Tag: interview

Over the last few weeks, I was interviewed extensively by Mark Siefert and Rich Johnston of Bleeding Cool, the comics media site. It is quite literally the longest, most thorough interview I have ever read, much less participated in on either side. Bleeding Cool posted the entire interview almost entirely verbatim, including the follow-up questions and answers. It is precisely 767 percent more honest and fair than the NPR hit piece was, and demonstrates rather clearly how the Internet media puts the mainstream media to journalistic shame.

This doesn’t mean either Siefert or Johnston agree with me at all about anything. They very clearly don’t, for the most part. But they recognize that Arkhaven and Dark Legion have successfully established themselves in the comics space and that it makes no sense to simply pretend that we don’t exist. Beyond that, they observably understand that the customary SJW response is not only ineffectual, but serves to add considerable fuel to the fire that motivates us and our supporters.

In some ways it’s a debate as well as an interview; while I could offer a few objections to some of his corrections to my answers, there is little point in going down those rabbit holes. For example, I don’t view Marvel’s denial of its director of content and character development Sana Amanat’s connection to the Clinton Foundation to be conclusive or convincing given the direct relationships between the foundation, her cousin, and her two brothers. But given the in-depth investigation they clearly did into my family and heritage – which was very interesting as I previously knew nothing about my historically significant Irish ancestor – they doubtless have the ability to dig considerably deeper into that situation if they wish to do so.

But it is a fair, detailed, and extremely informative interview, which I suspect a number of people on both sides of the ideological spectrum will enjoy reading. I expect a fair number of SJWs will be outraged by the fact that Bleeding Cool acknowledged my existence at all, and when they did, failed to devote the entire interview to angrily denouncing NAZICOMICSHATE, but then, birds will fly and fish will swim too.

We no longer live in a world where we can mutually pretend that our comics don’t contain politics so we don’t have to argue about it. Politics covers everything like a rash you want to scratch even though you know that’ll make it worse. Comics are no longer a brotherhood beyond politics, and fandom is no longer sacred ground.

Vox Day has played a role in creating that world, in my opinion (which he disputes to a substantial degree in the interview below, for the record), and has also published books that I dislike, and things that are intentionally antagonistic. On the book and comics publishing front, that doesn’t bother me, at all. Have at it. It is a legitimate function of art to be disagreeable, to inspire dislike and even anger.

Because comics can in fact be dangerous, very many publishers in our history have faced struggles for distribution and placement on newstands or in stores. Day has stated that he’s had some inexplicable issues with selling his comics on Amazon. If that’s true, it’s wrong. Any distributor or retailer can refuse to carry a comic for any reason (a concept that I am personally very familiar with), and that’s perfectly fine too. But if there’s any third party or rogue employee interfering with Castalia House books or comics from being sold at Amazon when those comics are salable according to standard policies, not only are you in the wrong, but you’re also helping Vox Day, not hurting him. You’re giving him and his followers something to fight.

You won’t convince anyone that Vox Day’s politics and opinions are wrong by restricting his followers’ ability to buy his comics. Quite to the contrary. Attempting to win by restricting the publication of information (note that this is a different thing than controlling the flow of information that you yourself consume) does not put one in particularly enviable company. That’s not how to win any modern conflict, let alone a conflict based on information… which is all of them now.

I’d much rather be reading the There Will Be War series than discussing Vox Day’s politics. Or writing that post about Luis Senarens that I mentioned earlier. But politics are the core of who Vox Day is and what he talks about — for the moment — so let’s go….

Bleeding Cool: I want to start off with something that’s come up in connection to Comicsgate and events that have spun out of your disagreements with Ethan Van Sciver. Comicsgaters often say they want politics out of comics. At its core, the idea that people want comics to be escapist entertainment certainly isn’t objectionable. But you recently noted:

“Second, comics have always had political and ideological elements to them; the core problem with what the SJWs are doing in comics is less about how they are inserting their lunatic politics into the comics and more about the way in which they are ideologically policing who is permitted to produce and publish comics at Marvel, DC, Image, IDW, and other comics publishers.”

Is it possible to create superhero comics without political elements? Is “with great power comes great responsibility” a political statement?

Vox Day: Yes, it is possible to create superhero comics without political elements, but one will end up with a limited range of stories that are intrinsically unrealistic. After all, there is no way that the governments and militaries of the world would simply ignore the increased power that superheroes could offer them. “With great power comes great responsibility” is not a political statement, it is a moral statement. And it is not possible to create superhero comics without moral elements.

Read the whole novella-sized article, entitled Vox Day: Altered States of America, there.

Also, speaking of Arkhaven Comics and Chuck Dixon, I’m happy to report that CHUCK DIXON’S AVALON #2: RULEBREAKER, is now available in a gold logo edition from Arkhaven Direct, this time complete with dialogue. We’re working on getting replacement issues out to those who received what we shall euphemistically describe as “silent collector’s editions”.

UPDATE: The initial response on Twitter is, of course, entirely surprising to absolutely no one.

Smack Talk Showdown@SmackTalkShwdwn
This is disgusting. Why give this hate monger a platform?

Bounding Into Comics interviewed me about Arkhaven, Comicsgate, and our next crowdfunding campaign:

Bounding Into Comics (BIC): The comic book industry at large appears to be in decline. The latest report indicates a 6{64c1a3d9a40559511922326ab01596b0c1a24761117e0e4906b04888ba2118a8} decline in sales in 2017. What made you want to dive into comics with Arkhaven Comics and Dark Legion imprints when the comic industry appears to be contracting?

Vox: The decline in the comics industry is the result of two factors, an artificially constricted distribution system and the SJW convergence of the publishers. People simply don’t go to comic book stores like they did in past decades and they REALLY don’t like the conversion of all their traditional heroes and villains into politically correct parodies of themselves. No one wants to read tedious left-wing sermons about Gay Black Hindu Socialist Batman in a Wheelchair crying onto Hispano-Palestinian She-Joker’s shoulder over his doubts that society will accept his planned transition into Batwoman.

Their stories are boring. Their heroes aren’t heroic. Their villains are cardboard cutouts. Their morality tales aren’t moral. Their female characters are increasingly fat and ugly and mannish. It’s no wonder their readers are increasingly abandoning them.

BIC: What do you think is the primary reason behind the decline in sales?

Vox: Initially, the distribution issue. The industry has never recovered from Marvel’s attempt to move into distribution and the resulting Diamond monopoly. But the next phase of the decline is due to the convergence of the comics themselves. The third phase will be the mass collapse of the comic book stores, which has already begun.

BIC: Are you seeing success with Arkhaven Comics and Dark Legion despite the industry contracting overall?

Vox: More than you would probably believe if I told you the details. We have already signed with a movie producer. We already have multiple movie and game deals on the table. Not options, actual development projects with real budgets.

BIC: With your success, what are you doing on the distribution and the story end that differentiates you from the rest of the industry?

Vox: We’ve partnered with a very large general distribution company, which allows us to reach readers outside of the traditional comic book stores. On the story end, the mere fact that our writers are firmly on the side of God, America, and Western civilization sets us very far apart from the godless globalist degenerates who are attempting to push their delusions and depravities at the expense of telling quality stories. It doesn’t hurt that we feature actual published writers, who read and write actual books, writing our stories.

BIC: What’s your take on ComicsGate? Do you consider yourself part of ComicsGate?

Vox: I am the leader of ComicsGate. So can you.

Read the rest of it there. Note that it’s two pages.

In not-unrelated news, Neon Revolt enthusiastically endorses the idea of our next campaign:

I have to give credit to the absolutely prolific Vox Day and direct your attention to his new comic series – Alt-Hero (which is doing exceptionally well on Amazon). In it, he’s decided to feature a whole storyline revolving around, who else, but #QAnon!

Check it out, starting at 10:10 in the video.

And I highlight this because I really think it’s important to check out the work of creatives who are striving to work independently and create good, traditionally-themed art and media – especially because the #LunaticLeft derives so much of its power and influence due to its systematic domination of the media. First, it allows the Left to legitimize ideas that just should never be legitimized, demoralize and erode the more traditional elements of society, and appear much bigger than it actually is. It builds these insidious, entrenched power structures that bombard the public with certain messages, and then turns around and does everything it can to make sure it keeps anyone to the right of Marx unemployed – no matter how talented they are.

Often, the only viable route forward for these kinds of artists to create their own platforms, their own businesses, and operate completely independently.

Vox is succeeding in this arena with his Arkhaven Comics label. And that’s vitally important, because things like this open up opportunities for other creators that might not be so welcome in the traditional halls of power.

My only concern, Vox, with this storyline – is that the truth will be much wilder than any kind of fiction anyone could cook up.

I have absolutely no doubt at all that the truth will eventually prove to be wilder than what The Legend Chuck Dixon is writing, but we’re going to give it whirl anyhow. It’s going to make the average Bond plot look like a murder in Miss Marple’s village by comparison.

Jess: I read that your previous you are a pretty smart guy you are a game designer, accomplished musician, and member of Mensa, a high IQ Society. Is that true, you’re really a smart guy?

Vox: Yes. I’m a National Merit semifinalist, which is actually considerably more difficult than Mensa.

Jesse: So were you born that way?

Vox: Yes.

Jesse: What is a high IQ?

Vox: Well, you know, IQ is best understood in terms of its standard deviation, so 100 IQ is normal, the Mensa level IQ is the top two percent of the population, so one in 50, that’s about 132, you know. I’m in the 3 to 4 standard deviation range, so I’m probably around the one in a thousand, one in 1500 level. There are plenty of people like me, but not a whole lot.

Jesse: Do you feel smart? I mean, how do you know that you’re that smart?

Vox:  I guess the easiest way for me to explain it is to put it in terms like this; I’m also slightly colorblind. There are some differentiations between orange and green that I literally cannot see. You can point it out to me, you can trace it, you can draw it, and I cannot see it, no matter what. Being highly intelligent tends to be like the other side of that, you know, you see things, and you think they’re obvious, and it’s very, very surprising to you that other people can’t see them. So, I would say that in terms of your day-to-day relationships with other people, it’s often just having to understand that other people can’t always see what you see, or they can’t always reach conclusions as quickly as you can.

Perhaps this exchange may help put the Jordan Peterson thing in perspective and explain why so many smart people managed to miss the insidious nature of his philosophy and his rules for life even if they happened to be in the unusual position of having actually read his books. For example, Peterson wrote some things that I immediately knew to be wrong in Maps of Meaning, mostly because I had previously been reading Umberto Eco quoting Aristotle and analyzing Aristotelian categorization in some detail the day before at the gym. Setting aside the small likelihood that the average person is going to read any of the relevant books without being paid a significant sum to do so, it was necessary to understand what Aristotle had written, understand what Eco was saying about what Aristotle had written, remember what Peterson had written, and also have understood that well enough to see the contradiction between the two on the one hand and the one on the other that rendered Peterson’s statements false. Anyone could be walked through that process, but it takes a relatively high level of cognitive processing power to understand all three elements well enough to immediately connect them even when there is no obvious connection, since Peterson never refers directly to Aristotle. Or, for that matter, to Eco.

Many of those observing my ongoing vivisection of Jordan Peterson’s philosophy are of the opinion that these things don’t really matter very much, that discussion of philosophies and moralities is esoteric discourse best left to intellectuals and that distinguishing between good and evil philosophies is irrelevant.

But as the experience of Moira Greyland shows, philosophy matters. Because evil philosophy is always utilized to justify, excuse, and even celebrate evil actions by moral monstrosities. Read the whole interview, it will provide new insight even to those who have read The Last Closet.

LifeSite: Many science fiction and fantasy authors have treated pedophilia, incest, and homosexuality with a creepy sort of sympathy. For example, Robert Heinlein’s “Time Enough for Love,” has a protagonist who has sexual relations with his adopted daughter, clones himself as two women and “marries” them (as well as two men), and finally travels back in time where he has sexual relations with his own mother. The book was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards and Heinlein was called the “dean of science fiction writers,” and his followers have created a “Robert Heinlein award” for science fiction writing.

My question is this: as one who grew up in this world and was so terribly victimized by such attitudes, why do you believe sci-fi and fantasy writers and their fans have such a thirst for this kind of material? What is the connection between these genres of literature and these pathological tendencies?

Moira Greyland: People wanted to have promiscuous sex and the books gave them a map.  The authors writing about the promiscuous sex were hailed as Great Thinkers, and it was assumed that if the people in the books were happy and promiscuous, then it would work out that way in real life.

Throwing off sexual morality meant more sex, more often, with no way for women to refuse without being labeled “prudish.”  It meant an end to the sexual dominance of the biggest and the strongest, and meant any ugly jerk could get laid if he had drugs and a good line.

Sexual morality is questioned, and all the rules are thrown out.  Suddenly, instead of having one husband and one wife, people are having all kinds of sex with all kinds of people, and a lot of people like it.  Some are too drug-addled, drunk or stupid to think through the implications, and others have weak personalities and go along with anything their husband or wife demands provided they can stay married.

But here is the trouble.  Since the new social circle operates on a new rulebook, whether it is the Stranger in a Strange Land rulebook or the Darkover rulebook, it is no longer acceptable to do things the old way.  In practice, the wife who has a broken heart because her husband is carrying on with five women, or five small boys, had better keep her mouth shut or risk losing him.

Since the books delegitimize jealousy and fidelity, troubles in the relationship which normally result from adultery must be blamed on something else.  Now instead of it being normal to hate the other woman, the wife is in the atrocious position of having to blame her own jealousy and possessiveness for her agony.  She can no longer blame her husband for his conduct, and must instead blame herself.

Naturally, in practice, this is a recipe for disaster.  The result is divorce, abortions, broken homes, single parenthood, and always the blame was misplaced.  Adultery does not work.  Promiscuity does not work.  Polyamory does not work.  But if you are in a social circle where they are normalized, you have to swallow the poison pill or lose your social group.

Even in the weirdest social circle, there will be a few good couples who love each other and who just can’t get into the poly stuff no matter how fashionable it might be.  One might even think that those people have a moral compass or a backbone, and they are probably the couple that heads on over to church while the rest of their circle are sleeping off the debauchery.   Are they aware that their morality has saved their marriage and their family?  Maybe.  But you can be sure they do not trumpet their differences.  And years after the dust settles, it will be those couples who say “I always felt funny about the weird sex in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s books.”

And it will be those couples who have stayed together.

Once God is removed from the picture, so are the limits of the moral structure He has imposed on Man. And then, “do what thou wilt” becomes the whole of the law, whether it is “with due regard for the policeman around the corner” or “without overlooking the guidelines of your culture since life is short, and you don’t have time to figure everything out on your own.”

That’s the title of Jonah Goldberg’s new book, which I expect will be primarily interesting for how Jonah tries to dance around the obvious, based on this extensive interview about it with Russell Moore. I’ll be posting my review of it after I finish reading it.

It tends to strike me as an attempt to defend the West while simultaneously de-Christianizing it. The core thesis strikes me as being fundamentally wrong, because “the fundamental form of human corruption” is most certainly not “I don’t like your artificial constraints on my human desires and my desire for my group to be victorious.”

Russ Roberts: It’s a fascinating book. It’s a disturbing book. It’s a somewhat depressing book, at times; and maybe we’ll look for some bright spots on the horizon and in our conversation. But I want to start with a paragraph from near the beginning of the book. You say the following

My argument begins with some assertions. Capitalism is unnatural. Democracy is unnatural. Human rights are unnatural. The world we live in today is unnatural, and we stumbled into it more or less by accident. The natural state of mankind is grinding poverty punctuated by horrific violence, terminating with an early death. It was like this for a very, very long time.

Elaborate on that. And talk about what you mean by the Miracle, which is the unnaturalness that we’re in the middle of.

Jonah Goldberg: Right. So, what I mean–I’ll just start with what I mean by ‘unnatural.’ If you took a jar of ants and you dumped them on a planet very much like ours, with our atmosphere, ants would do what ants do. And they would build little colonies and they would dig their little ant tunnels. If you took a pack of dogs and you put them in the wild, they would very quickly become a natural pack like they would. If you took human beings, absent all of the stuff that they learned from culture and education today and put them in the wild, they would not all of a sudden start building houses and schools and have startups. They would take to the trees, and have spears, and it would take a long time to discover spears. And they would behave the way that we are wired to behave. One of the core beliefs I have about a definition of–at the heart of conservatism–is this idea that human nature has no history.

And so, when I say that ‘capitalism is unnatural’: if it were natural, if it were the way human beings, like ants or dogs or any other creature naturally behaves in its natural environment, we would have developed capitalism a little earlier in the evolutionary history of man. We would have developed democracy a little earlier in the evolutionary history of man. In the 250,000 years, give or take, since we split off from the Neanderthals, the amount of time where we had any conception of natural rights–particularly for strangers, right? People within the tribe, that’s different. But for strangers, the idea that someone we just met has any dignity or any claim on justice–that is an astoundingly new idea in human history. And, this whole world that we live in–so, a big inspiration for this book is this idea you talk a lot about on EconTalk, which is: Hayek’s distinction between the microcosm or the microcosmos, and the macrocosm. And, I take Hayek–I think Hayek is absolutely correct, where he says that we evolved to live in small bands of people–troops, tribes, whatever label you want to call them. And that’s how our brains are structured. And our brains haven’t changed very much in the last 10-, 11,000 years since the agricultural revolution. And so, this entire extended order of liberty and contracts and the monopoly on violence of the state–all of these things are really new. They don’t come to us naturally. We have to be taught them. We have to be civilized–as a verb–into believing in these things.

And this Economic Miracle–and so the Miracle is–and I was heavily influenced by Deirdre McCloskey; and I think she gets a lot right. We can talk about one of the things she might get wrong, later. But, you know, for, what is it, 7500 generations? For 200-, 300,000 years, the average human being everywhere in the world lived on average on about $3 a day. I think it’s Todd Buchholz who says that man lived no better for most of man’s existence he lived no better on two legs than he had on four. And, it is only when you get this radical change in ideas that comes from the bottom up–what I call the Lockean Revolution, but I don’t think Locke gets credit for it. He just simply sort of represents it. For the first in all of human history basically in one place, this little corner of Europe, human prosperity, human wealth starts to explode. And that explosion radiates out around the world and is still doing so today. And that is a miracle. And the reason I call it a Miracle is not because I think God delivered it–the first sentence of the book is, “There is no God in this book.”

Russ Roberts: A promise you don’t quite keep; but, I know what you meant.

Jonah Goldberg: We can talk about it.

Russ Roberts: That’s all right.

Jonah Goldberg: But, what I’m saying is, it’s not providential. Right? God didn’t suddenly decide to give us all of this bounty. It’s a miracle because you people, you, you know, you witches and warlocks of the economics profession have not reached a consensus about why the hell it happened. You know, there is a consensus about the $3 a day stuff. But there is not a consensus about why this miracle or this explosion of rights, liberties, and prosperity happened. And, no one planned it. We stumbled into it by accident. And, my argument is that we should be incredibly grateful for it. And, therefore, protective of it. You only protect those things you are grateful for. And, that’s what I–that’s sort of the opening precis of the book, I guess.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. Just a couple of comments. I always think of it as the goose that lays the golden egg. If you have a goose that–all of sudden you get this goose that happens to be laying golden eggs instead of regular ones–you’d kind of want to be interested in what keeps the goose healthy and alive, and how this came to happen, as you keep it going. And we seem to be somewhat oblivious of it. I think it’s a human trait to be–take things for granted, and to think that tomorrow will be like yesterday. And so, the era of progress we presume is just a natural thing. And, as you point out–it’s hard to accept, but it’s not so natural.

Jonah Goldberg: Right.

Russ Roberts: And just to expand on the Hayek point, in The Fatal Conceit, he says: This micro-cosmos and macro-cosmos, we have two –we have to have two ways of thinking about the world. In our small families or our bands or our tribes or our communities, we have a more socialist–what you and I would call a Socialist–enterprise. We don’t sell stuff to our kids: typically, we share. It’s top down, not bottom up. In the family, the parents tend to run things. And, that’s very appropriate in a small group that’s held together by bonds of love, for genetics–whatever keeps it together. And, he says, we have to have a different mindset when we go out to the extended order–when we are traders and commercial actors. And he said, we have a tendency to try to take the beautiful and poetic ethos of the family and extend it into the larger order. And he says that leads to tyranny.

Jonah Goldberg: Right.

Russ Roberts: In a way, that’s–that’s what I want to–you might–it’s one of the things you are worried about in your book. Which is that the tribalism that we are hardwired for seems to be spreading beyond the immediate family.

Jonah Goldberg: That’s right. I think it’s worth pointing out: It is disastrous going both ways.

Russ Roberts: Hayek makes that point, yeah.

Jonah Goldberg: Right. Right. It’s disastrous to treat the larger society like a family or tribe. But it’s also disastrous–getting your g’mindschaft[?] and your Gesellschaft is always a problem. And treating your family like a contractual society destroys the family. And, both are really, really bad. And I agree that it’s not just that we are Socialist. I mean, the way I always put it is: We are literally Communist, in the sense that in my family it is: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. You have a sick kid, you don’t do any kind of calculus about what their contribution to the family is. You just do whatever they need. And, yeah. So, part of my argument is that–you know, the Roman philosopher Horus has this line where he says, ‘You can chase nature without–you can chase nature out with a pitchfork, but it always comes running back in.’ And, so, part of my argument is that human nature is always with us. Right? We are born with it. That is the preloaded software of the human condition, and you can’t erase that hard-drive. All you can do is channel and harness human nature towards productive ends as best you can. And when you don’t do that, human nature will assert itself.

And I think of this in terms of corruption: That, just as if you don’t maintain their upkeep–a car, a boat, or a house–the Second Law of Thermodynamics or entropy or just rust will–you know, rust never sleeps. Eventually, nature reclaims everything. And that’s true of civilizations, too. And if we don’t civilize people to understand this distinction between the micro- and the macro-cosm, what inevitably happens is that the logic of the microcosm, the desire to live tribally which we’re all born with, starts to infect politics. And if you are not on guard for it, it can swamp politics. And this is why I would argue that virtually every form of authoritarianism, totalitarianism–whether you want to call it right-wing or left-wing–doesn’t really matter to me any more. They are all reactionary. Because they are all trying to restore that tribal sense of social solidarity–whether, you know, it’s a monarchy or treating the leader of the country as the father of the country or the Fuehrer or whatever you want to call it. Or whether you are just saying that the entire society is just one family.

Whether it’s nationalism, or socialism, or populism–all of these things are basically the reassertion of human nature, which says: I don’t like your artificial constraints on my human desires and my desire for my group to be victorious. And that is the fundamental form of human corruption.