Tag: philosophy

Just create. Just do it.

Davis Aurini commends those who go out and create rather than sit around and complain:

Rather than trying to distribute the ideas – and handing them over to the Obsessives and Extremists who turn them into a farce – we need to own them.  We need to implement them.

We must go out there and create.

Roosh V took this theory, and put together a series of books which explained it’s application to his audience.  He wasn’t lecturing about theory – he was writing about practice.  He created something useful and marketable, a solid base which he owned.  This expanded into his forum, a community which has taken on a life of its own.  It is worth noting that the RVF exists for its own sake, not as a counter-reaction against an ideological opponent.  While feminists are frequently ridiculed on its pages, those who comprise the membership would be just as happy if there were no feminists to oppose.  RVF members don’t derive their identity from being anti-X – their identity comes from their individual accomplishments, and they frequent the forum for the sake of intellectual debate, entertainment, and networking.  Any political actions which derive from this shared identity will be as organic as the community-group that participates in local politics.

Another prominent example of the Red Pill in application is Vox Day’s various endeavours.  Of note are Castalia House and InfoGalactic.  Upon realizing that the publishing industry and Wikipedia had been taken over by far-left interest groups who eschewed objective truth and good fiction in favour of ideological nepotism, he didn’t go on a quest to ‘raise awareness’ of the problem; instead, he saw an opportunity for action.  While both of these projects are still finding their footing, by all accounts InfoGalactic is not only providing unbiased information, it’s providing it at a superior level to the equivalent articles on Wikipedia.   Castalia House, meanwhile, is free to pick up the talented authors who are being ignored by the mainstream publishers due to their race or sex.

The truth is that the SJWs are creating more opportunities for us than we can reasonably pursue. The trick is to identify the institutional weakness and hit it hard. For example, one thing I’ve learned about the comic industry is that the artists are often not paid royalties, just a flat per-page rate. So, one thing we are going to do to ensure that we eventually secure the best talent over time is, in addition to the flat fee, pay royalties for an extended period of time on our comic book sales, just as we do on our regular book sales.

You can’t start at the top, but you can come up with a plan to get there eventually. The Castalia House team goes over every print book carefully; if you compare our earliest print editions to the latest ones, you can see that we’re continually trying to improve the product. Creation is a dynamic process, and so the more you focus on improvement, the more you will gradually improve, until one day people suddenly blink and say, “Hey, you know, that’s actually rather good.”

Ever notice that no one calls Castalia House my vanity publishing house any more? I never had to say one single word to convince people otherwise. We just keep working on improving our offerings, one ebook or print edition or audiobook at a time. (I’ve always said that we’ll know that Castalia, or Infogalactic, is truly successful when the SJWs start denying that I had anything to do with it.) There is no magic plan for success and no easy path. You simply have to choose your path and walk it as tirelessly as you can.

Speaking of Castalia House, it turns out that today is a dual-release day. THE LAST WITCHKING & OTHER STORIES is now available on Amazon and Audible. Narrated by Jeremy Daw, our wonderful new narrator, it is 9 hours and 13 minutes of epic fantasy set in Selenoth. It includes “The Wardog’s Coin”, “Qalabi Dawn”, and “A Magic Broken” as well as the three stories from the ebook edition, “The Last Witchking”, “The Hoblets of Wiccam Fensboro”, and “Opera Vita Aeterna”.

The next Selenoth audiobook will be Summa Elvetica & Other Stories, which will also be narrated by Jeremy Daw.

Ideas must be sold

The Z-man observes that too many ideologues resist accepting the fact that their ideas have to be sold rather than simply accepted as holy writ from on high:

Good salesmen never lose sight of reality. That’s the problem with outsider political movements. They allow themselves to be trapped in narrow ideological ruts so any sales effort, that deviates in the slightest from dogma, results in civil war. The only pitchmen the ideologues accept are the guys waving around the severed hand, talking about how their product is great at cleaning blood stains. Any concession to public sensibilities is treated like heresy. The result is a self-ghettoization of the movement.

This has always been the problem with the libertarians. You can get a large audience in favor of limiting state regulation of commerce, but you are never getting a critical mass around the idea of abandoning paper money. You can talk people into loosening up marijuana laws, but no one is signing up for legal meth sales. That’s why the limit on libertarians is to have some of their language appropriated by Buckleyites. Otherwise, they are seen as a collection of eccentric weirdos.

That’s what’s happening with the alt-right and its fellow travelers. The core believers refuse to give in on basic tactics, like banning Nazi gear or minimizing the JQ stuff. The result is anyone that tries to soften the image is attacked as a traitor. That’s what you see with the Stormies. Anglin can’t accept even the token compromises at a site like Gab, so he goes to war with it. This ensures that his followers never stray from the ghetto that he has created for them. It also means potential recruits have a reason to ignore him.

This does not mean the alt-right is condemned to having fat guys in their tighty-whities, dancing around at their events. To avoid that fate, they need to produce leaders with the credibility to swat down guys like Anglin, when he gets out of control, but also aware of the fact that growing the movement means appealing to the general public. That means softening the pitch and making some compromises. They don’t have anyone capable of doing that at he moment, but they better find some.

He’s absolutely right. That’s why I reluctantly accepted the need to move into video despite the existence of Castalia House; I realized that we will never reach the non-literate majority through the medium of books. We have to speak their language and meet them on their ground. We need to accept that our preferences are irrelevant in this regard.

This is always difficult. The literate don’t want to deal with non-literate media. The dialectic-speakers don’t want to deal with rhetoric. The non-aggressive don’t want to deal with aggression. The socialists don’t want to deal with subjective value. The pagans don’t want to deal with the Christian roots of the West.

But regardless of who we are and what we desire, we have to take reality as it is, not as we wish it to be.

Leadership

This is how you do it. The first step is to understand that your success is not all about you and it never will be.

Lynch did everything right all day, starting with bringing his much less famous backup backs Jalen Richard and DeAndre Washington out on his flanks when he got the loudest ovation in years during pregame introductions. That decision was pure Lynch. When he told Richard and Washington he wanted them to take the field on either side of him, Richard said: “I was like, ‘They cool with this?’ Lynch said, ‘It doesn’t matter what they say. You boys are coming out with me.’ That just got me pumped from the get-go.”

The ideas, they percolate

An article on PJ media about a distressed young liberal woman who keeps finding out that the men to whom she is attracted turn out to be Trump voters.

No woman wants a man she can push around, walk all over, or beat in an arm-wrestling match. Politics be damned. That’s not how biology works. (Now, I realize I may be talking to biology deniers, but you asked “why can’t I stop?” and this is why. Biology.) Women are naturally attracted to alpha males and not that gamma guy in a onesie with fragile wrists. The left has emasculated their men to the point of putting them in dresses and sending them into the ladies’ room. It’s no wonder you need to shop outside your herd. Why the heck wouldn’t you?

The reality you’re facing is that your guys are the ones getting a wedgie and ours are the ones you want to go home with. I don’t blame you.

People often think that influence is somehow related to everyone knowing your name. That’s not influence. That’s fame.

On a related note, I’ve been hearing for the last week or two that the various kerfluffles with the two Andrews, Anglin and Torba, are “bad PR” and bad for my brand.

The objective measures:

  • Twitter followers declined from 33,000 to 32,800
  • Five Infogalactic Burn Unit members canceled their subscriptions. All five have already been replaced.
  • Daily average site traffic increased 5 percent
  • Daily average book sales increased 225 percent
  • 7 8 new Legal Legion of Evil volunteers.
It would appear there is a sound basis for the Fake Right theory that Mike Cernovich became a successful shekel-grubbing book salesman on the basis of metaphorically punching Clown Nazis. That wasn’t my intention, but if this is what “destroying my brand” looks like, I think I can live with it. Although perhaps the more apt term would be “thrive” on it.

By the way, there is going to be a BIG surprise awaiting the self-appointed experts on defamation presently expressing their legal theories on Gab. I have to admit, I was genuinely shocked myself to discover what is actually considered defamation per se in the relevant jurisdiction. I mean, there is not a single non-lawyer, on either side of the issue, who had a clear grasp of the actual legal situation at hand.

Mailvox: so just give up and die?

I have to confess, I find the defeatism of some of the critics of my advice to scratch and claw and stay occupied with genuine work to be more than a little mystifying.

Actually, I’ve been reading this whole comments section as well as the original post in fucking amazement, mouth agape.

For someone like VD who espouses this Lex Luthor type UHIQ evil genius his advice is comically out of date, but not surprising. When you run in rarified air feet usually not touching the ground this is not uncommon.

I know highly qualified people scratching out a living and just getting by who had this whole “keep your chin up, be strong, blah blah” mentality and it has been dragging on for half a decade or more in some cases.

Those days, quite frankly, are over. In the land of the eternal victim and the affirmative action hire your “just be busy and take any job” fantasy is about as relevant as thinking you are the most qualified candidate actually matters.

It is like these people are living in some odd alternate reality where they can -clearly- see the pozzing of the culture at large, but somehow think that in the job climate, there is still something resembling sanity, rationality, or logic.

Odd that… this is one of the worst articles I’ve ever seen here actually.

The thing is, in every single case, the individual criticizing the advice completely fails to suggest an alternative. Crime? Welfare? Suicide? More education? Kidnapping the relatives of HR executives?

I’m genuinely curious if they actually have anything to offer, or if my suspicions are correct and they are simply young, college-educated gammas who have no idea how to find or create a job. The fact that this particular gentleman is talking about “highly qualified people”, “most qualified candidate”, and “affirmative action hire” tends to indicate that he does not understand the distinction between corporate paper-pushing and actual work.

Look, we Generation Xers know what it is like to be prepared for one labor environment only to discover that all of one’s preparation has proven to be useless and misguided and generally inapplicable. The situation is what it is. So, what are you going to do about it? Cry, complain, and give up? Or make your own way?

Unemployment is a state of mind

Crew commented, correctly, on the fact that many managers and executives are unwilling to hire people who are unemployed. Their reasoning is pretty straightforward: if you were any good, then surely in this time of near-universal incompetence, you would have a job.

And, let’s face it, more often than not, they are correct on the average, even if that is not true in the case of the special, highly skilled snowflake that all of the unemployed readers of this blog indubitably are.

This is nothing new. It has been this way for at least 25 years. So, one can either cry and complain about the situation, or one can accept it and figure out a way to utilize it to one’s advantage. Utilize it? Yes, precisely. Allow me to explain.

20-something years ago, one of my best friends was fired from the small, but elite law firm where he worked, because he had too tender a conscience to simply invent billable hours out of nothing, as they required of their associates. He spent over a year fruitlessly applying to various law firms around the city and got absolutely nowhere, as he ran into the same “if you don’t already have a job, we don’t want you” problem that presently plagues so many unemployed individuals today.

I advised him to get a job, any job at all, even if it was sweeping floors at a fast-food restaurant. When he asked, puzzled, how that would help him find a job as a lawyer, I told him that as a small business owner, if I see a lawyer who is willing to get his hands dirty and do whatever he needs to do in order to get by, that’s exactly the guy I want working for me.

So, still somewhat dubious, he took my advice. He got a job at CompUSA selling computers, mostly because he wanted to be able to talk computers on par with the rest of our social circle. Within six months, he was the store’s best expert on computers, and had become the go-to guy for all the other salespeople. He continued interviewing, to little avail, until a year after taking the CompUSA job, he interviewed with a growing technology consulting company. His legal background was unexceptional compared to all the other candidates, but they were blown away by his in-depth knowledge of computers, particularly when he was able to point out some strategic mistakes they were risking on the basis of their failure to understand where the consumer market was headed.

They were also impressed when they asked him about his strange resume, and he had a ready answer for them. He explained that after being let go, he had plenty of free time on his hands and figured that it was a good idea to get paid to learn something new.

He got the job. Then, when their company was bought by a much larger competitor, the acquiring company was so impressed with his performance in the negotiations and the contract-writing that they not only hired him, but named him the successor to their outgoing lead attorney. Following a second acquisition by an even bigger competitor, he was made a director and the head of the legal department of a $1.5 billion corporation.

Don’t quit. Don’t cry. Don’t complain. Do something, anything. Volunteer for an Open Source project. Become the volunteer IT guy at a local organization. Get a job doing anything. All of these things not only create the possibility of new opportunities, but send a very strong message that you are a professionally ruthless doer who isn’t afraid to work and is reliably going to get the job done.

Change or fall behind

Snidely Whiplash fails to understand why he’s not employed. Crew, who is not only of the Silicon Valley hiring class, but is the #2 Techstar and a member of the Infogalactic Star Council, is unable to set him straight.

Bob: The companies who try to move don’t succeed. They can’t convince their employees to move with them, and they can’t find the people they need in other locations.

Crew: I think this is not true. What you have in Silicon Valley is enormous numbers of H1Bs, some of whom have been laid off in the latest layoff rounds but they vary greatly in quality and putting together a good team can be very difficult.

Crew: Certainly, where I am we need people but we cannot find them and we are in the heart of Silicon Valley, so we do without and things just take longer to do. And the real problem is finding people who know how to balance short-term business needs (implementing what the customer wants to get their business) with longer-term company needs (doing it in a way that is supportable over the long term and doesn’t paint you into a corner.)

Crew: Despite that I still find time to work on Infogalactic and a couple of open source software projects. The reality is that people don’t go for those who have been laid off in most cases. Personally, I would prefer to employ Americans … but Silicon Valley has driven many of them out …

Snidely: And with pathetic attitudes like that, you’re helping to drive them out.

Jack: You still looking Snidely?

Snidely Whiplash: Sadly, yes, Jack. White, laid off, and over 50. Crew up there won’t hire me, no matter my skills or experience, because he’s an idiot.

I suggest that Snidely’s difficulty has less to do with his skills, his experience, or Crew’s purported idiocy than his personality. I’m not at all surprised to hear that he’s unemployed. He complains that Crew wouldn’t hire him, but I wouldn’t be inclined to hire him either. It’s one thing to not play particularly well with others, it’s another thing altogether to pride yourself on your complete inability to do so; even his self-selected moniker is an indication of misplaced pride. It’s not an accident that someone who elects to call himself “snide” reliably goes out of his way to say unnecessarily negative things about almost everything and everyone.

Snidely, that’s your main challenge. Not anti-American discrimination in tech. The moment I hear that negative, superior tone in a man’s voice, I immediately cross him off the list, whether he’s a programmer, an artist, or a writer. Sure, he may be directing it at something we mutually despise now, but I know perfectly well he’s going to be directing it at a co-worker, at the project, or at me before long. My experience has taught that such individuals never prove to be worth their downside, no matter how talented they are.

I’ll give you an example of that negative communication style right in that same thread.

This is how a normal person expresses his opinion: “Hey, it would be great if you would release audio-only versions of the videos. I would prefer to listen to those.”

That is a helpful, positive way to express an opinion. It’s a good idea too. Why not be sure to release the videos in podcast form or make them otherwise available for audio download? I expect we will do just that.

Now, this is how Snidely communicated the same idea: “One thing I would encourage, as it’s probably a make-or-break for me, is to have just the audio portion. Frankly, you’re not that attractive, and both my money and my bandwidth are limited.”

Same idea, different delivery, and it inspires an entirely different reaction: What the Hell? Fuck that guy! One has to read it twice to even register what the relevant opinion is, so distracting is the negativity.

There are three problems in just two sentences. First, the tone is heavily negative (make-or-break, frankly, not that attractive, limited). Second, he twice tries to make the entire subject about him when it isn’t. Third, he insults my appearance, and even worse, he does it without any need to do so in order to make his case. It’s just egregious. Now, I could not care less what some 50-something man happens to think about my appearance, but that sort of comment is not going to go over at all well with the average individual who is vain enough to be making videos.

So, Snidely, why would you EVER say anything like that? You didn’t need to justify your preference for audio over video, because I was openly asking for everyone’s opinions. And why are you whining and complaining about who Crew hires or doesn’t hire? You not only haven’t given him any reason to consider hiring you other than empty public posturing, you’ve given him excellent cause to not even accept you as a volunteer for any of the high-profile projects he manages. That’s not intelligent. That’s self-sabotage.

Now, I understand that this is a very challenging labor environment. It’s stressful for everyone. Even those with seemingly secure jobs know that they could lose them at any time due to an untimely comment overheard by the wrong person, a corporate acquisition, or a corporate move. One friend of mine, long self-employed, was convinced by his wife to take a great job offer at one of the strongest, most successful Fortune 50 technology companies in the world, in the interest of stability. He was even assigned to a mission-critical project. I would have sworn he had some of the best job security on the planet.

Nine months later, the CEO announced that the corporation was shutting down all its activities in my friend’s state. Since my friend was mission-critical, he was given the opportunity to uproot his family and move across the country to a place they knew no one. He wisely declined. So much for stability and job security.

The point is that in this environment, you have to continually up your game. And whether your weakness is on the skills side, the experience side, or the personality side, you have to shore it up. As I mentioned in last night’s Darkstream, video was never my medium. It still isn’t my preferred one, but I have upped my video game, and I am going to continue to increase it because that is what I have to do if I am going to be at all relevant to the 90 percent of the population that is post-literate.

The times always change. We can either change with them or we can fall behind.

Overheard

At the post-dinner table:
Vox: The expression on the face of someone coming out of a Japanese toilet is 40 percent “I think I’ve just been raped”, 40 percent “I’ve never felt this clean in my life”, and 20 percent “I’m not sure if I liked that or not.”
Lucy: That sounds like my average Saturday night.

The Man in the Arena

This is a nice defense of yours truly by Rabbi B at Men of the West. I don’t ask for anyone to defend me, but I do appreciate those of every race, religion, and even creed who are willing to stand beside me, or even just hold their fire long enough to pay a modicum of respect.

There is an old saying that it’s the pioneers who take the arrows. This is most certainly true of Vox Day and perhaps ironically so, considering his Native American heritage. I think many would agree that Vox has certainly taken his fair share of arrows lately. Now, this may not qualify him as the undisputed leader of the Alt-right (and Vox is quite loathe to exalt or proclaim himself as a leader of anything), but I would argue that it certainly qualifies him as one of its unsung heroes.
Vox is simply a person who is committed to the truth; always has been and always will be, period. In Jewish parlance, he is a mensch. In an age where the truth is spun, disparaged, and cast to the ground to be trampled underfoot, Vox is not content to stand by and do nothing. Vox, to put it plainly, is a man who is valiant for the truth.
We find ourselves in a time where the end justifies the means and the truth be damned, and so Vox is not only going to be misunderstood and misrepresented due to his superior intellect for which many are simply no match, but even more so on account of the truths which he tirelessly expresses, champions, and defends day in and day out.
Because of his staunch commitment to the truth, he is inevitably going to make some enemies along the way and, consequently, he is going to be forced to endure and withstand a steady barrage of attacks from every quarter: the Left, the Right, the center, the cuckservatives, the neo-cons, the libertarians, the Alt-right, the Alt-lite, the you-fill-in-the-blank. There is no shortage of those who oppose the truth and who are unafraid and brazen enough to relentlessly attack the valiant vessels of the truth. Vox just happens to be such a vessel for a time such as this.

The thing that I always try to keep in mind is that the truth is what it is, regardless of what you, or I, or anyone else, happen to think. Now, we see as through through a glass, darkly. So, be as ruthlessly honest with yourself as you can, and all the rest will tend to fall in line on its own.
I don’t expect everyone to agree with me. I don’t expect ANYONE to agree with me on everything. How could I, when I don’t always agree with my own ideas from five or ten years ago? What I expect is the aforementioned arrows, some merited, some not so much.
I don’t really care about labels and parties and movements and such. What I care about is the underlying ideas that they represent, in some cases accurately, in some cases not accurately at all. Because ideas are how we understand the truth, and whatever small fragments of the Truth that we are capable of comprehending.