Darkstream: why no one likes you

I probably should have called this Darkstream “how to be less disagreeable” or something, but regardless, it’s something that unpopular people really need to listen, understand, and apply. So much behavioral unattractiveness is avoidable, it just requires a modicum of self-awareness and self-control.

A really big giveaway is trying to make a issue about the person rather than the issue. If you disagree with someone, do you have a tendency to focus on what the person said and what was wrong about that or do you immediately go to try to question the person’s motivations, you immediately go to try to question the person’s character, you try to discredit the person in the eyes of other people? Those are all gamma behavioural patterns.

There’s a good comment here and this is exactly true. He says, “I notice that they tend to scan for trigger words that they respond emotionally to rather than processing the ideas and then responding to the ideas.” People don’t like this behavior. This is what this is what is so strange about these patterns is that no one likes this behavior. Men don’t like it, women don’t like it, absolutely no one likes to be around it, and no one likes to be subjected to it. And so, you know, if you find that you’re not popular, if you find that people go out of their way to avoid being around you, if they kick you out of their groups online, you know, the chances are very good that your behavior is caught up in in this vicious spiral of negativity. Some of it is directed internally, but a lot of it gets directed at anybody who upsets you or makes you feel bad.

The problem is that other people know about this even if they even if they can’t articulate exactly what your behavior is. They have seen it before in others and they have had bad experiences with others who exhibit those behavioral patterns….

The one thing that I would like to convince you if you are someone that is unpopular, disliked, etc, the one thing that I’d like to convince you more than anything is to understand that everyone sees through all of your little posturing. Okay? The snarky declarations of victory, the redefinitions of defeat and claiming that you actually really won, these are things that are not fooling anyone, you know?

Because, like I said, there aren’t that many fundamental behavioral types and so when you’re doing that kind of crap, then you’re doing something that the other person has seen a hundred times before from other losers like you. So you know, you’re not getting anything past them. Even if they don’t call you out, even if they just roll their eyes and let it go, you shouldn’t think you’re getting away with anything and you’re not fooling anyone, all right? The snarky comments, the posturing, the eye rolling, these are things that people notice and they remember.

UPDATE: Then again, this comment tends to indicate that many unpopular, disagreeable people prefer their negative behavioral patterns to popularity.

I often find that the people who self-identify as alpha and put everyone else down are actually narcissistic sociopaths attempting to justify their anti-social behavior and pretend they’re a much higher status than they actually are. That you admit to looking to your wife for approval before you speak definitely takes you out of the alpha category.
– Jack Burton

I suggest Jack watch the video again. I’m literally talking to him and men like him. By the way, Big Trouble in Little China quotes are also a gamma tell.

In any event, I don’t look to Spacebunny for approval. I look to her because she actually pays attention to the social mood of the gathering and the flow of the conversation, which I don’t always do. This helps me avoid humiliating someone who really doesn’t deserve it or responding to a harmless statement in a manner others are likely to deem awkward or inappropriate.

His audio is never good. His content is never good. His speaking ability is never good. Why does a self-proclaimed genius speak like he has brain damage? He’s stupid, lying or both. Using your podcasts to attack others all the time = gamma of the lowest order.
– Jack Burton

I suggest you look in the mirror because you’re literally talking about yourself and projecting your faults on others. You ARE the nerd, a huge nerd. You don’t just know quotes, you create the quotes. You don’t just visit fantasy worlds, you live in a fantasy world. You make your living writing third-rate fiction to appeal to the same nerds you seem to hate. Your complete lack of self-awareness and hypocrisy is astounding and just shows how deep your narcissism is. The idea that merely quoting a movie or book means you’re gamma is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard and is completely nonsensical. You’re a nerd pretending you’re better than other nerds. It’s really pathetic. You’re a liar and a fraud. I’m not making sarcastic sounds. I’m not indirectly taking shots. I’m telling you directly that you’re full of shit. Something your wife, real or imagined, does a lot I’m sure. 
– Jack Burton

Who lies more, Peterson or “Vox Day?” Who lives in a fantasy world and sells his fantasies to others, Peterson or Vox? Who is a huge nerd but attacks and exploits other nerds? Vox is clearly much more dysfunctional, deceptive, parasitic and negative than Peterson.
– Jack Burton

It’s amusing that the biggest gamma nerd of them all pretends he’s alpha, LMAO. He’s up to his castizo eyeballs in comics and pretends he’s some kind of chad alpha. He’s a short, doughy geek who couldn’t defend himself to save his life. He even admitted he doesn’t respond to people unless his wife gives him permission. Just stand there and hold her purse, you wimp.
– Jack Burton

Everyone always knows

It’s remarkable how often these big corporate scams are totally obvious from the start. And as a general rule, if the founder is putting on Ted Talks and blathering on about saving the world instead of desperately trying to keep their head above water, you can be pretty sure it’s a scam of some sort.

The biggest problem of all was the dysfunctional corporate culture in which it was being developed. Holmes and Balwani regarded anyone who raised a concern or an objection as a cynic and a nay-sayer. Employees who persisted in doing so were usually marginalized or fired, while sycophants were promoted.

Employees were Balwani’s minions. He expected them to be at his disposal at all hours of the day or night and on weekends. He checked the security logs every morning to see when they badged in and out. Every evening, around 7:30, he made a flyby of the engineering department to make sure people were still at their desks working.

With time, some employees grew less afraid of him and devised ways to manage him, as it dawned on them that they were dealing with an erratic man-child of limited intellect and an even more limited attention span. Arnav Khannah, a young mechanical engineer who worked on the miniLab, figured out a surefire way to get Balwani off his back: answer his emails with a reply longer than 500 words. That usually bought him several weeks of peace because Balwani simply didn’t have the patience to read long emails. Another strategy was to convene a biweekly meeting of his team and invite Balwani to attend. He might come to the first few, but he would eventually lose interest or forget to show up.

While Holmes was fast to catch on to engineering concepts, Balwani was often out of his depth during engineering discussions. To hide it, he had a habit of repeating technical terms he heard others using. During a meeting with Khannah’s team, he latched onto the term “end effector,” which signifies the claws at the end of a robotic arm. Except Balwani didn’t hear “end effector,” he heard “endofactor.” For the rest of the meeting, he kept referring to the fictional endofactors. At their next meeting with Balwani two weeks later, Khannah’s team brought a PowerPoint presentation titled “Endofactors Update.” As Khannah flashed it on a screen with a projector, the five members of his team stole furtive glances at one another, nervous that Balwani might become wise to the prank. But he didn’t bat an eye and the meeting proceeded without incident. After he left the room, they burst out laughing.

Khannah and his team also got Balwani to use the obscure engineering term “crazing.” It normally refers to a phenomenon that produces fine cracks on the surface of a material, but Khannah and his colleagues used it liberally and out of context to see if they could get Balwani to repeat it, which he did. Balwani’s knowledge of chemistry was no better. He thought the chemical symbol for potassium was P (it’s K; P is the symbol for phosphorus)—a mistake most high school chemistry students wouldn’t make.

The amusing thing, of course, is the way in which these idiot engineers were clearly more interesting in proving that they were smarter than Balwani than they were in the fact that he was the guy upon whom their paychecks, stock options, and careers all depended.

And almost everyone seems to want to believe. Remember, I called BS on this woman the moment I heard her talk, just like I did on Jordan Peterson. The only difference is that even the true believers now understand that Holmes was a fraud. Most people still don’t grasp that Peterson is a charlatan too.

Another phrase stuck out in the talk. She said something about transformative technology which has a magical ring, like Steve Jobs dancing on a cloud of air. From now until forever, if anyone ever says transformative technology in a talk, find the exit door.

Then she decried the appalling lack of access.

“People could not get copies of their own lab results!” she said. We can buy a snake! A military truck! A tank! Yet, we can’t order a simple blood-based pregnancy test.

Think about it! Someone is worried, nervous–distraught. There is a dark cloud. Anxiety. Nerves. You can feel it. And yet…you can’t buy a simple blood test on your own!

“When individuals have access to the information about their bodies they can begin to change outcomes,” said Holmes. She used plenty of interesting factoids. She said words like engagement, knowledge, and access. She shifted to a personal story. She lulled us, she calmed us. She talked about things we care about. That are quite serious.

And yet, we were not really listening.

She never really said anything about the science.

Or the tests.

Or the clinics.

Or anything concrete.

The Empire is long gone

But the post-Imperial idiots now running what passes for formerly Great Britain don’t seem to grasp that they are not a major power anymore.

Abramovich was a protege of Vladimir Putin – the most ruthless leader in Russia’s recent history. Indeed, his decision to shelve plans for Chelsea’s new stadium has all the hallmarks of his one-time Kremlin mentor.

It is a warning shot, while in a fit of pique, from a man who feels he has been more than generous to Britain but who feels insulted in return by the British government.

Also, it can be seen as an ominous hint that he is ready to end his links with Chelsea FC altogether and possibly sell the club rather than continue pouring money thanklessly into one of the kingpins in Britain’s national sport.

But Abramovich’s move is far more complex – and menacing. This is not just a hissy-fit by a spoilt Russian oligarch. I am convinced that Abramovich made this decision with the approval and possibly the explicit instructions of Putin.

Given that Abramovich is a Jew and a newly minted Israeli citizen, it’s remotely possible that this one-man anti-British divestment campaign is being directed by Jerusalem instead of Moscow. But regardless of whether it is the Russians or the Israelis who are reacting to the bizarre ill-treatment of their citizen, the point is that the British are again seriously overestimating their importance.

How can we tell if it is the Russians or the Israelis behind this? Simple. If Russian investors withdraw from the UK in masse and crash the City markets, it’s the Russians. Remember, the Russians already know they are going to have to get out of the SWIFT system and join the Chinese alternative at some point. This could be the first sign that this financial migration is actually beginning.

More likely, it’s just the rational response of a man to receiving a very clear message that he is not wanted, so he is quite reasonably opting not to financially support his declared enemies. Would that conservatives did the same!

Normalizing assassination

It’s interesting that there was so little media coverage of a recent SNL skit implicitly portraying the assassination of President Trump. Can you even imagine the endless outrage if they had portrayed the implicit assassination of his predecessor? There would have been literal riots in several cities.

Saturday Night Live has parodied The Sopranos’ iconic last scene for its season finale, bringing back Alec Baldwin to play President Donald Trump.

The new episode’s cold open begins with Baldwin’s Trump picking a song from the jukebox at Holsten’s in Bloomfield, New Jersey – just as Tony Soprano did in the mafia drama’s 2007 series finale.

Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’ blares through the diner as the bell above the door jingles, and in walks Rudy Giuliani, played by Kate McKinnon.

Baldwin’s Trump asks if he’s been on Fox News lately to which he answers ‘twenty times last night’, adding ‘I even confessed to crimes you didn’t do — what are they gonna do, arrest the President? I dare ya!’

In walks guest star Robert De Niro, portraying Muller. But Baldwin’s Trump is the only one who seems to notice him, as the rest of his coterie peppers him with inane legal advice. In a moment layered with multiple film references, the Mueller character gets up and walks slowly to the bathroom as the Journey song continues to blare. He pauses and turns to Baldwin’s Trump, pointing two fingers at his own eyes and then at Baldwin, the ‘I see you’ gesture De Niro’s character did in Meet The Parents.

The scene then cuts to black, just as the final scene of the Sopranos did to much controversy. Though fan theories on the Sopranos finale differ, many believe that Tony Soprano was killed by a hitman, who was seen walking into the diner’s bathroom shortly before the scene cuts to black.

By making it Mueller, SNL is giving itself plausible deniability. See, it’s just a metaphor for a legal and political takedown, right? But the combination of the hit scene with De Niro – remember, as Vito Corleone, he initially makes his mark by murdering Don Fanucci – is the real meaning underlying the skit.

Fortunately, it appears the God-Emperor is more than ready for this enemies.

Zero Tolerance

Quando Capitan Europa fa un’ offerta a Janelle Jeanneret che non può rifiutare, la modella Francese non esita ad arruolarsi con L’ Iniziativa per la Giustizia Globale. Dopotutto, provvederanno un appartamento stupendo in Bruxelles, una nuova divisa, e addirittura un nuovo nome appariscente. Le offrono anche di pagarle una valanga di soldi… esente tasse! Ma c’è un tranello? D’altronde, come farà un groppo di superumani basato in Europa a stabilire giustizia globale?

Alt★Hero e il primo in un eccitante nuova linea di fumetti di supereroi di Arkhaven Comics.

TOLLERANZA ZERO is our first foreign language translation, and it was an interesting challenge because we needed a different font that had all the necessary accents. We also needed to make sure the various text strings fit inside the existing speech balloons. We ended up going with one that worked out so well that we will probably switch to it for future English editions. This is, of course, a digital edition for Kindle and Kindle Unlimited.

The next foreign language edition will be French, followed by German. We will get these into print eventually, but it is not an immediate priority. It’s free on Kindle Unlimited, so why not download a copy and brush up on your language skills. And on the topic of Alt★Hero, I should probably mention that more than 15 percent of the available Gold Logo editions for the first issue were sold on Day One, so if you would like one for posterity’s sake, don’t wait too long.

UPDATE: #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Foreign Languages > Italian > Comics & Manga

ABC’s corporate cancer

Tom Arnold estimates the losses from ABC’s reaction to a single tweet:

“ABC lost maybe $1 billion from this; this show was grinding out money hand over fist and they lost it all because somebody didn’t say, ‘Get that phone out of her hand,’” Arnold tells THR.

No, it’s all because someone didn’t say, “Who cares what Roseanne says on Twitter? We don’t.” And the losses could be more than that.

Not only will “Roseanne” fans never see season two of the show’s hit revival, the original series will now be harder to catch in syndication. Viacom is pulling the show’s reruns from its Paramount Network, TV Land and CMT channels, TODAY has confirmed. The syndication scheduling change, which follows ABC’s abrupt cancellation of the popular series’ recent revival, will go into effect on Wednesday.

Now, I could not possibly care less about a show that I have never seen at any point in my life, but it is a very important lesson in the willingness, nay, the eagerness, of the SJWs to cut their own throats in order to virtue-signal.

And if they’ll cut their own throats, they certainly won’t hesitate to try to cut yours. Never assume you are fully anti-fragile, never assume you are too big to take down, and never assume they will put their monetary interests before their virtue-signaling imperative.

Mailvox: Hope for Generation Zyklon

A reader sends in these optimistic observations of the postmillennial generation.

Gen-Z and Hope in the Post-Institutional Age

Recently at our church over a dozen graduating high school seniors were honored and their post-graduation plans were highlighted. Every young man is either majoring in engineering or a trade like welding, or electrical. Every young woman except one is going into nursing or the medical field. Why is this significant? This is Generation Z and they aren’t fooling around. They’ve seen their older Millennial siblings and cousins struggle with their worthless degrees and jobs, and they are already taking a different path. Gen-Z supports Trump, and most importantly, there’s no give-up in them or hopelessness, even with all of the problems we face.

If you are an older Millennial or Gen-X like myself, you have seen nothing but loss if you are politically right of center. Vox once mentioned Millennials know something is lost, but not what, but Gen-X watched it happened. This gave us perspective, but it also gave us unbridled cynicism.  Gen-Z doesn’t really live in a world of conservative losers and cucks, as they are now irrelevant. They only see a tough road ahead, but they are determined.

I’ve noticed that older Millennials and Gen-X have a problem. Whenever somebody on our side says they are going to do something, or fight back, or even express hope of winning, we have to repress our cynicism. Why? The conservatives turned out to be the biggest bunch of feckless, stupid, political losers in the last century, and we were dumb enough to believe in them for a while. It’s nearly impossible for us to believe anyone right of center can pull their heads out of their asses long enough to do anything meaningful, so we default to cynicism.

Who can remember American cars from the 70s and 80s? If you do, you will remember they produced some of the worst vehicles in history. We inherited them from our parents in high school and we went off to college with them.  Our experience with them was so bad that GM lost an entire generation of buyers. Quite purposefully, they stopped marketing to us and went for the younger generation who knew nothing of GM.  Microsoft had to do the same thing as the bad PR from the late 90’s and early 2000’s turned off millions of potential buyers. But a14-year-old Xbox owner knows nothing of that and doesn’t care.

In the same way, the failures from the 1960s until the present are history to an 18-year-old.

Gen-Z has a big advantage as they are essentially starting at the bottom.  The institutions are all gone. The corporations are all SJW-converged. Free speech is mostly gone. They don’t know a different world than this, but they do know that this is the wrong state of affairs. They didn’t get to see the massive societal destruction of the last 50 years, which is a good thing. Which is more demoralizing, seeing something you love being destroyed or walking in after the destruction to pick up the pieces?

So, if you are Gen-X, don’t mock them. Instead, help them and lead them. If they have a good idea, support them. Don’t be cynical. Don’t tell them about all of the failures you’ve seen or how it will never work. You just might be surprised.

Lead by example in technology. Do the small things around them like using Brave and not Chrome. Use DuckDuckGo and not Google. Don’t worry about being perfect, just do what you can and let them know that complete privacy in today’s world isn’t possible, but that doesn’t mean you can’t fight back.

Help them build their own platforms, and discourage them from building platforms based upon a converged corporation like Facebook or Google. If they get in bed with them, their livelihood could be gone in an instant or they might be tempted to compromise in order to keep the money coming in. 
Always support truth in all things. The little truths all support and belong to the big Truth.

Join an actual brick-and-mortar church and support it. Don’t gossip about it, the members, or disparage it without sound reason. Let Gen-Z know that being a member is Biblical, and that you support the institution, even if you have to clean it out yourself.

Finally, be positive. I realize this is nearly impossible for many of us after so many years of seeing things fall apart, but don’t buy into the secular eschatology that they are going to win. They are not! The future belongs to those who believe in the Good, True, and Beautiful, because those things belong to God.

Mailvox: Identity and apocalypse

A reader writes about his recent observations concerning identity:

During a recent get-together to play games one of my friends who is a racial mix of white and Latino (racially and ethnically) expressed his angst about identifying with either group. He asked if we (all white) thought he could pass as a Mexican, while we thought he could it’s the Mexicans who matter and not us.

It’s a normal question to wonder about your origins, but this seemed out of place to me and an odd thing to ask. It got me thinking about some others on VP who are mixed races and asking “What about me?”. The difference here though is that we weren’t having a conversation about race and the was out of the blue. I think he spoke for millions of mixed race Americans who know that something big is coming even if they don’t know what is coming.

For everyone outside of the US let me make something very clear, the racial situation in America is a complete mess. Just a few years ago it was “I see no color” to… well… I don’t know. It’s everything from voluntary segregation is good, to bad, to picking your own race or denying your own race, to everything in-between. A good example is an article I read the other day about a company who had the races break out into groups by race to discuss racial tensions in the office. A very obviously black girl refused to go to the black group as she was raised around whites, and said she had nothing to do with black culture. She proudly walked right into the white group. The black woman running the groups didn’t know what to do, so let her do it, but didn’t agree with her decision.

So an apocalypse of some type is on the way. The nature of it is unknown, but people can sense it.

If you ever talk to someone who thinks the current situation is going to work simply ask them for the successful model from history the US should emulate. They cannot and will not provide one.

The irony, of course, is it that it is whites who deny the irrefutable reality of identity politics who are usually the fastest to play the card of whatever identity-complication they can claim, whether it is an adopted black nephew, a transmogrified child, or a Japanese friend.

Conservative purges: TAC edition

Ron Unz describes how he was purged from The American Conservative in 2013:

On June 12th, 2013 I was having an unusually lengthy phone conversation with Daniel McCarthy, editor of The American Conservative (TAC). I live in Silicon Valley, three thousand miles away from DC, and despite holding the nominal title of publisher my involvement with TAC business operations had usually been negligible, amounting to just a few minutes a week on the phone. But I had grown alarmed over the lack of any major new donations since January, and had begun urging McCarthy to make the cuts in expenses necessary for the publication’s survival, while lobbying the board on the same subject. Web traffic had also been sharply declining for six or seven months, suggesting the need for a change in editorial focus. And several months earlier, TAC had cut its print frequency in half to just six issues a year while doubling the annual subscription rate to $60, thus quadrupling the per issue cost to an unreasonable $10, a pricing decision I’d strongly questioned at the time and now believed we needed to reverse.

Despite my tradition of operational disengagement, I felt comfortable pressing these points. Since late 2006 I had provided some 70{434e4795edb8718426f2262f16bc350bda72304c69f2c22d1de5754882bdf177} of TAC’s total funding, and even after converting the publication into a non-profit in 2010, I had still remained TAC’s largest donor during 2012, while also serving as chairman. TAC had come close to shutting down on a couple of previous occasions and I wanted to avoid taking such a risk again, especially since over the last year or two I had begun regularly publishing some of my own articles in the magazine.

Finally, at the end of the call I asked McCarthy whether he’d yet had a chance to prepare a redlined edit copy of the new article I’d submitted a couple of weeks earlier and on which he’d previously suggested one or two minor changes that I had subsequently made. To my enormous surprise, he informed me that he’d decided to flatly reject the entire piece—an analytical study of American urban crime rates—as representing the sort of racially-inflammatory material that had no place in a quality magazine such as TAC. He instead suggested that a more appropriate venue for my article would be one of the webzines categorized as White Nationalist hate-sites by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

After a few stunned words on my part, I hung up the phone and almost immediately received an emailing McCarthy had sent out to his undisclosed distribution list, harshly criticizing my behavior while repeating his same charges in more measured terms, describing the subject of my article as “a distraction from TAC’s mission” and something that would “fatally detract” from TAC’s advocacy of “the case for noninterventionism and restricting executive power.” I soon discovered that my TAC blogging privileges had also been terminated, banning me from the website. Later, my access to TAC’s ongoing website traffic information was eliminated. So more than six years after becoming TAC’s publisher, I had been summarily purged.

For several weeks I made frustrating attempts to gain support from the other members of TAC’s governing board. But they had spent years just as totally disengaged as myself from TAC’s operations and had absolutely no desire to involve themselves in what they perceived as some sort of rancorous personal dispute. During this period I did my best to avoid publicizing my situation, partly because I found it so humiliating, but finally in late July National Review learned of this simmering controversy and solicited an interview. Initially I hesitated, but seeing that TAC—after rejecting my article as “a distraction”—had covered its homepage for several days straight with articles about British rock bands, zombies, giant robots, and cartoon characters, I became angry enough to provide my side of the story to the media. Three days after NR ran its short he said-she said item, TAC’s board convened in a special Sunday phone session to remove me, formalizing what had already occurred.

No wonder conservatives never get anywhere, not with opinion leaders like these.

Moderates mourn the middle ground

It’s interesting to see how the mainstream media is belatedly discovering the fact that there is no longer any middle ground between Americans and the 100 million Not-Americans who invaded the dirt that turned out to lack the necessary magic. One has to wonder what they thought was going to happen in light of the post-1965 immigration changes. Were they really that ignorant of the consequences of every previous mass human migration?

More and more voices are raising concerns that the 2018 elections will ignite a terrible clash between supporters of President Trump and his increasingly agitated critics in a partisan battle that has been brewing for years.

Stanley Greenberg, former President Bill Clinton’s pollster, is warning of a “civil war.” Purdue University President Mitchell E. Daniels, former President Ronald Reagan’s political director and a two-term Indiana Republican governor, sees the nation dividing into feuding “tribes” that gravitate to tyrants who “bludgeon” opponents.

In two separate reports, the two opposites come to a similar conclusion that the nation and even families are terribly divided and that the media has played a big role in creating the split.

Daniels is well regarded as level-headed and has been dubbed the best university president in the nation. He has used his commencement addresses to push for openness and understanding, but this year he noted a shift to “tribalism,” where sides cluster in cliques.

“It’s no longer just a matter of Americans not knowing and understanding each other. We’ve seen these clusters deepen, and harden, until separation has led to anger, misunderstanding turned into hostility. At the individual level, it’s a formula for bitterness and negativity. For a self-governing people, it’s poison,” Daniels told his students this month.

Among the culprits he cited were biased media, the “anti-social media.” Said Daniels, “Our various modern media lead us to, and feed us from information sources that reinforce our existing biases. They put us in contact with other tribe members, but rarely those who see things differently. We’re starting to resemble ominously our primitive forebearers, trusting no one outside the tribe.”

And he called that “dangerous,” warning “almost all of history has belonged to the tyrants, the warlords, the autocrats, the totalitarians. And tribes always gravitate toward tyrants.”

He didn’t name names, mention President Trump or former President Barack Obama, on purpose. The reason: both sides and their mouthpieces are to blame. “It’s a general phenomenon,” he said in an interview in which he bemoaned “there is no overlap anymore.”

What I want every civic nationalist, every centrist, and every moderate to consider, and eventually, come to terms with is the fact that this is precisely the destiny they helped create. Every single identity-conflicted individual to whom I have ever spoken tries to carve out an exception for their wife, their children, their neighbords, their colleagues, their friends, and their immigrant grandparents. Every single one.

And that’s understandable. I have no problem understanding the temptation to do so, being an identity-conflicted first-generation immigrant myself. But this is a category error; the vast majority of the micro exceptions are totally irrelevant when it comes to the macro issue. Reality doesn’t care that you think it would be really terrible to be forced to choose between your nation and your neighbor, or between your family and your friend. War does not require your approval in order to take place.

Despite the largest invasion in recorded human history, most people in the United States have not been materially affected in a way they recognize. That is why they are oblivious to the obvious, and why they will most likely remain oblivious until it is far too late to do anything about the situation.

Donald Trump isn’t even trying to address the situation. The efforts of most politicians will only make things worse. Jordan Peterson’s Hail Mary assault on human nature will fail too. The desperate measures that are now required to salvage the nation and avert a war that will make the Civil War look like a casual warmup are on the level of those utilized for the Spanish Reconquista, and are not even close to being politically viable yet. Six years ago, I was warning you about this. Now the likes of Stanley Greenberg and Mitch Daniels are doing the same.

You have about 12-15 years to prepare for this now, possibly less, in my estimation.