Category: Uncategorized

Did Not See That Coming

Apparently the latest New Hitler is Israeli:

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich on Monday called for the “total annihilation” of Rafah and other cities in the Gaza Strip.

“There are no half measures. Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat – total annihilation. ‘You will blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven’ – there’s no place under heaven,” Smotrich said.

Smotrich’s reference to “Amalek” was from a line in Deuteronomy, a book in the Hebrew Bible. Amalek is a nation the ancient Israelites were commanded to destroy, and in the book of Samuel, the Israelites were told to “slay both man and woman, infant and suckling.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has previously compared Gaza to Amalek, which has been cited as evidence of genocidal rhetoric in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

I’m not sure that “Putting the NAZI in Ashkenazi” is a particularly great campaign program, but then, I don’t know much about Israeli politics these days. Hitler’s rhetoric went over fairly well in his time, after all.

However, I think it’s bizarre to see conservatives, Boomers, and conservative Boomers to be complaining that American college students are protesting against the genocidal actions of the Israeli government when the IDF is literally killing tens of thousands of Palestinians while top Israeli government officials are openly calling for a literal genocide of an entire people.

The Gazacaust isn’t going to be forgotten any faster than the Holocaust was, so Israelis had better get used to the idea of paying reparations to the Palestinians and their descendants for at least another 70 years.

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The Carlson-Dugin Interview

A selection from the complete transcript of the interview:

Tucker Carlson: So what you’re describing is clearly happening and it’s horrifying. But it’s not the definition of liberalism I have in mind when I describe myself, as what we say the United States is a classical liberal. So you think of liberalism as individual freedom and choice from slavery. Right? So the options as we conceive them, as I was growing up, were the individual who can follow his conscience, say what he thinks, defend himself against the state versus the statism, the totalitarianism embodied in the government that you fought against: the Soviet government. And I think most Americans think of it that way. What’s the difference?

Aleksandr Dugin: Very interesting question. I think that the problem is in two definitions of liberalism. There is old liberalism, classical liberalism. And new liberalism. So classical liberalism was in favor of democracy. Democracy understood as the power of majority of consensus, of individual freedom. That should be combined somehow with the freedom of other. And now we have totally the next station already. Next phase: new liberalism. Now it is not about the rule of majority, but it is about the rule of minorities. It is not about individual freedom, but it is about wokism. So you should be so individualistic that you should criticize not only the state, but individual, the old understanding of individual. So you need now – you are invited to liberate yourself from individuality to go further in that direction. I have spoken once with Fukuyama, Francis Fukuyama on TV. And he has said, before, democracy has meant the rule of majority. And now it is about the rule of minorities against majority, because majority could choose Hitler or Putin. So we need to be very careful with majority, and majority should be taken under control and minorities should rule over majority. It is not democracy, it is already totalitarianism. And now we are not about defense of the individual of freedom, but about prescription to be woke, to be modern, to be progressive. It is not your right to be or not to be progressive. It is your duty to be progressive, to follow this agenda. So you are free to be a left liberal. You are no more free enough to be a right liberal. You should be a left liberal. And that is a kind of duty. It is prescription. So liberalism fought during its history against any kind of prescription. And now it at its turn became totalitarian, prescriptive, not free as it was.

Tucker Carlson: And do you believe that was inevitable, that process? That was always going to happen?

Aleksandr Dugin: I perceive here a kind of logic. So a kind of logic that is not just a reversion or deviation. You start with one thing. You want to liberate individual. When you arrive at the point when it is possible, it is realized. So you need to go further. And you start to liberate ourselves from this time from old understanding of individual in favor of more progressive concepts. So you could not stop here. That is my vision. So if you say “Oh, I prefer old liberalism,” they would say, the progressives, they would say, it is not about old liberalism. It is about fascism. You are defender of traditionalism, conservatism, fascism. So stop here. Either be progressive liberal or you are done, or we will cancel you. That is what we observe, I would say.

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The Arkhaven Substack

The Castalia Library substack has been so popular, and so useful in providing Library and History subscribers with updated information about the production process and necessary shipping news that it is obvious that we need the same thing for Arkhaven Comics, especially in light of the delays in shipping Ghost of the Badlands to the recent retail purchasers.

More about that soon, hopefully later today, but the TL;DR version is that the first printing of the retail editions had a problem, so we fixed it, sent out copies to Razorfist for approval, and we’re waiting for him to receive them and approve the revised editions for shipping out to everyone.

One can theorize as to the whys and wherefores all one likes, but the simple fact of the matter is that provably Substack works to keep a community informed in a timely manner much better than a blog, a mass-mailing service, a social media site, the post, or carrier pigeons.

So, if you are a) an Arkhaven buyer, b) an Arkhaven backer, c) an Arktoons reader, or d) an Arktoons creator, I would very strongly encourage you to subscribe to the Arkhaven substack in order to keep up on all the latest news related to our print and digital comics.

REBEL DEAD REVENGE Episode 112: I’ll Deal With You Later

CROSS+WORD Episode 8: Party Time

A MIND PROGRAMMED Episode 49: Expendable Tools

上嫁小鼠 Episode 37: 是好是坏

STONETOSS Episode 289: Lost Civilization

DISCUSS ON SG

The Decline of the Literary West

Reader’s Digest is shutting down in the UK:

Reader’s Digest’s UK edition has closed down after 86 years due to ‘financial pressures, as the iconic magazine’s editor-in-chief shares a touching tribute. In an honest and heartfelt tribute, the iconic magazine’s editor-in-chief Eva Mackevic said ‘the company just couldn’t withstand the financial pressures of today’s unforgiving magazine publishing landscape’.

The closure comes 14 years after it fell into administration because of a £125m pension fund deficit.

Founded in the the US in 1922, Reader’s Digest – whose motto was ‘Articles of enduring interest’ – was first published in the UK in 1938. Back in 2000 Reader’s Digest UK was selling more than one million copies a month.

I loved Reader’s Digest. My grandparents were subscribers, and whenever I visited them I would read several of those thick little magazines a day. Laughter the Best Medicine was all right, but I preferred the more subtle humor to be found in Life in These United States. And the abridged novels it contained often provided exposure to interesting authors to be explored more fully in the the future.

But diversity doesn’t read. And increasingly, neither does the three-second attention span crowd. Books are in the process of returning to the elite status they once held prior to the release of the dime novel and the mass market paperback, which is not a bad thing for deluxe leather book binders, but isn’t a healthy sign for society.

With more than 3 million subscribers in the USA, the original magazine should be around for a while. But the failure of the once-powerful UK edition is a good reminder of the vagaries of time. Yesterday’s success not only doesn’t guarantee success today, it often plants the seeds for tomorrow’s failure.

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Monday Arktoons

STONETOSS Episode 288: Malgorithm

THE SIDEWINDERS Episode 53: The Riders Strike

BEN GARRISON Episode 143: Let Them Eat Cake

三更战 Episode 30: 三更之统治者

INVASION ’55 Episode 2: TOne Hundred and Eighty Million Years Later

AESOPS FABLES Episode 40: The Horse and Groom

TREASURY OF TALES Episode 47: The Three Little Pigs

PAPER DOLL VERONIKA Episode 101: Downhill Tales

CHATEAU GRIEF Episode 325: Hush Puppy

GIVE MY REGARDS TO BLACK JACK Episode 55: Reality

Non-Competes are No More

The FTC eliminates a corporation’s ability to limit the employment prospects of its former employees:

Pursuant to sections 5 and 6(g) of the Federal Trade Commission Act (“FTC Act”), the Federal Trade Commission (“Commission”) is issuing the Non-Compete Clause Rule (“the final rule”). The final rule provides that it is an unfair method of competition—and therefore a violation of section 5—for persons to, among other things, enter into non-compete clauses (“non-competes”) with workers on or after the final rule’s effective date. With respect to existing non-competes—i.e., non-competes entered into before the effective date—the final rule adopts a different approach for senior executives than for other workers. For senior executives, existing non-competes can remain in force, while existing non-competes with other workers are not enforceable after the effective date.

This is definitely a positive development. The idea that a corporation should be able to coerce an employee into agreeing not to work for a competitor without compensation is one of the pernicious consequences of Clown World’s contract morality, in which everything is permissible so long as the victim can be coerced, forced, scammed, or otherwise convinced to agree to it.

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The Indictments are Blowing in the Wind

The Gazacaust has clearly changed the Boomers’ position about the intrinsic legitimacy and sanctity of student protests on college campuses. Yet there was a time when Boomers used to shut down campuses on a regular basis, a time that is still cited by them as evidence of their moral superiority to other generations.

The major movements of the 1960s were the Civil Rights Movement and the Student Movement. Both advocated for those who were discriminated against in various ways. The Student Movement also led the Free Speech Movement, starting on the University of California, Berkeley’s campus in 1964. Initially, college students protested against social injustices like poverty, the unfair treatment of African American citizens, and freedom of speech on college campuses. They later shifted their focus to opposing the Vietnam War.

Neither blacks in the USA nor the Vietnamese in Vietnam were being treated anywhere nearly as badly as the Palestinians are being treated by the Israelis, at least on a per capita basis in the case of the latter. And yet, at the behest of their “greatest ally”, the Boomers and their fellow travellers are determined to prevent Generation Z from speaking out about the Gazacaust.

Protests are roiling college campuses nationwide as administrators with graduation ceremonies next month face demands that schools cut financial ties to Israel against the backdrop of the Israel-Hamas war.

Many campuses were largely quiet by early afternoon Sunday but about 275 people were arrested on Saturday at campuses including Indiana University at Bloomington, Arizona State University and Washington University in St. Louis. Those have pushed the number of arrests nationwide to nearly 900 since New York police removed a pro-Palestinian protest encampment at Columbia University and arrested more than 100 demonstrators on April 18.

Since then, students have dug in at dozens of pro-Palestinian encampments around the country, prompting a range of responses from administrators — arrests and criminal charges, student suspensions or simply continued pleas to leave. The plight of students has become a central part of protests, with both the students and a growing number of faculty demanding amnesty. At issue is whether the suspensions and legal records will follow students through their adult lives.

Faculty members at universities in California, Georgia and Texas have initiated or passed largely symbolic votes of no confidence in their leadership.

It might be interesting to compare the number of people arrested for protesting the actions of a foreign government as opposed to those who were protesting the actions of their own government. Because, as we know, a foreign elite generally rules more harshly that a people’s own elite.

DISCUSS ON SG

Nothing Will Stop the Fall

Of Clown World. Its collapse is absolutely inevitable:

The arrival of the US M1A1 Abrams tanks in Ukraine was hailed as a turning point in the war. Coming in at roughly $10 million a unit, the Nato stalwart was supposed to provide the armoured fist that would punch through the Russian lines. But tactics evolve quickly in warfare, and Russia’s use of surveillance and hunter-killer drones has led to heavy casualties for Ukraine’s tank fleets. This is alarming for NATO. If Russia has found critical vulnerabilities in our armour, our borders are beginning to look very vulnerable.

Washington pledged 31 Abrams tanks to Ukraine in January last year. The first batch arrived in September. They finally appeared to make their combat debut in February this year, with the first video footage released on the 25th of Februray. On the 26th, the Russians scored their first Abrams kill.

Two months after entering service, the Abrams tanks are now being withdrawn from the frontline. Five of the 31 tanks delivered last year have already been destroyed.

Everything Clown World does is based on the concept of “fake it ’til you make it”. But no amount of rhetoric, chutzpah, and word spells trumps physical reality, because influence is not power. Everything the clowns say is a lie. Literally everything.

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How the Media Sausage is Made

The media consists of a shrinking collection of genuine lowlives. Seriously, they collectively have the ethics of criminals and the morals of pimps, as a recent revelation in the Trump trial in New York City demonstrates:

The head of the National Enquirer, David Pecker, took the stand during the Trump hush money trial in New York and, according to the New York Post, admitted that he helped cover up a story on Woods back in 2007.

Woods apparently had been caught in an affair with his then-mistress Mindy Lawton, with photos being taken of the two in Woods’ Cadillac Escalade. Pecker admitted under cross-examination that he had bought the photos, then approached Tiger about making a deal to avoid publishing them.

Sure enough, soon afterwards, Woods appeared on the cover of Men’s Health, another magazine title under the American Media Inc. parent company umbrella. Woods also consented to a 12-page long story inside, a lengthy, in-depth article for the usually private Woods.

The Post spoke to a source described as part of his “inner circle,” who said that Woods was essentially forced into agreeing to the interview. “It was a total shakedown,” the source told The Post. “He was totally blackmailed, but what could he do? He had to play ball. He didn’t have any other choice.”

This isn’t at all unusual either. Every time they are working on a hit piece, they contact the target, explain a few of the accusations against you, then offer you “the chance to tell your side of the story”. But they don’t print anything you say that will offer a reasonable justification or a convincing defense, they just quote-mine the interview in order to support their narrative.

At best, they don’t run anything at all and you might as well have turned down the interview. At worst, you say something they can take out of context that looks even worse than anything they had already, something that will permit you to be deplatformed, debanked, de-employed, and further discredited.

Which underlines why you never, ever, talk to the media about yourself, your opinions, your accomplishments, or your friends and family. And just to address the spergs and pedants, I will add that if you’re not particularly controversial, sending out corporate press releases to industry-specific publications are probably fine.

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