First, we’re pleased to announce that comments and direct subscriptions are now available on Arktoons. Second, if you have been a paying subscriber at arkhavencomics.com at some point over the last year your account has been imported to Arktoons at arkhaven.com.
Your account exists – but your password does not. They are encrypted so we could not migrate them. To setup the password for your user on arkhaven.com, go here and fillout the form with your username and click Submit: https://www.arkhaven.com/request-password-reset
A special thanks to all of you who have been supporting Arkhaven for little more than a “thanks” and the knowledge that you are in the fight. Every user who has supported Arkhaven at arkhavencomics.com over the last year has been imported to Arktoons with a special status. There are no badges available yet, but the record is in place, and once we have the design out you will have OG status on Arktoons in perpetuity.
Karl Denninger points out that under long-established international law, the US Congress has effectively declared the United States to be in a state of war with Russia:
Congress has explicitly authorized, and Biden will sign, this bill that specifically permits the transfer to Ukraine of basically anything other than nuclear material. Seriously folks — that’s the only real exception found in the referenced definition.
By agreeing to provide direct weaponry that can be and will be used in the waging of war by one of the two parties to same we have entered the conflict. That our GIs are not directly involved there is of no consequence. This is no different than shipping arms to Britain during WWI in the Lusitania or the lend-lease provisions in early WWII that ultimately led us to get involved there in Europe. Indeed Pelosi directly referenced those early WWII provisions indicating that she knows damn well the implications of what Congress just did.
In fact it was lend-lease of March 1941 that led Hitler to come after the United States; we had entered the war as a belligerent by officially agreeing to supply war material to Britain.
In those two wars there was no realistic means for the Germans or other Axis powers to hit us directly on our own soil. But they did in fact do that in response when they sunk the Lusitania, which had a bunch of Americans on board. They could reach that ship, did reach it, and did sink it. They did so because we were supplying England with munitions.
We claimed at the time we were not, we were lying and that is now established as a historical fact.
The Germans hit a legitimate military target despite our and Britain’s claims at the time otherwise.
Today the situation is different. Russia can hit us here and not just with nukes. They can hit American assets that are by any reasonable international standard military targets all over the world and that includes military command and control which by our Constitution includes all members and facilities of both Houses of Congress along with the Executive, never mind obvious things like the Pentagon.
I don’t think Putin is crazy enough to do it right up front but do not mistake “doesn’t” tomorrow morning for “can’t” — the door is open.
Don’t kid yourselves folks; such a strike, if it occurs, is entirely legal from an international law perspective under the laws of war. It is legitimate for a belligerent to strike the military elements, direct and indirect, of an entity supplying its opposing military.
We are now a belligerent in this conflict having crossed the line when we went from providing food, medical assistance and similar to military goods and the definition in this act does not draw a distinction, not that there really is one that is internationally recognized in the first place, between offensive and defensive arms.
The neocons wanted their war with Russia. Looks like they’re getting it, and it won’t be even remotely surprising if they get it good and hard. It’s worth noting that it was just nine months from FDR’s establishment of Lend-Lease to formal war with Germany; if a similar time frame holds, the USA will be openly at war with Russia by January, just in time for General Winter.
But legalities and diplomacies aside, the USA is already observably at war with Russia, given that it is already spending 6x more on the Russo-NATO war than the entire Ukrainian military budget. All the endless word games and legal posturings about the expansive redefinition of neutrality and what is justified in response to the illegality of war aren’t going to prevent a single missile from being fired against a legitimate target in a belligerent state.
Perhaps the most irritating Boomercon blather is their constant bleating about “unity” and how calling out material evil is “divisive”. Neon Revolt has no patience for it either.
All you are doing is helping the globalist agenda with this division. If you don’t think this is part of their plan, you are more confused than you already seem.
muh division muh divided by age muh they want u divided
Boomers, you divided an entire generation out of reasonably priced housing with the banking schemes your generation gleefully went along with. Now, when two entire generations are now being turned into rent-peasants by the likes of Blackrock, all you’re capable of doing is berating those you collectively excluded from the very benefits and opportunities you enjoyed. It’s the classic Boomer move of pulling up the ladder behind you while yelling “pick yourselves up by your bootstraps” to everyone below you.
Basically, you want “unity” so long as it never costs you anything.
Which is really just another way of saying you want a pat on the back for maintaining globohomo’s status quo.
There can be no unity with the wicked, their servants, or their slaves. No unity with the Devil and no sympathy for the Boomers.
One year ago, Arkhaven Comics launched Project Asteroid, also known as Arktoons. I predicted that the new site would change the comics industry and eventually replace the dinosaurs known as the Big Two, Marvel Comics and DC Comics. And while that process is far from complete yet, the events of the last year have tended to suggest that this will be the case.
Sales of DC and Marvel comics continue to decline, while Manga dominates the print sales charts. DC gave up on its digital site, flirted with Tapas, and has been reduced to publishing digital comics on Webtoons as if it were a sad, lonely gay teenager with a crayon and a dream. DC has gone through two rounds of layoffs, while Marvel’s lone experiment on Webtoons featured episodes that couldn’t even attract 5,000 likes.
There are others who scent the weakness. Substack has invested what it claims is one of the biggest-ever investments into comics, but has barely produced 20 total episodes in six months. In the meantime, Arktoons presently features 1,962 episodes, and has introduced literally dozens of new original series, including Hypergamouse, Deus Vult, Midnight’s War, My Sister Suprema, and How To Succeed Like a Dark Lord. It has also attracted a number of excellent commentary cartoons, including Stonetoss, Savage Memes, Ben Garrison, and Bob. Every day, at least 6 series, and sometimes as many as 10, introduce new episodes.
After more than six million pageviews, we’re still just in the process of getting started. More about this on tonight’s Darkstream. In the meantime, the Thursday Arktoons are live:
It has always puzzled me why Mark Levin appeals to conservatives, particularly Boomercons. To me, he has never been more than an older, fatter Ben Shapiro, gatekeeping Americans on behalf of the Israel First party. But recently, he uncloaked and showed his true colors:
Fox News host Mark Levin went full neocon on Sunday night, attacking “so-called nationalist populists” as un-American isolationists and ordering viewers to “reject” both ideologies as “dangerous” and disconnected from the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
“I have in front of me the pocket edition of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, the word nationalist cannot be found in either the Declaration or the Constitution, why is this?” Levin said. “Because the people who founded your country and the people, the Framers of your Constitution, were not nationalists — they were Americans.”
“So what am I saying, am I a globalist?” Levin said. “I don’t even know what that means. No, I’m a red-blooded American Constitutionalist who believes in Capitalism and representative government.”
“What does that mean?” he asked. “It’s simple, you don’t treat communist China the way you treat Great Britain when it comes to trade. You don’t send advanced technologies to Russia or to Iran technologies you might send to Israel.”
First, Levin is not an American. He is not descended from the people who founded the American nation, he is not part of the Posterity for whose benefit the U.S. Constitution was written, and, as he quite rightly admits, he is not an American nationalist. Second, Levin may or may not be a globalist, but he is an Israeli Firster, which is why he asserts, incorrectly and on the basis of absolutely nothing, that it is reasonable for Americans to send advanced technologies to Israel that is not in the American national interest to provide other countries.
The fact is that a substantial amount of the advanced US technology that was acquired by China over the last 30 years was provided to the Chinese by the Israeli government.
The head of defense exports for the Israeli Defense Ministry resigned after a U.S. investigation concluded that technology, including a miniature refrigeration system manufactured by Ricor and used for missiles and in electro-optic equipment, was sent to China, according to the Israeli newspaper Maariv. Another Israeli news site, Aretz Sheva, reports the U.S. is concerned the technology could ultimately find its way to Iran, which last year sought to buy military equipment from China for its nuclear program.
The Maariv report identified the Israeli defense official as Meir Shalit, and said he apologized to U.S. officials on a recent visit.
Israel has a long record of getting U.S. military technology to China. In the early 1990s then-CIA Director James Woolsey told a Senate Government Affairs Committee that Israel had been selling U.S. secrets to China for about a decade.
Israel Passes U.S. Military Technology to China, 24 December 2013
This proposal floated by the Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom may be one of the most shortsighted, suicidal geopolitical visions ever articulated in the written history of Man, as the West is rapidly being replaced by the growing power of the NorthEast.
The world order created after the Second World War and the Cold War isn’t working anymore, so the West needs “a global NATO” to pursue geopolitics anew, UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss argued, in a major foreign policy speech on Wednesday. Truss also urged the US-led bloc to send more “heavy weapons, tanks” and airplanes to Ukraine, and said China would face the same treatment as Russia if it doesn’t “play by the rules.”
“My vision is a world where free nations are assertive and in the ascendant. Where freedom and democracy are strengthened through a network of economic and security partnerships,” Truss said in a speech at a Mansion House banquet in London.
Dubbing this arrangement “the Network of Liberty,” Truss argued it was necessary because the economic and security structures developed after 1945 – such as the UN Security Council – “have been bent out of shape so far, they have enabled rather than contained aggression.”
“Geopolitics is back,” she announced.
The collective West and its allies need to supply Kiev with “heavy weapons, tanks, aeroplanes – digging deep into our inventories, ramping up production,” Truss said, because the objective is to “push Russia out of the whole of Ukraine” and rebuild the country along the lines of a new Marshall Plan.
“The war in Ukraine is our war – it is everyone’s war because Ukraine’s victory is a strategic imperative for all of us. Beyond that, NATO must ensure that “the Western Balkans and countries like Moldova and Georgia have the resilience and the capabilities to maintain their sovereignty and freedom,” and uphold the “sacrosanct” open-door policy, Truss said.
Her ambitions went beyond Europe, though, as Truss denounced the “false choice between Euro-Atlantic security and Indo-Pacific security. In the modern world we need both. We need a global NATO,” she said. “And we must ensure that democracies like Taiwan are able to defend themselves.” Pointing to London’s unprecedented effort to embargo Russia, Truss insisted that “economic access is no longer a given. It has to be earned,” and that countries who wish to earn it “must play by the rules. And that includes China.”
In other worlds, the New World Order aka the neo-liberal rules-based world order aka Globohomo has failed, so naturally what is needed is more of that which has failed. This response isn’t even remotely surprising in the abstract, as doubling down is what idiots and fools always do instead of examining the reasons for their failure and rethinking both their assumptions and their approach.
But it is surprising in the particular, as Russia, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and now Algeria have made it clear that they will not submit to the globalists’ demands that they deliver natural resources to their Western customers on demand while simultaneously being subject to having their economic access to those same customers controlled by the globalists.
Indeed, if they are given a choice, many in the West will choose the growing economic system of the NorthEast over the collapsing system of the West. But they will not be given a choice if the globalists have anything to say about it.
This tends to strongly support something I have repeatedly pointed out, the Russian Special Military Operation has very little to do with Ukraine per se; it is merely the opening battle in the NorthEast’s war with the globalists who rule over the West. This will be confirmed when the second battle begins, though whether that will be in Taiwan, Western Europe, Russia, or somewhere in the Middle East is yet to be seen.
In response to Russia refusing to ship natural gas to countries that refuse to pay in a currency deemed acceptable to Russia, European leaders are threatening to utilize even harsher rhetoric in response.
Russian energy giant Gazprom today halted gas supplies to Bulgaria and Poland for failing to pay for its gas in roubles, as Vladimir Putin ordered last month, pushing European gas prices up by 24 percent.
The decision is the Kremlin’s toughest response yet to crippling Western sanctions imposed over Moscow’s brutal on-going invasion of Ukraine, that have sent the Russian economy and the value of the rouble into a nosedive.
In response, the UK warned President Putin that Russia’s move will only add to its status as an economic and political pariah, while Poland and Bulgaria both accused Moscow of blackmailing them, and said they will end their dependencies on Russian gas.
European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyen also called the move ‘yet another attempt by Russia to use gas as an instrument of blackmail. This is unjustified and unacceptable.’
The European Union could impose a crude oil embargo on Russia, with the two having been locked in a stand-off for weeks after the EU rejected Putin’s demands for payment in roubles from so-called ‘unfriendly’ buyers.
The market reacted quickly to the decision by state-owned Gazprom. Benchmark European gas prices jumped by up to 24 per cent to €121 (£102) per megawatt-hour today, to hit their highest level this month and almost seven times higher than they were a year ago. The UK equivalent increased by 14 per cent to 180 pence per therm.
The two EU countries are the first to have their gas cut off by Europe’s main supplier since the Kremlin launched what it calls a ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine on February 24, and after it threatened to turn off the taps to the West in response to mounting sanctions.
Europe is being taught a hard, but necessary lesson in the difference between hard power and soft power, which is the difference between actual power and empty words. And it is paying a steep price for being the lapdog’s lapdog, which is another word for chew toy.
Russia’s move raised wider concerns that other countries could be targeted next.
COULD BE? Without question WILL BE is the much more certain bet. Many of these countries, including Germany, France, and the UK, are fortunate that they aren’t already being actively bombed for their overt belligerence in supplying Ukraine with military weapons. And their leaders appear to have no idea just how bad the collapse of the neo-liberal world order will be for them, even as the first domino is falling.
The broader, negative political impact of the war, should it rage on indefinitely, is almost incalculable. The UN’s future as an authoritative global forum, lawmaker and peacekeeper is in jeopardy, as more than 200 former officials warned Guterres last week. At risk, too, is the credibility of the international court of justice, whose injunction to withdraw was scorned by Putin, and the entire system of war crimes prosecutions. In terms of democratic norms and human rights, the full or partial subjugation of Ukraine would spell disaster for the international rules-based order.
Exactly. Amen and hallelujah. This is about as close to a good war as it gets.
A friend who correctly called fake news on Jack Maxey of the false Hunter Biden laptop leak also offered me his take on Elon Musk and his recent actions, including the acquisition of Twitter.
Musk is a premier mechanism by which a certain faction of USG routes around the scleroticism of fedgov.
Most obviously with SpaceX contra United Launch Alliance, but also Tesla to counter Chinese electrotech dominance, Boring Company for post-drone swarm underground warfare, Neuralink for 1) controlling said drone swarms 2) AGI via human brain activity cloning.
His entire portfolio of companies is dual use for military purposes. Twitter is the public infowar arena for the Deep State.
Now Musk and by extension this faction own it.
Difficult to tell if this faction is friendly, neutral or hostile. They appear to me to be at the least not obviously friendly. This will be a public, reasonably sensitive test as to whether they are useful, depending on how they handle banned anti-prog accounts and ongoing anti-prog (note the distinction from rightist) speech.
Considering that Ivan Throne has already managed to get himself banned from the New and Improved Twitter (Musk edition), I am confident that all of Musk’s blatherings about FREE SPEECH are nothing more than empty rhetoric and advertising to bring all the basic conservatives and their gatekeepers back into the conservative sheepfold.
As far as I’m concerned, literally nothing has changed.
Furthermore, I note that the Enlightenment value of consequence-free freedoms of speech and expression is neither a Christian moral value nor a societal virtue. Societal virtue is determined by qualititative measures, not quantitative ones.
A society or an institution that permits everything is better described as licentious, not free, while a society or an institution that bans blasphemy, obscenity, and vulgarity is fundamentally different than one that bans the existence of opinions about historical events, sexual behaviors, and certain nations.
Musk’s faction is almost certainly more libertarian and licentious than the social justice faction, but it’s entirely possible that, given his predilection for dabbling with women enamored of spiritual darkness, that it is even more deeply wicked.
RHETORIC by Aristlotle is now available from Castalia Library in both Castalia Library and Libraria Castalia editions. It’s one of our fastest-selling books, as we’d already be sold out if we hadn’t boosted the print run to 850. There are currently just 937953 30 copies left in stock. In addition to featuring our most Franklinesque spine – which you can see above in between SUMMA ELVETICA and HEIDI on the left – it also features a preface by yours truly.
Preface to Rhetoric
Aristotle’s Rhetoric is one of the most useful and important analyses of human communication ever written. It is also one of the great philosopher’s least appreciated works, as it is easily mistaken for a mere technical breakdown of the various forms of persuasion rather than what it truly is, a brilliant conceptual guide to understanding and anticipating human behavior.
While a considerable portion of the text is devoted to the mechanics of the syllogism and the enthymeme, as well as the presentation of the inevitable lists which Aristotle characteristically constructs, by far the most important element of this little book is the philosopher’s division of humanity into two fundamental classes: those who are capable of learning through information and those who are not.
This is such an important distinction that it is remarkable for its complete absence from the schools and universities today. The distinction calls into question everything from modern pedagogical systems to personal conversations while simultaneously explaining the mystery that has confounded every intelligent individual who has ever tried, and failed, to explain the obvious to another person.
Indeed, it is comforting to have one’s long-held suspicions about the intrinsic limitations of one’s fellow man confirmed so comprehensively. More importantly, Aristotle’s rhetorical framework provides those who understand and apply it the ability to effectively communicate to the full spectrum of humanity, in effect permitting the reader to transcend his natural psycho-linguistic instincts and attain true intellectual polylingualism.
It must be admitted that Rhetoric would be considerably more accessible if the terminology utilized was a little more expansive and a little less imitated. Even though his definition makes sense when the relevant terms are analyzed in detail, it is not exactly conducive to comprehension for Aristotle to define the two subsets of rhetoric to be dialectic and rhetoric, therein requiring a casual distinction between rhetoric and rhetoric-rhetoric, or capital-R Rhetoric and lowercase-r rhetoric. Adding to the confusion is the fact that both Hegel and Marx subsequently attempted to redefine the term dialectic, although there is precious little in common between Aristotelian dialectic, Hegelian dialectic, Marxian dialectic, and the current dictionary term.
However, once the reader grasps that in this context, Rhetoric simply means persuasion, which is divided into a) fact-and-reason based persuasion, or dialectic, and b) emotion-based persuasion, or rhetoric, the basic framework becomes clear. The philosopher explains that while some people can be persuaded by information and logical demonstrations, people are most readily persuaded by emotional manipulation. Moreover, some people can only be persuaded by emotional manipulation, as Aristotle observes in what may be the most important sentence in the book.
Before some audiences not even the possession of the exactest knowledge will make it easy for what we say to produce conviction. For argument based on knowledge implies instruction, and there are people whom one cannot instruct.
What Aristotle is observing is that some of those who are limited to rhetoric are immune to dialectic. Such individuals cannot be swayed by facts or reason, no matter how exact the knowledge provided, no matter how impeccable the logic presented. Those who are immune to dialectic can only be reached through rhetoric, which is to say by manipulation that plays upon their emotions more effectively than whatever feelings inspired them to be convicted of their current beliefs.
While this manipulation may strike some readers as unethical, it is justified by necessity, as the duty of rhetoric requires addressing those “who cannot take in at a glance a complicated argument, or follow a long chain of reasoning.” While the enthymeme resembles the logical syllogism, it is not, in fact, logic, and the truths that it proves are only apparent truths.
Which, of course, is another way of saying that they are literal untruths.
This is why people whose natural preferences incline toward dialectic have a strong tendency to regard rhetoric as being fundamentally dishonest, and to consider the emotional manipulation involved in utilizing rhetoric to be intrinsically wrong. This distaste for rhetoric among those capable of utilizing dialectic is common, but it is nevertheless false. First, because even the most logically correct dialectic can be entirely false if the premises upon which the syllogisms are constructed are false. Second, because the more that the rhetoric incorporates and points toward the truth, the more effective it tends to be.
Neither dialectic nor rhetoric are inherently true or false; the very attempt to distinguish them in this manner is to make a category error. It might help to think of them as languages; just as one could not reasonably describe English as honest while insisting that German is deceptive and morally wrong, one should not assign morality to either of the two subsets of Rhetoric.
It is more correct, more practical, and more effective to apply the principle of utilizing the form of communication best understood by the listener. Just as one would not speak Chinese to an individual who only understands English, one should not rely upon rhetoric when speaking to a dialectic-speaker, or expect a rhetoric-speaker to be persuaded by dialectical arguments.
Aristotle himself believed it was vital for a man to be able to employ both arts, not so much for the purposes of persuasion, but rather, to avoid being deceived.
We must be able to employ persuasion, just as strict reasoning can be employed, on opposite sides of a question, not in order that we may in practice employ it in both ways (for we must not make people believe what is wrong), but in order that we may see clearly what the facts are, and that, if another man argues unfairly, we on our part may be able to confute him. No other of the arts draws opposite conclusions: dialectic and rhetoric alone do this. Both these arts draw opposite conclusions impartially. Nevertheless, the underlying facts do not lend themselves equally well to the contrary views. No; things that are true and things that are better are, by their nature, practically always easier to prove and easier to believe in.
Aristotle’s Rhetoric is every bit as useful and valid today as it was when it was first written more than 2,300 years ago. It is less a work of philosophy than a treasure chest of practical information for the individual who seeks to pursue the Good, the Beautiful, and the True.
