#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
“New York will award 95 delegates on the GOP side, and 247 on the
Democratic. If Trump wins by one vote over 50 percent, both statewide
and in every congressional district, he will take all 95 delegates.”
Trump needs a big performance here to regain his momentum. This is an open thread to discuss the New York primary.
This is just too freaking funny. From File 770:
If anyone wonders what side of the cultural divide that Chuck Tingle, author of Rapid Puppy pick “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” , falls on, he’s having Zoe Quinn, Gamergate patient zero, make his video game.
Beautiful. Simply beautiful. I very much doubt any of these SJWs have ever actually seen Depression Quest. It should be absolutely fascinating to see what Locke Valentine does with Mr. Tingle’s inimitable oeuvre, given her almost unbelievably limited skill set.
The New American reviews Cuckservative:
Cuckservative is co-written by Vox Day and John Red Eagle. Vox Day is the pseudonym of a video game designer who has amassed quite a following in the online world with his often-controversial views. Day’s high IQ and technical approach to problem solving is felt throughout Cuckservative. Much effort is given to making the book’s main argument that immigration is the most important issue of our day and that “cuckservatives” are on the wrong side. “Thanks to their cuckservative ideology, America’s self-styled conservatives have literally betrayed the entire purpose of the Constitution of the United States, and in doing so, they have put the very survival of the nation at risk,” the authors charge.
Reading the book, one might easily feel reminded of two earlier books by Pat Buchanan: Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency, and State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. The first book detailed the neoconservative infiltration of the conservative movement, and the latter detailed the demographic destruction caused by our immigration policy. Day, much like Buchanan before him, takes the GOP and the conservative establishment to task, but Day comes at it with an almost scientific approach. Cuckservative recounts how, almost from the beginning, the conservative movement was all too willing to purge elements that it feared might hurt its respectability in the eyes of its opponents. These “purges,” which have continued throughout all of the conservative movement’s history even to this day, “indicated a cowardly and submissive willingness to surrender when faced with public criticism.”
The vast majority of the book makes arguments against open immigration and goes into detail on the errors of the pro-immigration arguments espoused by the cuckservatives in the conservative movement. As the book explains, open immigration has been and will continue to be disastrous for anyone looking to secure political victories for the Right. The cuckservatives fail to realize this and routinely label any opponents of open borders and amnesty as “racist” or “xenophobes.” As a matter of fact, the book explains, “Today’s cuckservatives appear to be in a competition with the left to see who can open the borders wider, provide amnesty for more aliens, and add greater incentives for immigrants to retain their own culture in the place of American traditions and values.”
The cuckservative view on immigration is dismantled across multiple chapters. The “Melting Pot” is exposed as a myth. The idea that immigrants from nations with historically leftist governments will somehow miraculously become limited-government Republicans is ridiculed as the “Magic Dirt Theory.” Cuckservative explains that the “extremely high preference for expansive government among Hispanic immigrants is consistent with traditions of government in Latin America since the days of the Spanish Empire.”
These concerns are not just limited to the political realm for, as Cuckservative explains, “import people and you import their culture.” The discussions in the book are especially timely considering the refugee crisis currently unfolding in Europe.
Reading the comments of some of the commenters over there, I can’t help but think some of them don’t so much need to read Cuckservative as they desperately need to read SJWAL.
If you still think that a civil debate where the facts are thoughtfully articulated and the other side’s arguments are humbly but keenly dismantled, you’re not only wrong, you’re 2,400 years behind the times.
The inability to account for debt and the total failure to understand the relationship between banks and loan creation are two of the reason mainstream economics is so hapless with regards to producing functional models. The world’s most important economist explains that his professional colleagues are simply ignoring one of capitalism’s most pressing problems:
I like Joe Stiglitz, both professionally and personally. His Globalization and its Discontents was virtually the only work by a Nobel Laureate economist that I cited favourably in my Debunking Economics, because he had the courage to challenge the professional orthodoxy on the “Washington Consensus”. Far more than most in the economics mainstream—like Ken Rogoff for example—Joe is capable of thinking outside its box.
But Joe’s latest public contribution—“The Great Malaise Continues” on Project Syndicate—simply echoes the mainstream on a crucial point that explains why the US economy is at stall speed, which the mainstream simply doesn’t get.
Joe correctly notes that “the world faces a deficiency of aggregate demand”, and attributes this to both “growing inequality and a mindless wave of fiscal austerity”, neither of which I dispute. But then he adds that part of the problem is that “our banks … are not fit to fulfill their purpose” because “they have failed in their essential function of intermediation”:
Between long-term savers (for example, sovereign wealth funds and those saving for retirement) and long-term investment in infrastructure stands our short-sighted and dysfunctional financial sector…Former US Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke once said that the world is suffering from a “savings glut.” That might have been the case had the best use of the world’s savings been investing in shoddy homes in the Nevada desert. But in the real world, there is a shortage of funds; even projects with high social returns often can’t get financing.
I’m the last one to defend banks, but here Joe is quite wrong: the banks have very good reasons not to “fulfill their purpose” today, because that purpose is not what Joe thinks it is. Banks don’t “intermediate loans”, they “originate loans”, and they have every reason not to originate right now.
In effect, Joe is complaining that banks aren’t doing what economics textbooks say they should do. But those textbooks are profoundly wrong about the actual functioning of banks, and until the economics profession gets its head around this and why it matters, then the economy will be stuck in the Great Malaise that Joe is hoping to lift us out of.
The argument that banks merely intermediate between savers and investors leads the mainstream to a manifestly false conclusion: that the level of private debt today is too low, because too little private debt is being created right now. In reality, the level of private debt is way too high, and that’s why so little lending is occurring.
I don’t agree with Keen on everything, but he is the most important, most revolutionary economist in the world today. And he is dead-on with regards to both the problem of private debt as well as the way in which banks originate, not only loans, but credit money itself.
In light of the numerous requests that have been made concerning an expansion of the Brainstorm concept into subjects beyond game development, we are expanding it to include actual online courses, complete with tests, grades, and achievement badges, for those who are interested in continuing their educations. These courses are not accredited in any way, shape, or form, as they are solely concerned with the acquisition of knowledge and the deepening of understanding rather than academic credentials.
Although it may not be the first course we actually schedule, the lead course will be ASTRONOMY with Dr. Sarah Salviander. Dr. Salviander is no stranger to many on this blog, although not everyone may know that she is a noted astrophysicist whose specialty is black holes. While most of her publications, such as Fe II Emission in Active Galactic Nuclei: The Role of Total and Gas-Phase Iron Abundance and Accretion Disk Temperatures of QSOs: Constraints from the Emission Lines are completely beyond, well, pretty much everyone here, including me, she is the author of Castalia House’s Astronomy & Astrophysics homeschool curriculum and is eminently qualified to teach the Astronomy course as a subject matter expert. The course will consist of 10 weekly lectures and will cost $200. Brainstorm members will receive a 50 percent discount. A date has not yet been established, but it will take place in the fall.
The other course is one that has long been in the making, but finally came together when I put together a homeschool curriculum for my own kids. ECONOMICS with Vox Day will consist of 10 biweekly lectures, will cost $100, and will be free for all Brainstorm members. I’m still sorting out the details of when it will begin, as I have to schedule it around the next GameDev course that will begin on May 21st, but it will definitely be this year. We also expect to announce other courses with other subject matter experts in the near future.
If you are seriously interested in taking either course, please indicate as much in the comments. And if this incentivizes you to sign up for Brainstorm, you can do so here. Speaking of Brainstorm, there will be a closed session on Saturday, the 23rd, at 7 PM Eastern, and an open Hugo Awards Nomination Party at 12:30 PM Eastern on Tuesday, the 26th, whenever the announcements take place.
Invitations for the former will be sent out tonight and a registration link for the latter will be provide a day or two before the event.
The Death Panel are joined by special guest Vox Day.Topics include free trade vs. protectionism, The Dissolution of the US, Trump.
0:00 Intro- Vox Interview
1:30 Free Trade/Protectionism
44:45 The US Breakup
1:25:00 Sad Puppies/Rabid Puppies
1:47:25 The SJW List
I was impressed with how well these guys know their economics. It was also interesting to see how they clearly understood the difference between the various European nationalisms and white nationalism.
Roger Cohen fails to understand what it was, or why it is dead:
Liberalism is dead. Or at least it is on the ropes. Triumphant a quarter-century ago, when liberal democracy appeared to have prevailed definitively over the totalitarian utopias that exacted such a toll in blood, it is now under siege from without and within.
Nationalism and authoritarianism, reinforced by technology, have come together to exercise new forms of control and manipulation over human beings whose susceptibility to greed, prejudice, ignorance, domination, subservience and fear was not, after all, swept away by the fall of the Berlin Wall.
As Communism fell, and closed societies were forced open, and an age of rapid globalization dawned, and the United States earned the moniker of “hyperpower,” it seemed reasonable to believe, as Francis Fukuyama argued in 1989, that, “The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.” Therefore, per Fukuyama, the end point of history had been reached with “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
This was a rational argument. It made sense. Hundreds of millions of people enslaved within the Soviet imperium had just been freed. They knew — everyone knew — which system worked better. The problem is that the hold of reason in human affairs is always tenuous.
Looking back at human history, the liberal democratic experiment – with its Enlightenment-derived belief in the capacity of individuals possessed of certain inalienable rights to shape their destinies in liberty through the exercise of their will — is but a brief interlude. Far more lasting have been the eras of infallible sovereignty, absolute power derived from God, domination and serfdom, and subjection to what Isaiah Berlin called “the forces of anti-rational mystical bigotry.”
What Cohen thinks is “liberalism” is nothing of the sort. Liberalism wasn’t rational. It wasn’t immune to greed, prejudice, domination, subservience, or fear. Western liberal democracy was, from the very start, a con job; as we have seen everywhere from Colorado to Dublin, from Amsterdam to Wyoming, there is nothing even remotely democratic about it.
Liberalism is dead because liberalism is, and always was, a lie. And across the West, people have learned to stop falling for it simply because their so-called leaders push it on them.
It’s rather remarkable that in this long article about female fans doing to the new Star Wars what female fans always do – which is turn literally everything into sordid romance – that the author can’t possibly figure out why nearly all of them are intent on putting Rey together with Kylo rather than with the nominal hero of the piece:
In those days, as now, fan-fiction was a hobby largely undertaken by women; though solid data is sparse, most of it shows cisgender men in the minority by a wide margin. There’s no single agreed upon answer to the question of why this is, but one common explanation cites the desire to create narratives outside the male perspective that has historically ruled the entertainment world. Interviewed by Fangirl Chat in 2014, Maggie Nowakowska, a prominent member of the early Star Wars zine scene, recalled that this was an explicit goal of hers: “We wanted to make sure we got some female Jedi in there because we were afraid the boys would get on it first and the next thing you’d know women were never Jedi.”
Not all fan fiction centers on romance, but a good portion of it does. In many fandoms (The Force Awakens included), “slash” stories about men getting with men tend to be very popular: perhaps for some of the same reasons lesbian porn is popular among straight men, or because pop culture generally tends to create more (and more fleshed-out) male characters than female ones, or because media has historically lacked for queer love stories. Even when the subject of a story is a heterosexual relationship between leading characters, foregrounding romance can be a transgressive move depending on the source material. At one point in the ’80s, Lucasfilm broke with a policy of mostly ignoring fan fiction by sending publishers warning letters because of a story that featured love scenes between Han and Leia….
“There’s a curve as to which ships are the most popular and which are the least. That Reylo is bigger than Finn and Rey is surprising to me.”
It’s true: Stories by fans about The Force Awakens’s two lead heroes falling in love are far outnumbered by ones about the movie’s heroine and its village-slaughtering villain doing so. One common explanation for this says that Rey and Kylo are simply the most fascinating people on screen. J.J. Abrams has talked about his philosophy of movies being “mystery boxes,” and certainly both of these characters, with Rey’s unexplained backstory and Kylo’s hazy motivations, fit that description.
There’s also a level of moral unsettledness that make them stand out. Kylo is visibly tempted to turn back to good; Rey has more pressing concerns than the fate of the galaxy. Ricca explained it to me in terms of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Rey’s focused on the bottom, on survival, while Kylo highmindedly obsesses over being the best Dark Sider he can be. “Having the two meet as equals is bizarre, and hints a lot of things,” Ricca said. “Some of those things are explored in Interstellar Transmissions, and a lot of them aren’t, because there’s so much potential.”
The problematic fact that they are attempting to avoid mentioning is that Finn is black. The reason so little fan fiction is written about Finn and Rey is because, despite being under constant barrage by Hollywood and the advertising industry pushing miscegenated propaganda, the vast majority of white women simply don’t find black men to be as attractive as white men. Like calls to like, as it has always done and as it always will do.
However, the article does indicate the primary problem with science fiction and fantasy today. Most of it simply isn’t genuine science fiction and fantasy, it’s merely professional fan fiction.
Some people doubted the veracity of my claim that the purpose of the SJW list is to help SJWs find employment at SJW-converged companies. What they fail to understand is that there is no better way to legally ensure the segregation of those individuals from the sane elements of society as well as ensuring that the converged companies more quickly experience the full consequences of their embrace of social justice:
The University of Missouri will be shaggier and dirtier and faculty will be responsible for taking their own trash to dumpsters under the plan for cutting 50 jobs in campus operations detailed in an email memo sent Friday by Vice Chancellor Gary Ward.
Landscaping operations will be cut back so sidewalk edges are trimmed no more than twice a year and only in the most visible locations, Ward wrote. After Saturday football games, the debris left by tailgaters will not be picked up until Monday, he wrote.
Custodial staff no longer will clean or remove trash or recyclables from offices, Ward wrote. “This frees up custodians to assist with recycling, which, previously, has been a volunteer effort,” Ward wrote.
The plan to save $5.47 million in the MU Operations division that employs 842 people exempts the MU Police Department and MU Environmental Health and Safety. Ward warned it likely means slower response time for maintenance issues, less overtime and slower snow removal.
In the email, Ward warned that “we will be unable to sustain the level of service for which you have become accustomed. I do not anticipate that changes beginning July 1, 2016, will inhibit the academic mission at Mizzou, nor is it my intention for that to ever happen.”
Ward’s email is his response to a March 9 directive for a 5 percent cut to general fund budgets from interim Chancellor Hank Foley. The directive imposed a hiring freeze and warned there would be no salary increases.
The Columbia campus is trying to cover $22 million of an expected $32.5 million shortfall because of declining enrollment and new commitments such as the new Division of Inclusion, Diversity and Equity, spokesman Christian Basi said. The cuts do not take into account possible state budget reductions or increases.
Notice that this $32.5 million shortfall is not only the result of their target market’s negative reaction to SJW activity at the university, but also due to the fact that the SJWs running the institution would rather pay for the Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity than pay custodians to prevent them from living in filth.
Many people make the mistake of thinking that common sense aversion to negative consequences will suffice to prevent SJWs from pursuing total societal convergence. The decisions of the SJWs at the University of Missouri should suffice to disabuse them of that notion. It won’t, but it should.
It is the year 6080 AD. Detective Theseus Hollywell has at last discovered the hiding place of William Locke, a notorious fugitive from justice who has been hunted for decades after committing unspeakable crimes.
But Locke has a trick up his sleeve, one that the detective couldn’t expect: He has a story to tell.
This is the tale of the theobots, the robotic beings created to love God and Man with a perfection no mere mortal could achieve. In ten stories by eight different science fiction authors, Locke recounts the role of the theobots throughout history, from the purposes for which they were originally created to their ultimate role in deciding the fate of Man, the galaxy, and one lost and tortured soul.
GOD, ROBOT is a themed collection of intertwined stories from some of the best known names in superversive science fiction. Written in the tradition of Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics and edited by Anthony Marchetta, the book contains stories by John C. Wright, Steve Rzasa, Joshua Young, L. Jagi Lamplighter, and others.
GOD, ROBOT is 162 pages, is DRM-free, and is available on Amazon. Note: One story in the collection, “The Logfile” by Vox Day, was previously published in The Altar of Hate.
UPDATE: From the Amazon reviews:
FIVE STARS. This one pleasantly surprised me. I don’t mind
Asimov-style sci-fi and find the basic concept of the three laws of
robotics very interesting, but it’s not my favorite subgenre, and I felt
I could guess where things were going to go before I read it. It took a
few pages, but in spite of my initial reservations I was drawn in by
the multi-part sequential story which takes the well-known three laws
and posits what might happen if two more laws were added… the greatest
commandments of scripture–love God above all, and love your neighbor
as yourself–and builds an alternate future based on the
theologically-aware robot race that results and seeks its own place in
God’s creation.