Category: Uncategorized

The Five Reasons for Failed Fantasy

The Dark Herald reviews the year in fantasy for 2022 and provides an explanation for why it was so disastrous.

First, everyone wanted their own Game of Thrones, (it wasn’t just Jeff Bezos).

Second, none of these producers knew anything about fantasy and they didn’t want to learn. They just wanted to glom on to something and tell their own version of THE MESSAGE.

Third, neither did the people who ran the studios. They were green-lighting anything that could be accused of being a fantasy franchise with an existing fanbase. And they also wanted to use it to spread THE MESSAGE.

Fourth, Woke. All of these shows were much more interested in contemporary politics than they were ancient worlds, eerie wonders, and glories beyond imagining. They cared more about scoring points in Hollywood than they ever could about fantasy.

Fifth, all of these shows were the result of globalism. Oh, it was Hollywood globalism to be sure, so on top of all of their other failings, they were shallow as a mud puddle. But it was all globalist fantasy. It was something too hopelessly bland to be at all interesting.

“The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don’t think it gave life to the orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them; and if they are to live at all, they have to live like other living creatures.”

I can’t help but find it amusing that all of these producers are casting desperately around for the next A GAME OF THRONES and it will never, ever, occur to them to go to the one epic fantasy series that is fully capable of providing them what they are looking for and more.

But it’s just as well. I have zero desire to see ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT utterly demolished the way that everything from WHEEL OF TIME to SANDMAN have been destroyed.

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Traffic Report 2022

2022 was another year in which I failed to finish A SEA OF SKULLS. It was also a year that saw the full effects of Google’s banning of the blog, as the precipitous decline to 12 million annual views from the previous year was actually smaller than the immediate month-on-month decline. Shadowbanning and deplatforming works, to a certain extent, which is why they do it. I also suspect that people are just exhausted with vaccine-related news, given that it’s mostly a grim chronicle of things going from bad to worse for the majority of the population. One can only read so many stories about young men and women dying from Suddenly before tapping out.

In 2022, Vox Popoli had 12,018,040 Google pageviews, down 69 percent from last year. The blog is now running at an average rate of 30,307 daily pageviews, down 17.9 percent from an average 36,091 last year. Total historic blog views closed out the year at 264,572,806. The running annual pageview totals are as follows:

2008: 3,496,757

2009: 4,414,801

2010: 4,827,183

2011: 5,422,628

2012: 6,098,774

2013: 9,340,663

2014: 11,236,085

2015: 16,211,875

2016: 25,817,343

2017: 31,216,357

2018: 32,260,094

2019: 32,757,068

2020: 41,338,037

2021: 38,884,355

2022: 12,018,040

It appears that it is time to retire the annual comparison to the former Most Popular Blog in Science Fiction, because there is no data to which this blog’s traffic can be compared. Also, Whatever now features as many posts by Scalzi’s daughter, with whom I have no issue, as it does by Scalzi himself, so the comparison is not even all that relevant anymore.

To be honest, this year feels a bit like the passing of a torch, not to any one individual, but rather, to the community as a whole. No one actually needs to visit here to access my ideas anymore, not when a single video promulgating concepts first presented here has 21 million views. This is not a complaint, but rather, an observation made with no little sense of satisfaction; it’s very freeing to know that others will not only take on the burden of spreading the ideas around, but will do so far more effectively than I ever have.

Intellectual success isn’t people knowing your name, it’s people embracing your ideas without ever needing to know your name. Having reached the point of having self-appointed populizers means being able to focus on breaking new ground rather than simply repeating the same basic things over and over again.

I won’t be taking a step back or reducing blog posts and Darkstreams, but I will attempt to focus them less on the operational details and other distractions and more on the core ideas. The Bindery, Selenoth, and a revival of Castalia’s traditional publishing are my top priorities for the new year; among other things, we’ll be publishing THREE new Conan novels by The Legend Chuck Dixon in 2023.

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Never Wrong

You might have thought Scott Adams was wrong. But he wasn’t. You just aren’t smart enough to see that when he said “2+2=37”, what he really meant was “4”. Of all the people who were ever right, he was right the most.

Gammas gonna gamma. If there is one certainty in this life besides death and taxes, it is that gammas are always going to gamma. But it’s obvious that the narrative has completely shifted, as even those who pushed the vaxx most avidly are now beginning to deny that they ever did what they quite clearly and observably did.

UPDATE: Scott Adams doubles down.

Idiot cartoonist Garrison combines two fake news stories about me into one.

I predicted the shots wouldn’t work and never trusted them. I was anti-mask, anti-lockdown, anti-mandate.

Musk agreed with me that WEF is not conspiring to reduce population. No one got schooled.

Moron

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The Coming Big Tech Implosion

It appears that government support and near-monopolies aren’t going to be enough to keep some of the tech giants afloat when the economy collapses:

Amazon is burning billions on Alexa because voice assistants need massive infrastructure but can’t be monetized. Google Cloud is $700 million in the red as of last earnings and heading south to a state of madness like a New Jersey retiree. These are mature products in saturated markets. You don’t need an MBA to know what will happen. But even the dean of Harvard Business School can’t say when.

The big confounding factor is reputation. Take Alexa, which, as has been noted, is overwhelmingly used for a few simple tasks: playing music, setting timers, doing quick queries, switching lights. Shopping and advertising? Not so much. The issue for Amazon over those few popular use cases is that they are very popular. For some demographics among the elderly and disabled they’re now part of their daily life. Millions more are habituated, with Alexa just being quietly useful when hands are full or pulling up a calculator app is just too much hassle.

Amazon’s model was to sell the hardware at or below cost and make the revenue from content and services. It’s a perfectly good model, if those services and content are as engaging as video games, or user data can be folded into ad targeting. None of this is true for Alexa, and it never will be. But if Amazon cuts and runs, hundreds of millions of users have had an intimate part of their life ripped out. One, furthermore, they considered paid for when they bought the gadget in the first place. How badly does Amazon want not to do that? It costs billions. It can’t keep paying. But it can’t just let it go.

Google is in an even worse position, not from the amount of red ink currently bleeding from its Cloud division, but because of its room to manoeuver is far less. There are around 4 billion email accounts in the world, and around 1.8 billion of those are Gmail. When you run a service for that many users, they run you.

Amazon is also getting absolutely hammered by the increase in transportation costs. Given that its core business runs on very thin margins, there is no way it’s not running in the red now. While both companies are being propped up by the US federal government, it’s doubtful that this support will continue once WWIII begins to seriously draw down the resources available to the government.

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Dialogue 2022

The Sino-Russian alliance is observably stronger than ever. Contra the incessant mainstream media nonsense about both nations, this is clearly not a conversation between two leaders who are desperate or believe that their geostrategic positions have weakened in the last year:

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Good afternoon, President Xi Jinping, my dear friend. I am delighted to see and greet you.

We are creating a very good tradition – to hold a videoconference at the end of the year to review our work and map out plans to build up Russia-China relations and strategic partnership and to exchange views on the most topical international issues.

But first of all, I would like to congratulate you and all our Chinese friends on the successful completion of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China and you personally on being re-elected as General Secretary of the of CPC Central Committee. Your guiding role and the CPC’s leadership are essential for the sustainable socioeconomic development of the country and the strengthening of its positions on the global stage. I wholeheartedly wish every success to you and the friendly people of China.

In the context of growing geopolitical tensions, the importance of the Russian-Chinese strategic partnership as a stability factor is growing. Our relations have passed all the tests, demonstrating their maturity and stability, and they continue to grow dynamically. As both of us pointed out, our current relations are enjoying the best period in their history and can be regarded as a model of cooperation between major powers in the 21st century…

President of China Xi Jinping: President Putin, my dear friend.

I am delighted to see you again.

A videoconference with you ahead of New Year’s Eve has become our good tradition. This year, we had two in-person meetings and spoke over the phone multiple times. We maintain close strategic contacts. After the success of the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, you immediately sent me warm greetings. It was greatly appreciated.

Under our joint leadership, the overarching Russia-China partnership and strategic cooperation demonstrates maturity and ability to withstand challenges in this new age… In the face of the challenging and largely ambivalent international situation, we are ready to build up strategic cooperation with Russia, providing each other with development opportunities and remaining global partners for the benefit of our countries and in the interests of stability in the entire world.

The full transcript isn’t available at the link yet, so if anything interesting pops up in the sections added later, I’ll note them here.

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Clown World Claims Brazil

As was the case with Donald Trump, Bolsonaro’s courage failed him at the Rubicon:

The outgoing president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, has affirmed that “nothing justifies” violent plans such as the one that allegedly foresaw an attack in the area of the Brasilia airport and has disassociated himself from the mobilizations organized in recent days in front of Armed Forces installations to demand a military uprising.

He has also disassociated himself from the camps that demand in his name the annulment of the results of the last elections and the intervention of the Armed Forces. In this sense, he said that these are spontaneous rallies and that he has “withdrawn” from any kind of protest of this type.

What a strange thing to say, given the way in which violence has been deemed appropriate and necessary by everyone from the Pope and the Founding Fathers to the Zionists, the Greatest Generation, and the invaders of Grenada, Iraq, and Afghanistan, to say nothing of those who are funding violence, and increasingly, engaging in violence, on behalf of Ukraine. These cuckservative leaders were happy enough to order their militaries into action against foreign nations that have never done anything to their people, but shirked at actually using them to defend the people against their actual enemies.

“I tried to find a solution inside our constitution but I didn’t have enough support.”

And that is why conservatives will never save anyone or anything. Despite all their brave rhetoric, they’re cowards at heart. All evil has to do to defeat a conservative is tell him that resistance is illegal.

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Polish Regulars in Ukraine

This news of large numbers of Polish regulars replacing Ukrainians and foreign mercenaries on the front is as-yet unconfirmed, but it won’t be very surprising if it is confirmed soon. It will, however, be a significant step toward transforming what had been a simple border dispute into a regional conflict.

There are no more Ukrainians on the front. There are only Polish there, Polish regular soldiers. And my war correspondents know that. What does this mean? This means that we are already at war with a NATO country. Directly. There are now fifteen thousand Polish regular soldiers there. What if there are hundreds of thousands; won’t we attack Poland; If they push us from there? The situation is evolving before our eyes. We are now at war with the Polish Regular Army and we already know that.

The war was always between Russia and NATO, but if the reports of Polish regulars on the front are true, that will mean that NATO plans to fight on even after the Ukrainian army has been rendered hors de combat.

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You Can Legislate Morality

Another foundation of libertarian philosophy is destroyed, as the response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade in Texas conclusively demonstrates:

Recently released data shows that abortions committed in the state of Texas have decreased by 97 percent since the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Based on data reported by the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, 68 total abortions were committed in the month of July in Texas compared to the 2,533 babies who were killed in January.

Although the number of abortions reached slightly more than 3,000 during the months of March and April, the statistics show that numbers steadily decreased beginning in May. There were 2,596 fewer abortions committed in July than there were in June.

Of the women who sought abortions between January and July, less than 100 were married. Sixty of the 68 unborn babies who were killed in July were the children of unmarried women.

Most of the abortions committed during these seven months ended the lives of babies at up to eight weeks’ gestation. Two were committed on babies at 9-10 weeks gestation, one at 11-12 weeks, two at 13-14 weeks, four at 15-16 weeks, and five at 17-20 weeks. No babies were killed past 21 weeks.

It’s not only morality that can be legislated, but sanity as well, as we’re seeing with the gender-denial nonsense. We’re learning – or really, re-learning with the support of statistical and scientific evidence – that most, if not all, of the Enlightenment theories are entirely false. From economics to science, what worked beautifully as rhetorical hypotheses for hundreds of years are turning out to be comprehensive failures when put into practice.

Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things… The fact that a chaotic and ill-educated time cannot clearly grasp that truth does not alter the fact that it always will be the truth. Our generation, in a dirty, pessimistic period, has blasphemously underrated the beauty of life and cravenly overrated its dangers. As for our own society, if it proceeds at its present rate of progress and improvement, no trace or memory of it will be left at all.

G.K. Chesterton

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The Greatest is Gone

Pelé, the Brazilian king of soccer who won a record three World Cups and became one of the most commanding sports figures of the last century, died Thursday. He was 82

Pelé was the epitome of the Beautiful Game. He was as gracious as he was graceful, and he was less beloved for his unparalleled athletic abilities than for his joyful and magnanimous spirit. He will not only be remembered by Brazilians, but by soccer fans around the world.

Requiscat in pace.

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The Vicious Circle

Americans are the only party that can save the USA from Clown World. The Sino-Russian alliance can, and will, resist the US military, but it is not strong enough to liberate the USA the way it can, and will, liberate Asia and Europe:

Russia can do many things, but it cannot liberate the USA from the grip of the Neocons. That is something which only US Americans can do.

And here we hit a vicious circle:

The US political system is most unlikely to be effectively challenged from within, big money runs everything, including the most advanced propaganda system in history (aka the “free media”) and the population is kept uninformed and brainwashed. And yes, of course, a major defeat in a war against Russia would shake this system so hard that it would be impossible to conceal the magnitude of the disaster (think “Kabul on steroids”). And that is precisely why the Neocons cannot allow that to happen because this defeat would trigger a domino effect which would quickly involve the truth about 9/11 and, after that, all the myths and lies the US society has been based on for decades (JFK anybody?).

There are, of course, plenty of US Americans who fully understand that. But how many of them are in a real position of power to influence US decision-making and outcomes? The real question is whether there still are enough patriotic forces in the Pentagon, or the letter soup agencies, to send the Neocons back down into the basement they crawled out of after the 9/11 false flag or not?

Right now it sure looks like all the positions of power in the US are held by Neolibs, Neocons, RINOs and other ugly creatures, yet it is also undeniable that people like, say, Tucker Carlson and Tulsi Gabbard are reaching a lot of people who “get it”. This has to include REAL liberals and REAL conservatives whose loyalty is not to a gang of international thugs but to their own country and their own people.

I am also pretty sure that there are many US military commanders who listen to what Col. Macgregor has to say.

Will that be that enough to break through the wall of lies and propaganda?

I’m more optimistic than The Saker, mostly because I think the system will begin the process of its own demise by undermining its own foundations. The imperial collapse will inevitably come, which is why Americans need to be ready to reassert their right to rule in their own country, even if that is no longer the geographic totality of the current political entity.

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