Tag: mailvox

Mailvox: infrastructure fragility

From a reader this morning

A pipeline that carried 40%+ of the gasoline for the southeast and east ruptured last week.  No quick fix due to the quarter million gallons of gasoline that spilled and is held in a retention pond.  I’ve thought for years that this pipe would be a good terrorist target and, though this isn’t terrorism, it’s going to wreck havoc in the southeast and east.  Nashville is already out of gas and it’s going to cascade.  This could end up being a huge election issue given Obama’s stopping new pipeline construction during his entire term.

If you Google the story the American media is almost silent, covered by British and RT.  That won’t last for long.  [Redacted] lives in Nashville.  I gave her a heads up yesterday so they could get topped off and this morning 80 percent of the stations are closed in her area.

If you’re in the southeast, fill up your gas tanks now and lay in some supplies.

UPDATE: The story is now public: Alabama, Tennessee, & Georgia Declare States Of Emergency As Gas Shortages Loom After Pipeline Leak

UPDATE: North Carolina has declared a state of emergency too.

Mailvox: give it time

GJ is disappointed with what he discovered at VP:

I listened to you on Molyneux and was impressed enough to follow your link here. Alas, as so often is the case, a closer inspection disappoints. The format of the site is not engaging, and neither is the tone. There’s an imperiousness, an intemperance about the writing that any traditionalist should find off-putting. The rules regarding commenting strike me as especially heavy-handed and narrow-minded. There appears to be an imperative need to delete everything and anything outside the privileged in-group’s wonted expectations. And the sneering boasts about superior mental attainments sound juvenile and absurd, especially given the gaming provenance of so many of you. If a commenter comes up short in debate (by what criterion we can only guess), why would that necessitate deleting his entire argument? Arguments stand or fall on their own merits and have nothing to do with “regulars.” or cliques. You brag that it’s “not a democracy.” Fine. But does that mean it’s a police-state? Your “finish him” attitude toward the intellectual arena would seem to owe more to Nintendo than Socrates.

I think GJ would do well to spend a little bit more time reading the comments here before reaching any conclusions. What necessitates deleting entire arguments is when they are presented by trolls, some of whom are Soros-paid hasbaras of one sort or another, some of whom are simply people with various psychological issues or an intense personal dislike of me or my politics. There are also those commenters who are intent on spreading a message of defeatism and despair, who may or may not be paid to do it. In none of these cases are they arguing honestly, and long experience has taught me that there is absolutely no benefit to permitting them any leeway at all.

While you may not recognize commenters intent on causing problems, I have been blogging for 13 years and it is very easy for me to recognize the different between someone who is honestly presenting an argument and someone who is not. For example, if you go to Steve Sailer’s or other right-wing blogs, you will see EXACTLY the same comments being copy-pasted into the comment threads there. Those commenters are autokill-on-sight; their comments are deleted and their usernames are spammed.

On the rare occasions that I mistakenly spam an honest commenter, I immediately restore their commenting privileges.

So, yes, one could say that it is a police state if one likes, although I would liken it more to a place that is under a constant state of siege. For example, when we tried allowing the SJW List to be open to editing by everyone, Wikipedia-style, every single page was either poison-pilled or spammed within 24 hours. Once we locked it down, we ceased to have any problems and the SJW List has continued to grow steadily since.

Now, I could simply lock down VP to registered commenters only, but I prefer not to do that since it would dissuade genuine passersby and casual commenters. Instead, I keep it open and crack down hard and fast on griefers. I don’t delete very many comments, there are only 31 trolls on autovanish, and the fact that GJ’s comment was not deleted should suffice to prove that differing opinions are permitted. The fact is that no one who posts a comment or series of comments that is an honest, on-topic argument need fear their comments will be deleted simply because they disagree with me or because it is outside the privileged in-group’s expectations.

As for Socrates, there is nothing Socratic about this blog. If you were more familiar with it, you would know the contempt in which that old dishonest fraud is held here. I prefer to try presenting conclusive and persuasive syllogisms, not play word games that prove nothing. And rest assured, despite being the Leader of #GamerGate, my “start nothing, finish everything” attitude owes nothing to Nintendo or even Mortal Kombat.

Things are as they are for various reasons, many of which have nothing to do with my personal idiosyncracies or preferences. The reason this blog is still around and still growing is because I respond to the actions of the commenters here, both good and bad.

Mailvox: so much worse

Castalia House exists because it is needed. Badly needed, it appears. A reader writes:

So I just read two stories from the latest issue of Analog magazine. I must tell you about them.

Story #1 is about a multi-racial research female scientist working for a white male research director. Her role model is a deceased multi-racial scientist who died in an experiment, famous, but whose death led to the current research director getting his job. She recreates the experiment and learns that the current research director rigged it to kill the heroic female multi-racial scientist so he could take her job.

Story #2 is about the CEO of a company who is married to his Chief Science Officer, who is a beautiful dark-skinned girl who beat up his bully in high school. He has IQ 140 but she has IQ 170. They develop brain-and-body augmentation technology and she becomes the first transhuman, better at everything than him in every way but she still loves him. But Christian extremists are outraged and terrorism ensues and they kill her, even though she is wonderful in all ways and a believer in non-violence. He has his own brain implanted in her cyborg body so they won’t know they won, and then goes on a killing spree against the Christian leaders who urged on the violence. Yay for transhuman transgender women ending Christian violence.

All I can say is, it’s so much worse than I thought.

This is exactly why Castalia exists. Consider these excerpts from the five most recent reviews of our latest novel, SWAN KNIGHT’S SON:

  • An excellent medieval fairy tale in the modern age.
  • Outstanding. I’m truly amazed.
  • Coming of age story written by of one of the greatest wordsmiths of our times. It is a story of a young man who doesn’t fit into society because he is too morally upright for the decadence that infests modern society.
  • A masterpiece
  • A true knight battling the forces of evil, while discovering who he is on multiple levels

 Remember culture > politics. What we are fighting here is a cultural war for the soul of the West.

Mailvox: what is Churchianity

Yesterday we had a few requests for a definition of “Churchianity”:

 Is there anywhere on this blog where you define “Churchian”? 
– MS

I too would like a definition of Churchian. Could you cover that in a future post?
– Jaypo

While I have frequently alluded to it, I have not addressed Churchianity directly on this blog before. In part, that is because I am loath to play Christian Police, a role for which I am ill-suited spiritually and temperamentally. I wish to stress that I cannot, and will not, be the judge of whether anyone is a genuine Christian or is a mere Churchian instead; that determination is well above my pay grade. It does not fall to me to even be the judge of my own Christianity, as we are all fallen and none of us know whether we will be saved or we will be one of those from whom Jesus will turn and say “I never knew you.”

In this, as in all things spiritual, we see as though through a glass, darkly. And yet, we are also given eyes and wit and perhaps even a modicum of spiritual discernment, so if we cannot judge another man’s soul, we can certainly judge institutions by their actions and intellectual concepts by their consequences.

I gave the matter a fair amount of thought when writing Chapter 9 of Cuckservative, “Christianity and Cuckservativism”. As my co-author, John Red Eagle, is agnostic, the task of addressing that particular topic naturally fell to me. I go into considerably more detail in the book, particularly concerning how Churchianity relates to various trends that have swept the American churches, but a few excerpts from it should help provide a better understanding of what Churchianity observably is before we attempt to define it.

Many churches have reduced Christianity to the parable of the Good Samaritan, to such an extent that their religion could be more reasonably described as Good Samaritanism than Christianity. And while they subscribe chiefly to salvation through works and societally-approved attitudes rather than faith, they nevertheless possess complete and utter faith in the intrinsic goodness of foreigners.

Churchians (for it would not be strictly accurate to describe them as Christians) are liars and deceivers. They worship the god of Babel, not the Christian God. They serve the world, not Jesus Christ.

But where does this religious obsession with improving the world through works come from, when it has been absent from Christian theology for the greater part of two thousand years? Indeed, the entire conceptual core of Christianity is fundamentally based on the nature of the world not only being fallen and imperfect and ruled by an immortal spirit of evil, but remaining that way until the Son returns, the Prince of the World is cast down, and the Kingdom of Heaven is established.

Justice, in both Greek philosophy and proper Christian theology, is “rectitude of the will”, as can be seen in Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, specifically Secunda Secundæ Partis, Question 58, Article 1. And in the Christian sense, rectitude of the will is defined by conformity with God’s will, which can be debated, but being immutable, is assuredly not defined by the ever-mutating social justice narrative.

So social justice Christianity, or Good Samaritanism, or Churchianity, all amount to the same thing: a false form of Christianity that cloaks itself in Christian rhetoric while denying both the conceptual core of Christianity and the fundamental nature of the justice to which it nominally dedicates itself. And these false forms all flow from a concept that is considerably newer than Christianity, although it is related to an older religion.

The term tikkun olam is from the rabbinic literature known as the Mishnah, which dates back to 1492 and is believed to come from an oral tradition that may be as much as a thousand years older. It appears in the phrase mip’nei tikkun ha-olam “to indicate that a practice should be followed not because it is required by Biblical law, but because it helps avoid social disharmony.”

The phrase is often translated as “for the sake of the healing of the world”, which is why the expression appears in English as a directive to “heal the world” or “fix the world”, but a better translation is “for the sake of the perfection of the world”.

In other words, the cuckservatives and other Churchians have elevated a literally extra-Biblical post-Christian concept that flies directly in the face of genuine Christian theology to a super-Scriptural level, then used it as the basis to judge both members of the Church and the Bible itself!

So, we can summarize all of this with the following definition:


Churchianity is social justice-converged pseudo-Christianity that cloaks itself in Christian rhetoric and trappings, follows the world rather than Jesus Christ, and seeks salvation through works instead of faith.


And if I can say this without sounding too eschatological, I expect it, or something very like it, will be the seed of the religion that worships Antichrist in the place of Jesus Christ.

Discredit. Disqualify. Deplatform.

It’s interesting to see how cuckservatives and conservatives are rapidly adopting SJW tactics too. Unfortunately, like the good moderates they are, they’ve adopted them in order to utilize them against those whose side they claim to be. This little rant from Patrick Frey, who is attempting to convince Tom Woods to stop interacting with me, is a good example:

Patrick Frey [Original post 8/15/2016]
I know little about Vox Day, other than that he told my friend Ken White, a great man and free speech warrior who has also written courageously about his struggles with mental illness, to “get off the Internet for [his] own good” because “no place for the depressed, the bipolar, or the schizophrenic.” I know VD loves to beat his chest about how “ruthless” he is (“We won’t hesitate to strike at your vulnerabilities” is an actual quote — ooh! he’s going to unleash the dreaded Internet Attack on his enemies!) And now, VD is explaining how American nationalism is really White nationalism:

I guess I’ll listen to Tom’s conversations with him, in which (so far) he manages to come across less like the rank jackass he has always been in his interactions with Ken White. But I’d really rather see Tom, whom I admire greatly, spending less time interacting with a guy who has acted like such a cretin online.

To be clear: I’m obviously not trying to tell Tom how to run his show. If he wants to give a platform to the likes of VD or Milo, that’s obviously his choice. I hope I can express my extreme dislike of these people forthrightly without it seeming like an attack on Tom — who, again, has added much of value to my life.

Seriously, though — just read through this blog post by Vox Day attacking my friend Ken White, and see if you can refrain from laughing at the way VD sells himself as Big Bad Tough Guy Vox Day. It really is tough to take this guy seriously.

Let me see if I have this straight. It is really tough to take me seriously, therefore it is imperative for Tom Woods to stop taking me talking to me lest he acquire unserious cooties or something. The threat of striking at one’s vulnerabilities is something to laugh at, but simply observing that a mentally unstable individual is, in fact, mentally unstable and is behaving in a manner indicative of mental instability, is an outrage to be decried.

Does he really think that Tom Woods, of all people, is liable to fall for this sort of nonsense?

Look, it’s not my fault that Ken White is mentally unstable. Nor is it my fault that, as a consequence of his being crazy, Ken White has repeatedly chosen to take unprovoked shots at me. It’s not as if I’m outing the poor guy as a whack job; if White hadn’t a) written about being institutionalized, and, b) taken unprovoked shots at Roosh, I wouldn’t know anything about it.

It’s not as if I read him or pay any attention to White. He may be back in the funny farm already for all I know.

What I do know is that I have absolutely no time for suggestions concerning with whom I should, or should not, associate myself. I’ve noticed that the bigger one’s platform becomes, the more people will try to hijack it and offer unsolicited guidance. I’ve had people try to talk me into disavowing Roosh, Louise Mensch, and more recently, Ricky Vaughan. But no matter who they are, my answer is always the same: no.

I pay no heed to thought police, speech police, tone police, or relationship police. Anyhow, I suspect Tom will be less than concerned about Patrick’s demands:

Tom Woods ‏@ThomasEWoods
Social Justice Warriors: who they are, and how to deal with them — my conversation with @VoxDay

Ty & Aliyah ‏@StopDividingUs7
And of course, typical supremacist making you pay to listen / view.

Tom Woods ‏@ThomasEWoods
Typical genius unable to press PLAY on a free podcast.

Ty & Aliyah ‏@StopDividingUs7
No, it requires viewers to download a bunch of your crap first. That is a heavy price to pay.

Tom Woods ‏@ThomasEWoods
No, it doesn’t. You are seriously inept. You just press the play button.

I’ll admit it. I laughed.

UPDATE: Patrick Frey is doing his best to create a wedge:

VD also says Tom Woods is “considerably less serious as an economist than I had imagined him to be” … again, watching a sort of middling intellect deem himself to be smarter than Woods and Sowell is amusing. 

“Didja hear what Janey said about you, Tina? Didja hear?”

I don’t know how to break it to Mr. Frey, but based on my interactions with Mr. Sowell, I’m at least a standard deviation more intelligent than him. Tom Woods is quite sharp, and I have a lot of respect for him, but nevertheless, he’s not up to speed on free trade yet. There is no shame or insult in that; Ian Fletcher certainly got there before I did.

I have no doubt that Tom Woods will eventually as well.

Mailvox: the reluctant revolutionary

From a reader deep in the belly of the Beast:

I am a teacher at a public school in [REDACTED].  During our first professional day this year our faculty was introduced to a new administrative mandate from the state bureaucracy.  At the conclusion of the presentation we were permitted to comment.  I asked the presenter if she thought the educational bureaucracy was insane, evil, or both.  My comment elicited a few chuckles from my colleagues.  She responded that she thought the new procedures would make her a more accountable teacher.  I rejoined that it would make of me a revolutionary.  Once again my colleagues chuckled.  Teachers are some of the worst sheeple on the planet.

I later approached a colleague who is a close ideological ally.  “Well, [REDACTED], which is it?”  As is frequently the case with him, he was quick to hit the mark.  “If they’re insane, it makes logical sense to accommodate them.  If they are evil, then we are morally obliged to fight them.”  Spot on.  He is good like that.

I tried to suppress my thoughts for the rest of the week, but the realization wouldn’t let go.  I had become a reluctant revolutionary.  Or rather, to be more accurate, the state had made me a revolutionary.  The idea sickens me.  I didn’t ask for this.  I have never aspired to this sort of vocation or anything like it.  It’s one of the last things I would ever wish upon myself.  But here I stand.

The comment you posted this morning from the German president about something being wrong with the people brought to me another sudden realization. Leaders as a class have never studied the antecedents of revolution.  If they had, they would keep on their desks a handy checklist and refer to it often.  But they truly are clueless. Revolutions are not a form of spontaneous combustion.  I am reminded of the final words of Madame Ceausescu as she was put up against the wall:  “You can’t do this; I treated you like my children.”  Clueless to the bitter end.

Or, as Aristotle put it, some people cannot be convinced by information. Never forget that. They genuinely believe they are our masters. I expect events will eventually convince them otherwise.

Mailvox: how can you tell?

JI wants to know how one can accurately pick out the sociopaths among one’s acquaintances and colleagues. A few observations:

  1. Look for abrupt changes in demeanor as the situation changes, and particularly for a wide-eyed, “caught red-handed” reaction when such a change is observed. Sociopaths go from bright-eyed, charming, and friendly to dead-eyed and icy cold in the blink of an eye. Normal people do not.
  2. Beware of anyone who is too friendly too soon. It’s one thing to hit it off with someone, it’s another to have someone glom onto you for no apparent reason.
  3. Perma-victims are usually perpetrators. Female sociopaths, in particular, are adept at revising every story to make themselves the victim, especially when they were the culprit. If nothing is ever someone’s fault, it’s usually all their fault.
  4. Trust your instincts. If you find someone repellant but you don’t know why, it’s your subconscious picking up on small contradictions that you haven’t recognized. Keep a close eye on that individual and you’ll usually discover what it was that your subconscious was warning you about.
  5. Sociopaths have a very alert gaze and they are always scanning to see if anyone is watching them. If you intentionally let them know you are onto them by not looking away and smiling at them in a “gotcha” manner, they will confirm their sociopathy by abruptly changing their behavior towards you, usually by becoming avoidant and launching a whisper campaign against you. This can be risky, of course, but it does provide certain confirmation. I would not recommend it for most people, as most people are insufficiently ruthless to deal effectively with sociopaths.
  6. A shallow “salesman” effect. If someone is always “hail fellow well met”, but doesn’t have any real friends, this is a warning sign.
  7. An attempt to “take over” a group of friends or a social organization, particularly if they attempt to cut out the person who brought them into the group.
  8. Persistent cheating and parasitism, especially in small matters that no one normally keeps track of. I’m not talking about someone who is cheap, but someone who is always a taker and never a giver or even a fair-exchanger.
  9. Constant whisper campaigns. Sociopaths are even more concerned with controlling the narrative than SJWs. If you find that someone has told three different stories to three different people about the same event, be alert.
  10. Be very skeptical of all sob stories. If you encourage a sociopath telling one by feigning shock and sympathy, he will proceed to go deeper, adding more and more detail, and more and more pathos, taking the story into completely absurd territory in order to see how much of a sucker you are and what he can get away with.
None of these things are definitive, they are merely suggestive. But taken as a whole, they are reliably conclusive.

Mailvox: an American in Europe

A reader visits Italy and discovers that what I’ve been saying about the very distinct European nations is true:

This being my first time in Europe I noticed right away that I had been working with a mental blind spot that I think most/all Americans who have never been abroad are likely suffering under.  Maybe it’s the homogenization of the ethnicities in the US, or maybe just the ubiquitous “we’re all the same” message that we’re fed so much that we notice it no more than the fish notice the water, but I was surprised – more like shocked – at how obvious the ethnic differences were between the European peoples.  We spent a lot of time at major tourist sites, so we were constantly awash in a polyglot.

Besides English I can only speak a smattering of Spanish, but merely identifying the various languages is pretty easy.  I began playing a mental game of “guess the ethnicity” and was surprised at how accurate I became. I would see a family group and try to guess where they were from based on their physical appearance and behavior, before hearing them speak.  It was easy to be right 50%+ of the time after just a few days.

To untraveled Americans, I think the ubiquitous mental image of the European countries is analogous to “states” in the connotative sense, not the denotative one.  Other than the fact that they speak different languages, we picture each of them as being as ethnically diverse as California.  Maybe it’s not true for everyone, but for me at least it was an eye opener to see that I could frequently distinguish between a Frenchman and an Italian even though they likely lived less than 700 miles apart.  In fact the only people I could rarely guess the nationality of correctly were Americans, as I’d frequently assume they were British, German, or Nordic.

I find it quite easy to spot the Americans myself. They tend to be fatter and louder than anyone else, and they are the only ones besides Africans who wear white sneakers. They also have whiter and straighter teeth.

What people living in the USA tend to forget is that their imported nationalities are all watered down now. Virtually no one is pure Irish or Swedish or Italian anymore, and so the US facial features tend to be a little blurred in comparison with the sharper features of their distant Old World cousins. In fact, here one can not infrequently identify what town an individual comes from on the basis of their facial appearance alone.

Of course, given my complicated background, I can very easily pass for anything from Bavaria south. One of my hobbies is explaining my excellent, unaccented English to American tourists in need of assistance.

“Thank you so much. I spent three years studying to be a rodeo clown at the University of Idaho.”

On a tangential note, it’s hard to believe, but the USA is even more cucked than Sweden. Keep that in mind every time you hear people intoning that Europe is doomed. The situation in the USA is worse by nearly every single measure.

Mailvox: Churchianity and Cruz

JM is mystified by the continued enthusiasm of Churchian cuckservatives for Ted Cruz:

I used to respect the authors of this blog and some of those they quote with approval, but I’ve lost respect for them in the last few months, and have dropped them from my blogroll.  I find it both interesting and annoying to see how they rationalize Ted Cruz’s refusal to keep his word into an act of Christian principle.  To be charitable, they may be unaware of all the dirty tricks pulled by the Cruz campaign, but they’d probably find some way to justify them, anyway.

I suspect that Cruz, Jeb, and Kasich never had any intention of supporting Trump regardless of the pleedge they made, and they’re just making up excuses to rationalize their dishonesty.

Most of the women mentioned in this post who are so upset at Trump and Christians who favour Trump are extremely judgmental Calvinists, who seem to be making this a test of Christian orthodoxy.

If these people are so enthusiastic about Cruz’s alleged adherence to the Constitution, why don’t they notice that he isn’t even constitutionally eligible to hold the office he was running for?

It’s just a form of Christian identity politics, that’s all. After all, once you’ve determined that Ted Cruz is the Holy and Anointed One, it’s a little hard to back down and admit that not only are you wrong, but you’ve been listening to false prophets you should never again give any credence.

Like any other cult that’s faced with dealing with false prophecies, the response of the hard core is to double down even as everyone else falls away.

The only reason they’re so upset with Trump is because he has shown their prophets to be false, their principles to be fake, and their pretensions to be ridiculous. I suspect that most of these die-hards are either women or gammas, as neither can ever forgive someone who humiliates them by publicly proving them to be wrong.

I wasn’t even a little bit surprised to see the poster boy for Churchian cuckservatives, Matt Walsh, being prominently featured in the approved quotes club. That is the sort of people JM is dealing with here.

Mailvox: stop posturing, morons

The ironically named General Noitall has no idea how clueless he is, but that doesn’t stop him from making confidently authoritative statements that are complete nonsense:

Flynn, under Trump, is set to be Sec. of Defense or, more likely, Chairman of the Join Chiefs. And as we know, Flynn “has no idea how to defeat ISIS”. Yet Trump has promised to take out the IS. What’s absolutely clear about Trump is that his understanding of the geopolitical nature of the world amounts to zero. His understanding of force deployment and use is zero. His experience with the military and dealing with the worlds leaders is zero. But, he does have Flynn.

We certainly know that General Noitall’s experience with the military is zero. How, pray tell, is a retired lieutenant general whose background is in intelligence ever going to become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?

For those who don’t know how it works, while the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is appointed by the President, he is usually selected from among the chiefs of staff – the four highest-ranking generals and admirals- from one of the four armed services. One seldom becomes CJCS without first being Army Chief of Staff, USMC Commandant, Chief of Naval Operations, or Air Force Chief of Staff, and more often than not, Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as well. These top officers almost invariably have a strong background of field commands, they don’t come from intelligence or logistics.

A three-star officer such as a lieutenant general or a vice-admiral is simply not in the running, particularly one who is not even in the service anymore.

That doesn’t mean Michael Flynn couldn’t be named Secretary of Defense, but then, if elected, Trump could just as easily name the science fiction author Michael Flynn too. Regardless, Michael T. Flynn won’t be commanding any military operations, much less all of them. He’s a civilian.

Look, you’re not fooling anyone when you strike knowledgeable poses concerning things you know nothing about, and make stupid pronouncements that only suffice to demonstrate your ignorance. So stop trying!

None of us know what Donald Trump is going to do when he’s elected. Possibly Trump himself doesn’t know. But I think we can be quite confident that he’s not going to follow Michael Ledeen’s idiotic lead and declare war on radical Islam, Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba, and whoever else Ledeen suspects might be in his imaginary Global Alliance of Evil.