Alt-Right, Alt-Hero, Alt-Germany, the trend is perfectly clear. When the mainstream fails as completely and comprehensively as it has failed, whether it is the American conservative movement, the Big Two of comics, or the grand coalition of the SPD, CDU, and CSU, popular alternatives are inevitably going to rise up to replace the institutional failures that have proven they are no longer capable of performing their primary functions.
Despite charges from mainstream politicians that it is “fascist,” the right-wing Alternative to Germany party is now polling second, ahead of the left-wing Social Democrat Party. The party’s growing popularity may be due to its strong stand against Chancellor Angela Merkel’s lax immigration policies. Or, it could be because it offers a clear alternative to the oddball coalition cobbled together by Merkel of Social Democrats and the chancellor’s CDU party.
Since it has proven necessary in the past, allow me to be perfectly clear. The “Alt” in Alt★Hero also does not stand for Alternative für Deutschland.
As always, the cuckservatives continue to dishonestly point to ideological differences when the real problem is one of identity and immigration.
Today, flying back from New York, I ran into someone in the Charlotte airport, a Christian pastor I’d met at an event last year. We spent about an hour talking about the rancor and distrust in our country. He’s involved in reconciliation ministry, which is to say, bringing people together across boundaries of distrust, and teaching them how to talk to each other.
I mentioned to him that I’d have conversations over the past few months with friends who broadly share my worldview and demographic characteristics (white, conservative, Christian, middle-aged), and I was surprised by how many of them say that they have deliberately chosen to socialize only with people like themselves. It’s not at all because they don’t want to talk to anybody who disagrees. It’s because they are afraid.
Afraid of what? They’re afraid that if they say something that offends a liberal, there will be hell to pay. Whether it was something genuinely offensive that they said thoughtlessly, and are willing to apologize for, or whether it was something harmless that nevertheless caused offense to the liberal, they are afraid that they will be condemned as a hater. They are afraid that the aggrieved liberal will spread a tale of their wickedness on social media, and they will be left to defend themselves in a world in which their demographic qualities (race, religion, politics, social class, etc.) will be taken as dispositive evidence of their guilt. They are afraid that in the best-case scenario, the sort of thing that in earlier times would have been something people could discuss, even argue over, while remaining friends would now cause a social conflagration that would cost people friendships — and in the worst-case scenario, one error, real or imagined, could bring everything in their lives crashing down.
I said to the pastor that I don’t know how we escape this, given that social media is never going away. Somebody’s reputation can be destroyed with remarkable ease.
Liberals? Really? I don’t know ANYONE who is afraid of offending liberals for their liberalism. What white Americans of all ideological stripes are afraid of is being accused of offending blacks, Jews, gays, women, Muslims, Asians, Hispanics, and non-European immigrants, in that order.
American liberals have been around for over a century. While they can, and should, be held responsible for a panoply of social and political ills, they obviously cannot be responsible for a current state of being that is observably new and different from before. What has changed, and the reason for the state of fear on the part of conservatives, cuckservatives, and moderates alike is the fact that the nation has been invaded and adulterated over the last 50 years, and the identity demographics have consequently changed.
Intellectual cowards like Rod Dreher lament the end of a trusting society, but they are too dishonest, and too frightened, to even address the reason it happened. And if you’re afraid to speak your mind freely and fearlessly in front of your friends and family, then you would be well-advised to eject them from your life without hesitation or remorse.
Dr. Hallpike spent his first ten years as an anthropologist living with mountain tribes in Ethiopia and Papua New Guinea and writing up his research for publication. He learned that primitive societies are very different from our modern industrialised societies and that it takes a considerable amount study to understand how they work.
But since all Man’s ancestors used to live in a similar manner, understanding these societies is essential to understanding the human race itself, especially when speculating about our prehistoric ancestors in East Africa. Unfortunately a wide variety of journalists and science writers, historians, linguists, biologists, and especially evolutionary psychologists erroneously believe they are qualified to write about primitive societies without knowing much about them.
The result is that many of their superficial speculations have about as much scientific credibility as The Flintstones. The various critical studies contained in Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense About Primitive Society examine some of the most popular of these speculations and evaluate their scientific merit.
Among the learned fools whose works are critiqued are:
Yuval Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Emma Byrne’s Swearing is Good For You
René Girard’s theory of learned behavior
William Arens’s The Man-Eating Myth
Noam Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar
No one systematically and structurally demolishes the pseudoscientific work of charlatans more comprehensively than Dr. Hallpike. Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense About Primitive Societyis a must-read for any educated individual who regularly finds himself coming into contact with intellectual poseurs who make a habit of quoting learned fools.
And if you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend Hallpike’s Do We Need God to Be Good: An Anthropologist Considers the Evidence, which is the only takedown of evolutionary psychology you will ever need. If you thought TIA did a reasonable job dissecting the arguments of the New Atheists, then you will truly appreciate both of Hallpike’s books.
“It’s not about stopping anybody from doing anything. You are free to do whatever comics you want. We’ll leave you alone to do your comics, and you leave us alone to do our comics. It’s really as simple as that. And the comics aren’t about everyone else’s comics. They’re just our comics.”
Dixon would hammer his point home:
“I guess because of the reaction to Comicsgate, we are put in the position of being anti-authoritarian, which is fine with me because I am anti-authoritarian anyway. I’ve never liked anyone telling me what to do creatively especially on creator owned projects. It’s my work. I’m going to do whatever I want. And I apologize to no one. These false associations they make with white supremacy, bigotry and homophobia. These are all just catch phrases they use to silence anybody who doesn’t agree with them. What’s silly is, it’s not about not agreeing with them. It’s about doing our own work. Is it a reaction to the market and what’s going on? Yes, it is. We aren’t out to censor or ban anyone, we are just offering an alternative.”
That’s really the point. We’ll do what we want to do. The SJWs at the converged comics publishers will continue to do what they want to do. And may the readers read and support whatever it is they prefer to read and support.
And in the event there happen to be sane and talented individuals working with those SJW-converged companies who are not being permitted to do whatever it is they want to do for whatever reason, well, that’s exactly what Dark Legion is for.
Chuck Dixon’s Avalon #2: Rulebreaker, is currently available from Arkhaven Comics in Kindle and Kindle Unlimited digital editions. It will be available in print next week.
I thought this comment at Bounding Into Comics was a positive indicator that some readers are beginning to simply judge Arkhaven’s comics on their various merits rather than their genesis.
Dixon is a class act. His Arkhaven comics are great…. I could give less of a shit about Vox Day or his politics, but his comics are good, they come out regularly (unlike all this indiegogo shit being late) and they are 3 dollars mostly, a few longer ones are 8. Not to mention they are entertaining. Misconception people have is “Alt-Hero” means “Alt-Right” but that is only if you are an EVS drone, it refers to the word “Alternative” which some comic readers may actually have the vocabulary to understand it. I read its first 4 issues and its light on the politics unless you call Antifa a force for good.
I do find it interesting that literally no one has ever bothered to ask me what “Alt★Hero” stands for. Everyone has always just assumed that it must have something to do with the “Alt Right”. But it doesn’t, it didn’t, and it never has. I have always intended the Alt★Heroes to be an alternative to the outdated heroes of Marvel and DC, not to the neocons and the American conservative movement.
And as our readers know, Arkhaven’s Alt★Heroes espouse a very broad range of ideologies, from the bureaucratic globalism of Captain Europa to the hard nationalism of Michael Martel and the imperialistic communism of the Gods of Peaceful Sleep.
Diversity & Comics YouTuber Richard Meyer has launched a civil suit against comic book writer Mark Waid. Filed on the 19th of September with the United States District Court in Austin, it claims ‘tortious interference with contract and defamation’. Meyer is represented by lawyers Daniel H Byrne and Dale L Roberts, of the legal firm Fritz, Byrne, Head & Gilstrap of Austin, Texas. Mark Waid is being represented by Mark S. Zaid, who is the founding partner of his own firm.
Antarctic Press claims their decision to cancel their publishing contract with Meyer was not related to Mark Waid’s efforts to convince them to do so, but then, confirming or refuting such claims is exactly what discovery is for. What I find interesting is that Marvel appears to have Waid’s back here, given the high-powered, politically connected nature of his lawyer.
25/25. You are a GENIUS! Way to go! Only people with an IQ score of 153-161 aced this general knowledge test.
I can personally attest that you don’t need an IQ of 153, much less 161, to score 25/25 on this general knowledge test. Especially since it took me less than 30 seconds to take it. Frankly, I’d be astonished if anyone reading this blog got less than 22 of the answers right.
As a general rule, Internet IQ tests are, like this one, completely fake and meant to flatter the test-taker. Knowledge can serve as a partial proxy for IQ, but it can never provide any sort of quantitative measure because storage is not processing power. Also, genius is not measured in capability or IQ, but in unique historical achievement.
But there is one intriguing thing about this clickbaitery, which is the notion that only people with IQs under 161 can get a perfect score. Are they suggesting that 4SD minds tend to overcomplicate straightforward questions? Or, as is much more likely the case, are they just playing the scientistic game of selling credibility through false claims of precision?
If so, they’re hardly alone. For as Daniel Dennett has assured us, you can trust biologists because physicists get amazingly accurate results.
Regardless of what you think of Q, things are heating up to the point that one way or another, we’re not going to be in any doubt about its legitimacy any longer.
If you’re not already subscribed to either the Daily Meme Wars or Castalia House Book Club, be sure to do so today. You can find both on the left sidebar. If you’re subscribed, we can contact you and provide you with the new blog location in the event this site goes down. Voxiversity and the Darkstream are already on BitChute, and in the event Amazon gets into it, you know where the Castalia/Arkhaven Direct stores are.
I tend to doubt anything will happen given the fact that there are few things that would be more useful than being given an excuse to obtain every internal communication at Google about me, but then, SJWs are not exactly known for their sense of self-preservation. Also, both Google and Facebook are in enough hot water in Europe that I doubt they are eager to create more points of vulnerability. That being said, it’s always best to be prepared, as Neon Revolt reminds us.
You know what’s at stake; you don’t need me to remind you. You know these technological oligarchs are complicit in so much evil, so they’re desperate to save themselves. If the Dems lose the midterms, these oligarchs lose their protection.
And the censorship is already happening.
Why, just a day or so ago, @ThomasWictor had his account purged from Twitter entirely. @realJamesWoods is still suspended for daring to post a meme. It doesn’t matter what you post; these sites have such vague guidelines, they’ll come up with any old excuse to censor whoever they don’t like.
You can’t expect the likes of @Jack and #Cuckerberg to fight fair. They’re willing to endure any lawsuit, any investigation, so long as it means keeping their scrawny behinds out of hot water. This may be all fun and memes for us, but for them, it’s life and death.
And like Q warns, expect Trump’s own twitter account to go down as well. I imagine they’re saving that play for a key moment; one where it will put his account out of commission for a few hours, and then, like Q says, they’ll reinstate it and blame the outage on a “renegade employee,” just like they did before.
After reading this account of the falling out between Terrence Howard and Robert Downey Jr., I very much look forward to competing with Marvel in the movie space:
Appearing on Watch What Happens Live, a caller asked Howard if he would ever appear in a future Marvel film now he is civil with Robert again.
Prompting him to reply: ‘You know what’s so funny? Even though I love Don Cheadle so much and I love what he’s done, I still hear a lot of fans asking, “Am I going to come back and be War Machine? Am I going to come back and be War Machine? I think they could have a huge franchise off of it. But f*** ’em.’
The feud began after Howard accused Downey, 53, of abandoning him when he tried to negotiate a better fee to appear in Iron Man 2.
He previously explained: ‘We did a three-picture deal, so that means that you did the deal ahead of time. It was going to be a certain amount for the first one, a certain amount for the second one, a certain amount for the third.
‘They came to me with the second and said, ‘Look, we will pay you one-eighth of what we contractually had for you, because we think the second one will be successful with or without you.’ And I called my friend – that I helped get the first job – and he didn’t call me back for three months.’
In other words, Howard didn’t try “to negotiate a better fee,” he tried to get paid what he was contractually obligated to be paid. Marvel tried to stiff him of 7/8ths of what he was supposed to be paid because they calculated, correctly, that his presence was not required for a successful sequel, so he walked away.
This behavior is completely consistent with what we have learned of Marvel’s treatment of freelance illustrators and colorists; their behavior towards writers tends to be even worse. It’s informative to learn that while Howard has forgiven Downey for not having had his back, he has neither forgiven nor forgotten Marvel’s shoddy treatment of him.
As you may have noted, nearly all of Castalia’s, Arkhaven’s, and Dark Legion’s various creators continue to work with us, and even those few who don’t tend to remain on good terms with us and may well work with us in the future. And on a not-entirely-unrelated subject, Bounding Into Comics is less than entirely enthusiastic about the upcoming Disney Channel film, Marvel Rising: Secret Warriors.
Looking at the Comichron numbers for the one-shot comics under the Marvel Rising brand, they are rather poor. In June, Marvel Rising Alpha would only ship 21,290 units. It didn’t even make the top 100 comics for the month. July would see Marvel Rising: Squirrel Girl/Ms. Marvel only ship 17,995 units. And then a different Marvel Rising: Squirrel Girl/Ms. Marvel would only ship 15,558 units in August.
If one takes into account the average sell-through percentage, Alt★Hero is already competing very effectively with the Marvel Rising brand without taking the crowdfunding aspect into account. And we’re not even in the comic stores yet.
Never trust a principled liberal. They will always betray their loftily-expressed principles when push comes to shove. Every single time. The ACLU “has chosen to make an exception”:
In the wake of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s sworn testimony of sexual abuse at the hands of Brett Kavanaugh, the American Civil Liberties Union has announced its opposition to his nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.
As a matter of organizational policy, the ACLU does not support or oppose candidates for political or judicial office. In this instance, the national board held an extraordinary meeting, and has chosen to make an exception to that policy.
“The ACLU’s board of directors, deeply concerned by the allegations raised in recent weeks, has made a rare exception to its longstanding policy and voted to oppose the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court,” said Susan Herman, president of the ACLU.
This “rare exception” should tell Republicans how important it is to ram through the Kavanaugh approval, by any means necessary.
“As a nonpartisan organization, the ACLU does not oppose Judge Kavanaugh based on predictions about how he would vote as a Justice. We oppose him in light of the credible allegations of sexual assault against him,” concluded Herman. What was that law again? How did it go? Ah, yes. SJWs always lie.
So there was very, very disappointing news for Star Wars fans today just a few hours ago. Variety and some other entertainment news sources reported that the woman who is primarily responsible for the destruction of the Star Wars franchise, the ongoing destruction of the Star Wars franchise, has actually been signed to a three-year contract with Disney and apparently is still going to be in charge of the Star Wars movies. Now, I personally think this is fantastic news, I think this is wonderful news, because it means that there is a tremendous opportunity out there for those of us who are creating alternatives. If you look at what has been done with Galaxy’s Edge, if you look at what we are in the process of doing with Faraway Wars, if you look at a lot of the other stuff that people are doing in a similar vein, this is an excellent opportunity for the Star Wars fans to find better and more worthy alternatives because it is now very, very clear that Disney is not going to fix what George Lucas broke.
In fact Disney is going to continue to make it worse. Disney is going to make Star Wars even more converged than it is. You might not think it’s possible, but believe me it is. There’s a good question, “Vox, why do they ruin everything?” They ruin everything because they don’t understand anything. You have to understand that culture and technology and art, all of these things, are black boxes to SJWs. They do not understand what they are, they don’t understand how they work, they don’t understand the nature of their appeal to other people. SJWs are essentially cargo cultists.
The reason why I argue that this is objectively bad, mechanically bad, and not just a plot twist that happens not to please me is this:
There are three components to any criticism of art. One is to look at the mechanics of the art form, regardless of content. That is an objective matter. The poem either has fourteen rhyming lines or does not; if it is a thirteen line poem, or blank verse, good bad or indifferent, it is not a sonnet. The next component is a judgement call: did the artist achieve the effect he was attempting? Was the audience moved as he was trying to move them? The final is subjective reaction: did I like it? And why did I?
It is often said in the modern day that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, which, in effect, says there is only one component to criticism: the subjective one. Nonsense. A fair-minded critic could, for example, be no fan of horror movies, or even dislike the whole genre, and still be able to tell John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN is well-made horror movie and Ed Wood’s PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE is not. More to the point, he could tell that MY FAIR LADY is not a horror movie at all.
In this case, in story telling of any kind, in film or print, any plot point needs set up and follow through if it is to be emotionally satisfying.
Example: The set up for a character like Rick Blaine in CASABLANCA, or Han Solo in STAR WARS, who at first wants no part of the fight is to have him show his reluctance. Hence the scene in CASABLANCA where Rick looks on indifferently as Ugarte is arrested and executed; hence the line in STAR WARS where Han will not stir a foot to rescue the princess until he is reassured that she is rich. That is the set up. The follow through is the about-face: when Rick sends away the woman he loves, despite the personal cost to him, or when Han returns unexpectedly to swoop out of the sun and blast Vader’s pursuit-ship as it is closing in on Luke for the kill.
In this case, we saw the set up for Finn’s reluctance in this last film and in this one. He attempts to steal an escape pod, and is zoinked by a zoink-dwarf with a zoink-wand. The follow-through was the about-face and the noble sacrifice to save his friends. Except that the suicide run is said over the radio to be in vain: a pointless gesture. Either Finn would have destroyed the gun by ramming it, or not. If not, it is not a real about-face. It is just a wasted character trying to waste himself to escape this wasteland of a film. But if it would have worked, preventing the sacrifice (at the sacrifice of everyone else) prevents any follow-through on the character arc: he is still, through no fault of his own, back where Rick and Han started out.
Good, bad or indifferent is another matter. Whether you personally liked it or not is another matter. On an objective level, having an event that robs all the meaning out of the set up event, and then leads nowhere to nothing, is a mechanical error in story telling. Story telling consists of telling about meaningful events, not meaningless ones. Even if you want to tell a nihilistic story, whose point is that life is pointless, the story itself must be told in a pointed way, and the events in the story must be meaningful in order to carry the message to the audience, even if that message says that meaning is illusion.
Basically, the story telling is objectively bad when the character in a drama loses all dramatic potential. There is no more story here. What is our Token Stormtrooper now? He is a hero who fails to be heroic. No chance to try again was given, not in this film. If the self-centered cynic, like Han Solo or Rick Blaine, has a certain romantic glamor to him, a cool self-possession. But a flunked suicide? What has he got? He is neither selfish nor selfless. He has no personality at all. The character becomes nothing.
