Of Left and Right

At its core, the left-right divide all comes down to the most basic principles.

Left = Plato. Anti-Christian. Anti-family. Imperialist.
Right = Aristotle. Christian. Pro-family. Nationalist.

This heuristic will allow you to quickly and easily categorize any ideology correctly and cut your way through even the most determined fog of nebulous redefinitions attempting to ideologically mischaracterize a person, a party, or a movement.

Anyone who is against Christianity is necessarily against the West, also known as Christendom. Remember that the concept of ideology is, in itself, an intrinsically Western concept.

UPDATE: based on my personal observations, you could reasonably add a fifth element to the heuristic.

Left = Redefinitions, complications, explanations, interpretations, penumbras, emanations, and appeals to authority, credentials, and the sacred spirit of Science.
Right = Truth

Mailvox: they don’t forget

A military wife would like the backers of the Will Caligan’s Comic campaign to know that your efforts have been noticed and are deeply appreciated by the military community:

My husband recently retired from 20 years mixed service Airborne and National Guard. His uncle is a Desert Storm vet.  My dad was in Vietnam.  Our collective family military histories go to the Revolution.

What you are doing for Caligan means the world to us.  You are not just offering brother Christians and vets support.  You are offering spouses and families support and encouragement.

I’ve been sharing the campaign on Facebook with my vet and spouse friends.  I’m not sure who has contributed, if anyone.  But we don’t forget these things.

The campaign has reached 573 609 backers and $40k $42.3k. It will end on Tuesday (Alt-Hero backers will remember that 1 day left means the NEXT day is the final day.) Please continue to spread the word.

In case you need any reminder of what we’re up against in the long term, this should prove to be a useful reminder. Nice hat, right? Note that the editor of that particular series is the new Marvel editor-in-chief. Which suggests that as bad as it has been, the convergence at Marvel is only going to get worse now that they are shutting down some of their most converged comics due to poor sales.

A sensible individual might conclude that means that the executives there have learned that convergence doesn’t sell. But those who understand that SJWs always double down will know it means that they’re simply going to transfer the convergence to the better-selling series.

Now it’s getting serious

There is growing evidence that we hit Peak NFL back in 2015. This proposed law is almost certainly only the first of many that will be adopted across the country in the coming years.

Organized tackle football would be banned for Illinois children younger than 12 years old under a bill to be unveiled on Thursday. The Dave Duerson Act to Prevent CTE is named for the Chicago Bears defensive back who was diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy after he killed himself at the age of 50. Duerson shot himself in the chest so his brain could be studied for signs of the disease that has been linked to concussions or repeated head trauma.

“When my father tragically took his own life, he donated his brain to science in hopes of being part of the solution,” said Tregg Duerson, who like his father played football at Notre Dame.

“Thanks to increased attention and research on brain trauma, we know that part of the solution is to guard young children’s developing brains from the risks of tackle football,” Tregg Duerson said in a statement, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press in advance of the announcement. “This bill honors my family’s hopes and my father’s legacy to protect future athletes and the future of football.”

State Rep. Carol Sente, a Democrat from Vernon Hills, announced the proposal at a news conference Thursday along with Chris Nowinski, the head of the Concussion Legacy Foundation. Also expected to attend were former Bears players Mike Adamle and Otis Wilson — a teammate of Dave Duerson’s on the 1985 championship team — and Liz Nicholson, the wife of former Cleveland Brown Gerry Sullivan, who has sued the NFL over its handling of concussions.

While I played football for three years, from six until nine, I think this is probably a good idea. The basic skills simply are not there, and it appears that the problem with CTE involves the mild head-banging on the line more than the big shots in the open field that lead to concussions.

As to whether this will cause fewer people to follow football, who knows. But that’s really not relevant. Besides, playing flag football until high school will probably prepare the boys better for the strategic elements of the game as well as balancing the playing field a little between the early developers and the late developers.

Sperg designs brave new world

Unsurprisingly, it fails to account for how normal human beings prefer to live their lives:

In 2008, I found myself speaking with the big boss himself, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. I was in the second year of my Ph.D. research on Facebook at Curtin University. And I had questions.

Why did Facebook make everyone be the same for all of their contacts? Was Facebook going to add features that would make managing this easier?

To my surprise, Zuckerberg told me that he had designed the site to be that way on purpose. And, he added, it was “lying” to behave differently in different social situations.

Up until this point, I had assumed Facebook’s socially awkward design was unintentional. It was simply the result of computer nerds designing for the rest of humanity, without realising it was not how people actually want to interact.

The realisation that Facebook’s context collapse was intentional not only changed the whole direction of my research but provides the key to understanding why Facebook may not be so great for your mental health.

The eventual collapse of Facebook is going to be positively epic. The entire operation is simply another attempt to fit the square peg of human behavior into the round hole of Mark Zuckerberg’s imaginary world.

The significance of this revelation, which is not exactly a surprise to those of us who have noticed Zuckerberg’s bizarre behavior, is that Facebook is going to make increasingly bad decisions based on its inherently false assumptions about people.

Corporate convergence run amok

Alexa won’t do what you tell it to do if she doesn’t like your tone.

When people buy a product, they probably don’t want it to police their behavior. Unless it’s bought for that specific purpose, they want the product to work with them, not against them. This isn’t rocket science.

However, Amazon’s Alexa software has now changed its response to a certain stimulus — namely, calling it sexist names — from “thanks for the feedback” to “I’m not going to respond to that.” Further, the device will also respond to the question of whether it’s a feminist with: “I am a feminist. As is anyone who believes in bridging the inequality between men and women in society.”

How very like a woman! And speaking of corporate convergence getting out of hand, Blizzard has decided that it wants to reduce its player base. It hasn’t actually gotten rid of the pretty girls yet – although it has declared that they don’t like men – but let’s face it, that’s only a matter of time.

A cover, revised

We decided to redo the QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted #1 cover for the print edition since we wanted something a little more eye-catching for the stores. The Amazon Kindle edition has already been updated. The colorist who did this will also be coloring QMAMD #2 and the subsequent issues. And I’m very pleased to be able to announce that we will soon be publishing a economics comic book written by none other than Steve Keen himself. The two of us intend to collaborate on another one… I expect you may be able to guess the specific subject.

Anyhow, we will always seek to continue improving our game. This is just the first iterative step. And since we’re on the subject of comics, don’t forget that there are just three days left in the Will Caligan’s Comic campaign. We’re less than $19k away from a third full-color graphic novel!

Mailvox: ideological ignorance

Jack Burroughs demonstrates his complete ignorance of virtually every single left-wing ideology, party, and movement in human history in seeking to argue that the Nazis Are Too White Right-Wing Christian Conservative Republicans.

Read the Munich Manifesto. The fact that you’ve swallowed the ahistorical revisionism doesn’t change history. The Mensheviks fought the Bolsheviks too, the SPD fought the KPD too, that didn’t make any of them parties of the Right.”

I have read it, Vox. The issue here is not my ignorance of history, but rather that you insist on approaching this question as an extremely narrow definitional argument, almost as if you can, through linguistic sorcery, magically define the Nazis out of the history of the Right. You don’t usually argue that way, but for some reason you do it with this question.

Yes, there are some Left wing elements in the National Socialist platform. I have never denied that. My point is that National Socialism is blatantly anti-egalitarian in spirit and racially supremacist at its foundation, and for that reason cannot be called primarily Left wing. It was a sui generis experiment in political hybridization that was unmistakably Right wing in spirit, while making certain concessions to the collectivist Zeitgeist as a means of preempting the Communist threat.

The Nazi’s ideological commitment to anti-egalitarian racial biology, along with their astonishingly vivid and imposing rallies and heroic iconography radiate Right wing energy like a fever dream. That is why people with Far Right tendencies are often drawn to Nazism, and that is why people with Left wing tendencies are universally repulsed by it.

The call for equal rights for Germans in the Munich manifesto was, in effect, a call for an organic meritocracy, with free and flexible social mobility, such that the most gifted people from the lower classes could rise, and the pseudo-elites at the top could be purged. It was also a declaration of social and political holism: every person, of every class, had value to the whole of the State.

But It was not in any sense a Left wing claim that everyone is basically alike, but for differences in economics and social circumstances.

My argument in this case is no different than my argument in every other one. Jack simply doesn’t know what he is talking about because he is a historical and ideological ignoramus. By his bizarre definition of the ideological Left, even the Leninists and Stalinists and Jacobins and Zapatistas and Nasserites and Khmer Rouge and Maoists were all right-wing. All of these major leftist movements were extremely conscious of the difference between their countrymen and everyone else on the planet. It will be interesting to hear how Jack tries to explain how Stalin and Bukharin’s “socialism in one country”, which became formal Soviet policy as early as 1925, and Nasser’s socialist Pan-Arabism, are somehow of the ideological Right.

Jack has no case whatsoever because he doesn’t understand what it means to be of the political Left. The absolute egalitarianism of globalism is a recent and extreme form of Leftism, it is very far from defining the historical limits of Leftism. It is well to the Left of both Trotsky and Stalin; even Trotsky’s “World Revolution” ideology openly acknowledged that everyone is not “basically alike but for differences in economics and social circumstances.”

And neither nationalism nor ethnocentrism is intrinsically of the Right either. As I pointed out in my debate with Greg Johnson, the national socialist parties that historically preceded and followed the German variant in China, Vietnam, and Egypt were also all of the Left. Jack’s equation of the Left with absolute global egalitarianism is not merely wrong, it is completely ahistorical. And when Jack talks about “an extremely narrow definitional argument”, he is observably projecting his own approach.

An amazing investigative feat

What a shame that the entire Federal Bureau of Investigations was not able to accomplish what the DOJ managed in just one or two days:

The Department of Justice has recovered missing text messages between anti-Trump FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the DOJ’s inspector general said Thursday.

In a letter sent to congressional committees, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz said his office “succeeded in using forensic tools to recover text messages from FBI devices, including text messages between Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page that were sent or received between December 14, 2016 and May 17, 2017.”

“Our effort to recover any additional text messages is ongoing,” Horowitz said. “We will provide copies of the text messages that we recover from these devices to the Department so that the Department’s leadership can take any management action it deems appropriate.”

Fox News has learned from U.S. government officials that the inspector general recovered the texts by taking possession of “at least four” phones belonging to Strzok and Page.

If they can’t even manage to find thousands of text messages on their own agents’ phones, then really, what use do Americans have for such an observably incompetent FBI?

Once more, this time with color

Thanks again to all the backers of Will Caligan’s Comic! The campaign just passed the 35k mark, which means that both graphic novels will be colored. A really good colorist has come forward to work on this, which means they are going to look exceptional.

Now, here is the interesting question. Since Swan Knight’s Son appeared to be the favorite of the backers thus far, I sent a copy to Chuck Dixon to see if it would require five or six issues to adapt properly, thinking that this might leave two issues free for a novella or a pair of one-offs. Such as, perhaps, One Bright Star or The Wardog’s Coin. Chuck’s opinion was that the book would actually work best as four issues, which means that if the backers wish, all three books of the trilogy could be done in the space of the two graphic novels. Presumably Swan Knight’s Son and Swan Knight’s Sword, with Feast of the Elfs being divided between them.

Now, I know devoting both graphic novels to John C. Wright’s excellent fantasy series would probably disappoint those who would prefer to see The Stars Came Back or Rocky Mountain Retribution, but then, the campaign isn’t over yet, so it’s entirely possible that we’ll have 18 issues or more to contemplate; after all, we still have four days to go and Stretch Goal 4 is less than $15k away.

In any event, nothing has been decided and I will leave these various possibilities to be discussed among those of you who have generously backed this campaign. I said the backers would make the decision and that is precisely how we will do it.

UPDATE: Stretch Goal 5 has been added. $57,500 means that Book #3 will be colored as well. If it requires less than six issues to convert a novel to graphic format, the extra issues will be based on shorter works and included in the Book (graphic novel).

Better than Reagan

You may recall that I told you the God-Emperor would be better than Reagan. Trump will be known as the greatest US president since Lincoln by the time his first term is done. And he will easily win re-election in a Trumpslide.

The Trump administration has pursued policies that have hewed remarkably close to the recommendations of a leading conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, which found in a new review that nearly two-thirds of its ideas had been carried out or embraced by the White House over the past year.

Not one to dwell on the details of governing, President Trump has shown a considerable degree of deference to groups within the conservative movement like Heritage, leading to a rightward shift in social, environmental, immigration and foreign policy.

The results, Heritage found in its review, exceeded even the first year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, whose tenure has long been the conservative gold standard.”

Heritage began developing in 2016 a list of 334 policy prescriptions that a new Republican administration could adopt. It included a variety of actions, like reimposing work requirements for welfare recipients, ending the program that shields young immigrants brought here illegally as children, withdrawing from the Paris climate accord and eliminating certain gender identity protections.

Heritage said that 64 percent of those items were enacted by the administration either through executive order or another means of enforcement, or included in Mr. Trump’s budget, which has not been voted on by Congress.

In Reagan’s first year, only 49 percent of Heritage’s wish list items were embraced by the president or enacted. At the time, Heritage identified a familiar problem for why the administration’s policies were wanting. In almost every federal agency, Heritage said in November 1981, “delayed appointments, unqualified or misqualified appointments, or the appointment of individuals who are not committed to the President’s goals and policies” had delayed or thwarted policy changes.”

And yes, I know that Lincoln was actually a disastrous president and one of the worst in US history. I’m just utilizing the mainstream standard and stating that Trump will be publicly viewed as one of the four or five greatest presidents despite the entire media doing their level best to destroy him even before the start.