Mailvox: the philosophy of failure

HD would like to avoid wallowing in disappointment and failure:

Will Wheaton’s latest post at his blog illustrates why I read your blog way more than I read his. It seems that every one of his blog posts is about him and his “woe-is-me” life stories. Whereas, at Vox Populi there is no Vox Day crying about how he can’t do anything, get acting jobs, or anything about his “woe-is-me.” In short, Wheaton’s blog is really just solely about him and your blog is about what’s happening in the United States and the world and not about Vox Day.

In regards to Wheaton’s latest blog post about not getting acting jobs, I’m fairly confident it is because he is a prima Donna and is probably a very high maintenance person to work with.

I get the feeling if I hired Will Wheaton for a speaking engagement I would have to hold his hand throughout the entire process, acquiescing to his demands to placate him. Whereas, if I hired you, I wouldn’t have to worry about you much. I suspect it would consist of making the arrangements in a straightforward manner with you and having you show up to do your part with little worry on my part.

Personally, I’m trying to escape the category that Will Wheaton is in. In my younger days I was that person who was that prima Donna, high a maintenance person to be friends with and be around, and now don’t have too many friends to speak of now. But I’m putting myself on a course to change that.

I appreciate the blog posts you have done about failure and writing. They’ve helped to put some things in perspective and have gotten me to think more about the course of my life.

I had no idea what he was talking about; I didn’t even know Wil Wheaton had a blog. But I found the post to which HD was referring and here is a brief summary of Wheaton’s complaints:

  • We can’t seem to get our careers back where we want them. We’re both having the same frustrations and hitting the same closed doors 
  • I couldn’t even get an audition. It’s really frustrating, and if I’m being honest, it’s depressing as fuck.
  • I go back and forth between giving up entirely on having on-camera work, and focusing on writing and voice acting, and working as hard as I can to get back in front of the camera
  • Everything I’ve been doing the last several years just isn’t working.
It’s rather amusing to read this sort of whining, considering that I saw an episode of one of the most popular television shows in America, The Big Bang Theory, last night, and not only Wheaton, but even his podcast, was heavily featured. He can’t figure out how to take advantage of that?

Now, I don’t know if he actually has a podcast or not, but Wheaton gets far more free exposure from his modestly successful acting career than any other blogger, podcaster, or writer on the Internet. Due to that free exposure, his writing and ancillary activities get far more attention than anyone not named “Bill Simmons”. Can you even imagine Stefan Molyneux or Mike Cernovich crying about that sort of thing? I know there are still some people who are dubious about the socio-sexual hierarchy and all, but this sort of thing demonstrates how even very high levels of success and fame are not capable of filling the endless hunger for approval in some men.

Can you even imagine how Wheaton going to react once he figures out that he’s not being published because he’s got any literary talent, or has anything interesting to say, but because he’s a moderately famous actor? Does he really not realize that many people, like John Scalzi, are only “friends” with him because he happens to be of use to them at the moment?

He must, on some level, as that partially explains why he’s so desperate for more success and fame. Wheaton is afraid that if he can’t maintain his status, everyone is going to consider him to be a fraud and abandon him. But who cares if fair-weather friends abandon you? They were never worth anything from the start. Only those who stand by you in times of difficulty matter. And once you have accomplished something, no one can take that away from you.

Life is a challenge. It is a constant series of challenges. But what makes us feel successful is rising to meet those challenges and surmounting them. If life knocks you down and no one deigns to give you a hand up, then push yourself back to your own damn feet. If no one wants to take you by the hand and guide you along the easy path while telling you how wonderful you are, then carve out your own way, even if doing so is laborious and difficult. Trust me, it will be much more rewarding in the end.

You never know what challenge life will send at you next. Last night, I had the distinct pleasure of practicing with my eldest son’s new team; my veteran’s team doesn’t start until next week, and at this time of year, every team is happy to have an additional practice body. Despite my being twenty years older than everyone, it went pretty well, as I not only scored the first goal in the scrimmage but was even asked to play with them in their first team’s first friendly. Score one for the old guys!

But that’s not why I was so pleased about the practice. What made me happy, what was genuinely heart-warming, was seeing my son take the field for the first time in 21 months, run at the front of the pack during the warm-up laps, and participate in the drills and the scrimmage like the healthy young man that he is. Brainstormers know what I’m talking about. And here is the thing. During those hellish 21 months, he never once complained about the pain, whined about being unable to play with his team, or cried about how unfair it all was. He just soldiered on, did what he had to do to get better, and now, almost two years later, he’s back on the field again.

He’s never going to play professionally. Given the disruption in his development at a fairly critical stage, he may not even be able to play for our club’s first team like some of his former teammates are already doing. But he already feels like more of a success than Wil Wheaton ever will, because he has conquered a long and difficult challenge through faith, courage, and willpower. And I would not be more proud of him if he was signed by AC Milan tomorrow.

Do you want to stop being a prima donna? Do you want to stop being a self-pitying, high-maintenance person that no one likes to listen to or be around? Do you want to stop navel-gazing and start accomplishing something that will let you know what success feels like? Then stop thinking about what others can do for you and start thinking about what you can do for yourself and for others. The world existed before you. It will exist after you. Don’t waste whatever time you have by dwelling on your disappointments and feeling sorry for yourself.

And don’t ever worry about what other people think about you, because 99 times out of 100, they’re not thinking about you at all.

Fail faster. Then pick yourself up and move onto the next challenge. As every gamer knows, if no one is shooting at you, you’re not going in the right direction.

Bloodshed in London

Lone wolf or garden-variety psycho, it’s still someone who shouldn’t have been there in the first place:

A woman in her 60s was knifed to death and five others injured during a bloodbath attack in central London that police believe may be terror-related.

Witnesses described victims “screaming and covered in blood” following the rampage in which the woman – believed to be a Spanish speaker enjoying a hen do – was brutally knifed around 10.30pm last night.

Other terrified onlookers described the crazed knifeman chasing pedestrians and “lunging for anyone he could see” as police confirmed mental health was a likely factor.

A 19-year-old man – described as being dark-skinned and of likely African descent – was arrested at the scene after being tasered by police in Russell Square – just yards from where one of the 7/7 terror attack bombs detonated in 2005.

Police confirmed terrorism was “one line of inquiry that we should explore”.

Three men and two woman were also injured – two of whom remain in hospital following the horrific mass stabbing near the capital’s Imperial Hotel.

Fortunately, the dead woman’s family will be consoled by knowing that this diversity has made Europe stronger.

UPDATE: Despite the fact that the killer is in custody, there are contradictory descriptions in the media: “A 19-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of murder after he stabbed six people in Russell Square at around 10.30pm last night. One witness called him ‘dark-skinned’ or African, another white and ‘chubby'”


UPDATE: The killer is confirmed: “a 19-year old Norwegian citizen, of Somali descent”.


It’s really terrible how awful and murderous those Norwegians are! They must be really bad people. Not nice at all!

Trolls go pro

Keoni Galt explains why certain trolls are incredibly persistent these days and why they keep showing up under different names:

In the case of Vox Day, he’s certainly correct that trolls aren’t really a problem on both his Vox Popoli and Alpha Game blogs, since he is quick to identify and ban any obvious trolls that appear in his prodigious and popular comment threads.

But while the obvious trolls are easily identified as unhinged ideologues and usually true believers in the $ocial Justice Warrior cause (indoctrinated liberal progressive adherents of cultural marxism — useful idiots,) I believe the other, more insidious types of trolls, the paid shills and psy op agents are far more pervasive and common than honest to goodness “trolls.” – a.k.a. stunted individuals looking for cheap thrills by being an asshole on teh Interwebz.

These shills are trained in tactics to generate a “desirable outcome” of promoting and reinforcing an established narrative, and they are paid for by shady business fronts laundering Government agency funds in service to a covert agenda of FedGov PsyOps, all to promote and reinforce PC establishment propaganda.

In other words, their exists an entire industry of cubicle farm-desk jockeys who get paid to do nothing more than sit in a boiler room styled setup at all hours and troll teh Interwebz.

This is another reason that the moderators and I don’t hesitate to spam any commenter who exhibits any sign of being a troll-whore. How you can recognize these trolls for hire:

  1. It’s usually a new name you haven’t seen before, and often using a nomenclature that doesn’t quite fit the blog regulars.
  2. They tend to be monomaniacal and only comment on certain specific topics. Lately, those are a) immigration and b) Trump.
  3. Their comments are pure rhetoric and are either triumphal or defeatist in tone.
  4. They don’t pay any attention to dialectical responses, no matter how effectively their statements and arguments are addressed. They NEVER admit that they are wrong, even when it is clearly demonstrated.
  5. Unlike regular trolls, they don’t get upset when they are spammed and banned. They just quietly disappear, then return under a different name spouting very similar statements.
  6. They post similar, or even identical, comments on other right-wing sites such as Steve Sailer’s site or the Unz Review.
  7. They frequently have a written tic or some other tell that renders them readily recognizable.

How should you respond to them? By ignoring them. You are not helping when you engage with them, particularly when you attack them. That is exactly what they are seeking, to provoke some kind of reaction, any kind of reaction. Derailing the discourse is one of their top priorities, along with discrediting the primary blogger(s).

Just leave it to the moderators and I to handle them. We have various means at our disposal, from autovanishing comments with flagged words to spamming to simply deleting them as soon as they are posted. We’ve been doing this for a long time, most of the moderators are experienced and highly skilled in textual analysis, and it’s easy for us to keep these troll-whores under tight control as long as the regular commenters don’t fall for the bait and get in the way.

Mailvox: an American in Europe

A reader visits Italy and discovers that what I’ve been saying about the very distinct European nations is true:

This being my first time in Europe I noticed right away that I had been working with a mental blind spot that I think most/all Americans who have never been abroad are likely suffering under.  Maybe it’s the homogenization of the ethnicities in the US, or maybe just the ubiquitous “we’re all the same” message that we’re fed so much that we notice it no more than the fish notice the water, but I was surprised – more like shocked – at how obvious the ethnic differences were between the European peoples.  We spent a lot of time at major tourist sites, so we were constantly awash in a polyglot.

Besides English I can only speak a smattering of Spanish, but merely identifying the various languages is pretty easy.  I began playing a mental game of “guess the ethnicity” and was surprised at how accurate I became. I would see a family group and try to guess where they were from based on their physical appearance and behavior, before hearing them speak.  It was easy to be right 50%+ of the time after just a few days.

To untraveled Americans, I think the ubiquitous mental image of the European countries is analogous to “states” in the connotative sense, not the denotative one.  Other than the fact that they speak different languages, we picture each of them as being as ethnically diverse as California.  Maybe it’s not true for everyone, but for me at least it was an eye opener to see that I could frequently distinguish between a Frenchman and an Italian even though they likely lived less than 700 miles apart.  In fact the only people I could rarely guess the nationality of correctly were Americans, as I’d frequently assume they were British, German, or Nordic.

I find it quite easy to spot the Americans myself. They tend to be fatter and louder than anyone else, and they are the only ones besides Africans who wear white sneakers. They also have whiter and straighter teeth.

What people living in the USA tend to forget is that their imported nationalities are all watered down now. Virtually no one is pure Irish or Swedish or Italian anymore, and so the US facial features tend to be a little blurred in comparison with the sharper features of their distant Old World cousins. In fact, here one can not infrequently identify what town an individual comes from on the basis of their facial appearance alone.

Of course, given my complicated background, I can very easily pass for anything from Bavaria south. One of my hobbies is explaining my excellent, unaccented English to American tourists in need of assistance.

“Thank you so much. I spent three years studying to be a rodeo clown at the University of Idaho.”

On a tangential note, it’s hard to believe, but the USA is even more cucked than Sweden. Keep that in mind every time you hear people intoning that Europe is doomed. The situation in the USA is worse by nearly every single measure.

Vaccine lawsuit in Japan

This anti-Gardisil lawsuit could prove interesting, as Big Pharma’s political influence is considerably less in Japan:

Sixty-three young women are seeking a combined 945 million yen ($9 million) in compensation in the first mass lawsuit concerning side effects from cervical cancer vaccines.

The women are suing the central government and pharmaceutical companies GlaxoSmithKline Plc and MSD KK.

The lawsuits were filed July 27 in the district courts at Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya and Fukuoka. The plaintiffs are aged between 15 and 22.

The women argue they have suffered health problems, such as pain in various parts of their bodies, difficulty in walking and also impaired eyesight, as a result of taking the vaccines that were meant to prevent cervical cancer.

They were mostly in junior or senior high school when they took the vaccines between July 2010 and July 2013.

The vaccines under question are GSK’s Cervarix, which was approved for domestic use in 2009, and MSD’s Gardasil, which was approved in 2011.

The plaintiffs argue that reports had been filed overseas where the two vaccines were in use before Japan about various side effects, including cases of death and serious illness.

On the downside, it looks as if the Japanese government is one of the defendants, which may be a tactical blunder by the plantiffs’ lawyers. But perhaps not; I know very little about the Japanese legal system. However, Japan is very big on taking full responsibility even when the individual is known not to be directly to blame, so I expect the pharmaceutical companies’ customary utilitarian defenses will not go over particularly well.

Democracy is incompatible with immigration

The Netherlands is rapidly learning why:

Europe has more than its share of angry anti-immigrant political parties these days. But one party has turned the politics of immigration on its head, positioning itself as perhaps the first in Europe with a pro-immigrant stance, run by people from immigrant backgrounds.

That party, called Denk, or Think, is led by a multicultural group of candidates seeking to combat xenophobia and racism in the Netherlands.

Denk has promoted itself as a kind of answer to the nativist and isolationist positions of the flamboyant far-right populist candidate Geert Wilders and his Freedom Party, which has been surging in the polls.

“What is unique about Denk is that it’s a party of people with a migration background who completely control the party,” said Cas Mudde, a specialist in European political and radical parties who was born in the Netherlands.

“Nonwhites have been in Parliament for a long time, but all the parties are still dominated by white Dutch people,” added Mr. Mudde, who is an associate professor at the School for Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia. “We haven’t had a party dominated by nonwhite Dutch that has a potential chance of getting elected into Parliament.”

The Denk party has proved contentious. It has been greeted with skepticism by its political opponents and criticism in the Dutch media.

Denk was accused in the local Amsterdam centrist newspaper, Het Parool, of “fanning flames of immigrant discontent.” On social media, the party has been called “Netherlands haters.”

Among the Denk party’s stated policy goals are banning from legislative forums a pejorative term often used for Dutch nonwhites, “allochtoon,” and to replace the term “integration” with “acceptance.”

It wants to establish a “racism register” to track the use of hate speech by elected officials and to bar those who promote racism from holding public office.

Most Americans don’t understand that the same process now at work in the Netherlands has ALREADY significantly altered US law and American society. The only difference is that the various distinctions between “nonwhite Dutch” and the native Dutch are more glaringly apparent than the superficial differences between Americans and “Irish-Americans” or “German-Americans” or “Jewish-Americans”. That is how the US immigrants managed to so successfully transform American society and eliminate so many American traditions without meeting much resistance.

It’s a little ironic that so many Americans are prone to proclaim “the end of Europe” on the basis of an non-European immigrant population below 10 percent when they don’t understand that they have already lost their own nation to immigrants who not only outnumber them, but now rule over them as well.

The top priority of immigrants has always been more immigrants. Because most post-18th-century immigrants are economic migrants who fully intend to reshape the land they have invaded to be more to their liking. See: Californication.

The only solution is to not permit immigrants to vote for at least three generations, until they are at least potentially assimilated. The same policy should have been adopted by the U.S. States in the 1950s.

An intellectual empire sans clothes

Steve Sailer explains why Donald Trump is simultaneously accused of stupidity due to his verbal simplicity even as he punctures the absurd pieties of the media Narrative:

Seven hundred years ago an English friar named William of Ockham gave his name to the traditional Western prejudice that the simplest feasible explanation is most likely to be true.

Six and a half centuries later we went to the moon.

Lately, however, we haven’t really felt all that inclined to figure out how the world works. It’s more important to demonstrate our mastery of socially preferred locutions.

For example, one pressing public-policy question of the day is: What are the main causes of Muslim terrorism? Now, an Ockhamite might surmise that one useful answer is:

Muslims.

But the respectable answer in 2016 isn’t supposed to be anything that blunt. In particular, any acceptable explanation must include the six-syllable word “Islamophobia.”

Logically, Islamophobia sounds like it would be an effect of Islamic terrorism rather than a cause.

But logic hasn’t been the goal in 21st-century America. Status is. Repeating the word “Islamophobia” demonstrates that you have been to college, or at least that you watch talking heads on TV who have been to college.

And that’s what really counts.

In summary, Trump has been able to galvanize American politics by telling so many unfashionable truths because the reigning dogmas of our day are smart in form yet stupid in content.

It’s more than a bit ironic that someone so famous for exaggerating should prove to be more fundamentally truthful than all the fact-checkers and media pedants who scrupulously report that which is technically accurate in order to mislead and deceive.

But no nation is ever likely to suicide itself, as the American nation has done, without being told, and accepting, many lies.

We live in a society that is every bit as dishonest with itself as the Soviet Union ever was. The USA is now the Evil Empire, and like its predecessor, it will collapse in disarray due to the increasing weight of those lies.

A point, missed

Kameron Hurley consoles herself:

If you are having a bad day, remember:
Ursula Le Guin has never written a bestselling book.
You’re welcome.

And they wonder why their SJW-infested work doesn’t sell very well when even their totemic inspiration didn’t.

The concept that their carefully-crafted political lectures are tedious in the extreme and will be avoided by most readers appears to be beyond their ability to understand. No wonder SJWs are increasingly gravitating towards children’s entertainment, as kids better tolerate being preached at and are much more amenable to swallowing even the most stupid ideas.

The Communist perspective on fascism

Keep illuminating article entitled “Divided They Fell” from International Socialism in mind when you observe the modern anti-fascists in action:

The Communist Party organisation began to change fundamentally in the mid-1920s. Concomitant with the degeneration of the Russian Revolution, Stalinisation of the KPD began under the leadership of Ernst Thälmann. Freedom of discussion and internal democracy were replaced piece by piece by a mood of unquestioning discipline and authoritarian leadership. Oppositional currents were discouraged from speaking openly and eventually forced out of the party. No longer held politically accountable to the membership, in 1929 Thälmann and Stalin agreed upon an ultra-left course against the SPD, concluding that the Social Democrats represented a form of “social fascism”. This disastrous line would eventually prove fatal for both the Social Democrats and the Communists.

The theory of social fascism dictated that Nazis and Social Democrats were essentially two sides of the same coin. The primary enemy of the Communists was supposedly the Social Democrats, who protected capitalism from a workers’ revolution by deceiving the class with pseudo-socialist rhetoric. The worst of them all were the left wing Social Democrats, whose rhetoric was particularly deceptive. According to the theory, it was impossible to fight side by side with the SPD against the Nazis under such conditions. Indeed, the KPD declared that defeating the social fascists was the “prerequisite to smashing fascism”. By 1932 the KPD began engaging in isolated attempts to initiate broader anti-fascist fronts, most importantly the Antifascischistsche Aktion, but these were formulated as “united fronts from below”—ie without the leadership of the SPD. Turning the logic of the united front on its head, SPD supporters were expected to give up their party allegiance before joining, as opposed to the united front being a first practical step towards the Communist Party. Throughout this period the leaderships of both the SPD and the KPD never came to a formal agreement regarding the fight against Nazism.

Another fatal consequence of the KPD’s ultra-leftism was that the term “fascism” was used irresponsibly to describe any and all opponents to the right of the party. The SPD-led government that ruled Germany until 1930 was considered “social fascist”. When Brüning formed a new right-wing government by decree without a parliamentary majority in 1930, the KPD declared that fascism had taken power. This went hand in hand with a deadly underestimation of the Nazi danger. Thus Thälmann could declare in 1932: “Nothing could be more fatal for us than to opportunistically overestimate the danger posed by Hitler-fascism”.The KPD’s seeming inability to distinguish between democratic, authoritarian and fascist expressions of capitalist rule proved to be its undoing. An organisation that continually vilified bourgeois democratic governments as fascist was unable to understand the true meaning of Hitler’s ascension to power on 30 January 1933, the day the KPD infamously (and ominously) declared: “After Hitler, we will take over!”

To this day, “fascism” still means nothing but “any and all opponents to the right of the speaker”. Note that SPD refers to the Socialist Party which established the Weimar Republic and is currently the junior partner in Germany’s governing coalition, and the KPD is the Communist Party.

Now he’s just trolling Catholics

The current pope has gone from reprehensible to ridiculous:

Pope Francis on Tuesday appointed a special commission to examine the role of female deacons in the Church, in a potentially historic opening on the possibility of women joining the clergy.

The 13-member commission, made up of seven men and six women, will study the question of female deacons with a particular focus on the history of women having played this role in the early years of the Church, the Vatican said in a statement.

The move follows a pledge made by Francis in May during a question-and-answer session with members of female religious orders.

Advocates of women serving as deacons have long argued that they are pitifully under-represented in the Church’s hierarchy and decision-making processes.

Allowing women to enter the clergy at a rank just below a priest would represent a first step towards correcting this imbalance, they argue.

They also insist there is no theological obstacle to the move because of the precedent established by women performing the role in the early centuries of Christianity.

At this point, given what we know about the deleterious effects of female ordination on every single Christian denomination, this has to be considered an intentionally destructive act.

At this rate, he is going to change his name to Francine, declare himself a trans-woman, approve married clergy, and announce his marriage to an imam before Christmas.