Tag: Darkstream

If you’re wondering why I selected Dennis Prager as the example of a Fake Nationalist in tonight’s Darkstream, just read this paragraph from a column on “nationalism” he wrote in 2015.

In the United States, however, a national American identity has always been a major part of what it means to be an American. The three pillars of Americanism, constituting what I have called the “American Trinity” — are found on every American coin and banknote: “Liberty,” “In God We Trust” and “e pluribus unum.” The latter is Latin for “out of many, one.” Because America has always been a nation of immigrants, it has no ethnic identity. Therefore, unlike almost all other nations, America could not depend on an ethnic identity to keep its people together. In fact, if all Americans retained their ethnic identities, America would simply splinter. So a non-ethnic American national identity had to be forged and preserved.

Count the lies. America was not, is not, and could never be “a nation of immigrants”. The claim is as false for Americans as it is for the English, the Germans, or the Swedes. The British colonists did not emigrate to the American Indian nations of the New World. One might as reasonably declare that “Palestine is a nation of immigrants” and insist on referring to Israelis as “Jewish-Palestinians”.

Fake Nationalists rely on the same sort of wizardry that the New Atheists and Jordan Peterson utilize. They substitute “nation” for “state”, then declare that if you have the right piece of paper, that somehow eliminates every tie of blood, birth, and DNA that connects you to your actual nation. Of course, a Fake American is no more a genuine American than a fake woman is a genuine woman, no matter what the state-granted paperwork says.

The state does not define reality. The state does not define sex. The state does not define gravity. And the state does not define nationhood. It may defy these realities, but it will not do so forever.

Last night’s Darkstream was on the media’s made men, including Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro:

As evidence that I’m not simply conjuring these observations out of thin air, consider this graphic on Ben Shapiro’s “gilded path to prominence”.

Following his departure from Breitbart. Shapiro quickly founded the Daily Wire with funding from its owners, brothers Farris and Dan Wilks, Texas fracking billionaires who supported Texas Sen. Ted Cruz in the 2016 Republican presidential primary. The brothers and their wives combined to donate $15 million to a pro-Cruz super PAC in the early election season.

YAF has “Young Americans for Freedom” student chapters at colleges and universities around the country. The nonprofit helps organize and sponsor campus lectures, and Shapiro is one of YAF’s most prolific college speakers. Since 2015, YAF has organized over 35 Shapiro speaking gigs, according to the organization. In November 2017, YAF announced that it would be the “exclusive home” of Shapiro’s 2018–2019 college speaking tour, funded by Fred R. Allen. (It’s unclear who Fred Allen is, and YAF did not return an inquiry about his identity.) The group announced on July 25 that six universities will host Shapiro this fall with the headline, “LOOK OUT SNOWFLAKES.”

The chart below clearly demonstrates the difference between organic popularity and manufactured fake popularity. Or, as one commenter noted, the difference between those who have sold their souls and those who have not. Keep in mind that the yellow line represents Stefan Molyneaux, who has 889,759 YouTube subscribers compared to Ben Shapiro’s 444,386. It’s difficult to see from this graph, but note that for 11 years, from 2004 until early 2016, my Google Trends profile was reliably higher than Shapiro’s despite the best efforts of those propping him up.

And no, I’m not envious at all. I’ve been calling out Shapiro since 2005. Why would I ever envy a cowardly little creature who couldn’t compete with me without selling his soul? I know the price of “success” like that and it is not one that I would ever be willing to pay.

If you want the answer, watch the Darkstream! Bonus points if you can catch the one step that Peterson’s defenders can legitimately attack. Although it will ultimately do them no good whatsoever, they might be able to make enough rhetorical hay out of it to convince some who desperately don’t want to believe.

The inaugural Bookstream includes a discussion of the sex predators in science fiction and a preview of the audiobook version of THE LAST CLOSET, narrated by author Moira Greyland, now available in MP3 format for $19.99 in the Arkhaven store. 14 hours and includes the ebook in EPUB and Kindle formats.

Now that we’re getting more serious about audiobooks, I’m going to do a weekly Bookstream. Some will be book reviews, others will be previews of our new audiobooks, and if I can ever get the stream to permit a live second party, we may even do author interviews.

One thing that we are considering is developing our own combined ebook/audiobook reader app that is integrated with the Arkhaven store. We’d probably crowdfund it to test the demand, so let me know a) what features would be of interest and b) what rewards would make crowdfunding such an app of interest to you, if any.

It occurred to me that emulating Whispersync’s ability to keep track of where you are in the same book across formats would be a lot easier if you used the same app to read the book or listen to the book on your phone or tablet, especially since we plan to include the ebooks with our audiobooks. So, that’s an obvious feature, one that is less obvious but absolutely vital to me would be the ability to export notes and highlights; it is a never-ending source of aggravation to me that Aldiko lets me highlight portions of the text, but I can’t export them to a text file. We’d also want to incorporate MoonReader’s ability to connect to the GoldenDict dictionary apps, for easy foreign language translations while reading.

Please note that we have NOT yet decided to do this, as while the initial response to our direct audiobook sales has been promising, it doesn’t justify this level of support yet. It’s simply us thinking about where we want to go strategically in 2019 and how we can best arrange to get there. Anyhow, if you have any ideas, feel free to share them here.

Note: if you’re using the Arkhaven store, be sure to turn off NoScript in your browser, as we’ve been informed that may be a contributing factor to charges being declined.

From the transcript of the Darkstream: now 1 million views strong:

So, Taleb says IQ measures “an inferior form of intelligence stripped of second-order effects meant to select paper shufflers obedient intellectual yet idiots. This is a true statement followed by a falsehood, well, actually, it’s all false. IQ doesn’t actually measure intelligence at all, it is a proxy for intelligence, okay? Intelligence is not something that we know well enough to quantify how many one has. We know exactly what an inch is, so we can measure exactly how tall you are but we don’t know exactly what an IQ point is, and so to say it measures an inferior form of intelligence, no, I don’t think that’s correct.

Q- What do you think is the average and max IQ of your fan base is?
A- Well, I know that there are several dozen people with IQs in excess of 150, so if you simply do the math, I’ll have to work it out, but I would say that the average is probably around 110, which is actually extremely high if you work out the math. Maybe a little bit more.

I have to admit, I was not expecting to be congratulated by YouTube. But, there it is:

Darkstream by Vox Day,

Whoa, you have 10,000 fans! Just think about that – TEN THOUSAND people love your videos and support what you’re all about. Now share the news and celebrate this awesome moment together!

You’re our hero,
♥ The YouTube Team

Rather decent of them, really. But on the off-chance that this is less than entirely sincere, I would still highly recommend that you not only subscribe to the Darkstream on YouTube, but also follow it on Stream.Me.

From the transcript of last night’s Darkstream:

Advice for someone in their early 20s who wants to throw their hat in the ring but understands every wise person who says it’s unwise to trust the mind of a young man. Well, I think that what you should do is you should seek to learn, and to understand the world doesn’t need your opinions. It is very, very unlikely that any view you are going to express is going to be an original opinion. I’m not discouraging you from sharing your opinion or expressing yourself, I just think that it’s always very important to understand that, and the more that you read, and the more that you familiarize yourself with the great thinkers of the past, the more you’re going to understand how many times very, very capable individuals have wrestled with the same questions that you’re wrestling with. If you’re a good thinker, if you’re a high-caliber thinker, you’re going to find that even the most original thoughts that you have were successfully anticipated by people 2,000 years ago, 1,500 years ago, whatever, and that’s why it’s so important to read.

Of all the various humilities, I think temporal humility is perhaps the most important and least common. Are we not told there is nothing new under the sun? A reminder to all Darkstream viewers: be sure to subscribe to stream.me/voxday as a backup to the YouTube channel.

No Darkstream tonight, as I’ll be going on with the Big Bear himself at 7 PM Eastern. It promises to be a bit of a humdinger, so you’ll probably want to tune in to his channel.

UPDATE: Here is the link for the stream. Damn, he’s good. What a pity he can’t host the Oscars either.