Wildcard Weekend Saturday

Discuss amongst yourselves.

Also: Bills, Titans, Saints, Seahawks.

Did the Churchians win?

The Churchian Methodists are offering Christians $25 million to leave the denomination:

Factions in the United Methodist Church (UMC) have reached an initial settlement around its intractable division over LGBT marriage and ordination—offering $25 million to a group of conservative congregations who want to break away and form a new denomination.

Various groups were slated to once again propose different plans for a split at the UMC’s general conference in May, but under the new agreement, they will abandon the proposals and put their full support behind the Protocol of Reconciliation & Grace Through Separation, which was announced Friday.... The protocol will still need to be approved by the UMC’s legislative body, but has unanimous support from a diverse 16-member mediation team, including representatives from “UMCNext; Mainstream UMC; Uniting Methodists; The Confessing Movement; Good News; The Institute on Religion & Democracy; the Wesleyan Covenant Association; Affirmation; Methodist Federation for Social Action; Reconciling Ministries Network; and the United Methodist Queer Clergy Caucus; as well as bishops from the United States and across the world.”

“This is very likely to bring to an end this dysfunction that we have suffered through for the past 47 years,” said Rob Renfroe, president and publisher of Good News and pastor of adult discipleship at The Woodlands UMC outside of Houston. “We were never going to find a way to move forward together. Our ultimate goal of setting each other free to do ministry as we believe God would have us do has come to fruition.”

The 12.5-million-member UMC has been in a standoff over LGBT issues for decades, culminating in a vote in favor of its traditional position against same-sex marriage and gay clergy during a special session last year. As a result, some left the UMC, some continued to defy the UMC positions outright, and some challenged the legality of the vote in the denomination’s court—ultimately putting the question of how to move forward before the delegation once again in 2020.

The result of months of negotiation, the new protocol creates a quick, “clean break” for a new, traditionalist denomination that has yet to be created but will receive a $25 million sum at its inception.

It was looking good after the vote this spring, and yet it seems that the Fake Christians always seem to end up with the leadership positions and the property. This is the price of failing to heed the Biblical warning about wolves in sheeps' clothing.

That being said, it's not over yet. And at the end of the day, all we need is twelve.

Post-peak NFL

The serious drop in attendance hasn't happened yet, but the NFL does appear to be past its peak already:

According to David Broughton and Andrew Levin of Sports Business Daily, the NFL averaged 66,648 attendees at home games in 2019. That’s the lowest average since 2004.

The Cowboys averaged 90,929, leading the league for 11 straight seasons. Fifteen teams saw a decline in attendance, led by the Jaguars (8.7 percent drop), Raiders (7.6 percent) and Bengals (7.0 percent)....

Attendance peaked in 2016, with 69,487 per game. In 2004, 66,328 attended each game, on average.

What is more ominous about this is that it is happening towards the end of an economic boom at a stock market peak. It's only a 4.5 percent decline, but as I noted in Corporate Cancer, the first downward stage is usually a 20 percent drop before it temporarily stabilizes at the lower plateau, with an eventual decline to 50 percent of peak.

Naming the names

A young victim of the Devil Mouse machine has filed a lawsuit against his victimizers that the media is attempting to bury:

Tammy’s son Ricky Garcia, 20, filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court in which he named his ex-manager Joby Harte, 37, Joby’s Hot Rocks Media business partners Paul Cohen and Sheri Anderson Thomas, talent agency APA, former APA agent Tyler Grasham, and manager Nils Larsen, currently employed by Management 360.

The suit alleges that from the age of 12 years old Ricky was groomed, sexually abused and raped on a weekly basis, and that Joby Harte passed him around as a “sexual plaything” to other powerful pedophiles throughout the business.

The day the suit was filed articles appeared in People, Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter, and TMZ, among others. However, despite the serious nature of the charges and the many and far-reaching implications of the case, not a single outlet pursued the story further.

“The one thing that can fix this is talking about it, but Hollywood doesn’t want to talk about pedophilia,” Tammy says, a reality she quickly figured out the day after the story of Ricky’s lawsuit broke, when everything went radio silent. And, of course it did. This story has the power to bring down giants. The problem is, it’s the same giants who also own the media....

Over the course of nearly two months of phone conversations as well as an in-person, sit-down interview, which will be released to the public, Tammy took me through a stunning timeline of events as well as provided me with emails, written witness testimonies and documents compiled for the civil lawsuit, all of which detail the years of torture and abuse her son suffered, the names of those who partook, those who knew, and those who covered it up. The following expose’ is entirely drawn from these documents, emails and witness testimonies.

It's long past time to methodically expose the Hollywood monstrosities to the public and permit them to clearly see the evil, rotting heart of the entertainment industry.

Twitter adds a new feature

Shadow-banning is now officially a feature of the Twitter services, according to their revised Terms of Use:

The process of limiting how many people can see posts from a certain Twitter account is commonly referred to as “shadow banning,” and many (including the company itself) have claimed that it is simply a conspiracy theory by conservatives and that Twitter does not limit the reach of content on its platform. But now, a change to Twitter’s terms of service appears to give the social media platform the right to do exactly that.

ReclaimTheNet.org notes that a recent change to Twitter’s terms of service adds that the company “may also remove or refuse to distribute any Content on the Services, limit distribution or visibility of any Content on the service…”

Twitter does not clarify what content may be subject to “limited distribution or visibility” giving the company free rein to limit any content it sees fit.

Sadly, the Legal Legion can't take any credit for this particular modification. In other social media-related news, SG2 has added video for a very select number of Paragon accounts. We're just testing it now, so if you're on SG2 already, don't ask for it, please.

Not a good start to the year

It seems unlikely that the assassination of a general from a country with whom the United States is not at war is going to end well for Americans:

President Donald Trump has ordered an airstrike that killed Revolutionary Guard General Qassem Soleimani, the powerful head of Iran's elite Quds Force, at Baghdad International Airport, the Pentagon confirmed.

The strike also killed Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy commander of Iran-backed militias in Iraq known as the Popular Mobilization Forces, which were responsible for the recent attack on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, officials said.

Tehran has vowed 'crushing' vengeance for Soleimani's death, an extremely popular figure at home, the country's highest ranking general and responsible for shaping Iranian foreign policy throughout the Middle East.

A Pentagon statement issued to DailyMail.com late Thursday, Washington DC time, said: 'At the direction of the President, the U.S. military has taken decisive action to protect U.S. personnel abroad by killing Quasem Soleimani.'

The United States has nearly two million Iranian residents living inside its borders. I tend to doubt most of them are more loyal to President Trump and the U.S. military than the Iranian people, which is why I am concerned that the next stage of the USA's Syracuse Expedition may have just begun.

It's particularly disappointing because the president had been doing such a good job of refusing to expand the needless imperial wars up until now. Perhaps the strike was legitimately justified, but given the last 18 years of costly, pointless, and mostly unsuccessful war, that also appears less than likely.

Certainly the Iraqis don't appreciate the action.

The caretaker leader of Iraq's protest-challenged government, Adil Abdul Mahdi, said the US assassination operation was a "flagrant violation of Iraqi sovereignty" and an insult to the dignity of his country. He stressed that the US had violated the terms under which American troops are allowed to stay in Iraq with the purpose of training Iraqi troops and fighting the jihadist organization Islamic State. 

UPDATE: 'Due to heightened tensions in Iraq and the region, the US Embassy urges American citizens to heed the January 2020 Travel Advisory and depart Iraq immediately. US citizens should depart via airline while possible, and failing that, to other countries via land.'

Despite all the announcements and theatrics, I can't help but observe that an identification reportedly based on a well-known ring could be faked rather easily. It would not shock me if Soleimani were to unexpectedly surface in the future.

Terry Pratchett knew the Gamma

From his very good NIGHT WATCH:

"You couldn't trust either of them. But they hated Keel with that gnawing, nerve-sapping hatred that only the mediocre can really bring to bear, and that was useful."

Novelists are, first and foremost, observers of human behavior. This is why one can clearly see Gammas described and portrayed, though obviously not identified as such, throughout the literature of cultures that range from Heian Japan to modern America.

Reading List 2019

Five Stars
A History of the Peninsular War, Vol. I, Charles Oman
A History of the Peninsular War, Vol. II, Charles Oman
A History of the Peninsular War, Vol. III, Charles Oman
A History of the Peninsular War, Vol. IV, Charles Oman
1Q84, Haruki Murakami
The Seville Communion, Arturo Perez-Reverte
The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu

Four Stars
Killing Commendatore, Haruki Murakami
Wellington's Army, Charles Oman
Warwick the Kingmaker, Charles Oman
Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
A Hymn to Old Age, Hermann Hesse
In the Beginning Was the Command Line, Neal Stephenson
Neuromancer, William Gibson
Count Zero, William Gibson
Mona Lisa Overdrive, William Gibson
Zero History, William Gibson
The Master of Go, Yusanari Kawabata
What We Become, Arturo Perez-Reverte
The Nautical Chart, Arturo Perez-Reverte

Three Stars
Klingsor's Last Summer, Hermann Hesse
Hooking Up, Tom Wolfe
A Man in Full, Tom Wolfe
A History of England, Charles Oman
Pattern Recognition, William Gibson
The Jews, Hillair Belloc
Captain Alatriste, Arturo Perez-Reverte
Purity of Blood, Arturo Perez-Reverte
The Sun Over Breda, Arturo Perez-Reverte
The King's Gold, Arturo Perez-Reverte
The Cavalier in the Yellow Doublet, Arturo Perez-Reverte
The Children of Hurin, JRR Tolkien

Two Stars
Fall, or, Dodge in Hell, Neal Stephenson
The Trojan Mouse, Sam Lively
The Virtue of Nationalism, Yoram Hazony
Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
I am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe
From Bauhaus to Our House, Tom Wolfe

One Star
The Right Side of History, Ben Shapiro
House of the Sleeping Beauties, Yusanari Kawabata

If you're interested in a discussion of these books and why I rated them the way I did, you can watch it on Unauthorized if you are a subscriber there.

What happened to "our greatest ally"?

If Israel is a good and faithful ally to the United States, why is it reportedly hiding an alleged pedophile and child rapist from the FBI?

An explosive new report has asserted that deceased sex criminal Jeffery Epstein and his alleged 'madame' Ghislaine Maxwell were foreign intelligence 'assets', and that she is currently hiding in a safehouse in Israel.

'Ghislaine is protected. She and Jeffrey were assets of sorts for multiple foreign governments. They would trade information about the powerful people caught in his net — caught at Epstein's house,' a unnamed source told Page Six.

Maxwell, 58, has been accused in lawsuits of procuring underage girls for Epstein to sexually traffick among his wealthy and powerful friends, and is reportedly the subject of an ongoing FBI probe.... 'She is not in the US, she moves around. She is sometimes in the UK, but most often in other countries, such as Israel, where her powerful contacts have provided her with safe houses and protection,' the source said. 

If the report is true, it would appear to directly contradict that whole "greatest ally" narrative. And, of course, raise the question why any nation would want to offer safe harbor to a sex trafficker. Now, perhaps the report is not true. One would hope it is not. But given its potential significance, it does need to be addressed in a transparent and forthright manner by the Israeli government.

Mailvox: confidence and courage

The Dread Ilk are not intimidated by the challenges to come in 2020. A reader writes about the implications of Christian nationalists becoming the strong horse again.

American Thinker had a piece a couple days ago that it is Donald J. Trump's election to lose in November at this point.

The hysteria of the past three years is almost indescribable. The meltdown by liberals, leftists, progressives, and cultural Marxists has been been both irritating and entertaining. Their inability to deal with reality has been sobering to watch. I have had a few friendships that ended since 2016 due to my inability to think progressive in our now bifurcated society.

A thought did come to me. In the likely event that DJT is reelected, will this shock some left of center to reality? People by nature back the strong horse. This is how Islam and later socialism and communism have spread. As you have pointed out, Conservatism Inc. has failed to conserve anything. People decide see weakness and therefore lack of faith in the beliefs of the so-called conservatives. An average person wants to be on the winning team.

You have the end of eight years of the Obama centrally-directed economy with growth close to zero. At some point, jobs and hopefully general prosperity will sink into most except the most muddle headed millennial skull. As the dissonance between indoctrination vs. reality becomes more apparent, will we see a cultural shift?

Holding steadfast to beliefs, acting on them, punctuated with intermittent acts of boldness rolling back Obama's legacy and cultural Marxism in general over eight years should cause a fair portion to jump ship and move back into the ranks of Western Civilization. All it takes is courage.

Courage, confidence, and a crusading faith in Jesus Christ is how we will move forward into 2020 and beyond. Deus vult!

Traffic report 2019

If 2018 was an unusually challenging year, 2019 was a year of almost non-stop crushing by the Evil Legion of Evil and the extended blog community. Like the previous year, it was full of deplatformings and bannings, disruptions and disqualifications. Unlike the previous year, it also saw the Legion striking back with a vengeance, including a resolution of the Indiegogo deplatforming and a multi-pronged replatforming campaign on behalf of the Big Bear and others directed at Patreon that is still in process.

And while 2019 unfortunately did not see the publication of A Sea of Skulls, it was witness to the creation of Castalia Deluxe and a stupendously successful campaign to bring the Junior Classics back into print. The Castalia crew also managed to get the 31+ hour audiobook for A Throne of Bones out, which was unexpectedly successful as more audiobooks were sold in five months than the ebook and print editions combined had sold in five years. And 2019 also saw the long-delayed publication of Corporate Cancer, which despite its short length was two years in the making.

In 2019, Vox Popoli had 32,757,068 Google pageviews. The blog is now running at an average rate of 89,745 daily pageviews, up a modest 1.5 percent from an average 88,384 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
2019: 32,757,068

I mentioned that readers should look for further advances on the video front in 2019, but I had absolutely no inkling of the massive enthusiasm that would greet the establishment of Unauthorized.TV. What started as a backup plan in the event of a possible YouTube deplatforming has somehow been transformed into one of the more significant activities in which we are involved. Unauthorized ended the year with 15,032 registered users while the Darkstream closed out 2019 with 33,484 subscribers and 698 channel members. And then, of course, there is the smashing success of the Rebel's Run fundraising, about which you will no doubt hear considerably more in 2020, as well as SocialGalactic 2.0.

Thanks to everyone who continues to read VP and to everyone who supports one or more of the various penumbras that have emanated from it. Thanks especially to the Infogalactic Burn Unit, the Alt★Hero backers, the Castalia authors and volunteers, the Brainstorm crew (about which more in 2020), the Unauthorized subscribers, the Reprehensibles, the Replatformers, 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, regardless of what form it takes. 2019 was a fantastic year. 2020 is going to be epic.

Sadly, due to the capitulation of John Scalzi, who apparently has given up posting no longer posts his blog traffic numbers, the comparison of VP's annual traffic to that of the Most Popular Blog in Science Fiction is no longer possible. Sometimes victory is bittersweet.

Regardless, the ride never ends.

UPDATE: I am informed me that there were also 625,200 downloads of the podcast derived from the Darkstream in 2019, which was up from 500 downloads in 2018. I am skeptical that we can maintain that rate of growth in 2020, but then, you never know.

Corporate America took the ticket

Not that most of it hadn't already done so, but it's useful to understand that much of what is publicly considered to be "success" in the United States has nothing to do with competition in the marketplace, but rather, secret government funding:

By midway through the Obama administration, the CIA and FBI were creating “extensive digital legends with increasing sophistication,” as one former senior official puts it, with cooperation from key government agencies like the Social Security Administration, Health and Human Services and the IRS.

U.S. intelligence agencies also work with “friendly digital companies,” like commercially available ancestry databases, to alter personally identifying information, say former officials, and also backdate work histories. Concerned about digital leakage, and cognizant of the need to strictly quarantine deep-cover intelligence officials from their organizations, U.S. officials have adopted a strategy of “eclipsing” these individuals slowly into their cover identities before they are allowed to undertake their missions.

The CIA and FBI both concluded that every person connected to these organizations’ “black side” undercover programs had to be completely sealed off from the rest of their colleagues, say former officials. This firewall is an immensely complex undertaking in a world where electronic emissions from a single cellphone traveling, say, from CIA headquarters in Virginia to an unmarked office building nearby could blow multiple undercover operations. The FBI has also struggled with this transition. As of a few years ago, “none of this was completed yet, and none of it was even remotely being done easily,” says a former senior official.

The CIA, at least, had its own past practices to draw from, especially in its training of NOCs, say former officials. Years ago, the school for NOCs was entirely quarantined from that for normal future CIA operations officers, who undertake rigorous instruction at “the Farm,” a Williamsburg, Va.-area base, say two former senior officials. NOCs “never came to the East Coast” and were trained at separate secret facilities, says one of these former officials. But because of their often “rebellious” attitudes in the field, and in order to “increase their behavioral consistency,” senior CIA officials decided to move their instruction to the Farm. This move produced better-trained NOCs but also increased the threat of exposure. As of recently, the programs were sealed off from each other again, says a former senior official.

The pressures of the digital age have led the CIA to favor flexibility and deniability. The agency has formed a new reserve officer program to allow spies to work in the private sector, especially the tech industry, says a former intelligence official. The program is designed to allow those operatives to maintain their clearances so they can return seamlessly to the agency after a few years, says this person.

Another measure the CIA has used involves paying companies to gather intelligence for the government without even knowing it. In the last several years, the CIA has ramped up its use of “cutouts” to pay third parties to gather intelligence for them unwittingly, posing as data brokers looking into trends in the oil and gas industries, for example, says the same former official.

That's how Facebook, Google, and other companies became so dominant. They possessed an advantage similar to the one that state-owned corporations have in communist companies; they didn't need to actually sell anything to anyone in order to generate income. As would-be competitors to YouTube have learned, it's very difficult to compete with companies that can afford to operate hundreds of millions of dollars in the red every year without being forced to shut down.

Mailvox: the limits of ambition

In response to a previous Darkstream, a recovering Gamma asks about where the line between positive ambition and evil ambition is drawn:

How can one determine whether an ambition is just and for good, or the motivation is evil and subversive?

As a recovering Gamma, i have the core of success you mentioned and i am trying to channel it to bring glory to god.

I am crushing right now, but the concern of stepping out of line worries me.

The answer is pretty simple. Do your ambitions involve building up your own responsibilities and capabilities or do they involve inserting yourself into the activities of another individual in some capacity for your own benefit? The former ambitions are good. The latter are evil.

Riverboat Ron is a Redskin

Ex-Carolina Panthers head coach Ron Rivera was hired by the Washington Redskins. Rivera has already shown that he can transform himself, but can he transform the culture of losing imposed by Dan Snyder? It's an intriguing post-season development.

Attack on a US embassy

The more things change in the Middle East, the more things stay the same:

The Pentagon has sent 100 Marines to the US Embassy in Baghdad to bolster security in the wake of an attack on Tuesday where hundreds of pro-Iran militia members stormed the compound, set walls ablaze and chanted 'Death to America!' in retaliation for American air strikes. 

US soldiers inside the embassy have fired tear gas, stun grenades and warning shots, wounding 62 of the hundreds of fighters who broke down the main door to the compound and set a fire in the reception area, according to the Popular Mobilization Forces, an umbrella group for the militias recognized by the Iraqi government.

The ambassador to Iraq was on leave at the time of the attack and embassy staff had already been evacuated before the US Marine guard became besieged behind the bullet-proof glass and on the rooftops.

Tuesday's attack on the embassy was is in retaliation for US air strikes on the Iran-backed Kataeb Hezbollah on Sunday night, which killed two dozen fighters. Those strikes were in retaliation for last week's killing of an American contractor at a US base in Kirkuk.

I think I speak for most Americans when I say, "who the hell cares?" American troops shouldn't be in Iraq in the first place. Sending in more Marines and risking them getting wiped out is not at all the wise course of action. And babbling about how "Iran will be held fully responsible" serves no purpose at all when everyone knows that the US cannot and will not win a war against the Iran-China-Russia alliance.

The age of the one global superpower is over. Leave the Middle East to the Middle Easterners.

The nature of The Storm

AC posits that the reason for the circumspection and concern about the public's response to whatever the revelations about the Deep State turn out to be is probably a lot less esoteric than the speculation concerning sex crimes, occultism, ideology, and aliens:

Q said 4-6% would be “lost forever” in post 529. I am not sure he meant they were diehard leftists. Notice 4-6% is roughly what is probably in the covert informant/intelligence network, given TIPS was set to start at 4% of the population, and it has doubtless grown since then. Those might be network members who will not want to give up the old system because they were raised in it, and like being in the preferred discount club. My guess is the revelation of what was being done to everyone will even shock the most diehard of liberals into support for Trump and Q, when they see what is in their files. This will be much more personal than you would think, with teh conspiracy giving real people who know you the ability to invade your most private sanctuaries. Even leftists will be outraged.

Notice also, Q says in post 586, “60% must remain private [at least] – for humanity.” That may mean he intends to keep 60% of what is in the files secret, because the trauma for everyone, of seeing schedules and descriptions detailing every nuance of everything from their private secrets like affairs, their bathroom activities in detail, drug problems, porn preferences, and other peccadillos, to the most intricate details of their sex lives with their spouses, including transcripts and recordings, would destroy people’s abilities to enjoy their lives, if it was made public for all to see and review.

That may also be what he meant by a full revelation would send most people to the hospital with panic attacks and leave them unable to function. Knowing how real people violated the sanctuary of your home, and could still be using technology to do it undetected, would send a lot of people over the edge, if all revealed at once. Even revealed slowly over years, it changes how you view the world, and your sanctuary, in a very profound way. Nothing feels secure.

“The choice to know will be your’s” may mean you will be able to request your own file, and see what was in it, and the details of how it was acquired, and how many people had access to it and were reviewing it for laughs.

We know that one in five citizens of East Germany were working as informants for the Stasi. We also know that the USA has been a secret surveillance state since the 1960s, and an open one since 2005 or so. I can still remember when NSA spying and surveillance software like the FBI's Carnivore aka DCS-3000 were considered conspiracy theory around the turn of the century.

But the awareness that we are being spied upon is very different than actually seeing your full collection of sex tapes, upskirts, and shower videos, just to name a few of the privacy violations that have been amassed by people employed by the federal government, some of whom were almost certainly your friends and extended family members. Just think of how many divorces would result in the first month after the releases.

It would be cruel, and would likely cause a tremendous amount of crime and civil chaos, if all that information was simply dumped upon each and every member of the American public at the same time. Hence the measured and gradual preparation of the public for them as well as the limited release. AC's theory may or may not be correct, but it does make sense and is in line with the developments we have been observing in the god-emperor's war against the Swamp.

Inexplicable resignations

Again, I observe, which provides a better guide to future events. The mainstream narrative or the Q narrative:

The heads of both MI5 and MI6 are due to step down in the new year at a time of ongoing threats from Islamist extremists, Russia and the rise of China, The Telegraph understands.

Two new top spies, who could be posted in from outside the agencies, will face immediate global problems in these “dangerous times,” a former intelligence official has told the Telegraph.

Sir Alex Younger, the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), better known as MI6, and Sir Andrew Parker, his opposite number at MI5, are both thought to be standing down in 2020.

I wonder why they are suddenly resigning....

A tactical analysis

Watch this tactical analysis of the recent church shooting in Texas. Very insightful, very informative. And one hell of a shot from the old guy!

The key is to a) be armed, b) be aware, and c) do not hesitate to act when necessary. Both the usher and the first responder were suspicious, and both had the opportunity to put themselves at a tactical advantage by moving closer in the first instance and surreptitiously drawing in the second, but unfortunately, neither of them acted on their initial suspicions. It's completely understandable, of course, but even so, their failure to act on their suspicions cost them dearly.

Mailvox: deal with it, gamma

It's interesting to see how one gamma troll has belatedly learned that the costs of trolling can come back to bite him years later. I received an email today from someone seeking my assistance to remove his comments from the blog.

I need you to be a friend and remove the comments by "[redacted]." I learned the hard way that employers are very unforgiving regarding comments. But a fall in a pit a gain in one's wit. I also need you to edit out my name in other comments.

So, as I am always amenable to reasonable requests from readers, I went to find the comments specified with the intention of deleting them. At which point, I discovered that these comments were not run-of-the-mill comments from regular readers, but the usual hectoring and posturing from the sort of individual we no longer permit here.

For example, here is one typical exchange:

Gamma: I am almost unable to offer meaningful assistance to you on a personal level, and you quickly become annoyed with me.

VD: Then shut the hell up and stop trying to offer unsolicited advice. It's not that hard to avoid annoying people.

Shut. Your. Fucking. Mouth.

That works 99 percent of the time. If no one has asked you for help or assistance, stop trying to give it to them. If no one has asked you about something, stop trying to teach, help, criticize, or otherwise talk to them about it.

Gamma: It is extremely unwise to return vitriol for kindness.

"If you repay good with evil, evil will never leave your house." (Proverbs 17:13)

Solon:  *Shakes head sadly*

Your reply is ridiculous. Preaching, holier-than-thou, "I know better than you."

He told you to shut your mouth on his blog. The correct response is to accept your chastisement and learn from it, not go full-Gamma and try to tell him he's wrong.

Or to use some logic: your response is not "good," and his response is not "evil." He didn't ask for your advice, you outright admitted you had nothing to offer, and when he said "then go fuck yourself," you responded in butt-hurt indignation. You even tried to use a Bible quote without even having the self-awareness to apply it to yourself.

Shameful. Your advice was not requested, your post was arrogant, condescending, and rude to assume you know shit about VD or why he likes Trump.

Textbook gamma. Vox, I believe you said you were going to start banning Gammas?

So, instead of complying with his request, I replied:

No. You're no friend and you never were. Deal with it, troll. 

His future non-employers should thank me. No one wants or needs these people in their organizations or in their lives. I've given these people chance after chance after chance to no avail. There is absolutely no point in helping them evade the inevitable consequences of their malicious and unnecessary actions.

I deal every single day with people holding me accountable for my words. Don't come to me looking to help you avoid accountability for yours.

Conservatives wave the white flag... again

Rod Dreher does what conservatives do best, surrender. Now they're waving the white flag in the culture war:

Chick-fil-A proved that no matter what nasty things your enemies said about you, if you held your head high and continued doing good work, you would succeed. With so many American businesses and institutions capitulating to the woke mob, Chick-fil-A’s quiet, lonely resistance was inspiring.

It all came crashing down in mid-November, when the company quietly announced it was changing its giving priorities. No longer would it donate to the Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, two charities that activists slammed as gay-haters. Chick-fil-A did not say outright that it was cutting off ‘anti-LGBT’ charities, but for anyone half-literate in reading public relations statements, it was clear they were doing exactly that.

It’s hard to overstate the symbolic importance of this move. For one, Chick-fil-A’s white flag meant that it accepted the vicious slander that the venerable Salvation Army, of all organizations, is a hate group. More importantly, Chick-fil-A was not pressured by financial losses to back down. It did so from a position of strength — hence the stunning demoralization of conservatives. If even one of the great financial success stories in American retailing would not hold out against leftist campaigners, what hope do the rest of us have to thrive in a highly ideologized public square?

Mind you, Chick-fil-A’s opening toward armistice will not buy it peace. The fast-food giant will now be shaken down so hard by gay groups seeking ‘reparations’ that its corporate teeth will rattle — and that still won’t be enough. LGBT activists will not rest until they have strangled the last Evangelical wedding-cake baker with the entrails of the last homophobic farm fowl.

However, in US culture war terms, Chick-fil-A’s surrender really is a Germans-marching-down-the-Champs-Élysées moment for the right. The conflict, which roughly dates from the late 1960s, has moved from a combat phase to a life-under-occupation period. Though the craven capitulation of a Christian-run corporation as successful as Chick-fil-A must shatter the delusions of the most ardent dead-enders, in truth the culture war was definitively lost five years ago.

What a total load of nonsense. Not only are we not surrendering, we are taking the offensive! The Promethean forces have been reeling since 2016, weakened from within and from without, under assault from the god-emperor, from China, from Russia, and from the Men of the West.

Never pay any heed to a conservative. They are cowards, cucks, and capitulants.

And never forget. All we need is twelve.

Speaking of hunting trolls

A word of advice: emailing us nothing but a link to a video and saying "this video is in violation" is entirely useless. If you want to help, then please put in the work that will actually reduce the workload of others.

This is what a proper copyright violation report looks like:

1. Copyright Infringement Notification
What is the issue?

 Copyright infringement (Someone copied my creation)

2. Copyright infringement - Who is affected?

 My company, organization, or client

3. Videos to be removed

∗ URL of allegedly infringing video to be removed:

Describe the work allegedly infringed:
∗ The YouTube URL of my original video: 

∗ Where does the content appear?

Timestamps:
Where does your work appear in the targeted video?
 to
Where does it appear in your source video?
 to

Note that without the timestamps from BOTH the original and the violating video, the lawyers cannot submit the copyright infringement notification. So, if you're not going to provide that, there is no point in providing anything.

I understand people are simply trying to help. But the key word there is "trying", as it is vital to understand that actual help requires REDUCING the burden upon others, not INCREASING it. Which is why just bringing something to someone's attention cannot reasonably be described as helping.

The troll wars

The problem with which we've been dealing for the last few years is just a microcosm of a much larger one that has disturbing long-term implications for the future direction of the intersection of technology and law:

The resounding message in the Pew report is this: There’s no way the problem in public discourse is going to solve itself. “Between troll attacks, chilling effects of government surveillance and censorship, etc., the internet is becoming narrower every day,” said Randy Bush, a research fellow at Internet Initiative Japan, in his response to Pew.

Many of those polled said that we’re now witnessing the emergence of “flame wars and strategic manipulation” that will only get worse. This goes beyond obnoxious comments, or Donald Trump’s tweets, or even targeted harassment. Instead, we’ve entered the realm of “weaponized narrative” as a 21st-century battle space, as the authors of a recent Defense One essay put it. And just like other battle spaces, humans will need to develop specialized technology for the fight ahead.

Researchers have already used technology to begin to understand what they’re up against. Earlier this month, a team of computer scientists from Stanford University and Cornell University wrote about how they used machine-learning algorithms to forecast whether a person was likely to start trolling. Using their algorithm to analyze a person’s mood and the context of the discussion they were in, the researchers got it right 80 percent of the time.   

They learned that being in a bad mood makes a person more likely to troll, and that trolling is most frequent late at night (and least frequent in the morning). They also tracked the propensity for trolling behavior to spread. When the first comment in a thread is written by a troll—a nebulous term, but let’s go with it—then it’s twice as likely that additional trolls will chime in compared with a conversation that’s not led by a troll to start, the researchers found. On top of that, the more troll comments there are in a discussion, the more likely it is that participants will start trolling in other, unrelated threads.

“A single troll comment in a discussion—perhaps written by a person who woke up on the wrong side of the bed—can lead to worse moods among other participants, and even more troll comments elsewhere,” the Stanford and Cornell researchers wrote. “As this negative behavior continues to propagate, trolling can end up becoming the norm in communities if left unchecked.”

Using technology to understand when and why people troll is essential, but many people agree that the scale of the problem requires technological solutions. Stopping trolls isn’t as simple as creating spaces that prevent anonymity, many of those surveyed told Pew, because doing so also enables “governments and dominant institutions to even more freely employ surveillance tools to monitor citizens, suppress free speech, and shape social debate,” Pew wrote.

We're already seeing how companies like Facebook and Google have weaponized the concept of "fake news", and now entire countries are following suit. In what is a crushing refutation of libertarian theory, the Internet and the devolution of what were once civilized anonymous discussion spaces on bulletin boards and CompuServe have clearly demonstrated that Man cannot handle the freedom of a perceived lack of accountability.

There are deeper philosophical aspects to this, that lend additional clarity to traditional thinking about morality and ethics. Even the most devout atheist should be able to recognize at this point that Man was not made for, nor can he reliably handle, even the perceived absence of a Lawgiver to whom he knows he will be held responsible for his actions.