The shattering of the neocons

They call themselves Never Trumpers, but they are actually Trotskyite world revolutionaries aka neoconservatives. And their day is done.

The Never Trumpers say they don’t recognize a Republican Party where the core tenets are neither free trade nor foreign democracy promotion. But maybe they just didn’t know their voters by sight, because the only party that has truly departed recognition is Never Trump. Each week brings this movement a new and bizarre position: Opposing tax cuts, supporting Obamacare; wishing North Korean talks ill, wishing Democratic investigators well; dreaming of European political meddling, pining for American political comeuppance.

Rick Santorum, the Catholic working-class firebrand rarely seen among Washington’s polite classes, had long commented that a party such as the GOP, with a donor class so out of line with its base, could not possibly continue to function. There could not be such a massive realignment without something somewhere snapping, but despite the Never Trump hysteria, it doesn’t appear to be the party. Though the president’s House was defeated in the first post-Trump national elections and his two-year approval among Democrats lies at historic lows, his approval with his own voters—those who the Never Trumpers courted not long ago—is second only to George W. Bush after 9/11.

As the second year of Trump’s presidency ends, these former Republicans have insulted and alienated their readers until they had none. They’ve squandered their time on unimportant, self-righteous panel discussions, finally reduced to bobbing up in partisan anti-Trump venues surrounded by men and women who called them war criminals just years before, buoyed for a time by saying the right thing about the right enemy. NAFTA, mean words and Donald Trump cannot possibly be the origin of these shattered minds, however vital those were to the breaking.

There is no party for the neocons anymore. The Democratic Party is now the Party of Diversity. Republican Party has finally slipped its Buckley & Bush leash. And no amount of declaring The Littlest Chickenhawk a True Conservative and a Real American, or pushing him to the forefront of the media, is going to put them back in control again.

Discovery

This weekend, we discovered that Indiegogo actually broke their own refund policy when they refunded all the AH:Q backers.

When are contributions not eligible for a refund?

Contributions cannot be refunded by Indiegogo, if any of the following are true:

• The contribution funds have already been transferred to the campaign owner
• The campaign has ended [emphasis mine -VD]
• The perk associated with the contribution has been fulfilled (contribution is marked as fulfilled on Indiegogo by the campaigner)
• Indiegogo determines that there has been an abuse of our Terms of Use, or the refund policy.

The AH:Q campaign ended on September 26, 2018. On October 11, Indiegogo froze Arkhaven's account and announced it was initiating a review process. Less than an hour later, but two weeks after the end of the campaign, Indiegogo sent ineligible refunds to all the AH:Q backers in violation of its own refund policy. It wasn't until the next day, October 12, that Arkhaven was informed that Indiegogo "will be processing refunds for your campaign."

UPDATE: It just keeps getting better. From the same Refund Policy page.

Please note, we are unable to cancel your campaign or issue mass refunds for any campaign that has raised funds.

C-can you feel that? Can you hear that? That sounds like... rubble. And it's... it's bouncing!

Women working destroys marriage

The social science backs up common sense and observation concerning the terrible social policy of encouraging women to work outside the home rather than marry and raise children.

We examine causes and consequences of relative income within households. We show that the distribution of the share of income earned by the wife exhibits a sharp drop to the right of 1/2 , where the wife’s income exceeds the husband’s income. We argue that this pattern is best explained by gender identity norms, which induce an aversion to a situation where the wife earns more than her husband. We present evidence that this aversion also impacts marriage formation, the wife’s labor force participation, the wife’s income conditional on working, marriage satisfaction, likelihood of divorce, and the division of home production. Within marriage markets, when a randomly chosen woman becomes more likely to earn more than a randomly chosen man, marriage rates decline. In couples where the wife’s potential income is likely to exceed the husband’s, the wife is less likely to be in the labor force and earns less than her potential if she does work. In couples where the wife earns more than the husband, the wife spends more time on household chores; moreover, those couples are less satisfied with their marriage and are more likely to divorce. These patterns hold both cross-sectionally and within couples over time.

Whatever the theoretical benefits of doubling the percentage of women in the workforce were, the material costs to society have dramatically exceeded them. This is not about women working per se, as one-third of women have always worked, but the change since 1950 is that most young marriage-age women now work so that old men can collect Social Security, watch TV, and play golf instead of working as they always had before.

The results have been not merely dyscivic and dysgenic, but downright dyscivilizational. And regardless of what you think on the matter, it is clear that a society which encourages widespread female education and employment is not sustainable and is guaranteed to collapse sooner rather than later.

ComicsGate history: 2VS edition

2VS is up to his usual antics again, this time on Captain Red Pill's channel. You all already know my position on 2VS. He's not an enemy, unlike our actual enemies he's not out to destroy Western civilization, Christianity, or the European nations. That being said, he's not a friend, and due to his intrinsic unreliability, he's not even a potential ally. And while he's a talented illustrator, he draws far too slowly to function within Arkhaven's production process.

I'm not angry about his decision to attempt to revise his past indiscretions with regards to ComicsGate, I'm not even annoyed. I find it to all be tedious and unnecessary at this point. What happened has happened. It's a pity, it was ridiculous, and I wish I had simply stayed well out of it, but it was probably all for the best in the end. The thing is, between building our infrastructure, fighting our legal battle with Indiegogo (which is now officially on), and continuing to innovate and get our comics out, none of us at Arkhaven has any time or interest in any ongoing Internet drama. Ethan has his own issues to deal with, as apparently there was some problem with the writer he hired, and he's already had to push the release of his comic back so far that we may actually complete and publish all six issues of AH:Q before Cyberfrog ships. Why he wants to keep going on and on about ComicsGate makes no sense to me.

2VS: Vox Day is somebody who I really, really enjoyed my acquaintance with. I didn't really know him — like, I didn't know his beliefs — but what I did know is that he was kind of Alt‑Right, and he decided he wanted to come in and fight these SJWs in comics without having known anything about comics, and he put out this crowdfunded comic book called Alt★Hero.

She was wearing, like, a Confederate flag for a costume. She was a hot chick. It was everything meant to trigger social justice warriors. Now, my attitude was, look, you don't want to fight the extremes with an extreme; you want to offer a moderate — you want to offer a centrist alternative to get all the audience, get all the customers. Yeah, you know, something that was my plan. His plan was just to be the opposite side. So we we fought about that for a little while. I had him on my show, interviewed him, you know. I don't know ... we kind of talked. We formed kind of a weird kind of friendship over the telephone. And then what happened was he decided that what he wanted to do was he wanted to make a publishing imprint called ComicsGate.

CRP: Oh, now I remember. So he stole your name?

2VS: Well, it's not my name. It’s just a hashtag. But in point of fact, you know, it's like there are people who consider themselves ComicsGaters who just didn't want the forced association with Vox Day. The idea was that the hashtag belongs to everybody and nobody, and you can't really — like, if you're gonna — if Vox Day is going to publish a comic book company called ComicsGate, the implication is that, you know, ComicsGate is Vox Day’s belief system.

And people had a real, real tough time with that and didn't want him to co-opt the movement. So I talked to some lawyers, and they said, “You do a YouTube show called ComicsGate Live, you actually own the copyright to the name ‘ComicsGate’.”

CRP: Oh, wow.

2VS: “Well, that's like ...”

CRP: Shit.

2VS: “... because you monetized it first.” So I hit Vox day with a ‘cease and desist’ and threatened him with a lawsuit and we've had problems ever since, he and I. But I told him, you know, when he told me he was gonna do this, I said, “Vox” — and these are magic words coming from me — I said, “Vox, as a friend, don't do it.” And he just ignored me and went on to a Livestream and announced it. Now, if I say to you “as a friend”, and you go against that, I'm asking for a favor like that, and you just defy it ... you turn, you know ... I can either owe you a favor or we're gonna become enemies; it's one of those two things. That's the way it works in my world. That's the way it's always worked in my world. So if I say to you, “Coach Red Pill, as a friend, don't do that to me” — don't do this, don't do that — and you do it anyway, you've become my enemy, because I rarely say things like that. I don't make requests to people, but I knew this was gonna cause all kinds of trouble. And it has.

I mean, it's a shame. So Vox Day went on a whole tirade, trying to smear me and calling me two-faced and everything. I'm very much singularly-faced. I asked him not to do this because I felt that it would hurt the movement that we've been working so hard to nurture and build into something, and he chose to try to co-opt it, I think, for his own reasons, which I don't want to speculate about. But anyway, Vox Day also has gone after Jordan Peterson. Just, I mean, total ... sorry. The book 12 ... well, yeah, like he ... I think so ... I think he had some good points. I actually told him. I said, “I gotta say, I'm friends with Jordan Peterson. I like him. But you did a good job. I mean, I think you did point out some of his foibles and weaknesses.” Yeah, you know, good on him. But, you know, you got to be honest with people even if you ... yeah, even if you don't agree with them about everything. Even if you're in a fight, man. When they get one over, you gotta kind of acknowledge. It’s humility, you know. You got call ’em like you see ’em, you know, not like you'd like to see ’em, you know?

CRP: No, I'd ... Look, in so far as Vox Day ... I have no opinion about him. I have never interacted with the guy, you know ... but in so far as what you said earlier, that he wanted to do a comic book character who would, like, trigger the SJWs, trigger the Libs, right? All right. Here, with you, I agree that it has to be something that will appeal to the normies, to the broad middle.

2VS: That’s the only way to beat them.

CRP: Yeah, and to go for the extreme? No. You just create a caricature. Not a cartoon in a cool way. Like, you do, but like a character in the sense of a very small niche audience is gonna care about that shit, you know. And if you're a businessman, because you are and I used to be involved in commercial art, okay? I mean, I was writing stuff for money. I just, you know, not not for accolades. I could give a shit about that. I was, you know, it's something that I was remunerated for, the same for you. You do comic books for money. It's a profession. It's a job. It's a perfectly respectable profession. And so the idea of doing something that will only appeal to a niche seems to me counterintuitive. You want to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. And sometimes you recognize that you have to put in elements that will appeal to a niche who will be like the hook for the bigger fish of the wider audience if you will, to make a very crude or weird metaphor, but you seen I'm saying. I mean it's all perfectly fine, but you're trying to appeal to as broad an audience as possible, and that I think what Vox Day is doing, it's just not appealing to me.

2VS: He can do it. I mean, you know, the thing is, Vox Day can call himself ... there are people in the chat that are, like, you know, Vox Day fans that are outraged right now. This guy HorseMumbler1 one says, “Ethan is lying, Coach Red Pill. Go listen to what Vox said about it at the time. The ComicsGaters acted like a bunch of half-wits.”

Well, HorseMumbler1, you know, I mean, I think we've litigated this to death, but I mean, I have the receipts, and, you know, Vox knows that I've got the receipts. And by the way, since then Vox has come to me asking for some favors. I want you to know that.

CRP: What kind of favors?

2VS: No ... no comment ... so, you know, Vox has his way of spinning a tale, of spinning a yarn. I wouldn't necessarily think that what Vox had to say ...

By the way, Vox is so smart about some things and so fucking dumb about other things, it's unreal. Like, he recently got his fans all together to explain to them why his model for the comic book industry was so much better than mine. I mean, I've lived in comics for 25 years. But what he did was he took Cyberfrog, and he said, “Look, Ethan's raised $628,000 for Cyberfrog, so why don't we divide ... you know, the main book is 48 pages long. Divide 48 into 628,000, that's how much each page costs of Cyberfrog to make. Ethan needs this. He needs $15,000/page to draw Cyberfrog. Now, on the other hand my book over here, Alt★Hero, brought in $25,000. Divide 48 into 25,000, we're bringing it in at $500 a page, so obviously our model is much more economic and makes more sense.” Because I was like ...

CRP: You raised pre-sales, pre-sales of the book, right?

2VS: It's called profit, Vox. It's not ... I make more per page than you. I don't require that much. I can draw it for free. But, you know, it's like saying, “How the hell is JK Rowling gonna write another Harry Potter book?” You know, her first book earned $117,000,000. Divide that by 500 pages. It's too expensive to write another Harry Potter book. Most half-witted and weirdo argument that he was making to his credulous audience, and, uh, you know, they're here.

I mean, you know I love you guys. But anyway the point is that, you know, their complaint is that did I gatekeep Vox Day? No, he just wasn't ... I wasn't gonna let him have the name ComicsGate if I had any legal protection over it, which I did, and he knew that. But, you know, it's everybody's. It's just not Vox’s exclusively, let's put it that way. I saved it for everyone.

CRP: So right now it's sort of like, you have the rights to it, but you're basically standing aside so anybody can use it?

2VS: That's correct, okay. Vox Day can say, “I am ComicsGate,” and I will say, “Okay, Vox, they can have a YouTube show called ComicsGate, and I'll say, “Okay,” and everybody will, but if Vox Day wants to set up a publishing ... like a monetized publishing arm that makes it look as though he represents ComicsGate, I'm not gonna let that happen, because ComicsGate is just a hashtag that everybody has to be able to use, and it doesn't imply association, like, unwanted association with any one individual. It can't be political like that. People can't perceive it to be Alt-Right. It has to be moderate. It has to be everyone. Now, the Alt-Right can be involved if they want. The Alt-Left can be involved. It doesn't really matter. It's just ComicsGate ... the idea is that there are no politics. It's apolitical. It's all about money. It's all about serving the customer. It's the opposite of the mainstream of the comic book industry right now.

With regards to my asking Ethan for a favor, it's absolutely true that I did recently ask him for something through a third party, something that is in literally everyone's interest, and I can confirm that he had the decency and the good sense to provide me with what I requested. As I have repeatedly said, he is not the enemy, and I would not hesitate to return the favor. I also should point out that contra some of the comments in last night's Darkstream, it's very clear that Ethan did NOT accuse me of ripping of Taleb, which everyone here knows perfectly well that I did not do. In fact, Ethan doesn't even appear to be familiar with Taleb in the first place.

Did you hear that Vox Day fans I use one of Vox's words anti fragile is Talab invented that all the time yeah yeah yeah well anti fragile is a concept that Nassim Taleb invented which is very very astute concept but yeah it's basically a system that becomes stronger with more use and abuse yeah Vox, they ripped that off him oh that's funny okay I didn't know about that.

For reference, here is the very first reference to antifragility in my 2015 bestseller, SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police.

Strategic Principle #8: Be antifragile.

I cannot too highly recommend Nassim Nicholas Taleb's 2012 book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, or too strongly stress the importance of applying the principles he explains in it to your life, especially if you are going to take a stand against the SJW Narrative. It should be your goal to become “a thing that gains from disorder” because disorder is the natural state of the world, particularly now that SJWs have become increasingly influential within it. Antifragility in this context means you have a maximal degree of flexibility, a high level of freedom of movement, sufficient psychological strength to withstand collective social pressure, and a lack of vulnerability to the usual SJW tactics of disqualification, discrediting, and disemployment.

On what planet could that possibly be considered "ripping off", much less "plagiarism", as one person characterized it?

Most DEFINITELY not Alt-Right

I have no idea why anyone thinks this clown is even remotely a threat to anyone except himself. Although I suppose it's possible you might actually pull something laughing at him.

The alt-right should be in favor of banning of all video games, and actually we should go further and we should make all video games feminist, extreme feminism, so basically the video game will be you have to ask permission to kiss girls and they just say no all the time. That's like you keep going up levels and you keep not getting laid. That should be the only video games allowed, and basically it's a it's just a you know you have heroic versions of purple-haired SJWs conquering Nazis and things like that.

So it we basically want these video games to turn off as many young men as possible so that they will turn on to something that's actually real and I'm actually serious about this.

Speaking as a professional multi-platinum-selling game designer, don't quit your day job. Assuming, of course, that you've ever actually had one.

JORDANETICS now in audio

JORDANETICS: A Journey Into the Mind of Humanity’s Greatest Thinker

by Vox Day

Narrated by: Thomas Landon

7 hours 32 minutes. $14.99. DRM-free MP3 format. Available only at the Arkhaven store.

Jordan Peterson is believed by many to be the greatest thinker that humanity has ever known. He is Father Figure, Philosopher-King, and Prophet to the millions of young men who are his most fervent fans and followers. He is the central figure of the Intellectual Dark Web, an academic celebrity, and an unparalleled media phenomenon who has shattered all conceptions of what it means to be modern celebrity in the Internet Age. He has thought thoughts that no man has ever thought before. He has dared to dream dreams that no man has ever dreamed before.

Of course, Jordan Peterson also happens to be a narcissist, a charlatan, and an intellectual con man who doesn’t even bother to learn the subjects upon which he lectures. He is a defender of free speech who silences other speakers, a fearless free-thinker who never hesitates to run away from debates, difficult questions, and controversial issues, a philosopher who rejects the conventional definition of truth, and a learned professor who has failed to read most of the great classics of the Western canon. He is, in short, a shameless and unrepentant fraud who lacks even a modicum of intellectual integrity.

But is Jordan Peterson more than a mere fraud? Is he something more sinister, more unbalanced, and even more dangerous? In JORDANETICS: A Journey Into the Mind of Humanity’s Greatest Thinker, political philosopher Vox Day delves deeply into the core philosophy that Jordan Peterson advocates in both his written works and his video lectures. In doing so, Day methodically builds a shocking case that will convince even the most skeptical Jordan Peterson supporter to reconsider both the man and his teachings.

Note: remember to turn NoScript off if you're having trouble with your order. If it's your first order, you may need to call your bank to tell them to approve the European charge.

There is a bonus in the Bookstream, when one of Richard Spencer's little gamma pals shows up and demands that I talk to Spencer... apparently not realizing that Spencer ran away from a debate with me proposed by the Ralph Retort. And it seems 2VS is now running around telling people that I plagiarized... NN Taleb?

This is why there is no media or new media worth doing anymore. It's all just grist for the drama mill.

Invasive species in Europe

It's strange that scientists expect people to be concerned about the threat invasive species pose to the native squirrel population, but not the native human population.

Meet 9 Creepy Species That Pose Greatest Threat to Europe

Scientists have identified 66 species of plants and animals that pose the greatest threat to biodiversity and ecosystems. These species, entering and falling into new territories, displace the local flora and fauna.

Scientists considered eight species to be the most dangerous, another 40 to be high-risk, and 18 others to be medium-risk.

Species considered by the team of researchers included plants, terrestrial invertebrates and some marine and freshwater vertebrates and invertebrates.

This is just additional evidence that even those who affect to believe in evolution by natural selection don't really believe in it.

How to spot a liar

Owen Benjamin explains:

Number one is a passive voice. Notice when someone doesn't use the word "I". Passive. Like saying "you". When you add too many words, liars a lot of times are trying so hard not to be caught lying that they overdescribe things. They won't say things like "I saw, I see", those are direct, that's direct language. It's always passive. "You'd be inclined to believe that". Liars also speak in the negative. Always understand that when a liar is speaking, they're always simply trying to avoid being caught in a deception. They're not trying to say anything, they're only trying to evade. It's like word judo.

So they don't say what they saw, they say what they didn't see. And they say "you". It's never "I". Because when you say "I saw, I went, I am, I will" that is people hold you to that. That's why Kennedy was like "We will go to the Moon. That's very direct language.

Evasive language is when you say "the gun went off". You don't say "I shot someone", you put all the onus on the object and not yourself. Like "you know how fast you were going?" "The car started accelerating." No.  A liar is always trying to take everything off you and you're never going to make a statement that can later proven to be false.

It's so funny because if someone speaks clearly and strongly and with meaning, I am so much more likely to give them the benefit of the doubt as just being wrong than if someone speaks this way. The odds are really high that they are liars.... They also tend to stutter on the word "I" when they are lying. "I... I... I."

I am immediately suspicious of anyone who will not answer a direct question or who begins evasive action. I knew Jordan Peterson was a liar due to his dishonest response to criticism on the IQ question, so when I saw his first video and witnessed his "I... I... I've been thinking so deeply about this for so long that I can't possibly give you an answer", that simply confirmed what I already knew. But it would have been enough to make me deeply suspicious of anything the man said.

Another tell is when they avoid precision with regards to quantities. They suddenly can't remember what their IQ is, but somehow, they know it is really high! They can't tell you how much they owe you, but they always know to the penny how much someone else owes them.

Financial blacklisting

Allum Bokhari traces it back to the credit card companies and the SPLC:

Crowdfunding platforms like Patreon, which allow online content creators to collect donations from their supporters, are frequently cast as the primary villains in financial blacklisting. Patreon’s recent ban of YouTuber Carl Benjamin, better known by his moniker Sargon of Akkad, triggered a crisis for the platform. Both donors and creators — including prominent atheist Sam Harris — quit the platform in protest, while Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin pledged to create an alternative platform that is pro-free speech.

But Patreon and other crowdfunding platforms are not the real villains. They are dependent on the whims of the credit card companies, something that was already apparent in August when Mastercard forced them to withdraw service from Robert Spencer. We now know that the credit card companies were also a factor in Patreon’s decision to boot Benjamin.

YouTuber and Patreon creator Matt Christiansen recently released a transcript of his conversation with Jacqueline Hart of Patreon about Benjamin’s ban. Hart frankly admits that the sensibilities of credit card companies play a key role in Patreon’s decisions.

Here’s an excerpt of that transcript:

JACQUELINE: The problem is is Patreon takes payments.  And while we are obviously supportive of the first amendment, there are other things that we have to consider. Our mission is to fund the creative class. In order to accomplish that mission we have to build a community of creators that are comfortable sharing a platform, and if we allow certain types of speech that some people would call free speech, then only creators that use Patreon that don’t mind their branding associated with that kind of speech would be those who use Patreon and we fail at our mission.  But secondly as a membership platform, payment processing is one of the core value propositions that we have. Payment processing depends on our ability to use the global payment network, and they have rules for what they will process.

MATT:  Are you telling me that this was Patreon’s decision then, or someone pressured you into this?

JACQUELINE:  No – this was entirely Patreon’s decision.  

MATT:  Well then I don’t understand passing the buck off to somebody else.  

JACQUELINE:  No, I’m not passing the buck off.  The thing is we have guidelines, but I’m trying to explain, #1 it is our mission to fund the creative class and obviously some people may not want to be associated.  

MATT:  Well if it’s your mission, then payment processors are irrelevant.  It’s your mission. That’s what you’re pursuing.

JACQUELINE:  We’re not visa and mastercard ourselves – we can’t just make the rules.  That’s what I’m saying – there is an extra layer there.

This “extra layer” places platforms like Patreon in an impossible position: abandon free speech or lose your ability to process payments. That’s also why so many free-speech alternatives to Patreon have failed: FreeStartr, Hatreon, MakerSupport, and SubscribeStar all tried to offer a more open platform, and were promptly dumped by the credit card companies. All are unable to do business.

This exposes the emptiness of establishment conservative arguments about the free market. Those who oppose Silicon Valley censorship aren’t allowed to just build their own alternative platforms. They must build their own global payment processing infrastructure to have any hope of restoring free speech online. That, or they must find a way to stop Visa, Mastercard and Discover from taking advice from the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and Color of Change.

I'm a little dubious that Patreon and other companies engaged in financial deplatforming are quite as innocent as Allum paints them here; it strikes me that they are really doing what they want to do and using the credit card companies as an excuse. But this financial deplatforming is unlikely to continue for long, as the political pressure is growing for the Republicans to do something about it, and it will probably not be long before we see the first successful legal action against a deplatforming platform, which should have a salutory chilling effect on those attempting to wage financial terrorism. Because that is quite literally what it is.

And perhaps more importantly, a number of Asian payment processors are extremely eager to move into the vacuum that is being created by the Third World-style unreliability and lack of accountability of their Western counterparts.

A satanic racial imperialist

In case you ever had any doubts about my complete rejection of Richard Spencer or why I identified him as a Fake Right anti-nationalist, this video should resolve them for you. This is a partial transcript of 'The Richard Spencer Show: Moonraker' with Mark Brahmin on HEELTURN

RICHARD SPENCER: This is our view of the world, this is what we do for you now, and this is our view for the future. At some point we need to put forth a legitimate vision and a legitimate platform, saying this is our answer to the world's problems. I think there's something to be said for such a vision.

CALLER: Ancient Greeks sacked cities and set fire to their homes. Modern paleocons say that there must be a homeland for all. They are gay. Nations rise and fall, we either live to colonize the stars or die honorably. Paleocons aren't even right-wing.

RICHARD SPENCER: I basically agree with this criticism of what you could say is pan-nationalism. It's almost like egalitarian nationalism, but it's almost nationalism as egalitarianism. You know, every single little people will have an ethnostate homeland and we'll all therefore kind of unify, or, you know, at least treat each other fairly, and kind of be unified, the friendship of peoples, you could say, and so on. I think there is something to be said for such a vision, and something at least rhetorically that we should call upon, and say that you have your ethnostate, this is what we want.

But as an actual ideology, I think it absolutely fails. This is not, this is simply not, how the world works. Nations and states are born, they live, they flourish, they decay and die. And we can't just freeze the world as it is now and say nothing ever changes from here on out. No, we believe in an organic view of society. There is going to be life, and death, and decay, and victory, and defeat.

I think as an actual philosophy, this pan-nationalism has never, I've never had any interest in it. And also, one thing we can learn from the ancient world, we can also learn from the modern world as well, there are hegemonic power blocs across the world. That is not going to go anywhere. We aren't going to just simply devolve into little statelets, or city states, or neighborhoods, whatever they want. There's going to be big kahunas out there, who have more power than others, and are going to form the geopolitical world order. That just is what it is. We need to live in the world that exists and not just in some fantasy land.

MARK BRAHMIN: It's also desirable. I mean, honestly, it's also desirable. There is this famous parable in the Bible about the Tower of Babel. And the whole premise of that parable is that there are effectively these kind of non-Jewish figures whoa re trying to build a tower to go to the heavens. The Jewish god effectively sees them as a competitor, right?

RICHARD SPENCER: Right.

MARK BRAHMIN: He sends down his minions. He says lets go down and confuse their languages and disrupt them. So that Tower of Babel is kind of an ideal. That's something that our adversaries wouldn't want. When I say "the Tower of Babel" that would actually be a kind of unified culture. This unified language, or a common language, and common culture. We already have that to on extent or another, with English being a coommon language in the Western World. I think going in that direction, further in that direction, is actually a good thing.

RICHARD SPENCER: We need to flip all this supposed Biblical wisdom on its head. This is the paleocon answer: Oooh the Tower of Babel or whatever! It's funny that a lot of these people are Catholics. No, we build structures that last a thousand years. That is what we do. We build the Tower of Babel. We build Rome and we centralize things and bring people together. And this can last a long time.

First, he doesn't know what "pan-nationalism" means. He himself is actually a pan-national imperialist, and what he's criticizing is genuine nationalism. Second, he's not merely non-Christian and he wasn't "confused about Brexit", he openly supports globalist projects like the European Union and looks to the Tower of Babel as an ideal.

Spencer is no more on the side of Western civilization than Jordan Peterson or George Soros. He's just another head of the globalist hydra.

The Trumpslide beginneth

Americans can, for once, be genuinely proud of their President and Tweeter-in-Chief. You know, maybe the Academy should have him host the Oscars. He's certainly funnier than the average Hollywood comedian these days.

Here we go again

Apparently Literally Who is uncontrollably attractive to niche journalists:

Last June, DC Comics announced that the company would be reviving their graphic and adult content imprint, Vertigo Comics. The relaunch was announced alongside several new titles which aimed to speak to current social issues, such as xenophobia in Eric Esquivel’s Border Town or sexual freedom in Tina Horn’s Safe Sex. One of the titles announced for this relaunch was Goddess Mode, a cyber punk adventure series written by Zoë Quinn with art provided by Robbi Rodriguez.

Recently, The Verge’s Laura Hudson conducted and  published an interview with Quinn. The published piece is a fairly standard promotional interview in which Quinn speaks at length on Goddess Mode in order to promote her book in the wake of the comic’s official release. Yet many readers were quick to point out that, while the piece itself was innocuous, there was a glowing omission: Hudson did not disclose her personal relationship with Quinn.

If there is anyone in the media who does not have a personal relationship with Zoe Quinn, please raise your hand. At least we can all look forward to the inevitable CSI-SVU episode about a crazed ComicsGater kidnapping the Zoe Quinn stand-in.

The ride never ends.

Universal liberal imperialism

As promised in last night's Darkstream, I started reading Yoram Hazony's The Virtue of Nationalism last night. I only read up to Chapter 8 before turning in, but so far, Hazony appears to be a genuine nationalist rather than a fake nationalist Neopalestine-Firster like Dennis Prager and Ben Shapiro. He makes some excellent observations, and while he so far has steered almost entirely clear of the heavy involvement of members of his nation in what he calls "the international liberal empire", that's not particularly important in light of the focus of his work on the intrinsic imperialism of universal liberalism.

MY LIBERAL FRIENDS AND colleagues do not seem to understand that the advancing liberal construction is a form of imperialism. But to anyone not already immersed in the new order, the resemblance is easy to see. Much like the pharaohs and the Babylonian kings, the Roman emperors and the Roman Catholic Church until well into the modern period, as well as the Marxists of the last century, liberals, too, have their grand theory about how they are going to bring peace and economic prosperity to the world by pulling down all the borders and uniting mankind under their own universal rule. Infatuated with the clarity and intellectual rigor of this vision, they disdain the laborious process of consulting with the multitude of nations they believe should embrace their view of what is right. And like other imperialists, they are quick to express disgust, contempt, and anger when their vision of peace and prosperity meets with opposition from those who they are sure would benefit immensely by simply submitting.

Liberal imperialism is not monolithic, of course. When President George H. W. Bush declared the arrival of a “new world order” after the demise of the Communist bloc, he had in mind a world in which America supplies the military might necessary to impose a “rule of law” emanating from the Security Council of the United Nations. Subsequent American presidents rejected this scheme, preferring a world order based on unilateral American action in consultation with European allies and others. Europeans, on the other hand, have preferred to speak of “transnationalism,” a view that sees the power of independent nations, America included, as being subordinated to the decisions of international judicial and administrative bodies based in Europe. These disagreements over how the international liberal empire is to be governed are often described as if they are historically novel, but this is hardly so. For the most part, they are simply the reincarnation of threadworn medieval debates between the emperor and the pope over how the international Catholic empire should be governed—with the role of the emperor being reprised by those (mostly Americans) who insist that authority must be concentrated in Washington, the political and military center; and the role of the papacy being played by those (mostly European, but also many American academics) who see ultimate authority as residing with the highest interpreters of the universal law, namely, the judicial institutions of the United Nations and the European Union.

These arguments within the camp of liberal imperialism raise pressing questions for the coming liberal construction of the West. But for those of us who remain unconvinced of the desirability of maintaining such a liberal empire, the most salient fact is what the parties to these disagreements have in common. For all their bickering, proponents of the liberal construction are united in endorsing a single imperialist vision: They wish to see a world in which liberal principles are codified as universal law and imposed on the nations, if necessary by force. This, they agree, is what will bring us universal peace and prosperity.

The book so far almost reads like something John Red Eagle and I might have written as a follow-up to Cuckservative. It's definitely something Castalia House would not have hesitated to publish. A warning for libertarians, though. You will find yourself distinctly disappointed, if not outright angered, by the positions espoused by Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek with regards to liberal imperialism.

It also makes me suspect that Hazony's tangential attack on globalism as a particularly virulent form of imperialism might prove to be more effective rhetoric than attacking it directly in its own right.

Breaking the SPLC

It's long past time that victims of anti-American thought policing began waging lawfare against the con artists of the SPLC:

In December 2018, a Baltimore lawyer filed a devastating lawsuit against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and two of its employees. The SPLC targeted Glen Keith Allen over his former ties to the National Alliance (NA), a white nationalist group. In doing so, the liberal group allegedly violated laws and legal codes of conduct by receiving and then paying for stolen documents in violation of confidentiality agreements. The group went after Allen with the intent of getting him fired by the city of Baltimore and permanently destroying his future prospects.

Allen's suit claims that the SPLC should have its 501c3 tax-exempt status revoked, that it owes him restitution for racketeering, and that it should pay $6.5 million in damages. It also references Allen's pro bono work on behalf of African-Americans and his mentorship of an African-American teen, powerfully rebutting claims that he is a racist. Allen told PJ Media he now regrets his NA support, and an African-American friend of his laughed at the idea of this lawyer being branded a racist.

Perhaps most importantly, the suit attacks the liberal group for undermining America's tradition of free expression. In an August 2016 interview with The Washington Post cited in the lawsuit, SPLC Intelligence Project Director Heidi Beirich (a defendant in the case) claimed to have watched Allen "like a hawk" because he had "the worst ideas ever created."

"This East Europe Communist thought-crime surveillance mentality is antithetical to fundamental American cultural and Constitutional principles protecting freedom of expression and association," Allen wrote in the suit, which can be found on his website. His lawsuit uses concrete claims of lawbreaking and defamation to expose the SPLC's Orwellian strategy of branding its opponents "hate groups" and orchestrating campaigns against them.

In August 2016, the SPLC published an article branding Allen a "neo-Nazi lawyer" and insinuating that this lawyer's work for the city of Baltimore was racist. Beirich, the article's author, smeared a small political party as racist and then published allegedly stolen documents protected by confidentiality agreements connecting Allen to the National Alliance.

This article led Baltimore's law department to fire Allen immediately, costing him at least 10 years of employment at a salary of $90,000 or more. The article also destroyed his reputation, making it extremely difficult for him to obtain a job, create a good relationship with clients, or argue before judges and jurors who would immediately judge him a "neo-Nazi lawyer." Furthermore, a year after Allen's firing, Baltimore badly lost the case, losing $15 million in damages.

It is said that around 60 Organizations' "Are Considering a Lawsuit Against the SPLC Following $3M Nawaz Settlement". They should do more than consider it. Both the SPLC and the ADL are thought-policing scams that make a very profitable living from defamation. The very name of the "Anti-Defamation League" is an example of the inversive wizardry that Owen Benjamin decries.

Darkstream: The rise of fake nationalism

If you're wondering why I selected Dennis Prager as the example of a Fake Nationalist in tonight's Darkstream, just read this paragraph from a column on "nationalism" he wrote in 2015.

In the United States, however, a national American identity has always been a major part of what it means to be an American. The three pillars of Americanism, constituting what I have called the "American Trinity" — are found on every American coin and banknote: "Liberty," "In God We Trust" and "e pluribus unum." The latter is Latin for "out of many, one." Because America has always been a nation of immigrants, it has no ethnic identity. Therefore, unlike almost all other nations, America could not depend on an ethnic identity to keep its people together. In fact, if all Americans retained their ethnic identities, America would simply splinter. So a non-ethnic American national identity had to be forged and preserved.

Count the lies. America was not, is not, and could never be "a nation of immigrants". The claim is as false for Americans as it is for the English, the Germans, or the Swedes. The British colonists did not emigrate to the American Indian nations of the New World. One might as reasonably declare that "Palestine is a nation of immigrants" and insist on referring to Israelis as "Jewish-Palestinians".

Fake Nationalists rely on the same sort of wizardry that the New Atheists and Jordan Peterson utilize. They substitute "nation" for "state", then declare that if you have the right piece of paper, that somehow eliminates every tie of blood, birth, and DNA that connects you to your actual nation. Of course, a Fake American is no more a genuine American than a fake woman is a genuine woman, no matter what the state-granted paperwork says.

The state does not define reality. The state does not define sex. The state does not define gravity. And the state does not define nationhood. It may defy these realities, but it will not do so forever.

Rod Dreher discovers his inner nationalist

Learning about the Spanish Civil War seems to have put a modicum of some stiffer substance - one can hardly call it steel - into Rod Dreher's spine as he gradually begins to discover why the Nationalist Right is inevitable.

In 1930, the military dictatorship was overthrown, and municipal elections across the country the next year led to a big win for combined parties of left and right who favored a democratic republic. (N.B., not all leftists and rightists wanted a republic!) After the vote, the king abdicated, and the Republic was declared. Later that spring, leftist mobs burned convents and churches in various cities, while Republican police stood by doing nothing. This sent a deep shock wave through Spanish Catholicism.

The Republic, in typical European fashion, was strongly anticlerical. It quickly passed laws stripping the Catholic Church of property and the right to educate young people. There were other anticlerical measures taken. Anti-Christian laws, and violent mob action, were present at the beginning of the Republic. Prior to watching this documentary, I assumed they happened as part of the civil war itself. Imagine what it was like to see a new constitutional order (the Republic) come into being, and suddenly you can’t give your children a religious education, and your churches and convents are being torched. How confident would you be in the new order?

According to the film, Spain was still in the 19th century, in terms of economics. It was largely agrarian, with a massive peasantry that was underfed, and tended to be religious and traditional. On the other hand, they were dependent on large landowners who favored the semi-feudal conditions. These landowners were extremely conservative. Their interests clashed, obviously, and became violent when the land reform promised by the liberal Republicans did not materialize fast enough for the peasantry. Mind you, the Republic was declared in the middle of the global Great Depression, with all the political and economic turmoil that came with it.

The urban working class was organized along Marxist lines, though the left was badly fractured, and unstable. There were democratic socialists, but also communists who hewed closely to the Stalinist line. Plus, anarchists were a really significant force in Spain, something unique in Europe at the time. They competed politically, and usually aligned with the left in fighting the right. But they refused to compromise their principles by taking formal power, even when the defense of the Republic required it.

Regional autonomy also played a role in defining sides. When the civil war started, Catholics supported the Nationalist side (the Francoists) … but not in the Basque Country, which was religious, but which wanted more self-rule — something the Nationalists despised. Catalonia also wanted more independence, which meant it was firmly Republican. Barcelona, the Catalan capital, was a Republican stronghold for left-wing reasons, to be sure. I bring up the situation with the Basques and the Catalans simply to illustrate the complexity of the conflict.

Anyway, the 1933 elections resulted in a swing back to the right, with a coalition of center-right and far-right parties winning control, and reversing some of the initiatives of the previous government. Socialists, anarchists, and coal miners in the province of Asturias rebelled against the Republic. They murdered priests and government officials; the military, led by Gen. Franco, brutally suppressed the uprising. All of this radicalized the left even more.

By 1935, left-right opinion had become so polarized that there was practically no middle ground left. Both sides came to distrust democracy because it was the means by which their enemies might take power. And, as one Nationalist interviewed in the documentary puts it, people on the left and right just flat out hated each other. The whole country was a powder keg.

By the 1936 campaign, the centrist parties had practically disappeared.

He's really going to harden his position after he reads Anthony Beevor's book on the war. Once you figure out that the other side really, genuinely, and truly wants to exterminate your religion and your race, only the suicidal and the delusional will persist in trying to "come together" and seek to "discuss our differences". You can brag about being anti-racist, apolitical, post-ideological, colorblind, or even apathetic all you like, but once it finally registers that the other side is literally hell-bent on destroying everything and everyone you value, it's no longer possible to continue lying to yourself.

I saw this in a microcosm in my interview with Bleeding Cool editor-in-chief Mark Siefert. He simply could not, and would not, believe what I was telling him about the SJWs in comics. He insisted that there must be a place at the table for everyone, that it didn't have to be war to the knife. I assured him that he was wrong, and that the SJWs could not be reasoned with, and the next day, he discovered the truth when he was ejected from his position by the very SJWs he'd been defending as reasonable the day before.

The cuckspace is shrinking. The middle ground is rapidly vanishing and nothing is going to bring it back. There is nothing to bring it back, because diversity is, quite literally, disintegration. It won't be long before those who believed they were morally superior for denouncing nationalists as fascists and nazis will be crying for those nationalists to save them... if they are not proclaiming themselves to have been nationalists all along.

The real lesson of the Spanish Civil War is this: you will not save your nation without fighting for it.

The Gilded Path

Last night's Darkstream was on the media's made men, including Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro:

As evidence that I'm not simply conjuring these observations out of thin air, consider this graphic on Ben Shapiro's "gilded path to prominence".

Following his departure from Breitbart. Shapiro quickly founded the Daily Wire with funding from its owners, brothers Farris and Dan Wilks, Texas fracking billionaires who supported Texas Sen. Ted Cruz in the 2016 Republican presidential primary. The brothers and their wives combined to donate $15 million to a pro-Cruz super PAC in the early election season.

YAF has “Young Americans for Freedom” student chapters at colleges and universities around the country. The nonprofit helps organize and sponsor campus lectures, and Shapiro is one of YAF’s most prolific college speakers. Since 2015, YAF has organized over 35 Shapiro speaking gigs, according to the organization. In November 2017, YAF announced that it would be the “exclusive home” of Shapiro’s 2018–2019 college speaking tour, funded by Fred R. Allen. (It’s unclear who Fred Allen is, and YAF did not return an inquiry about his identity.) The group announced on July 25 that six universities will host Shapiro this fall with the headline, “LOOK OUT SNOWFLAKES.”

The chart below clearly demonstrates the difference between organic popularity and manufactured fake popularity. Or, as one commenter noted, the difference between those who have sold their souls and those who have not. Keep in mind that the yellow line represents Stefan Molyneaux, who has 889,759 YouTube subscribers compared to Ben Shapiro's 444,386. It's difficult to see from this graph, but note that for 11 years, from 2004 until early 2016, my Google Trends profile was reliably higher than Shapiro's despite the best efforts of those propping him up.

And no, I'm not envious at all. I've been calling out Shapiro since 2005. Why would I ever envy a cowardly little creature who couldn't compete with me without selling his soul? I know the price of "success" like that and it is not one that I would ever be willing to pay.

The end of an era

We are rapidly approaching the end of the Carrier Age with regards to sea power:

They’re the pride of the US fleet: enormous 100,000 tonne, 333m long nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. But Beijing thinks they’re Washington’s achilles heel.

Rear Admiral Lou Yuan has told an audience in Shenzhen that the ongoing disputes over the ownership of the East and South China Seas could be resolved by sinking two US super carriers.

Taiwan’s Central News Agency (CNA) reports Admiral Lou gave a wide-ranging speech on the state of Sino-US relations. The high-profile, hawkish military commentator reportedly declared the current trade spat was “definitely not simply friction over economics and trade,” but was instead a “prime strategic issue”.

His speech, delivered on December 20 to the 2018 Military Industry List summit, declared that China’s new and highly capable anti-ship ballistic and cruise missiles were more than capable of hitting US carriers, despite them being at the centre of a ‘bubble’ of defensive escorts.

“What the United States fears the most is taking casualties,” Admiral Lou declared.

He said the loss of one super carrier would cost the US the lives of 5000 service men and women. Sinking two would double that toll.

“We’ll see how frightened America is.”

I don't think it's an accident that both Russia and China have developed carrier-killer missiles. It's not so much that they want to get into a conventional war, it's that for the first time since the end of World War II, they appear to possess the ability to keep the US military from exercising air superiority or even supremacy and controlling the oceans wherever it pleases.

One carrier sinking will forever change the balance of power. And even a shift in US strategy that clearly reflects an awareness of the new vulnerability of its carriers will probably be enough to alter it substantially.

We could hardly blame him

Bridget Phetasy@BridgetPhetasy

I just read the word “pedophobes” and well, I think we are done here, society.

This is what happens when you run away from being called wizard words. The wizards just create more words to control your behavior.

Deus vult.

Sparks flying at Arkhaven

Jon Del Arroz's superhero romance comic FLYING SPARKS is now available in high-resolution CBZ format at the Arkhaven Comics store.

Due to many requests from our readers for higher-resolution digital comics than the 1280x800 resolution utilized by Amazon Kindle format, Arkhaven and Dark Legion Comics will be releasing all of their new digital editions in 2048+ resolution DRM-free CBZ format for better-quality reading on tablets and smartphones.

Unfortunately, due to Amazon's requirement of exclusivity for Kindle Select, this means that our digital editions will no longer be available on Kindle Unlimited. They will still be available on Amazon as regular Kindle ebooks.

In other Arkhaven news, the AH:Q 2.1 campaign has been very successfully concluded with 279 new backers. Thanks to all of you who force-multiplied the project. We anticipate the initial release of AH:Q #1 to all the backers by the end of the month. We can also announce that 176 of the original AH:Q backers will submit their joint request for arbitration to Indiegogo next week. The rubble will be bouncing.

Industrial scale wizardry

From Jordan Peterson to The Last Jedi, you simply can't believe anything that the media tells you about what is big or smart or successful or popular anymore. Because it's all just corporate gaslighting for profit.

Director Kyle Newman: You look at The Last Jedi, and honestly, I don't know anybody out here, maybe two people in my life, out of hundreds of people that I've talked to, who liked the movie. All the filmmakers I know that won't talk about it publicly. All the people I know internally, there's all these people that won't, even journalists who gave it positive reviews are like, I do that because I need to maintain my access. Privately, there's a lot of people who really don't like it.

Geeks and Gamers: So you're saying that the ones who gave it good reviews really are phony reviews.

Newman: 100 percent. I can't name them, but yes, 100 percent.

I find it interesting that despite the constant encouragement to "think different" and "question authority" and engage in "critical thinking", the media devotes an incredible amount of resources to convincing those who consume its products to do precisely the opposite. This would appear to be the inversive wizardry that Owen Benjamin describes, albeit on a giant industrial scale.

Traffic report 2018

2018 was an unusually challenging year. It was full of deplatformings and bannings, disruptions and disqualifications. It saw the end of Alpha Game due to a lack of interest on my part and it failed to see the final publication of A Sea of Skulls due to a lack of time and focus on my part. It saw the collapse of the Amazon ebook market and a concomitant step backward for Castalia House. On the plus side, it also saw the publication of nearly 30 new comics from Arkhaven and Dark Legion and forced us to take structural steps that should provide a stronger foundation for future growth.

In 2018, Vox Popoli had 32,260,094 Google pageviews. The blog is now running at an average rate of 88,384 daily pageviews, up from an average 85,524 last year. The running annual pageview totals are as follows:

2008: 3,496,757
2009: 4,414,801
2010: 4,827,183
2011: 5,422,628
2012: 6,098,774
2013: 9,340,663
2014: 11,236,085
2015: 16,211,875
2016: 25,817,343
2017: 31,216,357
2018: 32,260,094

The biggest blog news in 2018 was the unexpected retro-cancellation of the successful Alt★Hero:Q crowdfunding campaign by Indiegogo, which not only led to the creation of our own comics site complete with a store and crowdfunding engine, but a successful replacement campaign that raised 42 percent more net than the original cancelled campaign as well. Thanks very much to all 1,657 backers who made that possible!

Another success was the return of Voxiversity and the development of its ancillary Darkstream, which is now averaging 8k views per stream. Look for further advances on the video front in 2019 thanks to the strategery of the Foundation.

We will have some very big announcements in the first two months of the new year, including the introduction of Infogalactic's first social component. On a personal note, I expect to publish Corporate Cancer by March and A Sea of Skulls in print before June. And I'm very, very pleased to be able to announce that Jeremy Daw has literally just completed the massive task of narrating A Throne of Bones; the audiobook, which we anticipate will exceed 40 hours in total, should be available on the Arkhaven store before the end of March if everything proceeds according to plan.

Thanks to everyone who continues to read VP and to everyone who supports one or more of the various endeavors that have emanated from it. Thanks especially to the Infogalactic Burn Unit, the Alt★Hero backers, the Castalia volunteers, the Brainstorm crew, and the Arkhaven team, all of whom have come together in a spirit of creative cooperation to make these various projects viable. Your participation in these things is invaluable and very much appreciated.

Of course, it would not be an annual traffic report without that old standby, the comparison of VP's annual traffic to that of the Most Popular Blog in Science Fiction. Some things never grow old. And the ride never ends.

That was unexpected

The Bengals finally part ways with Marvin Lewis:

The Bengals officially announced that Marvin Lewis is out as their head coach on Monday morning and the statement from the team called it a mutual decision to part ways.

Cue the drums beating for Eric Bienemy, whether he is ready to make the leap to head coach or not. Affirmative action destroys a lot more people than it helps.

Gase is out at Miami too. I suspect seeing the rapid success of Doug Pederson, Frank Reich, Sean McVey, and Matt Nagy is influencing a lot of owners these days.

The sacrifical Fake Indian

Elizabeth Warren tosses her headdress in the ring:

With a mere 673 days until the 2020 US presidential election, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren has announced the formation of an “exploratory committee” to consider a run for the highest office in the land.

In American politics jargon, this means the Democratic senator is most definitely running for president. Warren had repeatedly been named as a possible 2020 candidate since 2016 and even earlier, so her candidacy has come as no surprise to pundits.

(sniff, sniff)

Do you smell that? That's what TRUMPSLIDE 2020 smells like!

The Hollywood line holds

The Hollywood Mafia managed to kill the Esquire story on director Brian Singer:

J.Michael Trautmann@JMACdaKID
Whatever happened to that @esquire piece??

AJ Benza@RealAJBenza
I'm gonna talk a little on it on the next show (1/2). But, it seems to me what I feared. Possibly a major studio that Singer has either worked for or will be working for soon (Red Sonja perhaps?) stepped in and stopped it. I fear this became a war between lawyers. And Singer won.

But the line won't hold forever. There is very good reason to believe that #MeToo is a controlled burn meant to protect the serious predators in Hollywood.

Progress

Do tell us more about how the USA has changed for the better:

In 1960, for example, average weight of an American man was 166 pounds, according to a previous CDC report. By 2002, it had increased to 190. During that same time period, average height increased by a single inch for men, from about 5 feet 8 inches on average to about 5 feet 9 inches.

Add another 14 years, bringing us to 2016, and average height stayed the same (or maybe even dropped a fraction of an inch), while weights jumped another 8.5 pounds on average for men-- up to 197.9 pounds, according to the newer CDC report.

The numbers weren't much better for women, for whom weights on average rose from 163.8 pounds in 2000 to 170.6 pounds two years ago.

They left out the bit about women weighing, on average, only 140.2 pounds in 1960.  And only 127.7 for women 20-29. What a hellish place the pre-1960s USA must have been!

Darkstream: Jordan Peterson's IQ revealed

If you want the answer, watch the Darkstream! Bonus points if you can catch the one step that Peterson's defenders can legitimately attack. Although it will ultimately do them no good whatsoever, they might be able to make enough rhetorical hay out of it to convince some who desperately don't want to believe.

Last chance

This is the final day of the Alt-Hero Q campaign, so if you're interested in getting on board, this is your last chance to do so.  Remember to turn off NoScript if you're placing an order! Thanks very much to all 1582 backers of the three components of the campaign; this has proven to be a more successful, and more significant, crowdfunding campaign than we had ever anticipated.

Arkhaven still has a long way to go before we can set the cruise control, but we are systematically putting the infrastructure in place for consistent long-term success and we really appreciate the way Arkhaven's backers are continuing to make that posssible.

In other news, QMAMD #4 and #5 are being completed, Swan Knight's Saga #1 is almost ready to go to the letterer, and the first Premium editions of Alt-Hero as well as the first Alt-Hero novel will be published in January.

And, of course, the complete Right Ho, Jeeves omnibus edition is now available in a beautiful 152-page paperback that includes all six individual issues.

UPDATE: A high-level back of AH:Q shares his thoughts about backing the original campaign at the digital edition level:

I had no idea it would be so good and really regret only supporting for digital editions. Since then, I have gone for all the editions on the Alt-Hero: Q, during the silent campaign

Mailvox: the creation of Jordan Peterson

I was sent this by a Canadian gentleman this morning. A selection from his email:

After graduating from Fairview High (1979) Jordan studied Poli-Sci at Grande Prairie Regional College for two years before transferring to the University of Alberta (Edmonton) where he earned a BA (1982). Low grades and a poor LSAT score torpedoed foundational dreams of a legal career; leaving Jordan despondent.

Jordan stayed at U of A; defaulting his major to what was then Canada’s academic catch-basin, Psychology. Transferring credits and completing requisite courses fetched a second BA (Psych) in 1984.

From 1985 to 1991 Jordan studied at Montreal’s McGill University. After getting his Ph.D. he haunted McGill’s halls for three additional years as a Post-Doc before being rescued by a professors’ assistant posting at Harvard. Four years later he landed a teaching professorship at U of Toronto. Despite fictionalised autobiographical accounts of a varied, storied career; Jordy’s a schoolie.

Even his masthead boast about being a Clinical Psychologist is largely bogus. His clinical (private practice) work was a minor sideline. In Map of Meaning (1999) he bemoans his lack of clinical experience. Since then teaching paid the bills. Sorties into the media, writing, and a self-help publishing venture left little room for private practice. When his celebrity career took off he abandoned his few clients.

Peterson’s grooming by state broadcasters began in 2004 when TV Ontario produced a 13-part series based on Map of Meaning. Viewers tuned-out in droves. Following his UN gig in 2012-13, Peterson began uploading his lectures onto YouTube; attracting scant attention. Then a miracle…

On September 27, 2016 Jordan posted the video: “Professor against political correctness.” Within 24 hours, Canada’s main newspaper chain’s flagship, National Post, ran an article plugging the video. Two days later “As it Happens” – Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s weekday evening radio show (1.6 million weekly listeners) – interviewed Peterson, again plugging the video. CBC re-ran this show online titled “I’m not a bigot” accompanied by a flattering photo of Peterson. 

While billed as a populist Internet sensation, Peterson is, in fact, a mainstream media balloon. Even his Internet success was amped.  In December 2016 Peterson began podcasting. Weeks later he hired a team to record his class-room lectures. These were edited and disbursed across the web. Then YouTube’s gnomes went to work. Peterson’s mug-shot became ubiquitous in YouTube’s spontaneous suggestion columns. Persons not remotely interested in Peterson were persistently shunted to an array of cookie-cutter YouTube sites that exist solely to publicise chosen e-celebs. Comments sections of Peterson’s scatterbrained lecture videos contain numerous complaints of “click-bait.”

It would be interesting to know if the Canadian LSAT was also an IQ proxy, as this would prove that Peterson has been exaggerating his IQ. There are already some anomalies in his self-description of it; the fact that such an ambitious individual first attended a regional college also tends to suggest that his test scores were less than superlative.

You can see exactly how trivial a figure Jordan Peterson was prior to October 2016 from this Google Trends comparison from 2011 through the end of September 2016. Keep in mind that this chart begins more than 7 years after a 13-part televised series dedicated to Peterson's first book.

UPDATE: If it is true that Peterson applied to law school but did not get in, then he is lying about his supposedly high level of intelligence. From the Canadian Mensa site concerning prior evidence it accepts of a 98th percentile IQ.

LSAT Prior to 1982: 662. Effective 1982 (total percentile rank): 95. The average LSAT accepted by the University of Alberta Faculty of Law is the 90th percentile. In current terms, the 90th percentile is a score of 164, which equates to an estimated IQ of 124. That is the ceiling on Jordan Peterson's IQ.

UPDATE: Jordan Peterson's IQ claim:

I don't know what my IQ is. I had it tested at one point. It's in excess of a hundred and fifty but I don't know exactly where it lands now.... I'm not overwhelmingly intelligent from a quantitative perspective, you know. I think my GRE scores for on the quantitative end of things for about 70-75th percentile which isn't too bad given that you know you're competing against other people who are going into graduate school, but there's a big
difference between 75th percentile and 99th percentile, and I think that's where
it was verbally, something like that.

Now remember, Jordan Peterson is a habitual liar. Also note that if we put together the 75th percentile and 99th percentile on the GRE that he claims would indicate that he is at the 87th percentile combined. We can see that Mensa equates the 95th percentile on the GRE with the 98th IQ percentile, so adjusting for the difference in populations would move him up to the 90th percentile, or an IQ of 120, which fits right beneath his estimated IQ ceiling of 124.

UPDATE: Boom. Got him. I cannot believe I missed this! From Maps of Meaning.

I wanted to become a corporate lawyer—had written the Law School Admissions Test, had taken two years of appropriate preliminary courses. I wanted to learn the ways of my enemies, and embark on a political career. This plan disintegrated. The world obviously did not need another lawyer, and I no longer believed that I knew enough to masquerade as a leader.

So, he did take the LSAT, he does know his IQ, and now, so do we. Looks like we'll be adding Appendix D to JORDANETICS next week. Needless to say, I'll be doing a Darkstream on the subject tonight.

The failure of the Rooney Rule

Affirmative action cannot work in a meritocracy:

The proof is hiding in plain sight; currently, minority coaches and executives are dwindling, not thriving, in the NFL. Only one African-American coach or G.M. has control over a football operation, and Ravens G.M. Ozzie Newsome will be retiring at season’s end. That will leave no coach, no General Manager, no V.P. of player personnel, no one who has practical or contractual final say over the construction of an NFL roster.

If Chris Grier remains in Miami (his status is unclear), he’ll be the only minority G.M. when the dust settles on 2018. For coaches, it could become nearly as bad. With Hue Jackson already out in Cleveland, and Vance Joseph, Todd Bowles, and Steve Wilks expected to be fired in Denver, New York, and Arizona, respectively, the NFL will have only four minority coaches: Steelers coach Mike Tomlin (whom many locals want to see fired), Bengals coach Marvin Lewis (who could be out), Chargers coach Anthony Lynn, and Panthers coach Ron Rivera (who’s currently expected to be safe).

That’s not what the league or the Fritz Pollard Alliance envisioned more than 15 years ago, when the standard named for the late Dan Rooney first emerged as a device for rectifying decades of unfairly biased hiring practices by NFL teams, as demonstrated by the raw numbers.

The problem is a straightforward one of distributed intelligence among the various population demographics. The complexity of modern NFL offenses and defenses strongly favors intelligence. It's no longer enough to be a confident leader of men with charisma and personal discipline. And it's not an accident that Bill Belichick, despite his personality and character flaws, has become the most successful coach in NFL history, as he is one of the most intelligent and studious men to ever coach a team, and he surrounds himself with highly intelligent assistants and players.

All that forcing more black coaches and executives on the NFL is likely to do is to reveal their intellectual shortcomings in comparison with their smarter white colleagues. What did giving Hue Jackson an additional year to fail at a historic level accomplish? Affirmative action is nothing but enshrining the Peter Principle in law; it guarantees systematic failure. And while it might unearth the occasional pearl, it is much more likely to expose the overmatched and the fraudulent in an embarrassing manner.

The black coach challenge is the exact opposite of the black quarterback issue of the 1980s. As playcalling moved to the sidelines and coaches were allowed to communicate directly with their quarterbacks, the cognitive challenge of playing quarterback was temporarily reduced, making the position more viable for less intelligent players. But even that trend has now been reversed, as the increasing importance of pre-snap reading of the defensive formations and quickly going through the route progressions has caused it to rise again.

The only way to salvage the purpose of the Rooney Rule is to systematically reduce the requirements for cognitive capacity among NFL coaches and executives. I leave the likelihood of that ever happening to the reader.