Tag: mailvox

Mailvox: converged medicine

SJWs in Canada are attempting to play the “Code of Conduct” game in the medical field:

I am a physician in a Canadian province, and unbeknownst to most of the lay public, there is currently some infighting amongst the physician community here, centred on a physician’s organization. In short: some autocrats within the organization have taken it upon themselves to try and impose a “Code of Conduct” on all members. This “Code” includes provisions placing limits on what members may speak or write in public, subject to the whims of unelected, unaccountable busybodies.

There is no reason or need for this Code. No provincial physician’s group in the country has a similar Code. But, being familiar with your work, the phrase “Code of Conduct” sets alarm bells crashing in my head, and I recognize it for what it can only be: an SJW-style attempt to impose absurd and capricious rules on successful people.

I belong to an organization which is fighting all of this. Periodically they send out mass emails, and in the most recent one, they say this about the proposed Code: Most of the words used within the policy have no legal definitions and are so vague that they could be arbitrarily and subjectively applied to ANY words or actions of members; serving to silence voices through fear and suppression of free speech.

All of this may only be semi-interesting to someone outside the province and outside the profession, but I felt it to be yet another example of the “Code of Conduct” strategy currently being deployed by SJWs across the English-speaking nations. And Jordan Peterson recently predicted this, in a video in December – he’s been involved with a fight over similar issues with the Law Society of Ontario, and he predicted that it would be coming to all professions, soon.

Well, he was right; it’s here. Luckily some of us have read your books.

Personally, I think adopting a Code of Conduct is brilliant. Just suggest the following:

  • No telling lies.
  • No committing adultery.
  • No stealing or engaging in financial fraud.
  • No performing acts of euthanasia.
  • No performing abortions
  • No blaspheming the names of God or Jesus Christ.

Anyone guilty of violating the code will lose their medical license. Any questions?

Agreeing and amplifying may actually be a better defense against SJW-imposed codes of conduct than trying to argue that one is unnecessary. Once they realize it will be turned against them, they’ll stop pushing for it.

Dreamers are not Americans

As the God-Emperor reminds everyone:

When I became your president one year ago today, I took an oath to protect, serve, and lead ALL Americans.

Democrats have since shown our country that they could never do the same.

They chose to use our U.S. military as a bargaining chip to fight for amnesty for non-citizen illegal immigrants. But a good many patriots and I REFUSED to accept their ransom.

Now American voters need to remind Democrats that we will NEVER forget their reckless decision.

Tell Senate Democrats that YOU — the American voter — will ALWAYS remember the day that Democrats put illegal immigrants before American citizens.

One hopes Trump has the wisdom to ignore the example of his predecessors and simply ignore the government shutdown until the Democrats cave completely. No party that supports smaller government should EVER back down over a government shutdown. That’s the problem for the big government party… wait a minute!

Mailvox: your mileage WILL vary

Baseball Savant emails about his daughter’s inarguably flawless taste in epic fantasy literature:

I know I’ve e-mailed you this but my 14-year old daughter has read the Lord of the Rings trilogy 3x and the Hobbit countless times. She loves them. She basically has them memorized. She collects them if she sees copies with a different cover. It’s crazy.

She read Throne of Bones in a week. After, she read Lord of the Rings again. So I asked her, how does Vox compare to Tolkien.

She hesitated and then said….”Hmmmm, I think Vox got him.”

What I really like about Throne of Bones is that it sucks you in so fast. The beginning pages with the painting! Whoa. Loved it.

That’s very flattering, of course, and I’m delighted to hear it, but honestly, it would be hard for me to disagree more. Here is how I rank some random authors on a broad and indistinct range of criteria I have not fully articulated. In some cases, it’s based more on their peak, in others, on their average. There is no particular rhyme or reason in this regard; even the greatest novelists have their occasional clunkers.

10/10: Immortals
Tolkien, Eco, Tolstoy, Murakami, Hesse, Maupassant, Poe, Wodehouse

9/10: First-Rate
Lewis, Tanith Lee, Dostoevsky, Adams, Gibson, Herbert, Mieville, Stephenson, Balzac, Calvino, Douglas Adams, Lovecraft, Fitzgerald, Soseki

8/10: Second-Rate
Lloyd Alexander, Susan Cooper, Heinlein, Clarke, Barbara Hambly, Arthur C. Clarke, Pratchett, Keillor, Simmons, Zelazny, Howard

7/10: Third-Rate
Robert Anton Wilson, Katherine Kurtz, Ann McCaffrey, Raymond Feist, Eriksen, George RR Martin, Eddings, Card, Poul Anderson

6/10: Fourth-Rate
Gaiman, Asimov, Anthony, Bujold

At my very best, which is to say with ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT, I’d give myself an 8 to date. But I’d regard a 7 as perfectly reasonable, depending upon your tastes. And yes, I can explain each of these ratings in detail, but I’m not going to do so here.


MAILVOX: Just read your recent posts on Gaiman, was curious which book or two you would recommend starting with China Mieville? I have read about his work here and there and it seemed intriguing but never got around to it, am interested now upon seeing that you admire his writing.

I would read The City and the City, followed by Kraken, and then, assuming you enjoyed both of those, read his best, which is Embassytown.

Mailvox: up your game, people

JF writes about the declining quality of the comments here:

Over the years that I have been reading your blog, I haven’t always agreed with everything you say, but I always find that it challenges my thinking about the world. I traditionally have enjoyed the comment section, also. However; over the last year, after reading the post I find myself doing a quick skim through the comments to see who is actually posting to see if it is worth following the discussion.

A number of the commenters who brought thoughtful, funny, and intelligent views seem to have moved on or only comment sporadically now. This has left the comments section to become filled with more midwit posturing and monomania that derails conversation (such as “muh purity”). I don’t know what the solution is, or if it even needs one.

If I am out of line, just let me know. Either way, I’ll continue to read.

He’s not out of line, he’s absolutely right. Now, it’s important to keep in mind that this is a natural consequence of the blog readership having grown from 3,000 pageviews a day to 105,582 pageviews a day. The early readers tended to be highly intelligent outliers, almost all of whom were WorldNetDaily readers and familiar with a wide range of political subjects and authors. They were not monomaniacs and they had the ability to intelligently discuss a wide range of subjects as well as an interest in doing so.

Now we’ve got everything from Disney shills to commenters who see a nefarious Jewish hand at work in the fact that they ran out of skim milk this morning. I don’t follow every discussion in the comments myself.

Now, this doesn’t really matter all that much because the blog does not exist for the sake of the comments. The comments are mostly there as a requested courtesy for the readers and the posts of most interest to me seldom receive anywhere near the most comments. That’s fine, because things are what they are, not what we might wish them to be. But if you’re a commenter, perhaps it might matter to you that people notice the fact that you don’t have much to say and you say the same thing over and over again.

(Which, of course, you could say is true of some of my posts on certain subjects, but then, history keeps happening and you can’t say I don’t manage to throw the occasional curveball on even the oldest chestnuts.)

The moderators do a pretty good job of blocking the trolls and neutralizing the shills, but they can’t make people smarter, give them a broader perspective, or make them better-read or more interesting. That’s something every commenter will have to do for himself. So, perhaps you might want to think about this and put a little more thought into your next comment. Or perhaps you’ll just blurt out the same damn thing you’ve already posted here to no noticeable effect on 27 previous occasions.

It’s up to you. Just don’t think the readers don’t notice… and remember that there are more than a thousand of them for every one of you. Also, drop the posturing. If you feel the need to strike poses and posture, just get your own blog. Or a mirror. If you find that you’re about to make your third heated comment in another tedious pose-off with another commenter that everyone else is ignoring, just walk away from the keyboard. Believe me, no one – NO ONE AT ALL – is interested in those ridiculous arguments that never resolve anything.

We could, of course, turn on the feature that limits comments to members of the blog, which would permit the moderates and me to eliminate the shills, the trolls, and the tedious. In the past, I’ve resisted doing so in the interest of maximizing the range of the discourse, but if we’ve now reached the point of the tragedy of the commons, perhaps it is time to consider doing so. Then again, informing Google whose comments I permit here might be unwise, in light of recent revelations about the converged tech giant. Feel free to share your opinion.

Mailvox: Israel or the West

Howard takes an inherently anti-Zionist position on Jewry:

The notion that Jews are not part of Western Civilization, particularly those Jews who’s family’s and history are linked to the West and the U.S by multiple generations, is without merit…and again, simple, ignorant anti-semitism.

No, the idea that Jews are part of Western civilization necessarily eliminates any legitimate territorial claim they might have to the land of Israel, which is not and has never been part of the West. Jews can claim Israel or they can claim to be of the West, but they cannot claim both. Furthermore, Christianity is an integral element of Western civilization and Jews are, again by definition, non-Christian. They are not part of Christendom, which you will note is a synonym for Western civilization.

Howard’s historically ignorant posturing is reflective of the growing divide between Israeli and American Jewry. Many Israelis are already openly contemptuous of diaspora Jews who refuse to make aliyah and become citizens of the Jewish nation despite being able to do so, so it won’t surprise me if Israeli Jews eventually decide that the diasporans are not Jews at all, especially in light of the fact that most of them are less than half genetically semitic already.

No nation can survive its people not sharing a language, a religion, genetics or geography for long.

EVS vs VD

It is officially on.

Ethan Van Sciver‏@EthanVanSciver
Next guest interview is with Alt Hero creator and my new arch enemy Vox Day.  Monday at 7 PM.  Trailer is coming.

In order to allow us to focus on EVS’s questions on Monday, let me get a few of those posed by his Twitter followers out of the way.

Ask him why he’s so obsessed with Jews in the negative sense and why he believes non-white people are inherently chaos bringers and can’t be a part of western civilization.

I’m not obsessed with Jews in any sense. Being pro-Christian, pro-American and pro-Western civilization, I am opposed to everyone who seeks to fundamentally alter either the American nation or Western civilization, no matter who they are or what their reasons might be. Non-Westerners are not, by definition, part of Western civilization, they have their own civilizations, customs, and traditions which they quite naturally prefer, and to quote a VP reader quoting Horace, they change their sky, not their souls, who cross the sea.

In other words, they don’t bring chaos, they merely bring civilizational changes which often result in chaos. Exactly as European whites did to American Indian civilization. But the fact that the invasion and subsequent changes may be well-merited from a karmic perspective doesn’t actually make it desirable for anyone who values America and the West.

Ask him if he still believes N.K. Jemisin is a half savage, and those of her ethnic heritage shouldn’t write sci-fi.

Yes, I still believe NK Jemisin is “an educated, but ignorant half-savage, with little more understanding of what it took to build a new literature by ‘a bunch of beardy old middle-class middle-American guys’ than an illiterate Igbotu tribesman has of how to build a jet engine.” Those of her ethnic heritage are certainly welcome to write science fiction if they please, but Jemisin observably shouldn’t. Her two successive Hugo Awards for Best Novel are a more embarrassing indictment of the degraded state of so-called science fiction than the nominations of “Alien Stripper Boned From Behind By The T-Rex” and “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” combined.

Mailvox: 8 questions for the Alt-Right

Sargon of Akkad, a youtuber, recently made a video asking eight questions of the Alt-Right, and this caused me to wonder what you would consider the correct answers to be.

1: Are Jews Oppressing White people?

No. This is an exaggeration. Some elite Jews are suppressing non-Jews, for example, a very small number of Jews in elite university admissions offices are suppressing Asians and whites in the U.S. university system while aiding blacks, Hispanics, and other foreigners.

2. Should Interracial Couples be forced to separate?

No. People deserve to experience the consequences of their decisions and actions.

3. Should the government prevent citizens from leaving the country to preserve the race?

No. But it should not feel any responsibility to protect them, provide for them, or help them return when their hosts turn on them either.

4. Should the state control education?

No. It has done an abysmal job by every measure.

5. Should the state control the media?

No.

6. Should the State control the economy?

No. But it should control which parties are permitted, and are not permitted, to participate in the national economy. And it should always act to ensure that the nation benefits at the expense of foreign parties when those parties wish to participate.

7. Do the decisions of individual white people matter to the alt right’s goals?

No. Not even a little bit.

8. Should women have a role in public life? (or should they be home makers?)

The question is a false dichotomy. Being a homemaker is the most important role a woman can have in public life. They should be rewarded, encouraged and celebrated for doing so.

Of course, all these questions are loaded and amount to little more than a feeble attempt to discredit and disqualify the Alt Right. More importantly, they are irrelevant. The tactics and the strategies are not the objective; how you get there does not matter if the most important thing is to get there. We presently live in a lotus-eating society of freeloaders, which is why our society is going to collapse. And it should come as no surprise that the lotus-eating freeloaders are indignant at the observation that they are going to have to stop eating lotuses and freeloading if they wish to continue eating at all.

A Super Bowl theory

Whiskey1Zulu has a theory:

Here is my theory about the superbowl: Since at least 2005 the NFL looks for the best storyline to finish the season, and maybe back to 2001, where after 9/11 Patriots = USA = winners. In 2005 the owner of the Steelers was in failing health and the superbowl was thrown to them so they could have the most rings before he passed away.

Patriots will win over the Vikings. Vikings make it because they will be the first home team to ever make it to the superbowl, with the side benefits that they are the best team in the NFC and they are the best franchise to never have won the game.  Patriots will win because if they don’t there will not be a dynasty for the 2010s, the Patriots would be the first double dynasty, and pundits can tout Brady & Belichick as the greatest of all time forever, continuing to gloss over the constant favorable calls, known cheating, and allegations.

This combination provides the best possible storyline going into the final game and would get more people to watch because of those factors, attempting to redeem the season in the eyes of people who are already sneaking back to the TV for better quality football and forgetting about the protests and various other reasons football has been declining.

I have to admit, going into the season, I had a feeling that if the Vikings finally made it back to the Super Bowl with such a questionable team, it would tend to confirm the Original Cyberpunk’s theory that the entire NFL season is scripted.

And his logic is compelling, especially with the media suddenly – out of nowhere – banging the drum for the end of the Patriots era. That being said, I think LAST YEAR was supposed to be the last hurrah for them, which may be setting the stage for them to suddenly lose all of the mysterious bounces that have consistently gone their way over the last decade and more.

Personally, I don’t think there is formal scripting so much as a little gentle manipulation at the edges, particularly in playoff games that start to look like blowouts. For example, I don’t think some of the questionable calls that went the Titans’ way when they were on the verge of being put away were meant to help them win, but merely to keep them in the game.

For example, as a longtime spectator, I knew that the Titans were going to get the important calls once they were down 14-0 and looking hapless on national TV. Sure enough, Mariota’s fumble on the big hit by Johnson was blown dead due to nonexistent “forward progress”, which if is to be regarded as a precedent going forward, will preclude virtually all sack-related fumbles in the future. My theory is that Jeff Triplett isn’t actually the terrible, clueless referee he appears to be, but serves as the NFL’s Tim Donaghy, a hit man in stripes working for the Commissioner.

If nothing else, that would explain why Triplett still not only has a job, but is assigned to work playoff games.

Mailvox: roles are not interchangeable

Szopen shares an important observation from recent Polish history:

One acute political commenter made once a remark, that great guerilla leaders do not necesarily make great generals in regular war, nor great political leaders in time of peace. He noted that in context of Poland: that to oppose the communism and fight it effectively, one had very specific mindset. Sniffing the enemy agents, conspiracies, be suspicious, not willing to make compromise etc. That were the great traits when you were in conspiracy – but later made awful politicians when communism was (somewhat) defeated. Most of the great leaders of so called “democratic opposition” went on to become leaders of infighting, low blows, unable to compromise over even tiny issues in order to defeat the recovering left. He proposed that leaders of the resistance should get state salaries, become cult objects and then put into solitary luxury mansions, with everyone trying very hard to make their lifes comfortable and as far from the current politics as it is possible.

I guess most of current leading figures of the alt-right, with VD, Milo and Molyneaux should get their million dollars when the right take over the institutions and win the culture fight.

Another thing, from my observation is that people fighting against all odds, who are constantly being called the worst names, either become broken and give up – or start to share also similar traits. Cejrowski was on of the few guys who influenced hundreds of thousands young Poles. I loved watching his programs. However, in his later age he became an unbearable, arrogant arsehole. There is something similar about few other “lone fighters”. They raised the generation of rightwingers, but they lost something of their soul in the process, carrying the load in the times when no one was appreciating them. They seem to gain “f* you” attitude about everything they did. That’s understandable; otherwise they wouldn’t be able to do what they did. But still, for me they look like old, battle-hardened veterans with scars all over.

It’s amazing that VD is able to still be able to be, at least sometimes, polite.

One thing that people consistently fail to understand about me versus my fellow “leading figures” for lack of a better word is that I have always been an athlete. Not only that, but I have excelled in both individual and team sports, and discovered that I vastly prefer team sports.

That is why I can work effectively with others, and why I completely refuse to even try to work with those I identify as being self-serving, attention-seeking, or simply incapable of playing well with others. As I often tell people, the best way to get to know a man’s true character is to play with him on the soccer field. Every characteristic, from courage and determination to laziness and a desire to avoid responsibility, becomes readily apparent to his teammates. You just can’t hide anything from them.

It’s disappointing when those who have been assisted and supported by others affect to have become too important for them and attempt to move on, but then, they will learn their lesson soon enough as the support they need will not be there for them when opposition arises, as it always does. That is why it is always vital to never forget either your base or your allies, or to fail to protect their interests as assiduously as you look out for your own. The more the Right learns to do that, the more effective it will become.

Mailvox: feel the rage

GW wonders about the socio-sexuality of skepticism:

Perhaps you haven’t been following the debacle between the YouTube race realists and the skeptic community, but I would love to hear your view on the main instigator of it, Kraut and Tea. His infantile attacks on imagined ghosts of the Alt-Right, blatant hypocrisy in regards to the principles of not deplatforming or doxxing people, and smug overestimation of his level of expertise in biology and statistics seem like classic symptoms of a Gamma’s wounded ego. That he also refuses to silence his tongue when thoroughly outmatched is just more proof of his status.

It makes me think the “online skeptic” nowadays is predisposed towards being Gamma. What else can explain their lack of conviction? Their unwillingness to argue the believer or race realist in good faith?

There is no question that the average “internet atheist” is a Gamma. More than a few are Omegas. Both scientific studies that looked into my original hypothesis about atheism being a consequence of being on the autism spectrum found correlations between an inability to make social connections and an inability to feel spiritual connections.

This sort of aggressive atheist are akin to the blind man who not only insists that everyone else is lying about their ability “to see”, but also that they are inferior to him due to their inability to come to terms with their blindness. And then proceeds to try to poke out their eyes.

I have no intrinsic problem with people who don’t believe what I do about God or anything else. But I utterly despise those who first proclaim that religion is a crutch, then promptly attempt to kick out that crutch from others who are reliant upon it. They are nasty little creatures.