Category: Uncategorized

Why Gen Z Rejects the Jews

This incident in the UK pretty well summarizes why Israel is getting obliterated in the global PR war, particularly among Gen Zers.

This is the moment an irate taxi driver kicked out an ‘antisemitic’ passenger from his cab after she ranted about the ‘Jewish machine’. The furious London cabbie was filmed booting out his female fare, telling her to ‘get the f*** out of my cab’ during a journey through Soho, on Halloween last month.

Footage of the clash appeared online today, with former Tory leadership hopeful Tom Tugendhat MP hailing the driver’s actions as ‘the correct response to racism’.

In a conversation recorded on dash-cam, the passenger says: ‘It’s so easy to trigger people nowadays… The Jewish machine is so strong. It doesn’t allow you to talk. But again, there are so many examples of me showing you brutalisation of Palestinians.’

The irate cabbie then interrupts the woman and rages: ‘Right, you can get the f*** out of my cab. Out. Out.’

‘Why,’ asks the woman, before the driver shouts back: ‘The Jewish machine doesn’t allow you to talk!?’

‘You’re an example of that,’ replies the passenger as she gets out the taxi and a door slams shut.

Now, I’m sure Jonathan Greenblatt and his UK-resident equivalent are celebrating the fact that their pet politicians and clueless Anglo-Boomers are applauding what they have been taught to be “the correct response” to antisemitism. There are no shortage of comments supporting the cab driver’s actions; these are some of the top-rated ones:

  • Well done the cabby
  • Well done cab driver for speaking out.
  • Absolute respect for this man. Absolutely none for her!
  • Love that taxi driver!
  • Excellent. Well done, sir!

Of course, no one under the age of 65 comments on a newspaper site.

Meanwhile, the younger generations, who have been taught that everyone is equal, everyone has a right to his own opinion and his own truth, and that freedom of thought, speech, and expression is the highest human value, are NOTICING that this poor woman did literally nothing but express her own opinion, and in response was angrily denied a basic service that she had already purchased.

And I’m certain they are perfectly aware that if the positions had been reversed and a British driver had told a Jewish passenger to “get the fuck out of my cab”, the British flag would be flown at half-mast over Buckingham Palace, every Premier League team would hold a minute of silence before games for the rest of the season, King Charles would announce that he would prefer to be styled “the Defender of the Torah”, a new Cabinet Ministry would be appointed to “fight antisemitism”, Rachel Riley would be on the front page of every major newspaper crying about how she has a panic attack every time she sees a taxi, and the driver would be hunted down by Scotland Yard, disemployed, and prosecuted for thirty-seven hate crimes.

Now, the Boomers observably don’t give a damn about fairness. They literally could not care less about it. But Generation Z genuinely cares about fairness. Young people have always cared a lot about fairness, with the obvious exception of the Boomers due to their super-special generational status that rendered them society’s wise elders from birth. And there is absolutely nothing fair about the claim that an individual’s opinions, however unpopular, somehow magically eliminate all of the laws and rights and principles and ideals that have been relentlessly trumpeted since the dawn of the Enlightenment.

Those who don’t play by their own publicly declared rules will eventually discover, to their dismay, that their enemies have followed suit. And they will also learn that no one under the age of 50 gives a damn about this totally unexpected state of affairs.

The lesson, as always, is this: shameless hypocrisy is terrible rhetoric.

UPDATE: Yeah, blasting your users and banning their videos is totally going to convince Gen Z that you’re the good guys. Totally.

TikTok has blasted users promoting a vile letter written by Osama Bin Laden in regards to the 9/11 atrocities and promised to remove any content referring to it. ‘Content promoting this letter clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism,’ TikTokPolicy wrote in a post to X, formerly Twitter. ‘We are proactively and aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got onto our platform.’

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Live By the Big Two

Die by the Big Two. My sympathies for the self-reported decline of the Comicstorian are rather limited:

In a bombshell video this weekend, Ben Potter revealed that his channel has been losing money for some time now, which might come as a shock to viewers who have been watching his content, which highlights the best of Marvel and DC’s major events over the years and distills the books in easy ways for viewers to catch up on storylines…

Comicstorian caught lightning in a bottle as these superhero movies propelled interest to new cultural heights. His high production value offerings gave casual fans the background they needed on the characters to have a deeper understanding of Marvel and DC.

That all changed in 2020, according to Potter’s new video. COVID hitting slowed the production of films and ground the comic industry to a halt. It made the content harder to produce, and the offerings of Marvel and DC garnered fewer clicks than the previous content. He said the channel hoped to ride out the slowness of content and was kept alive by an angel investor who believed in his work.

But those funds eventually dried up, and as Marvel and DC began to push more woke content with their films and comics, interest in the Comicstorian content began to drop along with the companies’ properties.

Now, why would anyone involved with independent comics give a damn about this channel? When has he ever paid any attention to the considerable amount of content being produced by anyone outside the Big Two?

It’s really rather remarkable how the comics media would observably prefer to go down with the Marvel-DC ship than actually devote any attention to the space where all the action is. And I’m not just talking about the industry’s staunch refusal to pay any attention to Arkhaven Comics or Arktoons, because they also refuse to devote any to the successful products developed by independent creators like Razorfist, Eric July, Ethan van Sciver, and most of all, the massive Webtoons platform.

In fact, the comics media barely pays any attention to the long-established Japanese manga industry, even though it is bigger than Marvel and DC combined. It is essentially a collection of parasites that refuse to adapt, therefore they will die alongside their hosts.

UPDATE: In related news, the Dark Herald reports that Comixology is dead.

Amazon has finally and officially pulled the plug on the Comixology app.

ComiXology used to be something halfway decent back when the Big Two were halfway decent. It started life as an online community that would spot interesting upcoming releases and build pull lists for the brick-and-mortar comic book shops back when they existed.

It also had some tools for the aforementioned brick-and-mortar comic book shops to help raise their online presence. Then around 2009 ComiXology went one step better and launched a digital comic book reader and a digital comic book store. For a while it was looking like this was the future of comic books.

Project Asteroid strikes again. Arktoons is inevitable.

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The Vanishing Letter

Osama bin Laden wanted to speak directly to the American people. An undated letter promising endless war is one of hundreds of documents collected in the May 2, 2011 raid on his compound in Pakistan that was released Wednesday. The full text is below.

However, the full text of the letter was not actually provided by Foreign Policy. Two lines, highlighted below in bold italics, were omitted with the following note.

(TN: Two lines of poetry that say the Mujahidin will not stop fighting until the United States leaves their land.)

Even more intriguing, The Guardian just disappeared the page on which the letter had been published for the last 21 years.

Removed: document
Wed 15 Nov 2023 21.19 CET
This page previously displayed a document containing, in translation, the full text of Osama bin Laden’s “letter to the American people”, as reported in the Observer on Sunday 24 November 2002. The document, which was published here on the same day, was removed on 15 November 2023.

In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful.

From Usama Bin Muhammad Bin Ladin to the American people,

I speak to you about the subject of the ongoing war between you and us. Even though the consensus of your wise thinkers and others is that your time (TN: of defeat) will come, compassion for the women and children who are being unjustly killed, wounded, and displaced in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan motivates me to speak to you.

First of all, I would like to say that your war with us is the longest war in your history and the most expensive for you financially. As for us, we see it as being only halfway finished. If you were to ask your wise thinkers, they would tell you that there is no way to win it because the indications are
against it. How will you win a war whose leaders are pessimistic and whose soldiers are committing suicide? If fear enters the hearts of men, winning the war becomes impossible. How will you
win a war whose cost is like a hurricane blowing violently at your economy and weakening your dollar?

The Bush administration got you into these wars on the premise that they were vital to your security. He promised that it would be a quick war, won within six days or six weeks; however, six years have passed, and they are still promising you victory and not achieving it. Then Obama came and delayed the withdrawal that he had promised you by 16 more months. He promised you victory in Afghanistan and set a date for withdrawal from there. Six months later, Petraeus came to you once again with the number six, requesting that the withdrawal be delayed six months beyond the date that had been set. All the while you continue to bleed in Iraq and Afghanistan. You are wading into a war with no end in sight on the horizon and which has no connection to your security, which was confirmed by the operation of ‘Umar al-Faruq, which was not launched from the battlefield and could have been launched from any place in the world.

As for us, jihad against the tyrants and the aggressors is a form of great worship in our religion. It is more precious to us than our fathers and sons. Thus, our jihad against you is worship, and your killing us is a testimony. Thanks to God, Almighty, we have been waging jihad for 30 years, against the Russians and
then against you. Not a single one of our men has committed suicide, whereas every 30 days 30 of your men commit suicide.

Continue the war if you will.

Palestine shall not be seen captive for we will try to break its shackles.
The United States shall pay for its arrogance with the blood of Christians and their funds.

Peace be upon those who follow right guidance.

Justice is the strongest army, and security is the best way of life, but it slipped out of your grasp the day you made the Jews victorious in occupying our land and killing our brothers in Palestine. The path to security is for you to lift your oppression from us.

There can’t be much doubt as to why Bin Ladin’s “Letter to the American People” is being disappeared, in light of the recent Hamas attacks, the Israeli invasion of Gaza, and the rush of US men and material to the Middle East. The neocons in the US and UK media are obviously attempting to prevent the pro-Palestinian side from presenting its perspective to the public, and more importantly, they are trying to hide the material link between the past US military defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan with the present US military presence in Syria, Israel, and the Eastern Mediterranean Sea.

I doubt it matters in the slightest. As even the ADL has reported, the youngest generation in the West is solidly against the Israeli position in the Gaza conflict, while only the Boomers generally support it. While the Millennials and Generation X are more balanced – or in the case of GenX, characteristically apathetic – neither of them are even remotely interested in fighting anyone in the Middle East for any reason.

But there can be little question that this is an all-hands-on-deck situation for the neocons, so it will be very informative to observe which public figures fall in line with the demands of the Narrative, and which ones are not being controlled.

UPDATE: The media is officially upset that its attempt to disappear the Bin Ladin letter has failed:

A vile letter written by the warlord behind the 9/11 atrocities has gone viral on TikTok with users saying that reading it has led to them ‘understanding’ as to why the horrific attacks were carried out in 2001. The letter began to gain traction online after UK newspaper The Guardian linked to a 2002 article which translated it in full in an article about the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. It was subsequently deleted with the outlet telling DailyMail.com in a statement that it was removed because was being shared ‘without its original context.’

They’re not even attempting to pretend to be journalists anymore. The letter is “vile”? The attacks were “horrific”? Furthermore, The Guardian linked to the article in 2002, so the letter began to gain traction 21 years later, which is indeed “after” the link, but is a very misleading way to describe what happened and why people are paying attention to the vanished letter.

Remember, facts provided without approved context consistent with the Narrative is misinformation.

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Number Six Video Essayist

Academic Agent lists and analyzes his top ten video essayists. He was gracious enough to include me on the list, and as high as number six, which is a nice surprise.

Next person on the list, and again this is somebody who’s still around but they tend not to do video essays anymore, they tend now to focus on doing streams, although this person’s streams are still typically solo and straight to camera so they are kind of essayish, but that is Vox Day. Now, again, he might not be to everybody’s cup of tea, but back in the day Vox Day made some of the best videos going, so let’s have a little watch of one of his…

You get the idea. So I did notice a lot of people kind of instinctively reacted against that. To me it’s just self-evidently true. It’s just obviously true. All of this stuff is clearly, self-evidently, observationally true, and all Vox has done is codified something that exists in the world. I mean, you all know this guy, you all know this guy and if you don’t know this guy, or if you’re instinctively reacting against it, you probably are that guy.

So in terms of why have I rated Vox, he has very clear way of articulating himself. He does have this kind of slow kind of speech pattern but he’s quite good at articulating exactly what a concept is, defining it well, I think Vox has some sort of background, whether it’s formal or informal, he has some sort of philosophy background. I seem to remember he certainly studied ancient rhetoric and so on, so he’s quite good at explaining his concept in a very clear way.

Vox has also got something that I think is an underrated skill, basically which is coining a phrase. I am actually very good at doing this, I have so many phrases, you know, back to Fresh Prince and Boomer Truth Regime, and you know, you all know my little slogans and phrases. Aon McIntyre is fantastic at this on Twitter as well, but Vox has also always been very good at coining a phrase, you know, day of the pillow is one of Vox Day’s, for example, and you know he’s got others as well, but his categories here in the psychosexual hierarchy are also a good example of it and you’ll casually see these terms used around the place so that is why I have ranked Vox Day.

The Deepest Lore, 25 Oct 2023

It’s always nice to see that one’s work is appreciated. I really need to somehow find the time to get back to doing more Voxiversities. One per month would probably be doable, assuming that one of my preferred producers have the time. Perhaps once I get a camera installed in the library, which is something I’m already planning to do, we can revive the concept in the new year.

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The Defunding and Decline of the Media

We’ve already reached the point that mainstream media organs require sugar daddies like Jeff Bezos, Carlos Slim Helú, and the US federal government just to operate on a reduced scale. And now that the era of free money is over, the decline is going to accelerate as more mainstream and mainstream-supported organizations fail.

​​Nearly 20,000 jobs have been eliminated across the media industry this year as premium outlets struggle to combat declining rates in ad revenue, according to Axios estimates. The report found that media companies can no longer rely on short-term capital to insulate them from ad declines because of “high interest rates and investor skepticism.” Thus, the cuts were industry-wide in 2023.

The Washington Post announced plans to offer voluntary buyouts in an attempt to cut 240 jobs. The Post has roughly 2.5 million subscribers, down from 3 million at the end of 2020. The Post is set to lose $100 million this year.

CNBC Digital cut around 20 editorial staffers last week. Vice Media Group laid off about 100 staffers this year and consolidated its businesses from five to two. G/O Media suspended Jezebel and laid off some 23 staffers.

Elsewhere, ad revenue for BuzzFeed declined 35% year-over-year. Ad revenue for Dow Jones, the parent company of the Wall Street Journal, decreased 3%. Linear ads for television networks like CNN parent company Warner Bros. Discovery declined “12% on average,” per the report.

And this doesn’t even begin to account for media organizations using AI to replace hack journalists and editors. The situation presents a massive opportunity for alternative media companies that operate on a subscription model, but the challenge is to figure out what subscribers actually want/need and for which products they are willing to pay. The advertising model was always fake, it simply allowed the favored organizations to subsidize all the free viewers and thereby massively expand their influence.

It was also malinformative, as it permitted those running the propped-up organizations to believe that their businesses were sound and their products were hugely popular. But, as is so often the case with Clown World, most of that “succcess” was a manufactured and debt-inflated illusion.

So, the playing field is being levelled, to some degree, but that doesn’t mean that it is necessarily wise for any alternative organization to attempt to play on it. We’re not going to do anything right now, as we have our hands sufficiently occupied with delivering on our current projects. But it doesn’t hurt to keep an eye out for future ones.

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Interview with John Julius Norwich

This is an automated transcription of an interview with the late English popular historian, John Julius Cooper, 2nd Viscount Norwich, CVO, recorded in 2011.

VOX DAY: I’m delighted to be able to tell you today that my guest is one of my favourite historians, John Julius Norwich. He’s the author of more than 20 books including A History of Venice, Byzantium: The Decline and Fall, Shakespeare’s Kings, as well as his recently published memoirs entitled Trying to Please. Lord Norwich, welcome to the podcast. Western culture has always been obsessed with the Western Roman Empire, and paid relatively little attention to the Eastern Roman Empire, so to what do you attribute this general lack of attention or interest in the Byzantines versus the ancient Greeks and Romans?

JOHN JULIUS NORWICH: I think largely that… I mean, I didn’t. I had the sort of ordinary interest in the Greeks and Romans, because that’s what you have. If you go to school in England, you know, you go to public school education, you learn a lot about the Greeks and the Romans. But the interesting thing in England is that you never, never get any education at all about the Eastern Roman Empire, about Byzantium. It’s a conspiracy of silence, and it has been for the last 200 years. And I fell in love with the Byzantine Empire really, largely because of my friend, Patrick Leigh Fermor, who died last week, who was the greatest archeologist and a scholar of it, and who I went on a cruise around Eastern Mediterranean with. And also when, in 1955, when I joined the Foreign Service, My first post was Belgrade, in Serbia, or Yugoslavia as it was in those days, and I was just sort of swept up in the whole. That seemed to me the sort of the whole mystery and the magic of the Orthodox Church and the Eastern Roman Empire and Byzantium and all that. I suppose I’ve been swept up in it ever since.

VD: To what do you attribute the fact that it was a mystery to you? I mean, it’s certainly a mystery to Americans, we don’t spend any time learning about it either. Why is there such ignorance of it?

JJN: Why is there a conspiracy of silence? Precisely. I wish I knew. I went through what I’m sure would have been considered a very good English public school education at Eton. And I hardly knew what Byzantium was. I’m not sure that I knew whether it was Christian or Muslim. I’m not sure whether I don’t think I knew anything about it at all. And because nobody ever mentioned it all throughout my schooling. And I think I was not alone in this. I mean, people just didn’t. It was never taken seriously by English educationists.

VD: Constantine’s decision to move his capital from Rome to Byzantium was one of the more monumental decisions in history.

JJN: Yes, it tends to distract the reader, as if Obama had suddenly decided to move the US Capitol from Washington, DC to Mexico City.

VD: What was behind Constantine’s decision to establish a new capital? And why did the eastern half of the Empire survive so much longer than the Western one did?

JJN: Well, the capital had really, to all intents and purposes already left Rome. I mean, what happened already in this, in the second century? The second century AD, the whole focus of political and cultural activity, is moving to the east, is moving east from Rome, to the eastern Mediterranean. I mean, if you read the Acts of the Apostles, or if, if you read any of that stuff, I mean, it is it is in Asia Minor on the eastern Mediterranean, that everything is happening. Rome has become a backwater, it’s too far away. By this time. The Empire’s principal enemy is Persia, Rome to Persia. I mean, it’s, I don’t know, three or four months probably travel. And it was no it was absolutely necessary to move the capitol to where all the action was. Diocletian did it first. I mean, he, he decided to divide the imprint of the empire into four. And each one had a what he called a Tetrarch. But all four of them were in the east. None of them are in Rome, even then. So when Constantine decided in 332, to move to move the Capitol, it wasn’t a terribly new or revolutionary idea at all. I mean, he was really doing what had already happened. He was just choosing a new a new place. You know, I mean, Nicomedia. Antioquia was three or four other places, which had been tried out and they were very successful. So he just found this new place. which was superbly in a superb defensive position, and said, right, this is it, this is going to be in future capital. Apart from that we’re exactly the same Empire we’ve always been, where we’re Romans whether our empire is the empire of Adios, Nero and Hadrian and Trajan and all that lot. There’s no change, except that we’ve moved to a new capital.

VD: Why did the eastern half of the Empire survive so much longer than the Western one did?

JJN: Well, I mean, it’s survived. Very, very surprisingly, it remained. Except for 50 years in the 13th century, it remained undefeated, I mean, the Roman Empire continued under the new capital in Constantinople, and got incredibly powerful and is by far the richest, by far the most powerful state in the in the civilised world. Until two terrible things happen. One was the the surge of checks, the first wave of tax arrived, and defeated the Byzantine army. This was intense. And more or less flooded all over the whole of Asia Minor, which was where Byzantium got most of its food, and nearly all its manpower. And, and then, and then, that was the that was the first great disaster from which from which you’ve never recovered. And the second great disaster, of course, was the Fourth Crusade when the the Christian armies, who should have done everything they could to protect and defend and strengthen this last great outpost of Christianity in the east, turned against it and destroyed it, and left it a poor, pale shred of what it had been before, to the point where, although it lasted another 250 years, God knows how it did it. It really had completely lost its importance.

Continue reading “Interview with John Julius Norwich”

Not So Fast, Skater Boy

The UK police are apparently much less inclined to excuse the outrageous killing of a hockey player by another player than the global media is:

ITEM 1: NHL player Adam Johnson died on live TV after Matt Petgrave slashed his throat with his skate. Petgrave has a history of bad behavior in the EIHL, including racking up the most penalty minutes and getting booted out of games. The media quickly has declared it a total accident, but many viewers and expert hockey players are not convinced.

ITEM 2: A man has been arrested for the manslaughter of Nottingham Panthers player Adam Johnson after his tragic death last month. The 29-year-old American ice hockey star was reportedly killed after a skate slashed his throat in a collision during a match against Sheffield Steelers on October 28, causing a fatal neck injury.

Like pretty much every other man who grew up in Minnesota in the 1960s-1980s, I played ice hockey from a very young age. I played for eight years, and if it hadn’t been for a) early morning ice times, b) pretty girls on the ski slopes, and c) indoor winter tennis, I almost certainly would have played varsity in high school. I still consider the Minnesota State High School Hockey Tournament to be the third-best televised sporting event after a) NFL Redzone and b) March Madness, although I haven’t been a particular fan of any team since the Minnesota Fighting Saints shut down after the 1977 season and the Minnesota North Stars moved to Dallas in 1993.

And as a former hockey player, I have absolutely no problem saying that the kick that killed Adam Johnson was 100 percent intentional. I never, ever, saw anything that even came close to resembling what Petgrave did in all my years of playing and watching hockey. I don’t believe the African player was trying to kill Johnson, but he was clearly attempting to harm the other player when he struck him with his skate, so if that’s not manslaughter, then nothing is. There is no way the incident was merely “an accident”.

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