Olympic Lives Matter

The US Winter Olympic team shows what unity in diversity looks like.

Over the past six years the U.S. Olympic Committee has made concerted efforts to promote diversity among its team members. In 2012, a committee was formed to improve diversity and Jason Thompson was hired as director of diversity and inclusion.

In an angry tweet, Davis, who has won two golds and two silvers in previous Olympics took a shot at Hamlin, the holder of a single bronze medal.

‘I am an American and when I won the 1000m in 2010 I became the first American to 2-peat in that event,’ Davis wrote on Twitter. He then slammed TeamUSA for ‘dishonorably’ tossing a coin to decide who would have the honor of carrying the flag. ‘No problem. I can wait until 2022,’ he added before using the hashtag #BlackHistoryMonth2018.

Why don’t African-Americans simply compete as their own team? After all, we are frequently informed by them that they are a separate nation and a proud and vibrant people with their own history and culture. Shouldn’t they be able to have their own Olympic team too? Isn’t it racist to deny them that right? Why should they be forced to march behind the flag of bigoted white people, like slaves, instead of behind a proud Black Power flag?

On a tangential note, there are few things more reliably predictive of things about to head south than a commitment to diversity.

The horrors of the LGBT household

Lifesite profiles Moira Greyland’s autobiographical memoir:

The daughter of famed science fiction author Marion Zimmer Bradley has written an autobiographical account revealing the horrors of growing up in a home raised by LGBT parents who repeatedly sexually abused her and her brothers.

“I have heard all the customary protestations. ‘Your parents were evil because they were evil, not because they were gay,’ but I disagree,” writes Moira Greyland in her new book, The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon.

“The underlying problem is a philosophical one that is based on beliefs that are not only common to gay culture but to popular culture. And this is the central belief: All Sex is Always Right No Matter What,” she wrote.

“I had both biological parents in the home, but both refused to act like traditional parents,” writes Greyland. “I needed my father to protect me and to see me as a girl instead of refusing to protect me and seeing me as an amorphous nothing who competed with him for boys. I needed my mother to love me and hold me and comfort me instead of being a terrifying, angry dictator. Worse than that, I was expected to not want them to love me and protect me, or to act like normal parents. I was supposed to be happy that they were doing their own thing, no matter what they did to us.”

The Last Closet has been an Amazon bestseller for weeks as a Kindle e-book, and is scheduled to be published as a print book this month. Over one hundred readers have reviewed it, and virtually all have given it five stars.

The book recounts Greyland’s life with her mother, who was the author of The Mists of Avalon and many other famous works of science fiction and fantasy, and her father, Walter Breen, who was a world-renowned authority on numismatics. Both identified as “gay,” both abused drugs and were involved in occult practices, and both were pedophiles, Greyland says, a claim that has been confirmed by her only surviving brother.

Man people desperately want to believe homosexuals Are Just Like Everybody Else. But they are not. Just ask a policeman. Or ask a child of gay parents. Once an individual decides that he no longer has to abide by traditional morality because he has certain urges, it becomes considerably easier to violate even the most outrageous moral norms when he feels the need or even just the desire.

That doesn’t mean that gays can’t abide by traditional moral standards, or that all straights do, only that the probabilities observably differ. A gay man is 14 times more likely to abuse a child than a straight man. Even worse, gay priests are 198 times more likely to abuse children than straight men. One of the ugliest aspects of The Last Closet is the way in which Moira’s parents intellectually rationalized even their most abhorrent behavior. They were not unique in their ability to do that.

You can shriek “bigot” and “homophobe” if you like. But reality doesn’t care. No amount of denial will eliminate the logic, the probabilities, the statistics, or the pain of the abused children.

GDC rescinds award to Nolan Bushnell

I’m glad I stopped going to GDC after it changed its name from CGDC. It looks as if we’re going to have to launch a new conference for game designers who actually value gamedev history one of these days. Corporatization and subsequent SJW infestation have completely ruined something that used to be the highlight of my year back in the day.

The Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) announced that it would be honoring Nolan Bushnell, the co-founder of Atari, with its Pioneer Award.

Brianna Wu took to Twitter to disagree.

What followed was the #NotNolan campaign and a quick article in The Verge that would result in the GDC rescinding the award the very next day, instead choosing to honor “the pioneering and unheard voices of the past.”

I conducted my own research into the situation. I talked to several women who worked with Nolan Bushnell back in the 1970s. I talked with a man who has researched Atari for decades and wrote an 800 page book on the history of the company. I talked with Allan Alcorn, the engineer who designed Pong. They all provide a story much different to the one currently reported on by the press.

Several hours after Brianna Wu’s tweets, Elizabeth Sampat, who bills herself as a game designer and activist, posted the first of the #NotNolan tweets. Two minutes later, Jennifer Scheurle, another game designer and activist, followed it up with her own tweet. The #NotNolan campaign had begun.

The early stage of the #NotNolan campaign consisted of a total of 26 tweets sent out by 18 accounts. Several of these accounts are listed as game developers, including a developer from Bungie, one from Blizzard, and one from id Software. These 26 tweets received a cumulative total of 221 retweets and 645 likes — and likely fewer than that when The Verge wrote about them, as I’m counting them several days later.

In the article, the writer cited the examples of sexist behavior that Brianna Wu claimed, as well as some of the 26 tweets that comprised the NotNolan twitter campaign. It concluded, “Although many industries, from Hollywood to media, have had their ‘me too’ moments highlighting the predatory or sexist behavior of prominent men, video games has not” [sic] — and here she cites as evidence a post on the Patreon account of Elizabeth Sampat lamenting the lack of a MeToo moment in the video game industry. The GDC is quoted at the end saying they had not known about Bushnell’s behavior, but “will look at these more closely.”

The Verge article was posted at 8:46pm that night. On the next day, at 11:20am, the GDC rescinded the Pioneer award from Nolan Bushnell.

Unbelieveable. Literally Wu (real name John Flynt) has really become a cancerous, self-promoting little wart on the backside of the game industry. A microscopic and insignificant freakshow, but an increasingly irritating one.

I’d like to see game developers and game designers start boycotting GDC over this. I would, except I already stopped attending because it had become too commercial and too crowded.

The Trumpslide cometh

You might want to start sporting those Trumpslide 2020 shirts right about now:

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Wednesday shows that 48{f34b2ed14022567e3962d98ceb517f14c2acb643b80147bdb11c1357fe49acc6} of Likely U.S. Voters approve of President Trump’s job performance. Fifty-one percent (51{f34b2ed14022567e3962d98ceb517f14c2acb643b80147bdb11c1357fe49acc6}) disapprove. The latest figures include 34{f34b2ed14022567e3962d98ceb517f14c2acb643b80147bdb11c1357fe49acc6} who Strongly Approve of the way the president is performing and 42{f34b2ed14022567e3962d98ceb517f14c2acb643b80147bdb11c1357fe49acc6} who Strongly Disapprove. This gives him a Presidential Approval Index rating of -8.

President Trump has a stronger approval rating today than media darling Barack Obama did back in 2010 on this same day. Back on February 7, 2010 Barack Obama had an approval rating of 44{f34b2ed14022567e3962d98ceb517f14c2acb643b80147bdb11c1357fe49acc6} while 56{f34b2ed14022567e3962d98ceb517f14c2acb643b80147bdb11c1357fe49acc6} of likely voters disapproved of the far left president.

Donald Trump has already shown himself to be the best President of the 20th and 21st centuries. And he’s barely gotten started.

A Churchian response, part I

Well, this Churchian response to the 16 Points of the Alt-Right beautifully sums up Churchianity in one fell swoop. It is incoherent, incompetent, globalist, anti-Western, anti-nationalist, and anti-American. It takes Christian theology and transforms it into something evil and Babylonian. I archived the response  because I suspect that it is going to be taken down once the author realizes how completely he has damned his own position with his ignorance, ineptitude, and philosophical incoherence. He claims to be a “deontologist”, but as you will see, he is little more than a liar and an intellectual fraud.

1. I had a professor who once gave me some good advice, “do not be know for what you stand against; tell us what you stand for.” Despite ending clauses in prepositions, the advice is good. The Alt Right begins their treatise by claiming not to be a list of fear monger buzzwords; however, later in their own lists of rejections, they disavow free trade and advocate for nationalist controls. Milton Friedman famously said, “Economic freedom is necessary, but not sufficient, for political freedom.” Economics only offers a few alternatives to laissez-faire economics, none of which are sustainable. Those alternatives are socialism (whether Communist, Marxists, Leninist, Nationalists, or Stalinist) or feudalism. Since, I have never seen anyone from the Alt Right advocating for lords, vassals, and serfs, I will assume they must substitute some form of the socialist economics they just disavowed as an alternative to the free trade capitalism they disavow later. I could be wrong. They may be attempting to rebuild Camelot; however, they reject the concept of nobility, which precludes the institution of feudalism. The more likely conclusion is they do not really know much about economics but like to make noise. In total, I am in opposition to this statement on this principle; I never side with a self-refuting statement.

The Churchian clearly doesn’t know that socialism is not incompatible with free trade or that Marx openly advocated for it due to the way in which he correctly saw that free trade destroys nations. And his appeal to his professor’s authority is a literal logical fallacy known as argumentum ad verecundiam. The fact that he assumes the Alt-Right must support “some form of socialist economics” despite specifically rejecting socialism, Marxism, and Marxianism tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the quality of his subsquent arguments.

2. I do not fully embrace all of what Russell Kirk had to say because, though Kirk made an appeal to a belief in deontological morality, he later employed a utilitarian ethic in favor of custom. One may ask, “how, then, can a person reject Kirk’s views on custom and still claim to conserve anything?” The answer is simple. Kirk is not the arbiter of what it means to be conservative. I have conserved on the theological and philosophical principles found in the Bible, Aristotelian logic, deontological ethics, and laissez-faire economics. I am positive, Kirk would reject none of these; however, if one were to apply his principles in their absence, one could easily arrive at the notion one should preserve great injustices in the name of custom. Thomas Paine said, “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises, at first, a formidable outcry in defense of custom.” The American conservatism has always been classical liberalism, which values all people without regard to race, ethnicity, political, or socio-economic clout. To conflate classical liberalism with leftist progressivism is disingenuous or ignorant. Libertarianism is a form of classical liberalism, which has denied the deontological ethics which sustain society and instead substituted an appeal to populism allowing it to comfortably nestle itself on no moral absolutes. In later points, the Alt Right claims to have done the same. Once again, they have refuted their own positions.

Russell Kirk literally defined American conservatism. This Churchian is claiming to be a conservative while simultaneously attempting to redefine conservatism as egalitarianism and throwing around some terms that he clearly doesn’t understand. In this he demonstrates that being “a conservative” is nothing more than a posture and a temporally relative label. Which, of course, is one reason that the Alt-Right rejects the intrinsically defeatist attitude that is conservatism.

3. This is the first explicitly anti-Christian, Machiavellian concept. Here they deny the principle role to which Christ has called us. The Apostle Peter says: “Servants, be subject to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the unjust. For this is a gracious thing, when, mindful of God, one endures sorrows while suffering unjustly. For what credit is it if, when you sin and are beaten for it, you endure? But if when you do good and suffer for it you endure, this is a gracious thing in the sight of God. For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps. He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly.” (1 Peter 2:18-23)

Beyond this, the statement is inherently un-American. Consider Patrick Henry’s pyrrhic statement, “I regret that I have but one life to give for my country;” or John F. Kennedy’s declaration to the nations, “”Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” I want to always stand for what is right, even if that means temporary loss. “And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul? Is anything worth more than your soul?” (Matthew 16:26) Further, the Alt Right claims a “forward thinking philosophy;” though they are playing sematic games, the Alt Right adopted its “forward thinking” tactic from the progressive movement they claim to despise. They have not championed any conservatism but adopted every tenant of leftist progressivism and substituted themselves as the beneficiaries. I reject the entirely of identity politics and therefore reject the Alt Right and their wicked tactics.

But he’s not standing for what is right, he is actively endorsing surrender to evil. Notice that he’s endorsing defeat and slavery, as well as lying about the Alt-Right’s adoption of “every tenant of leftist progressivism”. We see this incompetent dishonesty from conservatives on a regular basis. No wonder they are so given to being repeatedly trounced by the Left, as they literally cannot tell the difference between a) tactics, b) strategy, c) objectives, and d) identity. I shall dub this erroneous conflation “tactobrication” and define the fallacy more precisely in a future post. Furthermore, his attack on Point 3 being “inherently un-American” is particularly ironic given his later admission that his “objective is 100{f34b2ed14022567e3962d98ceb517f14c2acb643b80147bdb11c1357fe49acc6} globalist.” You don’t have to be incompetent, incoherent, and dishonest to be a Churchian, but it observably helps.

4. This is a crock. Western Civilization came closer to the total annihilation of all life in the universe than anything since the fall and the flood. Westernism did not author Christianity or even cohere to it; instead God blessed the west with an underserved gift of centuries of Christianity. The west did nothing to deserve the gifts God gave us. Nothing western is essential to Christianity. Christianity itself is a classical middle-Eastern religion. Their own statement is an expression of ignorance in theology and history. While I do enjoy the benefits of the Western Civilization, I would be a fool to think we are the elite on the Earth. We are no more elite than the kid whose dad is a multi-millionaire. We did nothing to be born into wealth and splendor. Greece and Rome were prosperous for the same reasons the Egypt was prosperous; they sat at a hub of trade. Westerns people are neither superior nor inferior to anyone. Any civilization in the same position would prosper over three millennia. I reject the Alt Right on this.

Well, it’s good to finally see the Churchians come out and openly admit that they are hostile to Western civilization. I’ve been pointing this out for some time now, but perhaps those of you who doubted me will accept the statement from the jackass’s own mouth. And while Christendom isn’t essential to Christianity, which exists in its own right, Christianity is an essential part of Christendom. And to say that the West did nothing to “deserve the gifts God gave us” is simply a flat-out lie. Again, we see the incoherence of the Churchian, insisting that there is no reason beyond the gifts of God and sitting on a trade hub that Western civilization is superior to other human societies, which it isn’t.

Part II of IV tomorrow.

Evil globalist fights nationalism

George Soros is spending big to try to overturn Brexit:

Billionaire George Soros has handed £400,000 to a campaign fighting to stop Brexit, it was revealed today. The investment mogul is one of the biggest donors behind the Best For Britain group launched by Gina Miller.

The scale of the financial backing will raise alarm among Brexiteers, with fears running high that the process of leaving the EU could be watered down or even halted altogether.

Former Ukip leader Nigel Farage said people were starting to ‘wake up’ to the danger of the referendum vote being reversed.  Mr Soros previously said it was possible that the UK would apply to rejoin the European Union soon after Brexit.

Hungary has it right. Any organization that Soros funds or controls should be outlawed. These evil people are straight out of 1984, attempting to subvert the clearly expressed will of the people in the name of “democracy” and “the open society”.

I note that the Fake Right opposes Brexit and nationalism too. It’s just a coincidence, right?

Meanwhile, nationalism is rising again in Ireland.

Luke O’Connor applauded and cheered with gusto and occasionally leapt to his feet during speeches at the Irexit conference for those opposed to Ireland’s membership of the European Union. The 21-year-old Kilkenny student warmed to the praise lavished by former Ukip leader Nigel Farage on US president Donald Trump and the Brexit-like political earthquake he unleashed in 2016. O’Connor wore a Trump-campaign “Make America Great Again” red baseball cap to the Saturday conference at the RDS in Dublin.

“I honestly get a great reaction. I would wear it on nights out,” he told The Irish Times. “I am hoping something comes of this, if not a party that we can get candidates to run in the European elections, that we even have a voice.”

The DCU student was typical of most attendees at the event, organised by Hermann Kelly, spokesman for the Ukip-led Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy group in the EU Parliament. O’Connor is young, male and felt like his was a voice not heard in Irish politics or the media.

Their time will come. Their great-grandfathers fought to be free from Great Britain. They will fight and their children will be free of the European Union. I expect Irexit to take place within 10 years, assuming that the European Union hasn’t collapsed by then.

EXCERPT: Mutiny in Space

Mutiny in Space, by Rod Walker, is an excellent coming-of-age tale in the tradition of the Heinlein juvenile.

Ducarti produced an envelope, an expensive-looking thing embossed with the official seal of the Social Party. “One of the Party’s projects has been to circulate a petition demanding an increase in the estate tax to seventy-five percent. We now have adequate signatures to require a referendum. It should be one hundred percent, but sometimes it is better to eat the steak in small bites than to choke on the entire thing.” He offered it formally to Sergei in both hands. “I want you, as the youngest member of the Social Party on New Chicago, to present this petition at the appropriate government office.”

“Me?” said Sergei, his eyes widening. “That’s… that’s a really big honor, sir.”

“Oh, it is,” said Ducarti, still grinning. “It most certainly is. As the face of the Social Youth, as a true son of the Revolution, I think you are the perfect man to deliver our message.”

“I will go at once,” said Sergei.

“Good man. Also, as our official representative and voice, I insist you take one of the Party’s vans, emblazoned with the red hammer of the worker raised against the spiral of the galaxy. Think of what a sight it will make when the van pulls up, and every eye turns towards you, and you stride forth to present our petition to the corrupt, illegitimate authorities of New Chicago. We shall, of course, alert the media, so that the moment will be recorded.”

“Absolutely,” said Sergei proudly. “I’ll do it.”

“I’ll go with you,” said Mom. She smiled at Ducarti. “I would like to see my son take his first steps in service to the Revolution.”

“As you wish, Professor. And you, Nikolai?” said Ducarti, the cold eyes turning back towards me. “Will you accompany your brother as he assumes his birthright among the men of the Social Party?”

“No,” I said, stepping back. “I’m going home. I’ll walk. I don’t want to ride in a Party van.”

“As you wish, boy,” said Ducarti, still smiling, although it now struck me as more cruel than sardonic. “Go home. Go play with your engines. The Revolution does not require you yet.”

A gale of laughter went up from the Party members, and even Mom and Sergei joined in with the others. That hurt more than I would have thought. I whirled around so they could not see my burning eyes and I stalked from the warehouse without another word.

My defiance, combined with Ducarti’s contempt, saved my life.

I went home, but because I wasn’t watching the news, I didn’t see what happened. As soon as Sergei and Mom left in the van, Ducarti returned to his ship and immediately launched. From his ship safely in orbit, he monitored the progress of the van, watching until it reached the central planetary administration building fifteen miles from the spaceport.

Once the van reached the offices, in full view of the cameras that had been alerted, the fusion bomb hidden within the van was triggered.

Sergei and Mom were killed instantly, of course.

The forensics techs finally found some of Sergei’s teeth and a piece of Mom’s femur, but nothing else. Five thousand, six hundred and ninety-two people were killed in the explosion and the resultant collapse of the nearby buildings, and over eighteen thousand were hurt or wounded. The minute the bomb went off, Ducarti left the system, escaping to hyperspace before the system defense ships could close in on him. But before he hyperjumped away, he sent out a broadcast announcing that the bomb was an act of revolutionary justice against the planetary government and people of New Chicago for failing to embrace the principles of Sociality.

The reaction was as swift as it was violent.

The next day, the planetary government of New Chicago by an executive order of the emergency commission outlawed the Social Party. A lot of people were arrested over the next month, including most of the non-science faculty of the University. Pretty much every official in the local Social Party leadership was executed without trial as a co-conspirator, whether they had actually known about it or not, and a lot of other people were charged with various crimes.

Mailvox: the deadly high end

Just to be clear, I’m most definitely NOT singling out L’Aristokrato here. He is very, very far from the only person to blithely suggest going out and hiring other artists for our various comics, he just happens to be the individual to whom I responded on the subject. This is actually an important lesson in entrepreneurship concerning a very common misapprehension, so there is no need to get defensive or argumentative, just pay attention and think through what I’m telling everyone. My original response is in italics.

More importantly, however, I believe you need to look into getting at least one, or two high level artists as part of your crew.

Your beliefs are absolutely wrong and indicate a complete lack of business experience. No one ever successfully disrupts a market from above. As a matter of fact, there is a new company that is going about it your way. Top artists, paying them all top page rates. I will bet they’re gone within 18 months of their first publication. Sure, you get more attention. Lots of critical praise. But it only lets you hit a double instead of a single, and you need to hit a home run just to stay afloat.

I’m not sure why you’ve taken my comment so personally as to feel the need to add a baseless jab at me, instead of simply pointing out why you think I’m wrong. Though your observation is amusing, considering both that you know nothing about me, and that I’ve created and owned several successful businesses for sixteen years. More to the point though, it’s true, I don’t know much about “disrupting a market”; That’s not an angle I’ve ever tried, or had to try, given the areas I work with, so it’s entirely likely my observation is incorrect.

However, I didn’t take it personally. He just said something very, very stupid that I have heard dozens of people say since October. It is irritating and unasked-for advice, and it is frequently offered in a smug, knowing tone: “You know what you need to do…” No, I don’t fucking need to do that. To the contrary, following that idiotic advice would be fatal.

I have seen more than a few people, including my father, try to start a new business aimed at the high end of the market. Every single one of them failed. Not most of them, ALL of them. Every single one.

Now, L’Aristokrato may never have disrupted a market personally, but he has certainly seen new companies enter new markets throughout his life. When Honda entered the US car market, did they aim at the high end or the low end? How about Kia? When Diamond entered the video card market, did they come in as a low-cost provider or a high-end one? This is basic Business 102 stuff.

If you want to succeed in entering an existing market, the first and foremost objective has to be staying alive to play in the next round. And your ability to stay alive depends upon your resources. Sure, Mercedes can enter at the high end. So can Samsung. But a startup? No. See, we could have spent all the money from the Alt-Hero kickstarter on a single, beautiful, gold-plated 24-page issue using the most expensive artists we could hire. It would have been talked about and critically praised… and we would have gone out of business almost immediately.

Do you know how many pages of top-quality illustration $250,000 buys? 200 pages. And that’s without script, without color, without lettering, without print charges and without shipping. We are committed to producing 576 pages (990 with Will Caligan’s comics), and we have already finished the illustrations for about 80 of them.

Do. The. Math.

Look, I’m not at all sensitive about this and I’m not trying to be harsh. The problem is that this advice is not merely ill-considered and ignorant, it is downright lethal. If we were clueless enough to follow it, we would almost certainly fail. Unlike most people, I’ve actually seen this approach play out up close and personal. My father briefly published a magazine called People & Politics in the 1980s. He spent lavishly on it. It was beautiful, it was the highest-quality political journalism anyone had ever seen at the time, it featured in-depth interviews with every major political player from both parties, and it was universally praised for its ruthlessly even-handed approach. It even sold well, remarkably well for a brand new local magazine.

But it didn’t sell enough to break even. Not even close. I don’t think it even lasted a year.

And then, I saw one low-end Taiwanese company after another enter the graphics board business. None of their products were even close to as good as my father’s cards. We kept retreating to the high end, from 1024 to 1280 to 1600 resolution. And our market share kept shrinking, until in desperation they tried to make a move into the chip market before the boards were replaced entirely by GPUs on the motherboard. It failed, for reasons that I’ve mentioned before. That company, once an $80 million company, has been dead for 20 years. That is why I know all about how markets are, and are not, successfully disrupted.

So we’re not trying to compete with Marvel, DC, Image, and everyone else on the art. We don’t have the resources for that yet. Sure, we want the art to be as good as we can make it, and that’s why I’ve hired a number of industry vets like Chuck, Frank, and others whose names you would recognize. But we’re not going to compete on the art, we’re going to compete on a) the characters, b) the storytelling, c) the worldbuilding, d) the price, and, e) discount and availability.

And, of course, we’re not going to shove the latest SJW Narrative in your face, unlike Batgirl, Superman, Thor, and whatever other comics have been converged lately. Will we succeed? Only time will tell. But if you want to give me advice, please have the courtesy to know what you are talking about, understand what the logical consequences are, and at the very least, be sure that your numbers add up.

In answer to some related questions from Scotty:

Why handicap a book with less appeal? Isn’t this part of the problem with SJW comics? Why not give it every strength and every advantage to increase success? You want to compete with Batman and Spider-man, right?

  1. Cost vs expected sales.
  2. No, that’s a totally different issue.
  3. Because maximizing strengths and advantages means maximizing cost and maximizing risk. That is not how to maximize one’s chance of success.
  4. Hell no! We absolutely don’t want to compete with Batman and Spider-man yet. We know we can’t. We want to compete with the comics that are in the #200 range, not the top 10.

Progress and polarization

An interesting analysis of the death of the American newspaper:

Traditionally, a U.S. newspaper relied upon three revenue streams, roughly one-third each: subscriptions, commercial advertising, and classifieds. First, the Internet ate the classifieds (see Craigslist), then moved on to some of that display stuff. It is this which is blamed for the decline of the industry and the associated calls that Google and or Facebook should cough up some money to revive it.

Much more important, though, is geography. The U.S. is a big country. You could drop the average European country into it and not really notice. A result of this is that U.S. newspapers were, largely speaking, a series of regional monopolies. This was down to the same network effects that people use to complain about Facebook today. Once you’re getting the majority of the classifieds in an area, for example, you’ll end up getting almost all of them. People read the section because that’s where the ads are, people advertise there because the readers are there, and so on. And as above, classifieds were a very important part of newspaper financing.

But note my point here about those regional monopolies. Apart from the very largest cities, there was usually only the one major paper. And there was another one of those every … well, that’s the geography-dependent part. The U.S. rail network has never been very fast at the distribution of either goods or people. It’s optimized for bulk commodities like coal, iron ore, and the like. But getting something printed this evening to somewhere 400 miles away before breakfast? Not so much. Thus, each major urban center, perhaps some hundreds of miles from the next, had its own newspaper ecology.

Now along comes the Internet. Our local monopolies created by geography are now broken. It’s that, much more than the loss of one or more revenue streams, which is leading to the change. We simply do not need 50 or 200 major newspapers all trying to tell their readers about everything. It can be, and therefore will be, managed with very much fewer than that.

In other words, journalists now in the position of the buggy whip manufacturers they always used to enjoy mocking as people whining about inevitable progress. And here I thought journalists were supposed to be progressives!

This means that we’re not actually seeing a development of an Alt-Media so much as we’re simply seeing the centralization and polarization of the media play out as it has in Britain. Whoever makes the shift to be the national conservative newspaper will survive, almost all of the others will eventually be devoured by the Left Opinion Leader paper (The New York Times), the Establishment Government paper (The Washington Post), and the Establishment Business paper (The Wall Street Journal).

The NFL cheerleaders are next

Formula One abolishes its grid girls:

Walk-on grid girls were axed from Formula One today as the motorsport followed the move within darts to get rid of glamour women. F1 bosses said they will no longer use grid girls from this current season which starts in Australia in two months’ time because it is not in keeping with their ‘brand values’.

The move mirrors the Professional Darts Corporation’s decision last week to end the long-established practice of women escorting male players to the stage. The changes will also apply to other races which take place on grand prix weekends and will come into play from the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne on March 25.

Sean Bratches, F1 managing director of commercial operations, said: ‘Over the last year we have looked at a number of areas which we felt needed updating so as to be more in tune with our vision for this great sport. While the practice of employing grid girls has been a staple of Formula 1 Grands Prix for decades, we feel this custom does not resonate with our brand values and clearly is at odds with modern day societal norms. We don’t believe the practice is appropriate or relevant to Formula 1 and its fans, old and new, across the world.’

London-based charity the Women’s Sport Trust had previously put pressure on F1 to drop its walk-on girls along with boxing and cycling, after the decision in darts. It tweeted last week: ‘We applaud the Professional Darts Corporation moving with the times and deciding to no longer use walk-on-girls. Motor racing, boxing and cycling… your move.’

It doesn’t matter who you are, how successful you are, or what you do. Sooner or later, SJWs are coming for you and your job.

Given that the NFL is even more converged than F1, can you really doubt that the league will be forcing the teams to get rid of their cheerleading squads soon?  After all, they are at odds with what we are reliably informed are modern day societal norms.

Note that as with GamerGate and ComicsGate, it is the SJWs in the media who are driving this effort to disemploy pretty women. And you know ESPN is going to be all over this next season; it’s going to be the next great cause for them.

I think the girls are great, they get paid and it’s a job for them. I haven’t got a problem. But I do have a big problem in the age we live in – I’ve got the BBC, ITV and Sky, my three UK broadcasters, saying to me this is not part of their editorial policy any longer. They do not want to show the walk-on girls on television.
– PDC Chairman Barry Hearn