The inevitable end

Apparently 2VS has finally gotten around to turning on Comicsgate:

Vox Day opened up an imprint to allow small creators to use his printer discount on behalf of #ComicsGate, something that would have helped take the burden of production off of the smallest indie creators and help flourish a stronger and more united independent community. Knowing that Ethan Van Sciver had done everything he could to jump on the #ComicsGate brand, Vox ran the idea by Ethan in email to make sure Ethan was on board, and Ethan said yes.

It looked like a dawn of a new day for indie comics.

Until Ethan manipulated the situation into a power play to control the few fans under his umbrella.

In a move completely the opposite as he’d been telling Vox, Ethan took to his show and put Vox Day on blast, and his rabid, angry, outrage-prone fans went and brigaded Vox Day as a result.

Instead of getting great printer discounts, Vox was character assassinated. Anyone who called him friend got the same treatment. Ethan and his fans started becoming just like the SJWs they claimed to despise — screeching “alt right racist” at me and others in an attempt to character assassinate and destroy anyone who didn’t go along with their narrative.

All because Vox wanted to help out some small indie creators.

Just to be clear, I don’t care in the slightest about 2VS or Comicsgate. I have very little against them and even less for them. Contra the narrative they both tried to push, I was never interested in owning, controlling, or even having anything whatsoever to do with Comicsgate. I only got involved, for about a week, as it happens, in support of an erstwhile Dark Legion creator, which turned out to be both a stupid mistake and a significant learning opportunity.

The moral of the story: stay away, stay very far away, from the drama that inevitably accompanies narcissistic attention-seekers. In fact, the reason I no longer speak in public to anyone except Castalia authors and UATV creators owes as much to the Comicsgate kerfuffle as it does to the Wired and NPR hit pieces and the Fuentes fiasco.

I neither need nor desire drama, and I’m simply not at all interested in creating it for those who do. I do, of course, find it mildly amusing to observe 2VS showing his second face to his erstwhile supporters.

Fake outrage in Minneapolis

The media is staging at least some aspects of the “protests” in Minneapolis:

A smaller protest continued Thursday at Chauvin’s home…. A photographer at the house Thursday morning appeared to stage a shot in the officer’s driveway by encouraging two people to spray “Kill Pig Cops” on the garage door, according to Jennifer Kennetz of St. Paul. She said the woman claimed to be a magazine photographer and tried to persuade Kennetz and others to pose for her near the home.

Kennetz said she later saw the photographer persuade a young couple to spray paint the garage door while recording it with her cellphone. Police confiscated the phone, Kennetz said, and an Oakdale police spokeswoman confirmed the incident was under investigation.

At this point, it won’t surprise me to learn that George Floyd isn’t even dead.

Minneapolis burning


Diversity, Decline, and Fall

Nothing spells civic order like a police precinct burning to the ground. The violence in Minneapolis has spread to the suburbs of St. Paul, and it’s almost certainly going to get worse over the next few days because there is very likely something hinky going on behind the scenes. First, George Floyd and Officer Chauvin not only knew each other, they worked together at the same “club” on Lake Street.

“George Floyd and now-former Officer Derek Chauvin both worked security at the El Nuevo Rodeo club on Lake Street, according to Maya Santamaria. ‘Chauvin was our off-duty police for almost the entirety of the 17 years that we were open,’ Santamaria said. ‘They were working together at the same time, it’s just that Chauvin worked outside and the security guards were inside.’

Second, there is a good chance that neither Chauvin nor the three other officers involved will be charged with any crimes, as the county attorney clearly signaled yesterday.

At a press conference Thursday, Mike Freeman, county attorney for Hennepin County, condemned the actions of white cop Derek Chauvin as ‘horrific and terrible’, but said prosecutors needed to determine if he used ‘excessive’ force when he knelt on the black man’s neck for eight minutes until he passed out and later died.

‘That video is graphic and horrific and terrible and no person should do that,’ he said. ‘But my job in the end is to prove he violated a criminal statute – but there is other evidence that does not support a criminal charge.’

And third, the situation now appears to be getting completely out of hand, the full extent of which cannot be properly understood unless you are familiar with the geography of the Twin Cities.

An angry crowd broke into the Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct headquarters Thursday night and set fire to the building, capping another day of protests, many of them violent, across the Twin Cities.

The police station on E. Lake Street has been the epicenter of protests this week for people demanding justice after the death of George Floyd, who died Monday when a Minneapolis police officer set his knee on Floyd’s neck for several minutes.

Nearby, Minnehaha Lake Wine & Spirits, the target of looters the night before, also was set ablaze. As flames leapt, sharp explosions sounded as people threw bottles filled with accelerants or fired bullets into the fires….

On St. Paul’s East Side, vandals broke into Cub Foods and its liquor store at the Sun Ray Shopping Center. Police had shut down the mall by about 3:30 p.m., but even as officers filled the parking lot in front, people were driving in the back and grabbing boxes of bottles from the liquor store.

Roseville police Lt. Erika Scheider said they received reports of looting at Rosedale Center, Target, Walmart, Cub Foods, Best Buy, Pawn America and two cell phone stores.

“We responded to a number of looting calls throughout the city. Rosedale had a large group that was able to breach the doors and get inside,” Scheider said.

As I mentioned yesterday, I went to junior high and high school just a few blocks away from the Minnehaha liquor store. But the Rosedale Mall was where my family did most of our Christmas shopping, it’s where my father bought me the Intellivision that got me into video games, it was the home of the B. Dalton’s bookstore where I picked up most of my books before the Barnes & Noble opened in Har Mar, and my first real job was at the Rosedale Dayton’s.

And Rosedale is nowhere near the focus of the unrest at Minnehaha and Lake Street, it’s across the Mississippi River and at least a 15-minute drive up 35W even when there isn’t traffic. Roseville, the city in which Rosedale is situated, is an inner-ring suburb of St. Paul, but it still isn’t particularly vibrant or even very diverse. So, this suggests that the joggers and other violent opportunists are branching out and actively looking for places to loot.

UPDATE: If it’s this bad in St. Paul, how much damage has been done in Minneapolis?

Across the Mississippi River in St. Paul, looting, fire and vandals had damaged about 170 buildings by night’s end, police said.

No more hiding behind 230

President Trump signs the executive order to stop the abusive behavior of the social media giants:

Sec. 2.  Protections Against Online Censorship.  (a)  It is the policy of the United States to foster clear ground rules promoting free and open debate on the internet.  Prominent among the ground rules governing that debate is the immunity from liability created by section 230(c) of the Communications Decency Act (section 230(c)).  47 U.S.C. 230(c).  It is the policy of the United States that the scope of that immunity should be clarified: the immunity should not extend beyond its text and purpose to provide protection for those who purport to provide users a forum for free and open speech, but in reality use their power over a vital means of communication to engage in deceptive or pretextual actions stifling free and open debate by censoring certain viewpoints.

Section 230(c) was designed to address early court decisions holding that, if an online platform restricted access to some content posted by others, it would thereby become a “publisher” of all the content posted on its site for purposes of torts such as defamation.  As the title of section 230(c) makes clear, the provision provides limited liability “protection” to a provider of an interactive computer service (such as an online platform) that engages in “‘Good Samaritan’ blocking” of harmful content.  In particular, the Congress sought to provide protections for online platforms that attempted to protect minors from harmful content and intended to ensure that such providers would not be discouraged from taking down harmful material.  The provision was also intended to further the express vision of the Congress that the internet is a “forum for a true diversity of political discourse.”  47 U.S.C. 230(a)(3).  The limited protections provided by the statute should be construed with these purposes in mind.

In particular, subparagraph (c)(2) expressly addresses protections from “civil liability” and specifies that an interactive computer service provider may not be made liable “on account of” its decision in “good faith” to restrict access to content that it considers to be “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable.”  It is the policy of the United States to ensure that, to the maximum extent permissible under the law, this provision is not distorted to provide liability protection for online platforms that — far from acting in “good faith” to remove objectionable content — instead engage in deceptive or pretextual actions (often contrary to their stated terms of service) to stifle viewpoints with which they disagree.  Section 230 was not intended to allow a handful of companies to grow into titans controlling vital avenues for our national discourse under the guise of promoting open forums for debate, and then to provide those behemoths blanket immunity when they use their power to censor content and silence viewpoints that they dislike.  When an interactive computer service provider removes or restricts access to content and its actions do not meet the criteria of subparagraph (c)(2)(A), it is engaged in editorial conduct.  It is the policy of the United States that such a provider should properly lose the limited liability shield of subparagraph (c)(2)(A) and be exposed to liability like any traditional editor and publisher that is not an online provider.

Section 230(c) is the key to the publisher/not publisher dance behind which the social media giants hide.

Pouring gas on the flames

The Mayor of Minneapolis, who was parachuted in from the East Coast with the objective of becoming a future Senator, is making it very clear whose side he is on.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey says last night’s violent protests are a reflection of the reality the black community has faced and 400 years of inequality. He says to ignore it would be to ignore the “values we all claim to have.”

The Mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, gave the passionate speech that he needed to deliver to the hurt and angry black community in his city. He is telling them, their feelings are “not only understandable, they are right.”

It should be amusing to see him attempt to dance his way out of responsibility for the arson of which he was among the chief architects. And the hurt and angry jogger community is so understandable, and so right, that the Mayor has now asked for the Minnesota National Guard to assist them in their time of mourning.

The Cloud Police

Not content with eradicating thought crime from the social media platforms, the media is now teaming up with the technology companies to eradicate it from personal accounts in the Cloud:

The Washington Post’s Silicon Valley Correspondent Elizabeth Dwoskin complained that after the coronavirus documentary Plandemic was censored on social media, some YouTube clips were telling users how to access “banned footage” from the documentary via Google Drive. She then notes that after The Washington Post contacted Google, Google Drive took down a file featuring the trailer for the Plandemic documentary.

This is why you need to get off the Cloud, get off the social media platforms, and support the independent alternatives. Even if you are certain that you are not a crimethinker today, you cannot be certain that you will not be deemed a crimethinker tomorrow.

Asking questions is racist

Don’t ask questions of joggers or you might lose your job or even your lease:

A Minneapolis venture capitalist’s office lease has been terminated after a video went viral showing him asking a group of black entrepreneurs if they were tenants of the building and thus allowed to use its gym. In the video posted Tuesday night, Tom Austin, who is white, said he was going to call 911 on the group. He ended up calling the building’s property manager instead.

Meanwhile, Minneapolis enjoys more of its vibrant diversity, as “flames erupted” and “fires broke out” for absolutely no reason at all. This is an area I knew very well, as I graduated from a private school four blocks away from one of the liquor stores mentioned below.

Diversity in action


For much of the night, the police radio squawked with call after call, as looting started first at the Target store across the street from the precinct, before spreading to other areas in the city. Dozens of businesses were either looted or torched, or both, mostly in the area of Minnehaha Avenue and E. Lake Street, but also along business corridors on the city’s North and South sides.

Firefighters raced from one blaze to the next, often with police in tow for crowd control. After someone started a fire at an AutoZone store at Minnehaha and Lake, firefighters worked to douse the flames, knocking down the majority of them. But within a matter of hours, the store was ablaze again, as was a half-built affordable housing development that caught fire, sending flames more than a hundred feet into the air.

Vandals broke into Chicago-Lake Liquor, and also shattered a few windows at the Midtown Market down the block. They also targeted businesses along W. Broadway Avenue, north Minneapolis’ main commercial drag, and in the Uptown area. Several pharmacies were reportedly burglarized, with suspects fleeing with handfuls of prescription pill bottles.

A Target and Cub Foods anchoring the corner of E. Lake Street and Hiawatha Avenue were looted, along with other small businesses, including Minnehaha Lake Wine & Spirits. Flames and smoke shot into the air when a nearby AutoZone auto parts store was set ablaze. As some protesters tried to put out the fire, others danced gleefully in front of it, snapping selfies.

Equalitarianism is the real problem here. This isn’t about “police brutality”. After all, how many stores were burned and looted when an African cop shot and killed Justine Damond at her Minneapolis home in 2017?

Anyhow, I won’t mind if the joggers burn all of South Minneapolis to the ground. It’s a vibrant hellhole of diversity, and perhaps a sufficiently large conflagration will shake at least some idiot Minnesota liberals out of their smug equalitarianism.

And as one socialgalactician noted, it won’t be long before the word “jogger” is banned.

Meanwhile, Rep. Ilhan Omar, who “represents” Minneapolis in Congress, said: “Our anger is just. Our anger is warranted.”

This is why you always sink the damn ships and pick your own damn cotton.

Mailvox: invading academia

A grad student writes concerning a recent economics paper:

I forgot to thank you for your analysis on the deflation argument. I started a graduate program in economics last fall, and your deflation argument served as a critical point in a paper I wrote during the fall semester for a finance class. I received an A on the paper and am very grateful for your blog and Darkstream channel. The professor has an MBA in finance from University of Chicago and has worked in corporate banking since the 70s, so what you have been saying for decades is starting to resonate with economics professionals. He  wrote that the argument was very thought-provoking. I cited your sources rather than you directly because of how far you are out of the economics academic hierarchy.

A wise decision. It might bother some people to know that they will never receive public credit for their ideas, but it doesn’t bother me in the slightest. The more that you understand that the public laudation of intellectual celebrities is nothing but Promethean PR and ethnic propaganda, the less that sort of thing appeals to you. If, at this point, the media suddenly started talking me up as an important public intellectual and handing me awards, I’d be wondering where on Earth I’d gone wrong.

For me, the most interesting thing about the reader’s email is the fact that his professor, with an MBA in finance and 40+ years of banking experience, considers the concept of credit deflation to be “thought-provoking”. That underlines how completely inept, how completely ignorant, the greater part of the so-called intellectual elite are, even in their areas of credentialed expertese.

In any event, the reader is quite welcome. It’s good to know that someone, somewhere, is getting something out of this pensaverie.

Don’t threaten, just do it

The President threatens to shut down Twitter:

Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen. We saw what they attempted to do, and failed, in 2016. We can’t let a more sophisticated version of that happen again. Just like we can’t let large scale Mail-In Ballots take root in our Country. It would be a free for all on cheating, forgery and the theft of Ballots. Whoever cheated the most would win. Likewise, Social Media. Clean up your act, NOW!!!!
– Donald J. Trump

The great weakness of the conservative Right is their inability to accept the necessity of action. Every single social media giant merits being shut down for their crimes and their ongoing war against the Constitution.