Tag: media

Diversity in comics

Jon Del Arroz surveys the political diversity of Marvel:

Marvel has a diversity problem.

In that they have none in terms of diversity of thought. They are a pure social justice propaganda arm. This is dangerous when it comes to creating art, as if you have everyone thinking in lockstep, unable to get outside the box, you’ll have creative stagnation. More than that, when you turn children’s adventure fiction into adult message browbeating, you lose any semblance of fun that a product formerly had. It’s no wonder that sales have dropped by about half, when they have an entire writing core of every single one of their monthly writers hell-bent on a crusade of alienating half of the country in some social engineering through comics.  I don’t exaggerate my numbers either, and I did some leg work for you all so you might better make educated purchases, or lack thereof, of Marvel Comics.

Just looking on the comics rack, you can see where Marvel has decided to make a foolish stand. No sane person would go and buy these comics anymore, there’s nothing of value there. All they have left is legacy purchasers who have made such a habit of picking them up that they can’t drop it. Even those have been dwindling because Marvel’s taken their political nonsense to more of an extreme than Tor Books or Hollywood itself. Stories themselves don’t exist in a vacuum, however, it stems from their editorial and who they hire to write, which are no longer the brightest creative minds, but SJWs who yell the loudest and who purposefully virtue signal at every turn.

According to marvel.com, there are 18 writers on the current releases. I went through each and every one of their twitter accounts to give you a summary of where they spend their time on social media in terms of politics. I don’t mind people getting political occasionally, or even necessarily holding left wing views, but when it’s constant beating the drum of anger and hate, that’s what makes an SJW, and that’s where one needs to stay away (and is a primary reason for Marvel’s steep sales decline in recent years).  Here’s a brief summary of the writers’ twitter feeds, as I’ve gone through all of them for you:

Mike Costa – Constant Anti-Trump posts.


Jason Aaron – Anti-Trump, has #resist greenpeace retweet from inauguration. However, he doesn’t post politically very often, not pushing some anger crusade all the time.

Brian Michael Bendis – Anti-Trump posts, but posts so much it’s not a large percentage of his tweets.


Cullen Bunn – Rabid anti-Trump.


Becky Cloonan – a couple of snarky anti-Trump posts pre-election, but no political posts since. From the feeds, appears to be the sanest of the Marvel staff.


Gerry Duggan – Constant Anti-Trump posts, retweets Bernie (he can still win!).


Al Ewing – British, and doesn’t seem to post a lot of American politics, but very heavily steeped in globalism in immigration “rights” in his posts. Anti-Western civilization. 


Roxanne Gay –  Constant rants about feminism, anti-Trump posts. 


Zac Gorman – Complains about Republicans as “joke”, but only one recent post as such. Low percentage of political tweets.


Derek Landy – Anti-Trump, not overwhelming in political posts. Mostly sticks to posts about writing.


Kate Leth – Regular anti-Trump posts. Constant complaints about some boogeyman “privilege”, rambles at racist, sexist, etc., “white dudes”.  Rants about queer issues.


Stuart Moore – Regular posts anti-republican, anti-Trump.


Greg Pak – Complains about “representation” of different races. Lots of anti-Trump posts.


Dan Slott – Anti-trump rants all the time. 


Charles Soule – Constant anti-trump rants.


Nick Spencer – Rants about trump/republicans and calls anyone who disagrees with him flat out evil.


G.Willow Wilson – “Muslim” Ms. Marvel writer, rants anti-Trump posts all the time.


Chip Zdarksy – Constant anti-Trump posts.

UPDATE 3/22/17: Found another crop of Marvel writers: http://delarroz.com/?p=687  still batting 1000%. Looks like blackballing is real as the sample size becomes far less coincidental.

18/18 Marvel writers, 100%, are extreme left wing ideologues who hate half of the country, have nothing nice to say about the USA or its president ever.

So, here’s the question. What do we do about it? We are working on a graphic novelization of QUANTUM MORTIS: A Man Disrupted, as you can see below. And we do have the rights to a considerable quantity of stories. But we have one – precisely one – self-appointed volunteer who is creating this as a labor of love in his spare time.

Is this something where a Kickstarter would make sense? I don’t like the idea of relying solely upon the Dread Ilk for this, as you are already supporting more vital projects such as Gab, Infogalactic, and Castalia House. Those are strategic projects of general interest, whereas something like this is more specific to a single converged market.

My thought is that it would be interesting to subvert the current superhero genre with a group of nationalist superheroes who are totally opposed to the evil would-be rulers of the world; they’d be seen as villains, of course, by those who romanticized saving the UN every Saturday morning in the 1970s and 80s.

They’d be hunted relentlessly by the conventional superheroes as well as by the UN, Interpol, and all the globalist organizations. Marvel occasionally flirts with this sort of thing, except their themes are incoherent because they want their heroes to be personally rebellious and independent while at the same time being slavish servants of the global government and SJW ideology. We could call it Alt-Hero; typical scenarios would be foiling attempted assassinations of populist politicians, rescuing conservative speakers from antifa and Black Bloc mobs, and preventing mad corporatist schemes to do terrible things to large populations in the name of progress.

The advantage of the Kickstarter approach is that if there was not sufficient interest and the project failed as a result, there would be very little waste of time, effort, and money. What do you think? Is it something you’d find of interest? Is it a ridiculous idea? Is it worth looking into? The thing is, Castalia is going to publish at least one hardcover/softcover graphic novel anyhow, and so the writing, production and distribution elements are already in place. And every de-convergence starts with one small step.

The media reviews of Tor books

Are by Tor-published authors. Apparently Ars Technica doesn’t quite grasp the concept of “conflict of interest”:

The Collapsing Empire is a hilarious tale of humanity’s impending doom
John Scalzi’s latest novel is a thought experiment about the fall of civilization.
ANNALEE NEWITZ – 3/28/2017, 1:30 PM

Annalee Newitz is the Tech Culture Editor at Ars Technica. She is the author of Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, and her first novel, Autonomous, comes out in September 2017.

Yeah, so, about that first novel.

AUTONOMOUS
Annalee Newitz
Tor Books
Tor/Forge
09/19/2017
ISBN: 9780765392077
304 Pages

Tor has been doing this for a while now. The contributor at the Guardian who wrote at least one puff piece about Scalzi was a Tor author too.

Cerno comments on 60 Minutes

Don’t judge by theory, judge by the metrics. Mike pointed out in the comments here that his counterintuitive decision to go on 60 Minutes was clearly justified by the results.

Left wing Twitter expected me to be savaged last night, and you know what they did….They went silent on me because I won and are pissed at 60 Minutes and Pelley. The #1 blog on Buzzfeed today was about how I won. This was quite clearly a major win by all metrics.

I tend to agree. As I mentioned in the Darkstream last night, it’s very easy to see why Mike was justified in deciding to make an exception for 60 Minutes. Some statistics from Periscope:

2d ago 60 Minutes questions 6.5k viewers
1d ago Cernovich watches 60 Minutes special on fake news 65k viewers
18h ago #voxday Too big to ignore 838 viewers

 As I always say, Mike knows what he’s doing when it comes to the media. Mike not only popped his Periscope viewership by 10x overnight, people are now FAR more interested in getting his viewpoint than, for example, mine, as a result. That is not the hallmark of someone who does not know what he is doing.

Which is why, if your name is not “Mike Cernovich”, I strongly suggest you shut the fuck up about how to handle the media, especially if you find yourself tempted to criticize Mike’s media strategy. He knows the game, he knows how to play it, and he knows when to make exceptions to the general rules. You don’t.

Would I have gone on 60 Minutes? No. Would I have advised Mike to do so? No. And that is one reason why Mike’s recent Periscope has 65k viewers and my most recent one has 838.

Cerno on 60 Minutes

I understand why Mike decided to give it a go. But after seeing the results of his and Scott Adams’s recent experiences with the media, I have absolutely no intention of modifying my policy in the slightest. I’m not attempting to build a media career and Mike has already proven that a single shot or two of mainstream media exposure does not sell books, so there simply isn’t any upside in it for me.

I’m interested in continuing to help the Alt-Right, the Alt-Tech, and Blue SF build their own platforms, not waste any time with the fake news.

Cerno does 60 Minutes

This is an open thread to discuss Mike Cernovich’s recent appearance on 60 Minutes:

During a contentious debate on the nature of truth and what is “fake news,” Mike Cernovich told Scott Pelley what story 60 Minutes would publish before the episode had aired. Find an excerpt of this interview below:

Scott Pelley: Who’s gunning for you?

Mike Cernovich: You are. I’m on 60 Minutes. Right?

Scott Pelley: What do you mean, we’re gunning for you?

Mike Cernovich: Do I really think that you guys are going to tell the story that I would like to have told, no. Your story’s going to be here’s a guy, spreads fake news, uses social media, these social media people better … I know the story you guys are doing before you do it.

Scott Pelley: What’s wrong with that story?

Mike Cernovich: Because it is an agenda. The agenda is … The truth is you’ve talked to a person who sincerely believes true, you must also admit that there have been many stories reported by major outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Rolling Stone, that were false.

Scott Pelley: Agreed.

Mike Cernovich: People get it wrong, so why then come guns blazing at me, and not guns blazing at everybody? Why isn’t this segment going to say, how did the New York Times get conned? How did the Washington Post believe that Russia had hacked the power grid? We all together, collectively need to discover what the truth is, and converse with one another what the truth is, that’s a different story.

Mike and I discussed whether it was a good idea for him to make an exception to his usual policy to not grant interviews to what he calls the Hoax Media a few days ago. We’ll find out soon enough!

Wait, can THEY do that?

It never ceases to amaze me how the Left invariably whines and cries whenever it is subjected to the same treatment it metes out to the Right:

Conservative news outlets, including one with links to a top White House official, are singling out individual career government employees for criticism, suggesting in articles that certain staffers will not be sufficiently loyal to President Donald Trump by virtue of their work under former President Barack Obama.

The articles — which have appeared in Breitbart News, the Conservative Review and other outlets — have alarmed veteran officials in both parties as well as current executive branch staffers. They say the stories are adding to tensions between career staffers and political appointees as they begin to implement Trump’s agenda, and they worry that the stories could inspire Trump to try purging federal agencies of perceived enemies.

The claims posted on the conservative sites include allegations of anti-Israel and pro-Iran bias against staffers at institutions such as the State Department and the National Security Council. Breitbart News, whose former executive chairman Steve Bannon is now Trump’s chief strategist, has even published lists of workers that the president should fire.

Washington veterans say they can’t recall similar targeting of government employees, who are required to stay apolitical and generally shun the spotlight.

“It’s deeply unfair to single people out and question their loyalty,” said William Burns, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former longtime diplomat. “It’s demoralizing for institutions. It’s demoralizing for professionals, and it’s offensive.”

One hopes that the stories will inspire and encourage the God-Emperor to purge all the federal agencies of every traitor, mole, and heretic. In more than a few cases, he shouldn’t just fire most of those disloyal workers, he should order their arrests.

If they are enemies of the American people, actively seeking to undermine the duly-elected President of the United States, the God-Emperor not only has the right to order their arrest, he has the sworn responsibility to do so.

No pizza, only Russians

This article is practically dripping with Narrative:

The ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, one of multiple congressional panels examining Russia’s intervention, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday that there was “circumstantial evidence of collusion.” There also is “direct evidence . . . of deception, and that’s where we begin the investigation,” said Rep. Adam Schiff of California.

U.S. intelligence agencies charged in January that Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered the offensive, in which cyber operatives also hacked tens of thousands of emails from Democratic National Committee staff, Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta and other Democrats.

A top priority of investigators is to determine who delivered those hacked emails to WikiLeaks, a London-based transparency site that published them online, the sources said. News stories about the emails embarrassed Clinton at key points in the campaign. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has denied that the Russian government was the source of the email dump.

As for the bots, they carried links not only to news stories but also to Democratic emails posted on WikiLeaks, especially those hacked from Podesta and made public in October, said Philip Howard, a professor at the Oxford University Internet Institute who has researched the bot attacks.

Howard said that, as an example, bots had spread links to fictional stories that accused Clinton of involvement in running a child-sex ring in the basement of a Washington pizza parlor. The posts inspired a North Carolina man to drive to Washington and fire an assault weapon in the restaurant, according to police reports.

I’m frankly astonished that they haven’t tried to claim that the Russians are responsible for putting the evil murder art in the Podestas’ houses yet.

Notice how all these stories do the same thing and exaggerate the actual accusations in order to try to make it look ridiculous and unworthy of investigation. I don’t recall anyone ever saying Clinton was actually running anything at Comet Pizza. Let’s face it, she’s so inept that if she’d ever tried to run a child-sex ring, the videos would have somehow ended up being broadcast live on Nickelodeon.

And it seems a little strange that no one ever seems to ask why someone would drive from North Carolina to Washington DC for the express purpose of not shooting anyone. Did the guy ever even get charged?

The fake intellectual

Steve Sailer, quite rightly, despises Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell is a poor man’s John Maynard Keynes, making a nice living selling false ideas useful to the establishment to the middle class midwits who erroneously consider themselves to be intelligent. But I had no idea that he was a complete shill who is essentially nothing more than an ad man dressed up rather unconvincingly as a public intellectual.

Malcolm Gladwell says that he got into journalism by accident, that his real dream was to work for an ad agency. “I decided I wanted to be in advertising. I applied to eighteen advertising agencies in the city of Toronto and received eighteen rejection letters, which I taped in a row on my wall,” he wrote in his What the Dog Saw. If true, then Gladwell didn’t fail at all.  Rather, he has achieved his dream of becoming an ad man beyond all expectation. His position as a public intellectual and respected New Yorker makes him infinitely more effective and useful as an ad man than he would ever be if he were sitting and writing ad copy in the office of some big-name advertising conglomerate.

Yep, Gladwell has come a long way from his youthful days at the National Journalism Center, but, on the other hand, he hasn’t really moved at all. As Philip Morris put it, the National Journalism Center “was developed to train budding journalists in free market political and economic principles . . . to get across our side of the story.” Their investment in Malcolm Gladwell has paid off beyond their wildest dreams.

Seriously, Gladwell’s resume reads like a demon’s list of American corporations, from tobacco companies to pharmaceutical companies, Bank of America, and even freaking ENRON. The more one looks at the “news” media, the more it becomes readily apparent how totally shot through with corruption it is.

I’ve always considered Gladwell to be a nonsensical babbler, but I actually thought he believed his bullshit. It turns out he is merely a ruthlessly cynical con man. Of course, it only stands to reason that the fake news would rely upon fake intellectuals.

The Opposition Media discovers Alt-Tech

Mother Jones publishes the usual “hey, we discovered these guys are totally evil racist misogynists” hit piece:

Alt-techies are scornful of South Asians working in Silicon Valley under H-1B visas. White Morpheus, the Daily Stormer reader, told me that he became a white supremacist after working with “unqualified subcontinentals who were brought in by visa fraud to drive down American engineering wages” and who “produce subpar work product.” (Before I contacted him, White Morpheus had posted on Daily Stormer about forming a neo-Nazi meetup group in Silicon Valley and using programming tools to create more video games “like Angry Goy.”)

The H-1B visa program, which Trump has vowed to reform, is unpopular among many tech workers due to concerns about its effect on wages and job security. Studies have shown that the largest recipients of H-1B visas are outsourcing firms, and that H-1B workers get paid less money than their American counterparts for the same work. But hardcore racists see an opening to turn the H-1B debate into a recruitment tool in the Valley. “A bill is being introduced in the House of Representatives that will neutralize the economic advantages these anti-American companies get from gaming the H1-b visa system,” a contributor to the Daily Stormer wrote recently. “If the cucks in Congress don’t block it, the not-so-humanitarian motives of big business in browning and third-worldizing America will be revealed.”

“Tomorrow, being a Hispanic, Black, Muslim or woman in the USA is going to be very scary,” the Latino founder of a Silicon Valley startup wrote on Facebook on election night. The post elicited an outpouring of solidarity from many Bay Area techies—but not from Andrew Torba, an alum of the Y-Combinator tech incubator, who tweeted a screenshot of the post with the line “Build the wall.”

When other Y-Combinator graduates began criticizing Torba on Facebook, he waded into the fray: “All of you: Fuck off,” he wrote. “Take your morally superior, elitist, virtue signaling bullshit and shove it.” Using an alt-right term meant to demean mainstream conservatives, he added, “I call it like I see it, and I helped meme a president into office, cucks.”

Y-Combinator soon banned Torba from its alumni network for “speaking in a threatening, harassing way towards other YC founders,” in violation of its ethics policy. Torba denied threatening or harassing YC founders and called the ban “a quintessential example of Silicon Valley censorship in action.” He later turned down my request to speak with him about the incident by posting parts of my email to him on social media with the comment “We don’t interview with fake news sites.”

Andrew was right to turn down the reporter’s “request to speak with him”. This article is an clear object lesson in WHY YOU NEVER TALK TO THE MEDIA. I’ve turned down four or five interview requests in the last week alone. Deny them content. Deny them the ability to use you for their Narrative. Don’t try to use them, because they are using you. Don’t dance for them.

As for all you idiot spergs with your predictable and oh-so-clever-advice-that-no-one-ever-thought-of-before to “record the interview yourself”, just shut up already. All that advice indicates is that you don’t know what you’re talking about and no one has ever bothered to interview you. I recorded the Wired interview that was used against me. I recorded the David Pakman interview as well. The only reason the latter recording helped is that I have a bigger microphone than Pakman; the former didn’t do me one damned bit of good even when I brought it to the attention of the Wired editor.

I don’t know how I can make it any more clear: DO NOT TALK TO THE MEDIA. Even one of my very few former exceptions to the rule, Milo, has demonstrated that it is fundamentally a losing proposition.

Now, I’m not talking about friends and allies. I’m doing Stefan’s show in a few weeks and we’re going to discuss Dostoevsky. I did an interview with Brittany and Tara that I believe will be posted today. That’s different. Neither Stefan nor Brittany nor Tara are part of the opposition media nor can they easily be utilized by the opposition media.