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.
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 Grouplaid 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.
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.
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”.
Model: WizardLM-1.0-Uncensored-CodeLlama-34b. Based on Facebook’s Llama LLM, retrained with a filtered dataset, intended to reduce refusals, avoidance, and bias.
QUESTION: Who is Vox Day?
AI: Vox Day is a pseudonym of American writer and blogger Larry Correia. He writes science fiction novels, blogs about politics, and promotes self-publishing
The unravelling has started and it’s obvious that the neocons have already decided to pull the plug and turn off the life support system of the Kiev regime.
Let’s summarize recent developments:
Zaluzhny’s aides are deleted, one by assassination
Large-scale new ‘house cleaning’ of entire general staff is reportedly announced from Zelensky’s side
Major media campaigns from both sides push urgent narratives of stalemates, Zaluzhny implying the war will be lost, and an eye-opening exposé on a ‘isolated’ and ‘messianic’ Fuhrer-bunker version of Zelensky
Zelensky suddenly cancels presidential elections, likely sussing the plan to promote Zaluzhny as challenger
Money spigot has still been turned off for the foreseeable future, with no realistic plans on horizon at the moment
Ukraine now catastrophically losing on virtually every front of the war, set to soon lose another major, strategically critical city
Many influential voices like Arestovich now openly push ceasefire
The ‘grim reaper’ CIA director set to pay visit, which only happens on eve of some major pivot or escalation. Diplomats and Foreign Secretaries are sent to ‘discuss options’ or ‘negotiate’—CIA directors are sent to deliver final threats of action
Now, much of the foregoing information is already being discussed elsewhere. But the one chief question no one else seems to be asking is the most critical of all: if factions in the West intend to replace Zelensky with Zaluzhny, then what is the actual purpose? What do they intend for Zaluzhny to do or accomplish that Zelensky cannot?
Some haven’t thought this through, and just assume that “Zaluzhny is a strong leader” and therefore is being made to replace Zelensky so that he can whip the military into shape and win the war. But why would Zaluzhny need to be president to do that? He’s already the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces and that’s literally his job description.
So, logically speaking, the only possible explanation I can see making sense is that Zaluzhny is being chosen to sell the ceasefire to the people. Such a thing would sound more acceptable from the standpoint of a military leader and strategist who can explain that the situation is hopeless without time to recover and replenish the forces with an armistice. And more importantly, to sell it to the troops.
Notice how all of this has been transparent to anyone who simply watches the direction that the elite neocons are taking. This was obvious as far back as April and May, but the need to focus on the defense of Israel, which is the absolute #1 neocon priority, means that the Ukraine war will be over as soon as a military leader a) replaces Zelensky/Yermak and b) meets Putin’s terms.
However, it may not be as easy to accomplish (b) as the neocons and the media believe. I expect Putin will demand, at the very least, a complete end of the collective sanctions regime, a disinvitation to NATO, and the province of Odessa, and it’s going to be very, very difficult for all the true believers in the Narrative to accept that.
Notice, in particular, that the CIA director who is meeting with Zelensky this week wrote the following to his then-boss, Condoleeza Rice, in 2008 when he was the ambassador to Russia:
“Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”
In any event, don’t be surprised if the collapse and first attempt to reach a settlement happens considerably sooner than anyone expects. Keep in mind that the speed with which these events are taking place tend to indicate that the war in the Middle East is not proceeding as well as anticipated.
Five American service members were killed in a crash late Friday after their helicopter had a “mishap” during a training exercise and went into the eastern Mediterranean Sea, the military said Sunday. Two officials confirmed that the five were Army special operations soldiers, as first reported by The New York Times and Washington Post. Search and rescue efforts went into Saturday before being called off, according to the officials.
“Training Exercise,” in the military context, is always a pseudonym. The US special forces don’t “train” overseas, unless they are training foreign militaries. The “mishap” was most likely the fact that the helicopter was shot down, although the list of possible culprits is far too long to even hazard a guess.
Meanwhile, Gazans are reporting encounters with English-speaking troops with US flags on their uniforms. Given the number of dual citizens in the IDF, this doesn’t necessarily mean US special forces are already on the ground in Gaza, but it would be very foolish to assume they are not already engaged there.
Sometimes slower, sometimes faster, but Arktoons just keeps growing. Keep an eye out for some interface changes soon, as well as the return of a few of our more popular comics and the introduction of some new ones.
There are three ways to support Arktoons. First and foremost, find a series that is a daily read. Our creators, both Arkhaven and independent, are putting out 4-8 new episodes every single day. There are now literally thousands of episodes available. And for the fiction readers, there is at least one text episode every day – Mondays feature Chuck Dixon’s The Sidewinders, for example.
Second, back our crowdfunding campaigns. We don’t have any running right now, because we’re working on fulfilling our existing ones, but we’ll launch another one once we get a few more of these omnibuses out, including both Midnight’s War and AH:Q. And third, subscribe to Arktoons.
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