The Alt★Hero troll

It appears this is the “expert” in comics who has been denigrating the Alt★Hero project, falsely claiming to know what our costs are, and engaging in a futile attempt to demoralize us and our backers while sock-puppeting under three different names, Death Ray, Vox Diabolus, and Zardoz.

“Filth are my politics! Filth is my life! That is why I cartoon for MAD magazine (Scooby Don’t, Detective Slow-On-The-Draw and others), publish my own vile comics (Deep Fried, Weapon Brown and Clarissa), and otherwise drag all that is Art down to my level–right below the CHUDs!”

No wonder he’s so angry about the mere existence of Alt★Hero. He’s not entirely without talent, but I don’t know why anyone would ever want to work with him now after seeing how unprofessional his behavior appears to have been, both here and on the campaign page.

Social justice warriors are neither well-meaning nor are they on the side of truth and beauty. It’s not hard to understand why they reliably produce so much ugliness and falsehood.

EU incoherence

Both the EU and the Spanish government are proving to be tone-deaf over the threat to their claim to democratic legitimacy.

The obvious answer to the objection of Weber and others on the running of the referendum, is to have another one agreed by all and run in strict accordance with international standards. Yet strangely, despite their complaints about the process, they do not want to have a better process. They rather do not wish people to be allowed to vote at all.

There are however no arguments that the Catalan Parliament was elected in anything but the proper manner. Its suspension by the Spanish Constitutional Court – a body on which 10 out of 12 members are political appointees – is therefore not due to any doubts about the Catalan Parliament’s legitimacy.

No, the Catalan Parliament has been suspended because the Constitutional Court fears it may be about to vote in a way that the Spanish government does not like.

Note that it has not even done this yet. Nobody knows how its members will actually vote, until they vote. The Constitutional Court is suspending a democratically elected body in case it takes a democratic vote of its members.

This makes the EU look pretty silly. It was looking pretty silly anyway. I telephoned the Cabinet today of Frans Timmermans, the EU Commissioner who told the European Parliament that Spain was entitled to use force against the Catalans and it had been proportionate. I spoke to a pleasant young man responsible for the “rule of law and fundamental rights” portfolio in the Cabinet. I got through by using my “Ambassador” title.

Here is the thing. He was genuinely shocked to hear that people thought the Commission’s support for use of force was wrong. He stated that it had not been the intention of Timmermans to say the use of force was proportionate, rather it must be proportionate. He became very agitated and refused to answer when I repeatedly questioned him as to whether he thought the use of force had in fact been proportionate. I suggested to him rather strongly that in refusing to acknowledge the disproportionate use of force, he was in effect lying. I pointed out that Timmermans had supported use of force and said “rule of law” over and over again, but scarcely mentioned human rights.

Here is the thing. It was plain that his shock was genuine, and he had no idea whatsoever of the social media reaction to Timmermans speech. I told him to search Timmermans on twitter and facebook and see for himself, and he agreed to do so. The problem is, these people live in a Brussels bubble where they interact with other Eurocrats and national diplomats, and members of the Establishment media, but have no connection at all to the citizenry of the EU.

Crying “law, law, law” is never going to prove convincing to anyone. The Nuremberg trials killed the concept of the legal justification for morality once and for all. According to the neo-liberal world order, the law rests upon the collective consent of the governed, which consent can be withdrawn at any time as per the Chinese concept of the Mandate of Heaven. Both the EU and Spain are flirting with forces that have the ability to undermine them entirely, and unfortunately, they do not seem to understand this.

For those Spaniards who are apparently very, very slow, I do not support the communists of Catalan. Unlike the Lombardian and Venetian secessionists, I don’t regard their position on independence and the EU to be even remotely coherent. But that does not make what Spain and the EU are trying to do either right or wise.

The Saker is thinking on similar lines when he concludes the Russians are more amused than anything by the situation in Catalonia, and quite reasonably so:

Catalonia is far away from Russia and the outcome of the crisis there will have no real impact on Russian national interests. But on a political level, Catalonia is highly relevant to the Russian political debates. See for yourself:

The case of Catalonia can be compared to Crimea: a local referendum, organized against the will of the central government. In contrast, when Kosovo was cut-off from Serbia in total illegality and without any kind of referendum the entire West gave this abomination a standing ovation. The Russians then issues stark warnings about the precedent this set and thereafter South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Crimea happened. Is the secession of Catalonia not the next logical step? Is there not a karmic beauty in the fact that Spain and the rest of the EU are now being hit by the very same demon they unleashed in Kosovo? There is a definite Schadenfreude for many Russians in seeing the pompous asses of EU politicians sitting on the red ants nest of separatism – let’s see how smart and “democratic” you guys truly are?! It is rather funny, in a bitter-sweet way, to see how ‘democratic’ policemen beat up peaceful demonstrators whose only “crime” was to want to cast a ballot in a box.

A lot of Russians are now saying that Russia is now the only truly democratic and free country left out there. Needless to say, the way the Madrid government handled this situation further damage the credibility of the West, the EU and the entire notion of “civilized Europe” being “democratic”.

The filthy fat man

Why is Harvey Weinstein not finished in Hollywood already?

Two decades ago, the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein invited Ashley Judd to the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel for what the young actress expected to be a business breakfast meeting. Instead, he had her sent up to his room, where he appeared in a bathrobe and asked if he could give her a massage or she could watch him shower, she recalled in an interview.

“How do I get out of the room as fast as possible without alienating Harvey Weinstein?” Ms. Judd said she remembers thinking.

In 2014, Mr. Weinstein invited Emily Nestor, who had worked just one day as a temporary employee, to the same hotel and made another offer: If she accepted his sexual advances, he would boost her career, according to accounts she provided to colleagues who sent them to Weinstein Company executives. The following year, once again at the Peninsula, a female assistant said Mr. Weinstein badgered her into giving him a massage while he was naked, leaving her “crying and very distraught,” wrote a colleague, Lauren O’Connor, in a searing memo asserting sexual harassment and other misconduct by their boss.

“There is a toxic environment for women at this company,” Ms. O’Connor said in the letter, addressed to several executives at the company run by Mr. Weinstein.

An investigation by The New York Times found previously undisclosed allegations against Mr. Weinstein stretching over nearly three decades, documented through interviews with current and former employees and film industry workers, as well as legal records, emails and internal documents from the businesses he has run, Miramax and the Weinstein Company.

During that time, after being confronted with allegations including sexual harassment and unwanted physical contact, Mr. Weinstein has reached at least eight settlements with women, according to two company officials speaking on the condition of anonymity. Among the recipients, The Times found, were a young assistant in New York in 1990, an actress in 1997, an assistant in London in 1998, an Italian model in 2015 and Ms. O’Connor shortly after, according to records and those familiar with the agreements….

Dozens of Mr. Weinstein’s former and current employees, from assistants to top executives, said they knew of inappropriate conduct while they worked for him. Only a handful said they ever confronted him.

Mr. Weinstein enforced a code of silence; employees of the Weinstein Company have contracts saying they will not criticize it or its leaders in a way that could harm its “business reputation” or “any employee’s personal reputation,” a recent document shows. And most of the women accepting payouts agreed to confidentiality clauses prohibiting them from speaking about the deals or the events that led to them.

Charles Harder, a lawyer representing Mr. Weinstein, said it was not unusual to enter into settlements to avoid lengthy and costly litigation. He added, “It’s not evidence of anything.”

At Fox News, where the conservative icons Roger E. Ailes and Bill O’Reilly were accused of harassment, women have received payouts well into the millions of dollars. But most of the women involved in the Weinstein agreements collected between roughly $80,000 and $150,000, according to people familiar with the negotiations.

In the wake of Ms. O’Connor’s 2015 memo, some Weinstein Company board members and executives, including Mr. Weinstein’s brother and longtime partner, Bob, 62, were alarmed about the allegations, according to several people who spoke on the condition of anonymity. In the end, though, board members were assured there was no need to investigate.

I tend to doubt there is a person on the planet who is genuinely shocked by this, or that Weinstein expects to be able to skate by on his behavior – again – for reasons that no one could possibly ever know or anticipate.

It’s long past time for the media to dig deeply into the moral sewer that is Hollywood.

Alt★Hero: the novel

Thank you all so much for your remarkable support for the Alt★Hero campaign. I will announce the name of the co-author in an update to this post later today. I’m a little busy right now putting the final touches on a certain book that is going to be published on October 9th.

If you have ideas about new stretch goals or rewards, please feel free to suggest them in this thread. A number of people have already asked about the possibility of requesting a reward for the novel, either in ebook, print, or both.

As I mentioned in tonight’s Darkstream, we’re very pleased to announce that JON DEL ARROZ will be co-writing the first Alt★Hero novel with me, which will be published by Castalia House in ebook, audio, and paperback. He’s got a brand new science fiction novella out called Gravity of the Game, so if you want to see if he has what it takes in the literary sense, do go and see for yourself.

Buzzfeed and the stolen emails

Buzzfeed apparently got their hands on some stolen emails of Milo’s, a few of which were his exchanges with me. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the most noteworthy aspect of today’s “expose” on Milo.

A year and a half ago, Milo Yiannopoulos set himself a difficult task: to define the alt-right. It was five months before Hillary Clinton named the alt-right in a campaign speech, 10 months before the alt-right’s great hope became president, and 17 months before Charlottesville clinched the alt-right as a stalking horse for violent white nationalism. The movement had just begun its explosive emergence into the country’s politics and culture.

At the time, Yiannopoulos, who would later describe himself as a “fellow traveler” of the alt-right, was the tech editor of Breitbart. In summer 2015, after spending a year gathering momentum through GamerGate — the opening salvo of the new culture wars — he convinced Breitbart upper management to give him his own section. And for four months, he helped Bannon wage what the Breitbart boss called in emails to staff “#war.” It was a war, fought story by story, against the perceived forces of liberal activism on every conceivable battleground in American life.

Yiannopoulos was a useful soldier whose very public identity as a gay man (one who has now married a black man) helped defend him, his anti-political correctness crusade, and his employer from charges of bigotry.

But now Yiannopoulos had a more complicated fight on his hands. The left — and worse, some on the right — had started to condemn the new conservative energy as reactionary and racist. Yiannopoulos had to take back “alt-right,” to redefine for Breitbart’s audience a poorly understood, leaderless movement, parts of which had already started to resist the term itself….

Over the next three days, Yiannopoulos passed the article back to Yarvin and the white nationalist Saucier, the latter of whom gave line-by-line annotations. He also sent it to Vox Day, a writer who was expelled from the board of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America for calling a black writer an “ignorant savage,” and to Alex Marlow, the editor of Breitbart.

“Solid, fair, and fairly comprehensive,” Vox Day responded, with a few suggestions.

“Most of it is great but I don’t want to rush a major long form piece like this,” Marlow wrote back. “A few people will need to weigh in since it deals heavily with race.”

Lawsy me! Tell me if you can see why I find the reference to me to be absolutely hilarious. Also, in case you haven’t been around here since 2013, the quote attributed to me is both incomplete and incorrect. I actually called SFWA’s affirmative action pet NK Jemisin, the columnist for the The New York Times Book Review and one of only three two-straight winners of the Hugo Award for Best Novel in science fiction history, “an educated, but ignorant half-savage, with little more understanding of what it took to build a new literature by “a bunch of beardy old middle-class middle-American guys” than an illiterate Igbotu tribesman has of how to build a jet engine.”

Just to be clear.

The return of La Serenissima

Now that Catalonia is on the verge of independence, Lombardia and Venezia are next:

Italy facing its OWN Catalonia: Referendums in Lombardy and Venice could TOPPLE EU

This month the Lombardy region and the city of Venice will both vote on new powers of autonomy at referendums which are now taking on increasing levels of controversy. Previously seen as a low-scale vote on local powers, the referendums are now experiencing symbolic overtones following last Sunday’s Catalonian chaos.

Last weekend more than 800 people were injured by police as a referendum on independence for Catalonia was held – against the express wishes of leaders in Madrid and Brussels. And now Italy is facing similar chaos with two referendums set to be held on October 22, although in these instances the votes are state-approved and will not face violent opposition.

I’m pretty sure the Venetian referendum will pass. I’m less confident about the Lombardian vote, since there are some heavily socialist regions of the province, but it stands a reasonable chance of passing, especially given what we’re seeing out of Spain. And unlike Catalonia, neither Venetians nor Lombardians are at all keen on the EU. It’s time to let Garibaldi’s Folly pass into history and bring back the great Italian city-states of the Renaissance.

Basta bugie, no UE! 

Media: Wait, don’t you live in Lombardia?
VD: (whistles innocently)

Catalonia to declare independence

Apparently the combination of Spain’s actions and the EU’s statements have pushed the Catalan separatists over the edge:

Catalonia will move on Monday to declare independence from Spain after holding a banned referendum, pushing the European Union nation toward a rupture that threatens the foundations of its young democracy.

Catalan President Carles Puigdemont said he favored mediation to find a way out of the crisis but that Spain’s central government had rejected this. Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s government responded by calling on Catalonia to “return to the path of law” first before any negotiations.

Mireia Boya, a Catalan lawmaker from the pro-independence Popular Unity Candidacy (CUP) party, said a declaration of independence would follow a parliamentary session on Monday to evaluate the results of the Oct. 1 vote to break away.

“We know that there may be disbarments, arrests … But we are prepared, and in no case will it be stopped,” she said on Twitter.

To paraphrase Ben Franklin, you can declare your independence, but can you keep it? It will be informative to see what lengths Spain is willing to go to keep Catalonia, and what the EU is willing to permit Spain to do.

But, as we know from our study of socionomics, the breakup of both Spain and the EU are inevitable. The pendulum is just beginning to swing back from its credit boom heights.

EU or independence

The EU helpfully clarifies the situation for Catalonia:

European Union officials have ruled out helping to mediate the clash between Spain’s government and Catalan officials over Catalonia’s upcoming independence referendum.

European Parliament President Antonio Tajani said at an EU summit in Estonia on Friday that the dispute is “a Spanish problem in which we can do little. It’s a problem of respecting Spanish laws that Spaniards have to resolve.”

Catalan officials, including the mayor of Barcelona, have asked the EU to mediate the tense standoff ahead of Sunday’s planned vote that Spanish authorities say is illegal.

Tajani says the EU is maintaining its support of Spain’s government because “on a legal level, Madrid is right.” He says: “I think it’s important to talk on a political level after Monday.”

The EU has said Catalonia will be ejected from the bloc, if it declares independence.

And now we’ll be able to discover if the Catalonians really want to be independent, or if they just wanted a direct line to EU largesse.

“The art sucks”

Along with “no one will support this” and “HAHAHAHAHA LMFAO”, “the art sucks” has been one of the constant refrains of comic SJWs since they first became aware of Alt★Hero a few days before the Freestartr launch. We had, of course, announced the project months before, but they simply hadn’t paid it any heed until the first image of Rebel triggered them into a swarm.

Now, what those of you who have not paid attention to the SJW convergence in comics may not realize is that the art bar is considerably lower than you probably imagine it to be. For example, on the left is Kamala Khan, Ms Marvel, a teenage Muslim who is tragically afflicted with elephantiasis, but nevertheless, persists despite her handicap. On the right is Janelle Jeanneret, also known as Dynamique of the Global Justice Initiative, who I will remind is not supposed to be smoking while wearing her superhero outfit.

However, I do not subscribe to the genetic fallacy. The fact that malicious people of evil intent are seeking to discredit and disqualify the project does not necessarily mean that all of their criticism is invalid. Although I vastly prefer the Alt★Hero artwork by Cliff Cosmic, and would be quite happy to proceed with the project on that basis, Castalia House has always taken an iterative approach to quality. This is occasionally a little disturbing to some of our readers, who would prefer that we try to get everything flawless at the start, but the reality is that we’re still learning what we’re doing. And since the art is not the very best in the industry, that means it can be improved.

On a related note, if you think Alt★Hero looks amateurish, have a look at the formatting of some of our early ebooks, or our first casebound hardcover. The latter was particularly bad; we used a paperback template and the back cover text wound up actually touching one side of the back cover. The choice of font was a mistake too, and the interior paragraph spacing was excessive. But we have worked steadily at improving the quality of our products, and now our print editions are generally superior to those offered by our mainstream competitors.

We are taking the same iterative approach to Alt★Hero, which is why I’m very pleased to announce that Marvel and DC Comics veteran colorist Matteo Mystic has joined the team. He sent over the following bio:

In the process of working with the best artists in the comic book business for well over a decade, Matteo Mystic learned the dark arts of the great colorists and earned the privilege of working on top Marvel and DC titles such as Spider-Man, X-Men, and Superman. But after experiencing a crisis of faith, he fled the industry to a monastery high in the Italian Alps. He now spends his days illuminating Bibles and his evenings utilizing his skills in alternative heroics.

Mr. Mystic will be coloring four of the first six volumes. You can see his first work on Alt★Hero at the Freestartr campaign, at the end of Dynamique’s six-page introduction. I await with eagerness to hear the inevitable praise of those whose helpful advice we have taken to heart.

When losing, lose harder

Having failed to learn from the failure of its initial show of force, Spain appears to be intent on losing the moral level of war and is doubling down.

Defense Tuesday ordered the sending of the Army to Catalonia with material and to provide logistical support to the Civil Guard and the National Police . 

This should end well and totally convince the Catalonians that they really, truly are better off as part of Spain. I doubt it escapes anyone’s attention that the Spanish government has shown itself completely unwilling to use its Army against the marauding immigrants invading the country.