Just a note to apprise the Alt★Hero backers of the current progress. I’ve now completed the script for Alt★Hero #1: Falls the Hammer, so between Chuck and me we have written 108 pages of the 576 pages required for Alt★Hero volumes 1-6 and Avalon volumes 1-6.
The first 24 pages for Alt★Hero #2: Crackdown / War in Paris are now sketched, and they are now being inked, colored, and lettered. We anticipate having at least 3 24-page books ready for digital publication by the end of the year. The digital publications will be provided to all the relevant backers, but we cannot say yet when the first trade paperback will be ready as that depends upon the artists.
Due to a number of inquiries from independent creators interested in working with Castalia, we have created a second imprint for publishing outside projects that are either complete or already in development, including a pair of black-and-white neo-Lovecraftian graphic novels as well as a color adaptation of a PG Wodehouse novel. The first 24 pages of Quantum Mortis: A Man Disrupted will be done by the end of the year as well.
Just in case any backers missed the email, I should mention that backers are permitted to add to their backing in the event they would like hardcovers instead of paperbacks, or paperbacks in addition to digital editions, or whatever. Just email me to let me know of any additions; those of you who have already done so will receive confirmations later this week. The current plan is to release 24-page versions in digital format when they are ready, then publish the trade paperbacks and hardcovers once the necessary six 24-page versions are complete. Each 48-page volume will consist of two 24-page books illustrated by the same artist.
We will also be sharing some more new artwork tomorrow as part of the launch of a major new site.
Mr. Rational demonstrates why no one trusts atheists, including their fellow atheists:
You’re playing semantic games here by deliberately selecting a nonsensical phrase, Vox. “The Significance of Human Existence” makes perfect sense, and yes, random events in human history are perfectly understandable in that context.
This is another example of your need to have a First Cause for everything. It’s just a more advanced version of the animism of savages. You can’t not see intent and agency in everything because it makes you insecure, and like the left’s search for racism in society what you need to find will be found… somehow.
E.O. Wilson is one of the greatest minds of our age, and you reduce yourself to paraphrasing his book title in a silly fashion. Talk about ankle-biting.
This is simply embarrassing for Mr. Rational. It would appear that the sight of “one of the greatest minds of our age” being caught out has triggered him. Badly. That “silly fashion” of which he complains is the most generous interpretation of Wilson’s title possible; the alternative is that Wilson is every bit as dishonest as the Richard Dawkins and Sam Harrises of the world.
I am not playing a semantic game. I am observing that there is ABSOLUTELY NO DEFINITION of the term “meaning” that allows E.O. Wilson to be considered simultaneously a) philosophically competent and b) intellectually honest. As another commenter has already noted, Wilson’s book was not titled The Significance of Human Existence, but rather, The Meaning of Human Existence. A second bait-and-switch is not going to justify the first.
Also notice how the triggered little gamma male immediately leaps to making the philosophy personal. He cannot accept that “one of the greatest minds of our age” is either incorrect or lying, and that fact that I am the one who caught him out only makes his acceptance of that easily observably fact all the more difficult. Unlike both Wilson and Mr. Rational, I am perfectly willing to contemplate the possibility that there is neither intent nor agency in human existence, it is only that unlike them, I am sufficiently competent to understand and accept the logical consequences of that lack of meaning.
You’re too short for this ride, Mr. Rational. I will not again be rescuing your very stupid, very dishonest comments from the spam where they clearly belong, and will henceforth spam them. Since there is neither meaning nor significance in that decision, he really has no grounds for complaint. And even if he did, well, what could that possibly matter?
Groggy thinks I made a mistake.
Vox, carefully parsing the dictionary definitions above which you provided, “what actually is” is not a valid definition to extract.
what is intended to be, or actually is, expressed or indicated; signification; import
It does NOT say that meaning can be “what actually is”.
It says that meaning can be:
what is intended to be expressed or indicated
what actually is expressed or indicated
I actually share Groggy’s interpretation, but as I mentioned above, I felt that it was best to be generous and give Mr. Wilson’s defenders the maximum amount of rope with which to hang the man. Rather than being able to quibble over the parsing of the definition, his defenders are forced to either admit to his error, admit to his dishonesty, or commit their own intellectual sins.
“Prophet or not, Mohammad had a good grasp of the psychology of what motivates young men—and people in general—and structured things accordingly. Praying five times a day is a powerful psychological conditioning tool. Saying all your sins are forgiven if you die for the cause is a powerful motivation when they are constantly harping on all the sins people commit. They have the sword on their flags, and they are martyrs for their cause of taking over the world!”
“They are deluded fools,” replied Thomas sadly.
“Any more so than a third-century Christian choosing to get thrown to the lions rather than recant? You call them martyrs, too, do you not?”
“But that’s different!”
“Is it? You don’t arm yourself, you preach peace, and theirs is the way of the sword. If you were a testosterone-filled young man, which symbol would attract you more, a gun, or a lamb? I mean, unless you wanted to shag the lamb, slaughter it, and roast some kebabs afterward? Same for gang-bangers. They see the cops don’t let the good guys pack heat and tell folks to not fight the bad guys. Let the cops go after them. Let the insurance cover the losses. The guys in the hood see the law-abiding as weak, chumps, nothing but chumps or—if you’ll excuse the expression—sheep to be shorn.”
“But nonviolence works in the long run. I mean, look at Gandhi. His nonviolence worked very well—within his lifetime!—and freed India from England.”
“But he also said… Wait. Just a second. Got the quote… right… here.” He found it on the screen of his tablet. “He who cannot protect himself or his nearest and dearest or their honor by nonviolently facing death may and ought to do so by violently dealing with the oppressor. He who can do neither of the two is a burden. He has no business to be the head of a family. He must either hide himself, or must rest content to live forever in helplessness and be prepared to crawl like a worm at the bidding of a bully. Even your number-two hero knew that some people can’t be reasoned with, only dealt with at their own level.”
Finnegan added, “He also said that nonviolence would only work with a just and moral people like the English, and The sword makes men equal. Clearly nonviolent protest and letter-writing didn’t help the kulaks against Stalin.”
“But that isn’t Jesus’ way.”
“Hey, I didn’t bring up Gandhi.”
“Well, yes. But that isn’t the path of the Bible.”
“Truth isn’t always comfortable, Padre. It is what it is.”
“But guns are a symbol of violence,” said Cranberry firmly.
“No, they are not,” shot back Finnegan, just as firmly.
“Sure they are.”
“No, they are a symbol of worldly power. An amplifier of the intent of the user. In the hands of a nongovernment employee with a good heart, a symbol of freedom. In the hands of a good government, they represent law and order. In the hands of an evil man, a symbol of oppression and crime.”
Thomas had never considered that particular distinction. The vast majority of the previous conversations he’d listened in on had been of much more technical nature. “Possibly, but that doesn’t feel right. Far too many murders, wars, robberies, and suicides happen with them.”
“All of which happened before gunpowder showed up. Jaw of an ass sound familiar? The fact that… Wait. Let me get Old Testament here, I know I’ve got that quote somewhere…. Ah, here. Maimonides. Truth does not become truer by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it.”
“Maimonides wasn’t Old Testament. He was Middle Ages,” Cranberry pointed out. “And Jewish.”
“Ah, whatever. So was Jesus. Exact year is irrelevant. He’s an old-time scholarly dude. And he’s right. Doesn’t make a tinker’s fart in a tornado how the truth makes you feel. True is true. It may be inconvenient that three plus three is six, but there it is. Lifeboat math and figuring out who gets tossed over or fished out is never easy for a sane man.”
“But good men of Christian faith should not murder.”
“Agreed. But killing isn’t necessarily the same as murder. The commandment is Thou Shall Not Murder, not Kill. One is not just. The other is. Do cops and soldiers, even Christian ones, carry guns?”
“But soldiers and police are different!”
“Nope. They are people, too. Same rights, same commandments. Did the Knights Templar and the other chivalric orders carry swords much as the Saracen did or rely only on prayer while blessed by the Church and fighting to keep the Holy Lands safe for Christians? Did William Marshal, first Earl of Pembroke and pinnacle of the chivalric ideals, carry only words when asked by the pope to protect the young heir to the English throne to prevent war? He was so bad-ass even into his 70s that nobody was willing to challenge him to combat, so he secured the life of the future king of England and the Magna Carta. He was even offered a plenary indulgence for any sin he might ever commit in the future in exchange, for God’s sake! A spiritual blank check to do anything he wanted. But he turned it down. He was a good man and carried a sword doing his knightly duty for many long years.”
“But that was a long time ago!”
“So was Jesus. Does that make his words any less true?”
“Point taken.”
“Is the Church of today exactly the same as it was fifteen hundred years ago? Any new developments in that time?” Mickey asked.
“Well, yes, of course! Benedictine Monks and the Dominicans, Franciscans, Jesuits, and the various nuns’ orders. We adopted local languages in place of Latin. Other practical things like that. Times change, but the Word does not.”
“Not to mention some guy named Martin Luther…. But let’s not go there right now. So why were the monastic orders founded?”
“Monastic history is not my strong suit,” the bishop said, “but as I recall, once Christianity became the more-or-less official religion of the Roman Empire under Constantine, it wasn’t a great act of courage to be Christian. Some sought the hard life of a desert hermit to prove their devotion to God. Early Benedictines attempted to recreate that ascetic life, at least to a degree, and imitated Christ, who fasted in the desert before he started his ministry.”
“So a new order was founded to meet an unmet need?”
“Yes, I guess that is one way to look at it.”
“And the Templars?”
“To keep Pilgrims to the Holy Land safe, as you said, and retake it from the Islamic conquest. But this is totally different.”
After reading Tom Wolfe’s unstinting praise of EO Wilson, I decided I need to read the man’s work. Who could fail to be interested after this sort of billing? He could be stuck anywhere on God’s green earth and he would always be the smartest person in his class. That remained true after he graduated with a bachelor’s degree and a master’s in biology from the University of Alabama and became a doctoral candidate and then a teacher of biology at Harvard for the next half century. He remained the best in his class every inch of the way. Seething Harvard savant after seething Harvard savant, including one Nobel laureate, has seen his reputation eclipsed by this terribly reserved, terribly polite Alabamian, Edward O. Wilson.
Fantastic. But as I am insufficiently learned to read his scientific work critically, I elected to begin with his philosophical work, specifically, The Meaning of Human Existence. And I was unexpectedly disappointed on only the second page. To say that it does not begin well for a man of supposedly superlative intelligence would be an understatement.
In ordinary usage the word “meaning” implies intention, intention implies design, and design implies a designer. Any entity, any process, or definition of any word itself is put into play as a result of an intended consequence in the mind of the designer. This is the heart of the philosophical worldview of organized religions, and in particular their creation stories. Humanity, it assumes, exists for a purpose. Individuals have a purpose in being on Earth. Both humanity and individuals have meaning.
There is a second, broader way the word “meaning” is used and a very different worldview implied. It is that the accidents of history, not the intentions of a designer, are the source of meaning. There is no advance design, but instead overlapping networks of physical cause and effect. The unfolding of history is obedient only to the general laws of the Universe. Each event is random yet alters the probability of later events. During organic evolution, for example, the origin of one adaptation by natural selection makes the origin of certain other adaptations more likely. This concept of meaning, insofar as it illuminates humanity and the rest of life, is the worldview of science.
What? All right, hold on just one sociobiologically-constructed minute. No one, literally no one, ever uses the word “meaning” that way. Even less so can this usage be excused in the case of an author who is writing in the intrinsically philosophical context of attempting to explain the significance of Man’s existence. Let’s reference the dictionary.
MEANING, noun
what is intended to be, or actually is, expressed or indicated; signification; import
the end, purpose, or significance of something
Hmmm. He has at least a superficial excuse. It appears that Wilson is playing a little fast-and-loose with the definition of “meaning” here. He is clearly using it in the sense of “what actually is”. That is (unexpectedly) fair enough, except for the fact that by selecting that specific meaning of the word,(1) he reduces both his statement and the thesis of his book to basic tautologies.
Consider the title: The Meaning of Human Existence. Now let’s incorporate this second, broader way the word meaning is used, according to Wilson: The Actual Is of Human Existence. What, one wonders, can we derive from Wilson’s bold statement that humans actually exist? Are we to assume it is a catalog of facts about humanity rather than a statement about the significance of humanity’s existence? It’s more akin to a bad comedy routine than a genuine philosophical statement.
“What do you mean by that?” “What it is. What it actually is.” “I know what you said. But what do you mean?“ “What I said. What else could I mean?” “Don’t you mean what else could I actually is?” “Don’t you?”
In fact, I even suspect Wilson of cherry-picking this definition in order to beg the question he appears to be feigning to propose given the fact that it does not appear in other dictionaries, such as the Oxford online dictionary.
MEANING, noun
What is meant by a word, text, concept, or action.
Implied or explicit significance.
Important or worthwhile quality; purpose.
But the definition provided is even worse than the self-parody it appears to be. Remember, Wilson didn’t directly state that meaning is that which actually is, he declared the second way the word is used to be is that the accidents of history “are the source of meaning”. So, he’s actually using the word meaning in his own definition of the word meaning. This is either intellectual incompetence or intellectual shadiness, and while I cannot say which is the case yet, I am now on high alert to the probability of either… or both.
Given this shaky – or shady – foundation, I do not have very high hopes for the philosophy that Mr. Wilson has constructed upon it. I completely understand why some find my intellectual arrogance to be unseemly and offputting, but honestly, can you not in turn understand how I come by it, given how often this sort of thing happens? (1) One can legitimately groan at that one. It does nicely underline my point, though.
It’s hard to discern a pattern in the violence that has wracked the Swedish capital Stockholm for five nights. Rioting in the city’s suburbs has raised the national debate about immigration, unemployment and social inequality.
The cars attacked in the violence are not high-end – not the BMWs and Porsches you might expect to see torched by class warriors – but the vans which ordinary people need to go about their business. Schools, a station and a library have been attacked as well as a bank and a police station…. Many said there was a wider context of a growing gap between rich and poor in Sweden.
On OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) figures, Sweden has seen the biggest increase in inequality of any developed country over the past 25 years. Immigrants and their descendants tend to congregate in areas such as Husby, the neighbourhood west of Stockholm where the violence started on Sunday. About 80{23e931505c9998ea7789b03fa212186bf4d6af5391998e330e3a146ae78b2862} of the 11,000 residents are either first- or second-generation immigrants.
It is not any more the Sweden we all thought we knew.
What do you know. Another Magic Dirt fail. Apparently even Scandinavian socialist magic isn’t powerful enough to transform immigrants into Real Swedes Just Like All The Other Swedes Except For Their Darker Skin.
Identity always trumps ideology, regardless of whether that ideology is free market capitalism, American civic nationalism, or socialism.
Nations are people. Nations are genetic. Nations are tribes. Nations are neither propositions nor geography nor political constructs. FFS, before you embarrass yourself with ignorant objections, look up the etymology of the freaking word! Nationalism is literally genetic tribalism and nations are nothing more than genetic tribes with shared cultural, religious, and linguistic customs. 1250-1300; Middle English < Latin nātiōn- (stem of nātiō) birth, tribe, equivalent to nāt(us) (past participle of nāscī to be born) + -iōn- -ion
You may recall that last week, I posted an image of a GI Joe cover that many of you doubted could possibly be real. Well, it was. And here is an interview with the current writer of GI Joe, Aubrey Sitterson, with Bleeding Cool, which may prove to be more than a little informative. Note how this line was practically paraphrased from SJWAL’s description of the purpose of narrative propaganda: “It’s speculative fiction, right? So why not use it to conjure up a better world?” BC: Some Joe fans take issue with a person of your political persuasions writing GI Joe. Tell us why that’s actually a good thing.
AS: I’m a socialist, and that’s been a tough pill for some folks to swallow. That’s in part because in this country, the military is almost universally seen as a right wing institution, but that’s actually far from a universal sentiment. There are too many countries to list where the military has fought off right-wing coups or fundamentalist takeovers, or even where the military has sided with socialist insurgencies. In South American history, it’s not even uncommon for socialist activists to become soldiers themselves! It’s a common Marxist refrain, but that’s because it’s true: The military has revolutionary potential.
There’s nothing inherently right wing about the military, it’s just how the military has generally been used in United States history. One of the big questions I posed to myself, especially writing this book in the midst of Trump taking office and the rise of the alt-right, was figuring out what a socialist GI Joe book would even look like. After a lot of thought, it came down to tweaking not only our general perception of the military’s goals, but also the methods by which it achieves them. A socialist military doesn’t exist to further enrich the monied classes or enforce property rights or promote imperialist agenda. Instead, it has a far simpler, far more noble goal: Protecting and empowering people.
The book is designed to be aspirational, so I tried to write Joe as an idealized military – what the military would be if I could wave a magic wand and make it so. That’s why GI Joe became an international organization, one more concerned with protecting the population of the planet than promoting any single country’s interests, and also a big part of why we switched all of the Joes over to using laser weapons. It’s speculative fiction, right? So why not use it to conjure up a better world?
Using lasers also solved another big problem with doing a leftist take on GI Joe: Guns. I love gunporn action flicks as much as anyone, more than most, honestly, but what flies in John Wick or Commando simply ain’t appropriate in GI Joe, which is, at its core, and in my favorite incarnation, decidedly a kids’ property. I grew up watching all kinds of stuff that glorified gun violence and while I don’t think it broke me as a person or anything, that kind of material definitely contributes to the exaltation of firearms. And in 2017, with what feels like near-constant mass shootings, fetishizing guns in a children’s property isn’t just gross, it’s wrong.
That’s the behind-the-scenes reason on why the Joes use nonlethal lasers, but there’s also an excellent story reason as well: If the Joes are the best in their chosen fields, and they’re all working together…why would they even need to kill people? The Joes are strong and capable enough that they can afford to be nice, to give people the benefit of the doubt, even if doing so puts them at risk. And truthfully, that’s the very definition of a hero. BC: You’ve been the target of what we’ll call “backlash” for some of the changes you’ve made to GI Joe, but GI Joe as a property has been, in a lot of ways, progressive since the ’80s. In that respect, what parts of that legacy did you build on for your take on GI Joe?
AS: “Backlash” is a nice word for it, right? Though they’ve thankfully calmed down now, I was getting death threats for more than a month. One of the most perplexing things about that whole situation (outside of how someone could get so upset over a comic book that they’d threaten someone’s life) was that GI Joe has been progressive since the very first issue of Real American Hero. War was never something to be celebrated in that book — it was a sad necessity, albeit one where heroes could be elevated through valor. And that progressive trend was continued in the Sunbow series a few years later, with a level of gender, ethnic and racial representation that was simply unheard of at the time. And while the Joes were a diverse group of friends, the Cobra villains were, by-and-large, homogenous white males. That’s shockingly progressive for smack dab in the middle of Reagan’s America.
GI Joe is, at its core, a progressive concept, so I didn’t have to go in and do any heavy lifting. Instead, it was all about figuring out ways to continue that trend, but in a way that’s appropriate for 2017. Our new Salvo is a great example of that, albeit one for which I continue to catch a lot of heat from a certain vocal minority of Joe fans. Making Salvo a Samoan woman served a couple purposes. First, it gave us another international Joe for our newly international team. Changing the character’s race and gender not only gave us some Polynesian representation, but also helped us dodge some problematic visual associations, as Salvo’s original look (bald, heavily muscled white guy with giant guns and a shirt that says “THE RIGHT OF MIGHT”) reads as… a little too alt-right. It also presented an opportunity to introduce a different body type into the group, which I thought was important.
So, the SJW definition of a hero is “someone who is strong enough to be nice and give people the benefit of the doubt, even if doing so puts himself at risk.” That explains the SJW position on immigration, does it not? Okay, so that’s the shot. Now here is the chaser, a news item posted later that same day by the same comics news site, Bleeding Cool.
There’s still more than a week before the December 5th final order cutoff for retailers to order Scarlett’s Strike Force, the new GI Joe series launching out of IDW’s First Strike super-mega-crossover event. But before all the orders are in for the first issue, set to hit stores on December 20th, the book has already been canceled by IDW.
“Unfortunately, IDW told me early this month that Scarlett’s Strike Force was being canceled after issue #3,” writer Aubrey Sitterson told Bleeding Cool in an exclusive interview. “And with up through issue #4 already written, that means ending on a pretty outrageous cliffhanger.”
Since the first issue is more than a month away from hitting stores, with time yet left for retailers and fans to order it, it might seem premature for the book to already be canceled, but Sitterson relayed the reason he was given by his publisher, as unlikely as it sounds: “IDW told me they made the decision due to low sales.”
Good riddance! IDW appears to be figuring out that SJWs are a cancer a little faster than either Marvel or DC is. Of course, IDW has considerably less margin for error, since they aren’t being propped up by their movie-licensing revenue. UPDATE: No, my assumption was incorrect. Apparently IDW has learned nothing from this incident and the decision was imposed upon them from above. “IDW stood by Sitterson (he did keep his job as the writer after all). Their initial support statement was only retracted after Hasbro allegedly got involved.” Snicker-snack….
Steve Sailer reveals his hateful anti-semitic hatefulness as he proposes but ONE measly day to celebrate Jewish immigration and thank these valuable contributors to America for their efforts in making America more deeply and truly American:
Reading the columns of David Brooks, Bret “I have always thought of the United States as a country that belongs first to its newcomers” Stephens, and Roger Cohen, I now realize we should have a national holiday celebrating the immigration of their ancestors to the United States.
This National Day of Adulation and Gratitude for Jewish Immigration might be the only hope of keeping them from trying so hard to convert every other American national holiday into an occasion for their own ethnocentric ancestor worship.
Worse, instead of frankly admitting that they really, really like their own kind, the Brookses, Stephens, and Cohens feel compelled to concoct elaborate globalist theories about why every single American national holiday is a mandate for letting in not just their forefathers, but every scimitar-waving Muslim on earth.
If Steve didn’t hate and envy Jews, he would have proposed at least a week of celebration, although perhaps repurposing the 40 Days of Lent would be more appropriately demonstrate the boundless debt of gratitude every American no doubt feels to these true blue Americans who are exactly like every other American except for having arrived later and being more special.
I was on my way to work one morning around the beginning of March, when I decided to stop at MacDonald’s for a morning coffee, one of the few luxuries I can afford, despite having trained for four different fields of work throughout my life in Ontario, Canada. At my current job, I am by far the highest educated worker, with vast training, including a graduate degree in the chief public service that the organization provides: human services. Yet, I am employed on contract at the lowliest clerical job, with the poorest status, and wages and without benefit, not even vacation time (only money in lieu of vacation). That in it-self should raise the eyebrows of the handful of critical thinkers that still exist in this nation.
Immigration is a working class issue, make no mistake about it. If you were waiting for the wealthy to intervene and to try and stop immigration, that isn’t going to happen — ever!
At this point, the immigration tap doesn’t need to only be turned off, we actually need restoration efforts to make up for the losses sustained by Canadians proper — restorative justice.
I waited for my coffee, which was being poured by a long-time Canadian such as myself. Likely he was forced to take any job in order to continue to live in this town, like citizens in so many other small Ontario towns, which have suffered for decades as the jobs left for nations where products could be manufactured at a lower cost to create a product of poor quality to sell back to people like us.
I reached for the newspaper rack, and ended up with a newspaper in my hand, which I have learned through the application of my critical thinking skills to distrust and despise. Yet, it was in my hand, so I read the headline, “The Future Of Ontario’s Small Towns Is Immigration.”
I was served my coffee and I gulped it down, not paying attention to it, but rather the headline and burning my mouth and throat in the process. The pain was no comparison to the raw feeling of acid burning in my gut as I continued to read the front page newspaper story, which the low wage workers serving me would likely never even get a chance to glance at throughout their stress-full day at work.
Imagine having watched your entire community being fed a steady diet of raw potatoes and turnips for thirty years, and in order to survive you’ve swallowed it, but not because you liked it, but because you had been led to believe it was the only way to survive. And then one day you discovered that you could have been eating steak and lobster, and it was all a grand farce, because the joke was on you and the rest of the folks in your towns and communities all across the nation.
Reading that Toronto Star article, on that freezing cold morning in March, I recognized that “we” the working class had all been made complete fools, not once but again and again and again, as lie after lie was unveiled for us by grinning political shysters.
In case you haven’t figured it out yet, you’re not going to vote the invaders out. Immigration is not “good for the economy”. It is not “good for Americans”. It is not “good for Canadians”. It is, in fact, considerably worse for the native populations in the long term than Operation Barbarossa was for the Russians.
All of the 3.4 million invading Germans were expelled from Soviet territory within three years. How long will it take to expel the 80 million invaders of the USA? The frightening thing is that immigration on this scale isn’t just invasion, it is permanent occupation.
This Thanksgiving, Americans in general — and free-market conservatives in particular — have plenty for which to be grateful. And much of it would be absent had the White House’s current occupant not become president on November 8, 2016.
The day after Donald J. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, Princeton University economist Paul Krugman called Trump’s victory “the mother of all adverse effects.” He predicted “very probably . . . a global recession, with no end in sight.”
The Dow Jones Industrial Average, NASDAQ, and S&P 500 all hit record highs on Tuesday. The Wilshire 5000 Index calculates that some $3.4 trillion in new wealth has been created since President Trump’s inauguration and $5.4 trillion since his election. Fueled by the reality of deregulation, expectations of lower taxes, and a new tone in Washington that applauds free enterprise rather than excoriate it, the economy is on fire.
Atop the second quarter’s 3.1 percent increase in real GDP, and 3.0 in 3Q, the New York Federal Reserve Bank predicts that 4Q output will expand by 3.8 percent. This far outpaces the feeble average-annual GDP growth rate of 1.5 percent on President Obama’s watch. Meanwhile, the IMF expects global GDP to rise by 3.5 percent this year. So much for a Trump-inspired “global recession.”
The Never Trump faction still claims that the president of the United States “is no conservative.” And yet, with rare deviations (such as free trade), he spends nearly every day implementing the conservative agenda. Ideas that center-Right activists have demanded for decades are becoming public policy, one after another — to the pleasant surprise of even some of Donald J. Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters.
Ten months down. Thirty-eight to go. The best is yet to come.
Still not tired. By the way, I would be remiss if I failed to mention that Crypto.Fashion is holding a Black Friday weekend sale on nearly all of its Dark Lord Designs t-shirts, which includes $10 closeout sales of Trumpslide 2016 shirts. They are also now offering black Infogalactic and Castalia House coffee mugs.
This is a review by a guest reviewer, Castalia House narrator Jon Mollison:
Regular readers of this blog need no long and detailed rehashing of the decades of success globalists have achieved by injecting their message fiction into every nook and cranny of every medium of news and education and entertainment. Regular readers of this blog have all too often put down books, walked out of theaters, or snapped off the television with an angry snarl of, “enough with the message fiction!” Nor do they need yet another reminder that technological advances have reduced the barrier to entry for books and comics and videos such that the left-wing stranglehold exists solely by dint of decades of inertia and capital accumulated by their forebears. This being the Current Year Plus One, we can take that wonderful theory and expose it to the harsh light of scrutiny to see how well it works in practice. Before we grab our Deerstalker Cap and hold our magnifying glass up to Superversive Press’s latest collection, “MAGA 2020 & Beyond”, we need to get something out of the way.
This is not message fiction.
For decades, “message fiction” has been used to describe “ugly left wing lies wrapped up inside pretty fiction packages”. Mainly because that was the only message fiction available. Right wing message fiction was consigned to the dustbin of unpublishable Now that the Pandora’s box of self-and small press publishing has been opened, the peddlers of message fiction and their supporters want to change the meaning of the term to encompass all fiction with any message. But just as they no longer get to decide which messages are conveyed via fiction, they also no longer get to decide the definition of “message fiction”. And so the meaning retains its stink of left-wing propaganda. Hence, this collection of pro-Trump essays cannot be classified as “message fiction”.
Granted, MAGA 2020 & Beyond” is filled, cover to cover, with the exact same sort of heavy handed symbolism and wishful thinking and oversimplification you would expect given the title and cover art. And yet it isn’t message fiction, because the messages conveyed by these tales are neither ugly, nor left wing, nor are they predicated on a view of the world that just ain’t so. These works represent a direct challenge to message fiction.
So it isn’t message fiction, but is it any good?
Some of it is good. Some of it is great. Some of it is lousy. I can’t tell you which is which, though. That you’ll have to discover for yourself.
This collection contains thirty pieces of fiction and non-fiction, many of them by well recognized authors such as Brad Torgerson, L. Jagi Lamplighter, Declann Finn, Milo, Ivan Throne, John C. Wright, and Jon Del Arroz. It also includes works by rising stars such as Alfred Genesson, Dawn Witzke, Marina Fontaine, and the inimitable @Kaijubushi.
While the writing snaps and pops across the board, the styles of works in this eclectic collection of authors runs the gamut. The tone of the stories varies wildly, from Del Arroz’s over-the-top wahoo story of a TrumpMech piloted by young Barron fighting an irradiated Kim Jong-Unzilla (spoilers!) to the Christine Chase’s much more understated tale of a young woman serving as the audience for her grandmother’s reminisces about the days of fighting the black bloc and driving them from the streets way back in the early 2020’s. The weight of the message varies within the works as well. Sometimes the point of the story is a thin patina, as in Marina Fontaine’s story of a man coming out of the conservative closet and admitting his wrongthink to relatives. Sometimes it has all the subtlety of a Neil Blomkampf movie, as in Scott Bell’s story of police officers forced to head into the bleak hellscape of a city set aside as a reservation for socialists to live out their dreams of starvation and death camps where their idiocy can’t hurt decent Americans.
As to the non-fiction, they covering an equally wide spread of political ground. Ivan Throne offers an apologia for Trump that resonates with those who appreciate the multivariate ways in which the God-Emperor operates to destabilize the Deep State. John C. Wright’s unique erudition shines through as bright as ever in his think piece on how the cockroaches have and continue to scurry about in the wake of the 2016 election. My personal favorite of the non-fiction pieces is Monalisa Foster’s essay on the nature of language and her experience as a right-wing writer bobbing along in a sea of the left-wing subculture of writing.
That broad spectrum of approaches solidifies the book’s appeal for those across the political spectrum – at least that part of it that lies to the right of NPR. Edited by Jason Rennie, an excellent judge of work and a fine editor, “MAGA 2020 & Beyond” in unafraid of a little experimentation. Some of the experiments work, and some don’t, but they are all worth reading, if only to find out where your personal line lies between “fun” and “preachy”.
The skinflints among this book’s readership will feel likely cheated and argue that the works they don’t like somehow took enjoyment away from the works they do. That’s an unfortunate way to view this book, given that one of the underlying themes that consistently occurs in each work is a message of optimism and hope for the future. Like America herself – like Trump himself for that matter – this is not a perfect book. It has a few sour notes and no one will like everything they find between its covers, but on the whole, this book is fantastic. It stands for something much greater than itself, and it inspires those who embrace it to do more, to do better, and to make more of themselves.
It’s also worth noting that MAGA 2020 & Beyond largely forgoes pessimistic sneering at the common culture in favor of a more sunny approach. This book oozes with optimism and takes the path of building something worth reading rather than conducting more Monday morning quarterbacking of the dumpster fire that is American media. It’s a positive approach to replacing the dumpster fire with a roaring backwoods bonfire, complete with an invitation to men of good will to join in the laughter and fun. In that, this book also represents another example of the shift in the cultural war from a decades long Republican rear-guard action to an aggressive attack by the right-wing newcomers who seek to capture the cultural high ground through building something up rather than trying to tear something down. As such, this book represents a far more effective action than all of the think pieces ever written by the National Review crowd.
Of course, the real question for readers is whether or not this collection is worth the money, and the answer to that is a resounding YES. You probably won’t like all of it, but there’s a definitely something in here for everyone.
