When rhetoric works

The way to recognize whether rhetoric is effective or not is by the reaction of the targets. Rhetoric that inspires denials, protests, and wordy dialectical retorts is effective, but you can always recognize effective rhetoric by the attempts to ban it:

Conservatives chalked up a victory in the battleground of pejorative labels, concluding that the trending ‘Blue Anon’ branding of left-wing conspiracy theorists is sufficiently stinging after the term earned censorship bona fides.

The term made it into the online Urban Dictionary of slang words and phrases earlier this week, only to be removed by Sunday. A search of the term, a play on ‘QAnon’ that has been used increasingly in recent months to mock leftists, now comes up empty. Previously, the dictionary showed a definition for Blue Anon, noting that it’s “a loosely organized network of Democrat voters, politicians and media personalities who spread left-wing conspiracy theories, such as the Russia hoax, Jussie Smollett hoax, Ukraine hoax, Covington kids hoax and Brett Kavanaugh hoax.”

Conservatives interpreted the attempted disappearing of Blue Anon as a sign of success. “Wokies at Urban Dictionary zapped Blue Anon because it was too powerful,” journalist Jack Posobiec said Sunday on Twitter. Others predicted a ‘Streisand effect’, when attempts to hide something inadvertently bring more attention and interest to it.

Perhaps it would be worthwhile to define a seven-level Nicomachean Scale of Rhetoric, by which the effectiveness of various rhetoric can be judged.

  • (7) Thermonuclear. Example: racist, pedo, you have to go back
  • (6) Nuclear. Example: Holocaust denier, cuckservative, mudshark, superstraight
  • (5) Highly effective. Example: SJW, sexist, BlueAnon, feminazi, judeo-christian, Proposition Nation
  • (4) Effective. Example: tranny, slut, conspiracy theorist, anti-Semite, neoclown
  • (3) Mostly Harmless. Example: global-warming denier, glowie, incel, quisling, extremist
  • (2) Harmless. Example: truther, hypocrite, propagandist, agist, anti-science
  • (1) Give it up. Example: Dems are the real racists, crybully, TERF, handicapable
Keep in mind that the more amusing and memorable the variant of the term, the more biting it will be. Telling someone “you will never be a real woman” is always going to be more effective than simply calling them a “tranny”, particularly when the target isn’t at all gender-confused. It’s also more effective to say something like “calling her a feminazi is offensive to the German National Socialist Worker’s Party” than to just call her a feminazi.

Also, note that the more a rhetorical term ju-jitsus the other side’s rhetoric, the more effective it is. That’s why SJW and BlueAnon are far more effective than people with a dialectical inclination tend to understand, because it is simultaneously parrying the other side’s rhetoric while launching a rhetorical attack on the other side’s self-image.

Everything will never be enough

You can allow an African to marry your posterity. You can load them down with money, titles, precious jewels, and property. You can give them fame, fortune, and family. And they will still not even hesitate to call you racist the moment it suits them to do so:

Meghan Markle today used her bombshell Oprah Winfrey interview to accuse the Royal Family of having ‘concerns’ about ‘how dark’ Archie’s skin would be before he was born because she is mixed-race and Harry is white.

The Duchess of Sussex also described her ‘pain’ that officials had denied Archie the title of prince and accused Buckingham Palace of failing to protect him by denying him 24/7 security.

Meghan refused to say which royal had the conversation with Harry about Archie’s skin colour, claiming it would be ‘damaging’ to the person in her husband’s family who raised it. She told Miss Winfrey that it was ‘a pretty safe’ assumption to suggest that the royal family member was ‘concerned’ that Archie being ‘too brown’ was ‘a problem’. 

When asked if it was ‘important’ for Meghan that Archie be called a prince, she said she doesn’t have any attachment to the ‘grandeur’ of official titles. But she said it was about ‘the idea of our son not being safe, and also the idea of the first member of colour in this family not being titled in the same way that other grandchildren would be.’ 

Unlike most other peoples, Europeans have always been suckers for sob stories. There is a reason you don’t see UNICEF and the WWF advertising in Asian nations. There is a reason it was British pop stars declaring they were the world and trying to raise money for starving Ethiopians in the 80s, and not Russian or Brazilian pop stars. But Europeans are particular suckers for African grifters. I’ve known two of the latter fairly well, and you would be astonished at how many second chances both of them were given by every single white authority in their lives. I mean, their second chances were measured in the dozens.

Dementia vs economics

 I think we can safely conclude that dementia won.

“The vast majority of economists, left, right, and center, from Wall Street to the private, uh, the private, ah ah ah economic private polling initiatives, the economists as I said, left, right, and center, say in addition to the needs that the people have, we need this to grow the economy. That if we haven’t spent this money and recreated the kind of incentive for people to be able to make a good living, that we’d be in real trouble.”

– Not-President Joe Biden

Also, it’s pretty much only Keynesian economists, of the neo- and post- varieties, that still subscribe to the stimulus concept that observably hasn’t been working at all since the early 1970s. Remember, Keynesian economics do not account for debt as a variable in any way, shape, or form, which is why they are increasingly irrelevant with every passing year.

Retreat means more retreat

One of these days, Gab is going to have to seriously consider testing whether these banks actually have the legal right to politically discriminate against them. Because running from one converged bank to the next doesn’t appear to be working very well.

Last month, Gab CEO Andrew Torba revealed that the New Tech site had been banned from three different banks in the space of three weeks. On Friday in a statement posted online, Torba confirmed that yet another bank had banned the site from its services. “It’s getting to the point where we are seriously considering buying our own bank,” Torba said. “Funny how this started happening right when Biden got into office,” he added.  Two of the four banks were identified as NBT Bank, which mostly operates in the northeast of the country, and City National Bank of Florida.

Another option is foreign banks and foreign payment processing systems, both of which are usually more than happy to establish footholds in the US market. For example, the new Chinese peer-to-peer direct pay system not only avoids the converged banks, but the US dollar as well. If they’re going to kick you out of the system, then you shouldn’t hesitate to utilize the existing alternatives to that system, even those that threaten the system.

Anyhow, all this is going to accomplish is to speed up the development timeline of the peer-to-peer payment alternatives. If it’s happening to Gab today, it will happen to everyone who votes, speaks, or thinks against the imperial establishment tomorrow.

Don’t defend the Devil’s own

Charisma Carpenter offers suggestions concerning how she thinks people should respond to allegations of historical sexual and psychological abuse:

• Please don’t tell people to “rise above,” “just move on, it was a long time ago,” “get over it” and “forgive and forget” abusive experiences. This is dismissive and devoid of empathy. Justice for the abused is an integral part of the healing process. It’s hard for a traumatized person to move on when they watch the transgressors move up the ladder and gain power even as they repeat patterns of toxic behavior without answerability.

• Don’t ask others to share details of their trauma beyond what they are willing to volunteer. Questioning someone’s experience when it is not a part of a formal investigation is insensitive and signals that you, the judge, need more evidence to evaluate what you are being told is truthful. Just listen. Be empathetic. Be a safe person.

• Believe others when they tell you they are hurt or traumatized by events that occurred in their life. It’s taken serious courage for them to identify their pain and be able to speak about it aloud.

• Don’t play devil’s advocate for an abuser, make excuses for them or imply that victims have somehow misunderstood their trauma. If they are speaking about it publicly, they have likely done hard work in regards to their trauma and gotten help to process their experience clearly.

• Don’t expect victims of abuse to talk about their abuse at the time it happened. Often it takes years for survivors to process their trauma and even longer to realize the extent of harm it has caused.

• Ranking verbal and mental abuse as less intense or serious than acts of physical violence is also a form of abuse. It denies and dismisses a person’s experience as not being “painful enough.”

• Empathize with people who have experienced verbal, mental or sexual abuse. Just because you can’t see the scars doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

• Don’t blame people for staying in abusive situations. Blame the abuser or institutions still in place for making it difficult or impossible to leave. The underlying message is that the victim “asked for it” or that it’s their fault they were abused. It’s not. It’s the abuser’s fault.

• Sexist jokes, job-security threats, microaggressions and passive-aggressive behavior can no longer be accepted as “part of the game” to get ahead. Let’s cultivate change away from such toxic tropes. We owe it to the next generation to leave a better legacy in the workplace.

• Rationalizing power abuse, misogyny, racism or sexism to a survivor by explaining, “It was a different time then,” is unacceptable. These things were never OK. If we minimize these past behaviors, we’re bound to keep doing them in the future.

• Refrain from making comments, especially publicly, that unwittingly undermine the pain of others. Ask yourself: Do I have anything substantive to add to this conversation? Have I experienced trauma from abuse and discrimination? If the answer is no, it is not your turn to be heard.

• Believe people when they say, “This happened to me.” Believe it the first time.

• When an abuser is identified, keep the focus on the culprit instead of diverting the conversation to the abuses of others. Comparisons and “whataboutism” are tactics used to obfuscate the process of holding a specific person accountable and bringing them to justice.

• Seeking accountability and consequences for patterns of workplace abuse aren’t about “cancel culture.” It’s best to reframe it as “consequences culture.”

• Don’t make a survivor responsible for how their trauma makes you feel. Rather, consider the person who has been violated. That’s where the focus belongs.

• Headlines often describe acts of rape, assault or drugging victims as “sexual misconduct.” It is not “misconduct.” These behaviors are predatory and criminal. They should be labeled accordingly. Call the thing, the thing.

• Hire people who have spoken out. Nothing is more isolating and scary than having your ability to feed your family taken away. This fear holds people hostage to their suffering and supports a broken system. Stop labeling victims of abuse as the ones who are problematic. The abuser is problematic — not the abused.

It’s important to remember that the court of public opinion is NOT a court of law. There is no presumption of innocence in the court of public opinion, and given the historical nature of the Hellmouth, there should absolutely be a presumption of guilt if a Hellmouth power player is accused of abusive behavior. It’s almost certainly true.

Too many men are fearful that they might one day be accused of their own creepy or borderline behavior, which inclines them to defend the indefensible. And the fact that some of the women who are making accusations are literal whores is irrelevant, as under even the most amoral libertarian contractual standard, a prostitute always has the right to decide with whom she will engage in business relations or not. There is no statute of limitations on history.

Good and moral men are not going to be taken down by a higher public expectations of behavior. Gammas, creeps, and pedos will be. So the higher the behavioral bar is raised, the better. And the sooner the true realities of the Hellmouth are exposed, the better. 

Posterized

People have been asking for Arkhaven posters, and Cyber.fashion has delivered. This is the first poster for Chuck Dixon’s Avalon, and features Vogel soaring high over the skies of Avalon City. I actually have, and frequently wear, all three of the shirts advertised on the page, although the one I wear the most often is probably The Battle for Paris.

And original Alt-Hero backers will be glad to know that both Chuck Dixon’s Avalon omnibuses, which contain issues 1-6 and 7-12, will be shipping to them soon. If you would like more regular Arkhaven updates, I suggest following the @arkhaven account on Gab.

Of course, Arkhaven’s primary focus is on Project Asteroid, which is less than five weeks from impact.

An Army of retards

The USA is going to lose its next war, and in a manner that will not permit apologists to claim “well, we didn’t really try” or “the politicians sold us out” as they have with Vietnam and Korea. The reason is that the cognitive capability of the officer class is collapsing.

On paper, the US still has by far the world’s strongest military. This is the case whether or not you measure it by military spending, by various indices of military power (e.g. MEU, CAP, or the CMP developed on this blog), or as pertains to the narrower if arguably more relevant naval sphere, by naval megatonnage (even if the gap with China rapidly shrinks as the PLAN adds the equivalent of a major European Great Power navy every single year).

However, there are increasing reasons to think that large parts of this superiority could be becoming illusory – a dangerous state of affairs, given the recovery of bipartisan support for US military intervention and American elites’ oft-stated confidence in their military supremacy.

Some of these reasons are well covered in the military/strategy sphere, such as those relating to issues of the technological convergence of Chinese and other potential adversaries’ weapons systems. The most hyped example are Russian/Chinese hypersonic weapons, though there are many more prosaic examples, ranging from progressive improvements in Chinese fighter engines to the unexpected precision of Iranian ballistic missiles. This is accompanied by US procurement failures, with the F-35 program being the most high-profile example. However, what has not been written as much about is the rapid degradation of the human capital component in the US military – a factor that is no less important than military capital or technological prowess.

Fundamentally, you need your military forces to be staffed with high IQ and well trained men with high morale and commitment to its cause. High IQ is especially important in commanding positions and in the more “g loaded” services. According to a 2015 paper by M.F. Cancian and M.W. Klein, it seems to have been going rapidly down even before the diversity drives of the 2010s. The cognitive performance of US Marine officers has seen a 10 IQ point decline between the 1980s and 2010.

A ten-point decline is even worse than my calculations of the decline in average intelligence of the US population since 1960. My suspicion is that feminism has exacerbated the problem, as the most intelligent women from the most intelligent ethnic groups are failing to marry or have children, thereby multiplying the negative effects of non-European immigration.

By multiplying the average measured IQs for the four major ethnic groups in the United States with their changing demographic ratios, we can calculate how the demographic changes have affected the national intelligence over time. In 1960, we calculate the national IQ average to have been 100.3. By 2010, the average national IQ had fallen four points, to 96. By 2030, if the current population estimates are correct, it will fall another point, to 95. Lest you think that average national intelligence is irrelevant, note that just that four-point difference is essentially equal to the difference between countries such as Austria, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, and countries such as Uruguay and Portugal. There is a strong correlation between societal wealth and average national intelligence as measured in IQ.

Even the left-wing British paper, The Guardian, was recently forced to take note of this phenomenon, as it reported that scientists have determined genes influence academic ability across all subjects, and that as much as 60 percent of the observed differences between various population groups can be explained by genetic factors. So, the mass migration of the last 50 years has been materially dysgenic and has literally made Americans stupider on average. It’s not just you, mass entertainment really has been dumbed down in recent decades in order to appeal to what is an even lower common denominator than before.

Whatever one thinks of these changes, this is one of the fastest demographic transformations of a nation in recorded human history, and it is the direct result of public policy.

The USA is already Portugal with nukes. No wonder Russia and China are increasingly confident of their ability to break free of the post-WWII neoliberal order. A military whose strength is diversity is a military that lacks any actual strengths and will soon be defeated.

They canceled l’amour

The freaks now have Pepe le Pew in their evil little sights:

NYT columnist Charles Blow and his critics are trading rhetorical blows after the writer made Looney Tunes character Pepe Le Pew the latest target of the cancel mob, arguing that the skunk “normalized rape culture.”

“Right-wing blogs are mad because I said Pepe Le Pew added to rape culture,” Blow wrote Saturday, tweeting a scene from the Warner Bros. classic cartoon series. “Let’s see, he grabs/kisses a girl/stranger repeatedly, without consent and against her will. She struggles mightily to get away from him, but he won’t release her. He locks a door to prevent her from escaping.”

Blow added that Pepe Le Pew “helped teach boys that ‘no’ didn’t really mean no” and that overcoming a woman’s strenuous or even physical resistance was “normal, adorable, funny. They didn’t even give the woman the ability to speak.”

He is a skunk. She is a cat. Has anyone tried explaining this to the low-IQ gentleman? After all, it is possible that he genuinely believes the cartoons are a documentary series about Paris. 

How did I ever know?

I don’t know anything about The Talisman, a fantasy novel published by Peter Straub and Stephen King in 1984. After all, given the success of The Lord of the Rings and A Game of Thrones, it could be about anything, right? But as soon as I heard that Steven Spielberg and the Duffer brothers had acquired the rights to turn it into a streaming show, I was pretty sure that whatever it was, it was focused on children.

Steven Spielberg has found his next project: a series adaptation of Stephen King and Peter Straub’s 1984 fantasy novel The Talisman. The 74-year-old director will be executive producing an adaptation of the book for Netflix along with the Duffer brothers, best known for creating Stranger Things for the streamer. The series has been a long time coming, as Spielberg has been interested in bringing the novel to the screen since two years before it was even published, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

That’s a strong level of interest in what is near-worthless intellectual property. Is there really any need to ask what the basis for that interest was?

The series likely appealed to the Stranger Things alumni, as it follows a 12-year-old boy named Jack Sawyer as he travels to an alternate dimension in search of a talisman to save his mother’s life.

Oh, that’s why. Quelle surprise…. 

Weekend at Biden’s

Forget conspiracy theories, Q, and stolen elections. Ignore the Ides of March. Simply apply Ockham’s Razor to the so-called Biden “presidency”:

No news conference. No Oval Office address. No primetime speech to a joint session of Congress.

President Joe Biden is the first executive in four decades to reach this point in his term without holding a formal question and answer session. It reflects a White House media strategy meant both to reserve major media set-pieces for the celebration of a legislative victory and to limit unforced errors from a historically gaffe-prone politician.

Biden has opted to take questions about as often as most of his recent predecessors, but he tends to field just one or two informal inquiries at a time, usually in a hurried setting at the end of an event.

In a sharp contrast with the previous administration, the White House is exerting extreme message discipline, empowering staff to speak but doing so with caution. Recalling both Biden’s largely leak-free campaign and the buttoned-up Obama administration, the new White House team has carefully managed the president’s appearances, trying to lower the temperature from Donald Trump’s Washington and to save a big media moment to mark what could soon be a signature accomplishment: passage of the COVID-19 bill.

Also, not the President. This is not a “White House media strategy”. It’s a “Weekend at Biden’s” strategy.