiman, he shows us how he does it, which is with a relentless focus on himself and how he wants the readers to view him.

In the wake of the various recent allegations involving Neil Gaiman, people have been both very sad that someone who they looked up to as an inspiration has, allegedly, turned out to be something less than entirely admirable, and are now looking to see who is now left that they can rotate into the spot of “the good dude,” i.e., that one successful creative guy who they think or at least hope isn’t hiding a cellar full of awful actions. One name I see brought up is mine, in ways ranging from “Well, at least we still have Scalzi,” to “Oh, God, please don’t let Scalzi be a fucking creep too.” Which, uhhhh, yeah? Thanks?

I have many thoughts about this and I’m going to try to make sense of them here, as much for myself as anyone else, so this may be messy and discursive and long (seriously, 3600 words, y’all), but, well, welcome to me.

3,600 words with one single reference to Neil Gaiman. It’s impressive, in its own unique way. What’s amazing is that the dimwitted SJWs will actually give credit to Scalzi for “addressing the issue” even though he’s done absolutely nothing but evade it to what is very nearly the greatest extent possible.

And the amusing thing about the piece is that literally no one idolizes Scalzi or is in any way imagining that the Ohio Doughboy can serve as an effective substitute for the brooding, Gothically-dreamy Mr. Tubcuddle. Gaiman is the apex version of Scalzi, with similarly self-marketed and manufactured success that is an order of magnitude greater. But both charlatans – and they are not only both charlatans, but self-admitted charlatans who suffer from Imposter Syndrome – are masters of persuasion and self-promotion.

One must give credit where it is due, after all. They’re both very good, they’re just not very good at what most people erroneously believe they are good at. And while some of Gaiman’s fans are falling for it, others already see through the would-be self-appointed replacement.

I find Scalzi’s post problematic. To me it’s a big hint that Scalzi himself may have issues – not with abuse, but he may be letting his fame and the occasional adulation get to his head.

While he acknowledged ‘Neil fucked up’, his main post is ‘please don’t idolize me’.

I’m sorry, but as someone who has some experience with fame and recognition in my own scope (I can’t reveal anything else, for obvious reasons on this type of sub), I feel that this is an extremely disingenuous take. As I said to one of the mysterious new accounts that I argued with here, no one who achieves that level of fame does so by wallflowering and accidentally dropping themselves into it. Curating your image of yourself is hard work that takes requires a constant habit. Otherwise, you’ll be forgotten.

Does Scalzi think that the problem is being idolized? That fans sometimes see the person whose art they consume is a hero? Then he can publish his art anonymously. Wattpad exists. J.K. Rowling tried publishing under a pseudonym, so did Doris Lessing. A person who reached that level of fame worked to gain prominence.

And I still find what he said about Neil insufficient. It makes it sound like all Neil did was cheat on his wife like once or twice, and not manipulate his image to shield his alleged predatory behaviour over a course of decades.

And while Scalzi doesn’t actually say it, it’s almost as if he’s implying that the problem is that Neil’s fans idolized Neil. (And not: Neil constructed this image that can be idolized – as any person who desires fame would be constructing out of themselves – and then abused it). I’m sorry, but can we please remember that famous people are not your friends? Every step of fame is constructed by the person who desired it. If Scalzi has reached a point where he has fans who idolize him, he worked to achieve it. If he doesn’t want it anymore, stop working at it.

Honestly, I didn’t really care about Scalzi prior to this, but this way of weighing in on the Neil Gaiman scandals (turning it around to make it about himself) and the weird mass downvote I got on the Neil Gaiman sub just gives me a bad impression of the whole thing.

But that’s what Scalzi quite literally does best. He turns EVERYTHING around to make it about himself, without shame, hesitation, or regret. That’s the entire basis for his career and his success.

UPDATE: A Gaiman fan points out that Scalzi happens to be friends with a lot of serious creeps.

Dude’s had at least four friends be ousted as creeps in 4 years, the last couple of them within 6 months of each other, at least 3 of them male writers with some serious clout in the field and one of them a big deal in fandom/Worldcon/Hugo. Some soul searching seems in order as to why you keep finding self professed friends of yours being ousted as creeps, maybe?

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Never Talk to the Media

This is how it’s done. In fact, if everyone refused to talk to the media, its influence would be significantly degraded, because without the cover of direct quotes from the relevant sources, their little hit pieces always end up looking like the groundless opinion pieces they actually are.

News query from The Associated Press

I’m a reporter covering religion and politics for The Associated Press. I’m working a story about Sen. JD Vance and the role of Catholicism in his life and approach to public policy. He has often been discussed as being in dialogue with Catholic post-liberals or integralists. You’ve been described as one of the leaders of the integralist movement, or as you have described it, political Catholicism. Would you be open to an interview on this topic, on your interactions with Sen. Vance and on your thoughts about the implications of his nomination for the vice presidency?

Peter Smith, Reporter, Global Religion team, The Associated Press

Dear Mr. Smith,
Thank you for your message. With whatever respect may be due, I would rather handle a hissing viper than interview with a journalist from the Associated Press. Come to think of it, I have spoken unjustly; vipers are at least sincere in their own way.

Adrian Vermeule, Ralph S. Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard Law School

Personally, I usually don’t even bother responding to the inquiries, because even the most firmly negative response just causes them to run their Reluctant Interview script, in which they first appeal to the opportunity to let you tell your own side of the story, then to the importance of the story, and finally, to veiled threats about some of the negative stuff they could write about, but might not if you talk to them.

Don’t take the bait, in fact, don’t even respond to them in the first place. Don’t get cute, don’t get clever; the more dishonest reporters will even try to utilize any rhetoric on your part and present it as you somehow threatening them. Remember, their whole objective is to make you look bad, and anything you say to them, or write to them, is potential grist for the mill.

But don’t delete their emails, always save them, in case you need them for the police or for a lawsuit. Because it looks really bad for them when they are issuing those veiled threats or claim to be “giving you the chance to respond” to a story that is already written and is scheduled to run the very next day.

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SFWA Melting Down

It looks as if SFWA is rapidly going the way of RWA, which is to say, toward extinction. Fandom Pulse has covered the resignation of the last TWO presidents in the last three weeks, now it’s got some inside information as to what appears to be going on.

For the first of the inside information Fandom Pulse has gotten on the situation, we have a post to the SFWA forums from Michael Capobianco that exposes troubles within the organization. Capobianco wrote a series of novels in the 1990s and was married to fan-favorite Star Trek novelist A.C. Crispin before she passed. In this post, Capobianco exposes former President Jeffe Kennedy’s gross incompetence and mismanagement at running SFWA, and paints a story of disaster through the recent years of the organization. He said:

Since I think a lot of people are taken aback by Jeffe’s sudden resignation and lack some of the context of what’s been happening lately, I wanted to post here with my own perspective. Please note that this post is not an attack on any board member, on Jeffe, or on the board as a whole...

However, I just wanted it on the record that her resignation letter (attached here as a PDF in case you haven’t seen it) ignores the fact that some past members of the board and former staff, as well as numerous SFWA members, were asking for her to be removed from her position for a number of reasons. I would even say that her email is a great example of why folks were asking for her removal—it places the blame for what’s happening squarely on something else and makes her seem like the victim, rather than accepting any accountability for how her own actions have led to the current circumstances.

The immediate event that kicked this off was Terra LeMay being terminated from her staff position after putting in a 90-day notice due to being denied reasonable disability accommodations, and then banned from Discord and blocked from accessing her SFWA email (presumably by Jeffe) after she asked for an explanation on Discord in the ask-the-board channel. Prior to that, several former board members and staff have also resigned from their positions, although I do not know for certain these resignations were related to Jeffe and actually did not realize the staff had resigned at all until this happened. (AFAIK Kate is currently the only SFWA staff member.)

Communications from the board have been slow and opaque in general for the past few years, and the Nebulas conference seems to always get cited as a reason not to do anything. But on top of that, a number of volunteers or former volunteers (myself included) have been frustrated with a lack of transparency from the board and the fact that some board members have tended to consistently blame volunteers for projects failing when it was the board that canceled them—or even for projects succeeding if they caused extra work for the organization or its board members and volunteers—despite also frequently pushing extra-heavy workloads onto those volunteers and providing them with zero support. (As an example of this, see Jason Sanford’s post about his withdrawal from running SFWA’s annual auction.)

It seems like a part of the issue is that everyone serving on the board and in some volunteer positions is asked to sign a really broad NDA, which they feel stops them from being able to ever talk about anything. My personal opinion is that in this case, that NDA and the opaque environment it creates resulted in a space in which staff and board members did not feel empowered to speak out about their own poor treatment, and which allowed Jeffe to continue acting in ways that did not necessarily benefit the organization as a whole.

You know, back in 2013, SFWA had the opportunity to elect a smart business- and technology-savvy author who had a pretty clear vision for the way the industry was headed as its president. Not only did they not elect me, they even pretended to kick me out of the club for my effrontery in thinking that a very different course of action to prepare for the coming changes in the industry was in order. Of course, like everything the SFWA Board does, they did it incompetently and ineffectively, as they never held the membership-wide vote on expulsion that the state bylaws required at the time. Like it or not, I’m still a Life Member, at least for the next 6-9 months it takes for SFWA to completely collapse.

Needless to say, I’m only surprised it has taken this long, as I pointed out 11 years ago.

I certainly wish Steven Gould good fortune in piloting the organization, although given his support for the status quo and his stated opinion that SF/F is not in any trouble as an industry, my concern is that his victory will tend to increase the probability that the organization will founder upon the very shoals my platform was designed to avoid. But that is Mr. Gould’s concern now, not mine.

So, I founded and focused my attention on a little organization called Castalia House instead. At this point, I’d say that was a pretty good tradeoff. And if you want to have a look at our beautiful new WAR AND PEACE stampings for the pair of upcoming Library and Libraria editions, as well as the lovely new sign on display for the 2024-25 season at Meadowbank Stadium, check out the Castalia Library substack.

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Nick Fuentes Calls Out Tucker

He makes a VERY strong case that if either of them is a Fed, it’s Tucker Carlson.

If anyone has a transcript, send it to me, I’ll post it here. But if Tucker has any legitimacy whatsoever, he will extend the same courtesy that he previously extended to Ray Epps and Kevin Spacey and offer to interview Nick on his show. If he doesn’t, well, then it will be entirely obvious who the fraud – and presumably Fed – actually is.

Even Owen, who has had his differences of opinion with Nick, finds his argument persuasive.

This is an epic rant by @NickJFuentes. And as someone who has also been character assassinated when people can’t address my points I totally feel this frustration. He’s a smart dude and funny. And his takedown of tucker’s attack on him is very true and very deserved.

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UPDATE: The epic rant. Thanks to M for providing the transcript.

I saw yesterday Ian Miles Chong, who isn’t even American, he has never even been on the land, he said that I’m a fed, and he says it’s not clear what Nick Fuentes wants other than the elimination of all Jews. I swear these people lie every day. They make up a new lie fabricated every single day. They say it’s not clear what he wants other than genocide, genocide. And that’s when you realize it’s coordinated. These people are shills. They will do and say anything. They will make up any lie to stop the American people from having a voice, because that’s really what it amounts to.

Continue reading “Nick Fuentes Calls Out Tucker”

A Late Arrival

So this just showed up in the post today. We’ll go over it, fix any apparent infelicities, and then turn on distribution this weekend. It should be on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, etc. by late next week. You can already order it at NDM Express, though, just click on the image.

It’s only 750 pages even though it’s slightly longer than ATOB and the text is exactly the same size. This is because we’ve gotten much better at optimizing our line spaces and margins. So, we will be modifying ATOB to match at some point soon, for those who are obsessive about these things. But the three books all look great together on the shelf regardless.

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They Are Still Lying

Grummz calls out WIRED for lying – again – about #GamerGate:

Wired gets it completely wrong.

Gamergate started because journalists were exposed for trading favorable reviews and coverage in exchange for favors, and for lying about it, as well as the movement.

Ethics in journalism was the banner, and now Wired is perpetuating the lies and smear campaign that started it all.

Just yesterday we had recent example of a game journalist’s corruption, and even just weeks ago with Ubisoft and expensive Disney trips for influences.

The gaslighting that wired is doing here, shows the reasons haven’t changed, and the journalists are still scum.

To this day, the media still knows virtually nothing about #GamerGate. As an OG GamerGater, I do. I was there from the very start ten years ago, before it was even christened #GamerGate. I even know the identity of GamerGater#1, who broke GameJournoPros and exposed the gaming media’s whole ghastly favors-trading game; most people have forgotten that I was once not only a game journalist myself, I was the first professionally syndicated one.

The gaslighting, as Grummz correctly described it, was always an attempt to change the narrative away from the gaming media’s wrongdoings, many of which are things they do openly today that they don’t even bother to hide.

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Susie’s World

CALVIN AND HOBBES has turned out to be a warning about the bureaucratic madness of Clown World.

While the comic seems like a light and cheery look into childhood, there are very dark undertones. Like the main character in “Adventure Time” doesn’t realize he lives in a nuclear wasteland, “Calvin and Hobbes” is set in a world that has no place for a rambunctious boy. There’s an inherent loneliness permeating the comic from the title on, that Calvin only has an imaginary friend who understands what makes him tick. Calvin never comes across a figure that can channel his energies toward finding his way in the world…

Susie Derkins, on the other hand, has the world catered to her sensibilities. She loves school because she loves the accolades she receives from authority figures. Her aspirations, whether they are having kids or being a girl-boss, are catered to and considered mature. Whenever she gets harassed by Calvin, authority figures immediately swoop in to defend her. It’s not her fault the world she was born into gave her more advantages and comfort, and there’s nothing wrong with her taking advantage of it. She’s just in a protective bubble, and has no understanding of what is required to keep her small world turning.

In a way, the comic showed the stark realities of being a young boy trying to find his way. He is surrounded by types like Susie Derkins, who can’t help but be Susie Derkins. The real failure happens in the men who should have been there for him, channeling his energies toward finding a place in the world, and pushing back against the busybodies and scolds who want him to act more like a pliable, conformist little girl.

It’s a good piece, well worth reading for any fan of the comic.

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