#BoycottStarbucks

The bad coffee chain learns that no amount of virtue-signaling is sufficient to inoculate one from the SJWs:

Way, way back in the deepest mists of history, circa March 2015, the Starbucks Corporation rolled out an initiative they called “Race Together.” Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, concerned about the racial divide in America, instructed baristas to scribble the thought-provoking phrase “Race Together” on customers’ cups as a way to “foster discussion.” Because that’s exactly what you want when you’re waiting in line for an overpriced cup of coffee that tastes like it was filtered through a hobo’s liver. You want a lecture about what a racist you are.

Starbucks even gave us all some homework to do, in the form of an insert in USA Today.

I hope this fiasco proves instructive to Howard Schultz and everybody else at Starbucks. No matter how liberal you are, no matter how hard you work to establish and maintain your #woke credentials, all it takes is one slip-up. Just one viral video, taken on one of the cameras that we all carry now, and the angry mob will descend on you. Nothing you do or say will appease them. No apology will be sufficient. You can’t grovel low enough.

They won’t learn, of course. They never do. They’ll just grovel harder in the hopes that they get devoured last.

And notice how Treacher is a brilliant example of the haplessness of the conservative, always seeking the instruction of the enemy rather than its defeat.

The most underrepresented

According to the WGA’s 2016 Hollywood Writers Report, just two Native American writers were employed in film in 2014 (the latest year for which data is available), compared with 1,494 white writers. Native Americans accounted for 1.2 percent of the U.S. population in 2014 but in film represented just 0.1{a538f03b5e5ee5fdc03407ba0ca231ac78bf6d75a4715bce2458722af48b01e9} of writers, making them the demographic group with the most disproportionate underrepresentation by a factor of 12 to 1.

So, if we do start making movies in another year or three, I wonder if Castalia Studios will be celebrated as the first Native American-led film studio?

I’m guessing no.

Why Johnny still can’t read

The Atlantic simply cannot solve the mystery of ongoing US illiteracy:

Every two years, education-policy wonks gear up for what has become a time-honored ritual: the release of the Nation’s Report Card. Officially known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, the data reflect the results of reading and math tests administered to a sample of students across the country. Experts generally consider the tests rigorous and highly reliable—and the scores basically stagnant.

Math scores have been flat since 2009 and reading scores since 1998, with just a third or so of students performing at a level the NAEP defines as “proficient.” Performance gaps between lower-income students and their more affluent peers, among other demographic discrepancies, have remained stubbornly wide.

Among the likely culprits for the stalled progress in math scores: a misalignment between what the NAEP tests and what state standards require teachers to cover at specific grade levels. But what’s the reason for the utter lack of progress in reading scores?

My guess is because the teachers have lower-than-average IQs and they can’t read either.

So I graduated from college, and when I graduated there was a teacher shortage and I was offered a job. It was the most illogical thing you can imagine – I got out of the lion’s cage and then I got back in to taunt the lion again. Why did I go into teaching? Looking back it was crazy that I would do that. But I’d been through high school and college without getting caught – so being a teacher seemed a good place to hide. Nobody suspects a teacher of not knowing how to read. 

Mailvox: atheist copypasta

I usually just delete and ignore my daily hate mail, but this was right up there with the classic Navy SEAL copypasta.

Dear Pale Nigger with a Tiny Head

After encountering you and being within the confines of your sniveling shithole called “vox popoli” I have attempted to give my own honest and humble opinions and recommendations to anyone willing to listen. In hindsight I cannot imagine why I even paid attention to a lowly fool who believes wholeheartedly in the lie of jebus chris. Being the ultimate seeker of history beyond anyone I have ever seen I judge such books as ‘Ecclesiastes’ ‘Luke’ ‘Deuteronomy’ ‘Genesis’ ‘Exodus’ and other filth to be paltry, petty gibberish totally unfit for future generations to read. Unlike yourself, I am a reader of ALL known ancient languages and scripts. There are but few who could beat me in this field and most of them are dead. I have read the ‘bible’ from beginning to end and in all its earliest iterations. I know ALL of its flaws and the crude excuses of translations in its intricate fallacies. I am also aware of the seemingly endless archeological evidence and alternative historical records that ultimately crush the [ill]legitimacy of the Tanakh/Old testament and its synthesised bastard spawn the greco-roman ‘new’ testament. In the area of ‘gawd’s word’ I am superior in knowledge to anything you ‘know’.

Being as high as I am, and you as low as a mite, your censure of my deductions and articulations is quite the appalling breach of natural law. In the purely truthful sense of law it is only fitting that ‘eye for an eye’ to be meted on those equal and in this particular scenario you are not an equal on any level. The logical conclusion of this is to have you banned from employment and your entire well-being seized for the benefit of your betters as well as any belonging you claim to possess. You can retaliate but in the end it shall mean nothing. The tiny-brained mulatto wogs that dwell in that shitpit known as Italy are absolutely incapable of halting your punishment and any call to stop my righteousness shall only end in their demise. Any police found aiding your escape shall be executed as the repugnant criminals that they are.

I have noticed for a while that you have consistently deleted my infinitely righteous messages of truth on your site. As this crime is utterly irredeemable, I am forced to conclude that you have joined the ranks of the various cockroaches who have denigrated and insulted me for no better reason than to hide your own weak, pathetic, life-unworthy-of-life selves. As such, you shall be executed without dignity and any and every wog cop you call upon to hide yourself with shall also be judged guilty of the crime of preventing justice and tortured to death for this transgression.

You have been condemned and there is no redemption. No cry of mercy, no display of repentance to me or my Lord shall be accepted. Your existence shall be nothing but pain, misery and eventually suicide. May the disgusting thing you call “faith in christ” be expunged from your very being and your assets of “castalia house” be seized for the benefit of your betters.

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that this gentleman has asymmetrical features, objectively bad skin, and does not go out on a lot of dates. Can you even imagine how he would respond to getting shot down by a woman? I used to wonder why girls are so cruel to gammas, but now I understand.

Of course, it’s so over the top that one tends to suspect it is one of the Dread Ilk trolling.

God bless the GOP

Reince Priebus is determined to return the Washington Generals Republican Party to its more customary role of permanent defeat and retreat:

Priebus acknowledged Trump is, in some ways, not like any other Republican president. Trump is “extremely unique” in his personal style, Priebus said, and his campaign themes refocused the Republican Party on a populist message…. “I think post-Trump, the party returns to its traditional role and its traditional platform. It’s a Trump brand and he owns it and he has a way of protecting it,” Priebus said.

He’s proud to be a Republican because at least he knows he’ll lose.
He’ll surrender to the Democrats and he’ll defend the right to choose.
He’ll gladly stand up next to you and give up your liberty.
Cause there ain’t no doubt he loves to lose, God bless the GOP!

Physiognomy is more than real

It is science. And Martin Luther King’s dream remains just that, a dream that is not based on reality:

Unless it involves mocking President Trump’s supposedly “small hands,” there is nothing that horrifies our multiculturalist masters more than judging by appearances.

It is impossible, they claim, to infer anything about how someone is likely to behave by their gender or because they are from a particular ethnic group. Everyone is unique (but also, somehow, equal). Judging by appearances is not just superficial but plain evil.

It will be fascinating to see what they’ll make of the recently-published book by British academic Dr. Edward Dutton titled How To Judge People By What They Look Like, which argues that even within races and sexes you can, with a fair degree of accuracy, infer people’s personalities from appearances. You may even get an inside track on how smart they are by taking a good look at their physical characteristics, according to Dutton.

“You can’t judge people by what they look like! It’s drummed into us as children,” writes Dutton, an adjunct professor of anthropology at Oulu University in northern Finland. “It is utterly false.”

But Dutton makes a provocative case for resurrecting the ancient art of physiognomy—judging character from the face. He argues it should never have been dismissed as pseudo-science. Indeed, his research goes way beyond making inferences from the face. He writes:

We are evolved to judge people’s psychology from what they look like; we can accurately work out people’s personality and intelligence from how they look, and (quite often) we have to if we want to survive. Body shape, hairiness, eye width, finger length, even how big a woman’s breasts are . . . these and much else are windows into personality, intelligence or both.

So many people fail to understand that when I say the Alt-Right is inevitable, I am not merely engaging in rhetoric. I mean that quite literally and I am speaking in unvarnished dialectic. Just as communism is unviable because it denies economics and feminism is unviable because it denies biology, conservatism is unviable because it denies inequality. All of these unviable political identities have set themselves against science, history, and observable reality.

Remember, the red pill is reality.

As Dutton says in his book, the relevant research has been published in top psychology journals, such as Intelligence, Personality and Individual Differences and Evolutionary Psychological Science, as has his own research. This includes a study asserting that atheists tend to be less physically attractive and more likely to be left-handed than religious people and that they have objectively worse skin. Dutton, ever the evolutionist, opines that this is because we have been selected to be religious over thousands of years of evolution. Hence, those who are atheists reflect mutant genes in the brain and people with mental mutations are more likely to have physical ones. This explains their asymmetrical features and asymmetrical brains, leading to left-handedness.

You may recall that I was among the first to observe that atheists are neurologically atypical and that atheism is essentially a particular characteristic of being on the autism spectrum. It’s not a coincidence that you can often pick out an atheist by his appearance.

However, the link between psychology, personality, and intelligence on the one hand and appearance on the other involves considerably more than our genes, it also involves our choices and behavior. When we see a man who is slender and clear-eyed at 60, we can safely conclude that he is both intelligent and self-disciplined, just as we can reliably reach the opposite conclusion of a child who is obese at the age of 12.

Liar ban: WATYF

I’ve never been impressed by WATYF’s incessant posturing, but since he usually remained within more or less within the boundaries of the rules. I mostly ignored him. However, seeing how he was blatantly misrepresenting my positions at John Wright’s blog, I am now banning him from commenting here.

It’s really rather remarkable how dishonest so many self-professed Christian conservatives are about the Alt-Right, particularly the Christian Alt-Right, which they prefer to pretend does not even exist. Because they cannot rationally or scripturally defend either their theological positions or their commitments to various forms of equality, they usually resort to lying about us when they can’t simply ignore us. I’ve indicated WAYTF’s false statements in bold text and his omission of the necessary context in italics.

WATYF
To be fair, Vox’s emphasis on Christianity is just a bit offset by the fact that he says Christ preaches hatred as a virtue and that murder is totes OK (because war).

Benjamin Wheeler
Care to quote him on that? Or did you just think that because he says that not all men are equal that he preaches hatred? That, because he hates war, he wants to prevent it? I didn’t realize that peoples who never meet each other still war.

WATYF
No, I’m not misunderstanding him nor am I drawing an inference from something he said. He has said directly and with no equivocation that hatred is morally good (according to Christianity) and that murder is permissible because we’re in a culture war.

Here is the latest “hatred is good” post where he invokes God to justify his position. Remember, this isn’t just “we should oppose this view”, it’s “we should actively hate these people”.

Benjamin Wheeler
Strange, because all I got from that was the hatred of sin. The rhetoric is merely a vehicle. “I am proud of my wife for refusing to respect Jack and the social mores enforced by his little Safety Council. What is better than a hot blonde hater? Hate is human, and hatred is a human right. God hates deceit, God hates the wicked, and so should we.”

I didn’t realize I shouldn’t hate evil. I should start loving it! Thank you! I didn’t realize how wicked I was not hating sin.

WATYF
Yeah, your rhetoric isn’t going to work on me so don’t bother. I’m obviously not saying anything in your last sentence.

If all you got from that was the hatred of sin then you should read more carefully. He observably *isn’t* just saying, “hate evil”. He’s saying, “hate these PEOPLE because they do evil (or rather, belong to a group that is disproportionately likely to do evil)”. It’s right there in the text you quoted.

Benjamin Wheeler
I know. I’ve got so long to go before I can match Vox.

WATYF
His doesn’t work either. Rhetoric is generally only useful on the stupid and those who can’t control their emotions. It also makes the user stupider the more they use it.

So as I was saying, Vox openly advocates for a version of Christianity that preaches the hatred of entire groups (and individuals) as well as some other rather unchristian “virtues”. Yes, he repeatedly points out how Christianity is a pillar of Western Civilization (which I agree with), but I wouldn’t go to him to find out exactly what Christianity is.

Benjamin Wheeler
Right, but he gets a reaction out of you, since you’re both emotionally offended by him and unable to think past his rhetoric to any points underneath. I’m pretty sure you ignore any dialectic because it’s easier to paint him with a brush thanks to rhetoric.

WATYF
Are you reading anything I’m writing? I’m trying to figure out if you’re still trying to use rhetoric or if you just can’t understand the argument.

I’m not “reacting” to what he’s saying. I’m analyzing it (rather coldly and dispassionately). I’m quite able to “think past his rhetoric” which is why I can present the points underneath, and the points are explicit. People have asked him directly on his own blog to clarify and he has. At first, I assumed it must be some kind of tactic involving irony or whatever, but after enough times where he said it, explained his defense of the position, and confirmed it to people who asked, I saw no utility in assuming the opposite of what was obviously true.

But if you like, you can keep telling yourself that “God says it’s OK to hate people” doesn’t actually mean “God says it’s OK to hate people”. That just strikes me as a decidedly self-deluded way to approach the matter.

You’re not “pretty sure” of anything here. Nothing you’ve said has actually addressed anything I’m actually saying. I started reading Vox over a decade ago when he mostly avoided rhetoric and engaged in dialectic debates on a regular basis. That’s what attracted me to it. Now, it’s almost non-stop rhetoric, all day every day. It’s his blog, so whatever, but the change in the quality of the commenters there is a pretty good indicator of how that shift has affected his readership.

It’s amusing that WATYF claims that it is non-stop rhetoric here. That’s simply not the case. As for the intellectual quality of the commenters, it has naturally gone down as the readership has grown from 3,000 daily to 100,000 daily, but due to my consistently weeding out posers, gammas, trolls, and liars, it is a considerably more honest discourse than one will find elsewhere.

I would much rather have 10 honest commenters of average intelligence than 100 highly intelligent dissemblers and deceivers all trying to push their false narratives on the readers here.

As usual, WATYF is flat-out wrong. God does not just hate sin. God does not just hate wickedness. God hates the wicked. The wicked are clearly people, a subset of the human race set apart by their thoughts and their actions. Now, to the best of my understanding, the wicked are individuals who are not merely sinful, who are not merely weak, who have not merely given into temptation, but are those who have actively and purposefully set themselves against God and hate Jesus Christ. They are described as liars and deceivers and slanderers, among other things.

Should the Christian hate the wicked or should he love them? That is the question that I have yet to see a Churchian answer directly, without equivocation or dissembling or substituting words. And I also have an important follow-up question: is there a difference between sin and wickedness?

This explains SO much

The longtime self-declared standard bearer of the so-called conservative movement and editor of National Review, William F. Buckley, was a closeted homosexual:

Back in the day, there was a famous feud that sometimes spilled out into public view – on tv, in the courts, and on the pages of certain magazines – between two men, both now deceased. They were on opposite ends of one spectrum, and while it may come as a shock to some the same end of a different spectrum.

By the time it escalated into a legal battle – there had already been years of shouting matches and near altercations – the two had amassed impressive files on each other. The longtime Hollywood procurer for the other denies on record that any of his interests there were underage, but what of course about the time he spent abroad, in southern Europe and later in Asia? The sworn statements provided to that legacy detective agency tell a different story. This person went to his grave fearful about the release of these statements and related pictures. The relatives may have been scorned, and left out of the will, but they were still telling the truth.

So, why then did #1 drop the suit at the eleventh hour, fearful of what he might be asked under oath? It might be because of what #2’s team, which included a purported former KGB spy, had found out about #1’s own interest: barely legal hustlers, often rough trade. He’d hire them whenever he was visiting his many politician friends in DC. He called them his “habit.” For him, the revelation would have been enough to end his career, and bring down his empire.

From The New York Times of September 26, 1972:

Buckley Drops Vidal Suit, Settles With Esquire

The legal battle between William F. Buckley, Jr. and Gore Vidal arising out of their public exchange of affronts, apparently came to an end yesterday with an announcement by Mr. Buckley of two acts: the dropping of his suit against Mr. Vidal and an out-of- court settlement of $115,000 with Esquire magazine.

The conservative movement has always been a fraud. It is the Washington Generals of American politics. No wonder its opinion leaders are so reliably worthless.

A flood of disinformation

The US ambassador insists that the USA will not withdraw from Syria soon, contra the President’s previous statements. The objectives have officially evolved.

The US will not pull its troops out of Syria until its goals are accomplished there, ambassador to UN Nikki Haley said. This comes after Washington carried out airstrikes in Syria in response for an alleged chemical attack. US currently has over 2,000 troops in Syria and a number of contractors.

While it is America’s goals to see the troops come home, “we are not going to leave until we know we have accomplished those things,” she told Fox News Sunday.

Haley added the United States wants to ensure that chemical weapons are not used in a way that is of risk to US interests, the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) is defeated and Iran’s actions are monitored.

US officials were previously saying that their goal in Syria is just defeating ISIS. President Donald Trump said earlier that US would withdraw from Syria “soon”  and Washington would “let the other people take care of it now,” but no deadline for any such move has been announced.

That’s obviously not good. But then, if these rumors are true, the US will probably be withdrawing sooner rather than later, and there will be no more air strikes either.

It appears Russia was going to attack, and the U.S. was threatened into stopping the attack. This is probably the case. When this started, it was “going to be sustained, lasting days”. Then a large number of Russian planes took off, and suddenly America stopped attacking after only about an hour….

How do you go from “we are going to attack in waves, for days” to “an hour into the battle let’s call it quits”? And it is now confirmed that the Russian missile systems knocked out virtually ALL American cruise missiles, resulting in a totally failed missile attack. A few planes dropped bombs and then went home, with nothing returning. I think America quit because:

  1. Russian defenses worked perfect, and America was watching its missiles go POOF on computer screens before they reached their targets, and
  2. Russian war planes took off after the air defenses were very well proven, with confirmed destruction of practically all cruise missiles. That alone would not stop an American attack, but if any planes were carrying nukes it sure would, if it was proven Russian air defenses would escort those planes to their targets unscathed.

The big proof: the “days long attack” lasted about an hour. SOMETHING HAPPENED.

That’s not proof, let alone “big proof”. I haven’t seen any information that any Russian planes were launched anywhere, but we were told that Britain reports two hunter-killer subs were stalking one of its submarines carrying Tomahawk missiles, and that no missiles were launched from subs. In any event, the only way to determine who is telling the truth now is by watching to see what happens next. If there are more air strikes, that will be a strong indication that the Russians are seriously exaggerating. If there are not, that will be an indication, though less conclusive , that they are telling the truth now and the US has suffered a major blow to its military credibility.

It does seem a little strange that there should be so much sabre-rattling and posturing over a grand total of three targets in Syria, though. That offers minor support to the Russian account.

Voxiversity 005: a review

From a review posted on Idka:

I just watched the latest Voxiversity video. I had to wait, because I’m thinking about faith and epistemology for a blog post right now, and I find Vox persuasive, so I wanted to clarify my own thoughts before watching. That just took longer than planned.

Production-wise, it looks good, and the pacing works well. There is a nice balance between substantive points and visual quick-hitters, which is essential for the medium. Rhetorically, it is effective. The social transformation of Europe is superbly presented and the rape bit is a kill shot. The Christian ethics/falsification connection is less persuasive relatively, but seems more in need of fleshing out than off track, and it’s close is thought provoking.  A little of Eco’s The Open Work, to leave them engaged, perhaps. Overall, you can see the whole team growing into the format.

The delivery has been discussed on the blog, and I have a couple of observations. There is no perfect “voice” – it is a matter of showcasing strengths and mitigating limitations. Vox has a calm, measured tone that is excellent for presenting “hard” truths with matter-of-fact clarity. He also comes off as down to earth. Both of these qualities are working here. The editing adds the rhetorical punch, and an associate watching along pointed out that the low music is really effective on two levels. It keeps an elevated emotional engagement while subtly demonstrating the supremacy of Western culture. I concurred with that.

tl;dr – excellent addition to a project with huge upside. I hope these keep coming.

They will not only keep coming, but I expect an order of magnitude improvement in the visual quality when I am on camera in 007, which will be the second part of the Western Civilization and Christianity piece. We’re doing a shorter piece that is primarily graphical next for 006.

It’s important to keep in mind that what the producer and I are doing is new to both of us, so we’re not only figuring what we can and cannot do given our various limitations, we’re also experimenting with what approaches are effective and what is not.