Category Archives: Pet Peeves

Pet Peeves, Reviews, Sci-Fi, Speculative

War for the Planet of the Apes

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As a fan of the 1968 Planet of the Apes movie, and even the first sequel, I’ve watched the revamping of the franchise with interest.  Between career drama, family tragedy, and other distractions in my personal life, I missed this film’s release in 2017 and was not even aware of its existence until a few days ago.

Of course I had to watch it.

What it’s About:

After the events depicted in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Caesar has led his fellow smart apes into the woods and established a secret colony there. At the beginning of this film, the  evil humans (who apparently have nothing better to do) find the colony and intend to commit genocide against them.

Caesar needs to move the entire colony away quickly to a new settlement where they won’t be found, but breaks off from them to undertake his own revenge mission. To avoid spoilers, suffice it to say that from there, the plot builds toward a climactic battle at the end.

Who Directed this Thing?

Upon looking up director Matt Reeves on InfoGalactic, I was shocked to discover he is Generation X. For reasons that might occur to you while reading the rest of this review, I would have guessed Boomer–specifically a draft-dodging “campus activist” Boomer who probably still has a North Vietnamese flag tacked to his wall. I can only speculate about this: Maybe Reeves is a Boomer wannabe. Perhaps, like me, he grew up immersed in Boomer culture and, unlike me, adopted all of it as his own. (Full disclosure: I still love a lot of Boomer music and some of the American cars manufactured during their rising adult years are still my favorites. In fact, some of my best friends are Boomers.)

Cringe Factor:

The older I get, the more of a problem I have with cruelty to animals. The newest Ape movies have been hard to watch because there is so much of it. And, just like so many pinko directors before him, Reeves uses our empathy for the ape characters in an attempt to make us buy in to his themes and worldview.

On several occasions I felt like apologizing to my dog on behalf of all human beings. He sat watching me, waiting for me to turn off the TV and play with him–much less upset about human cruelty than I was.

Technical Ineptitude:

The screenwriter and director know absolutely nothing about the military, other than what they’ve seen in other movies and TV shows. Which is to say: damn little.

And that’s fine–as long as they steer clear of projects that depict military units and personnel. When film makers make their predictably half-assed effort, it grates on me

Hey, Spielberg is a leftist Boomer who (along with George Lucas) probably has a North Vietnamese flag tacked to his wall. But at least he hired an advisor for Saving Private Ryan so he didn’t vomit his ignorance all over the screen for the entire movie. There were moments when he obviously vetoed the experts’ advice, for the sake of dramatic tension and such. Because Hollywood Boomer. Can’t get your expectations too high with that crowd.  And this movie reminded me that Boomer director Francis Ford Coppola actually did a commendable job depicting soldiers at war (for a draft-dodging Boomer, anyway).

Dismissing exceptions like Spielberg and Coppola, when it comes to draft-dodging Boomers who make movies about war, there are two camps: those who believe the US armed Forces is comprised solely of the Marine Corps, and those who believe every swinging Richard in the military is Special Forces. Reeves was obviously discipled by the latter camp.

The evil humans are led by Woody Harrelson playing his own version of Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse, Now! Dude shaves his head and listens to Jimmi Hendrix while planning an idiotic defensive battle against other evil humans  who believe his methods are unsound and are coming to terminate his command, with extreme prejudice. At least there was no monologue about watching a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor.

The “Special Forces” officers and men under his command demonstrate the tactical acumen of a young boy playing with plastic army men. (Maybe the real deal is like that these days. I know the standards have been plummeting across the board as good soldiers have been chased out to open slots for freaks, perverts, womyn and diversity hires.)

However, the movie’s human soldiers do have magic ghost-ninja powers that allow them to repeatedly and easily sneak up and get the drop on the apes, who apparently lost their animal survival instincts, hearing, sense of smell, and developed one whale of a myopia in their vision. At least for the parts of the story that require such handicaps. In fact, these seasoned, professional SF A-Team operators can even have hysterical conversations about 30 yards from an ape listening post and not be discovered.

There’s a lot more I could complain about on this subject, but that would make this a loooooong post.

Theme, Etc:

Much like a Stanley Kubrick film, the big question the screenwriter/director wants you to ask is, “Who actually demonstrates humanity in this story?” Hint: it ain’t the humans.

I give the filmmakers props for driving this theme home with a couple shots of soldiers showing themselves to be more feral than the apes with the motivational mass command and hoowah-ing that grunts are conditioned to perform (but Special Forces soldiers do not, unless their ranks are filled with guys from the Ranger Battalions).  They sounded more like apes than the apes, and this is the closest the movie ever gets to verisimilitude from a military perspective.

Humans are barbaric savages who would rather lose a battle and be wiped out than to miss an opportunity to murder some escaping, unarmed apes. Like the gorilla traitors they employ as “donkeys,” humans are fanatical killers who will follow idiotic orders blindly without question, but are incapable of empathy, gratitude, fair play, or any sort of decency. Except for Nova, who is a young girl in this movie.

Caesar, Luca, Rocket and the other apes are the only characters (besides Nova)  who have any humanity.

This movie really comes off like yet another symbolic summary of Vietnam, as told by a communist propaganda minister–like Little Big Man, Soldier Blue, Return of the Jedi, and Avatar.

Everything you’ll see here has been done before many times. There is no part of this movie that suffers from any modicum of originality.

The acting is fine and the musical score is competent. All the elements of filmmaking come together to sadden, depress, disturb and/or infuriate you over the mistreatment of the apes. And that is pretty much all this film is good for.

Non-Fiction/Documentary, Pet Peeves, Politics/Current Events

Throw a Rock and You’ll Hit a Parasite

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Buyer Beware

Recently I was searching the Internet for an image of a book cover. The book is Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes. I have owned this book since I was nine years old and still have it, but it is a little worse for wear. I wanted the image of a pristine, legible cover.

I found one fairly easily, but I also saw a “for sale” price with one of the images…for below $7!

What?!?

Yeah, I already had  the book–but not in condition like that. And at that price? I’ve read all my life about guys who find optioned-out Hemi ‘Cudas sitting in barns for a couple hundred bucks, but I’ve never found such a deal. I would have been foolish not to buy it.

So I went to the store. The name of the site is “WOB” for “World of Books.” I ordered it and began getting emails just like when you buy anything online.

A week or so later, a package was delivered. I knew something was wrong before I even opened it. It was too thin to be Feiffer’s classic. Had the company advertised the complete, original book, but delivered the one with just the essay but the reprints removed? No, it was much worse. I would have been annoyed with that scenario, but just taken the “L.”

The Bait-&-Switch

Here is what they sent me.

Yup, with an incompetently-removed sticker on the back from some library in Virginia.

I contacted their customer service. Amazingly, they responded. I gave them all the info they requested, and somebody wrote me: “Blah blah blah I apologize blah blah blah I’d be happy to refund your order blah blah blah.”

To which I responded: “Thanks. Can you just send me the book I paid for, instead?”

Two days later I received the word: “This order has been refunded.”

And it was.

Pondering the Motive

So, what was the deal, here? Seems like it would be a disappointing prank, for a prankster. Some kind of grift? No–I got my $$ back. ID theft? I guess my info could be used by them for something–maybe forthcoming credit card fraud. Or maybe there’s some way this improves their SEO? I don’t know. I’m not interested in cheating anybody out of anything, never have been, and so never have wargamed out all the ways to take advantage of honest people online.

What I do know, beyond any reasonable doubt, is that nobody at WOB shipped me that children’s book thinking it was the same book they advertised and I ordered.

The Pervasion of Scam Culture

Scam culture is ubiquitous–and this has me thinking about it.

Know why this site is DOT NET and not DOT COM? Because a hosting company dropped the ball  while supposedly transferring us over from a different host, let the domain name expire and never told me until it was too late. When our domain name became available, apparently, somebody in Ukraine bought/secured the rights to it/whatever and then wanted thousands for me to get it back. They didn’t have any content or products to sell that related to the name in any way. They just wanted the name because somebody else had used it so must have figured it was in demand, and they could demand money for it.

Right now the world is full of people who can’t produce or conceive of anything useful, so they seek fortune by stealing or hijacking the intellectual property of others. The entertainment industry is full of such people, which is why there are so many movies about heists, glamorizing thieves, grifters and other scum who have never experienced an independent thought, but are lifted up to young people as heroes and role models because they figure out how to screw people over.

Our government is controlled by such scum. Back when elections were real, the scum were voted into power because they promised lower-caste scum to redistribute wealth from those who earned it to the Official Victim Class. You can probably name several Corporations that have grifted their way to power, backstabbing their way to the top. And of course we have entire countries like Ukraine whose primary function is parasitic, doubling down on an idiotic war and destroying its own young male population in the process, just so it can help the parasites in Washington bleed their host dry.

Parasitism is everywhere, today. There’s no escape from it. The American Dream was: build a better mousetrap that meets a need, and sell it at a competitive price; then use the profits to make a good life for your family. It has been replaced with the American Nightmare: screw over whatever decent people still exist and skate through life without ever doing an honest day’s work.

Pet Peeves, Superhero

Superpowers and What They Reveal

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If you could have a superpower, what would it be?

I’m guessing that’s a question that’s been asked in interviews at Marvel and DC for decades, now. Not completely unrelated: in what decade did the last noteworthy superhero debut? I’m thinking the ’60s, but maybe it was the ’70s.

We’ve all seen the creative implosion in mainstream entertainment. That industry has always been crawling with commies and perverts, but back in the day they at least had talent and could create art that decent people enjoyed.

Sometime between when they persistently but subtly slipped their cultural Marxist messaging into movies/literature/music that  otherwise  had merit, and ramming blatant Globohomo narratives down the audience’s collective throat at every opportunity, the vehicles they deployed to deliver their mind control also lost their entertainment value. They lost any modicum of originality, too.

Unable to come up with a single compelling story idea, Homowood can now only recycle what’s already been done several times before, or mine other IP from old TV shows, cartoons, toys, and comic books.

Comic “creators” (what an ironic phrase, when applied to Marvel and DC employees) can’t come up with a single interesting idea of their own. They simply take legacy characters still beloved, and pervert, race-or-gender-swap them to peddle more cultural Marxist narratives that drive fans away from the medium.

Let’s look at some of the efforts of comic writers to develop new, original characters, in the postmodern era, with a specific focus.

The bread-and-butter of Marvel and DC was the superhero.  Characters have personalities (well, once upon a time they did) of course, but what makes a hero super is their superpowers. What sort of superpowers have postmodern comic artists/writers given their characters? (By “postmodern,” I include Boomers, Millennials, and whatever Gen Xers managed to slip in between them.)

There’s a character by the name of Jazz–an aspiring rapper by day who moonlights as a crimefighting (?) mutant. His superpower: he can turn himself blue.

But Color Kid is even more powerful. He can not only turn himself blue–he can turn other stuff other colors, too. Evildoers best beware!

These are far from the only characters with gay-ass abilities, but I want to highlight some more characters with powers that are far less interesting than what they reveal about their creators. Let’s roll the clock all the way back to the beginning of the postmodern era for the first one.

Matter-Eater Lad:

This dude can (and does) eat anything–food, dishes, utensils, wood, metal, glass, whatever. I suspect this superpower was inspired by some real people in the comic company bullpens (and later, typical proprietors and customers at comic shops) who ate a lot more than they exercised. And eating disorders are a nice transition to…

Blob:

His superpower is, he’s morbidly obese. Bet you didn’t know that is a good thing, huh? Well, now you know that our country in the 21st century is overrun with superheroes. Blob is a hero that millions today can relate to.

Seriously, I don’t want to get off on a fat-shaming tangent, but it says a lot about the delusions of our cultural influencers that they would spin obesity as a heroic asset.

Domino:

Her superpower is good luck. I can’t disparage this one too much because, in real life, whatever invisible force is often dismissed as “luck” is more of a determinant of success than talent, expertise, discipline, effort and planning, in many situations. Most of the “creatives” in today’s entertainment achieved and maintain their positions by “luck” (plus checking the correct diversity boxes, and the integrity of a whore). If you don’t have “luck,” then it rarely matters how good you are or how hard you try–you’ll never get as far as the lazy, spineless, amoral, untalented hacks who have it.

Echo:

This one is a Freudian slip, personified. The superpower is the ability to copy somebody else. A comic book glorification of what woketards in the entertainment industry do: rip off the intellectual property of actual creators, and twist it to their own nefarious purposes.

Tattooed Man:

His tattoos come to life. That’s his superpower. Are you starting to see how most of these superpowers are just exaggerations of the real-world attitudes embraced by certain demographics?

In real life, there are NPCs who truly believe they can make themselves more attractive by covering themselves with ink and piercings. In their fantasies, I suppose, such modifications not only make them more attractive and interesting, but also more powerful.

Skunk:

This one’s superpower is, basically, body odor. Along with obesity, another common characteristic in evidence at comic book shops (and in the bullpens, probably) is an aversion to personal hygiene. Little did you lesser mortals know, but this is an inspiring crimefighting tool.

Rainbow Girl:

Her superpower is bipolar mood swings. Are you starting to see that these characters are simply grandiose self-inserts by the narcissists who work at the Big Two? What sane people see as a handicap, flaw, or disorder is ack-shully part of what makes the visionaries in mainstream comics so superior to you.

There’s a character introduced within the last few years whose superpower was the ability to force others to like her. I kid you not. So remarkable and inspiring was this character that I can’t remember her name. Neither, apparently, can the World Wide Web.

Examine the Cultural Gatekeepers:

You’ve got an industry run by fat, unbathed, mentally unstable basement-dwellers (who believe themselves to be secret kings and queens far superior to us, with the knowledge of how to fix the world’s problems), incapable of developing characters that anybody finds interesting–much less heroic.

When you think about it, the “creatives” in the industry today almost perfectly match the personality profile of the fictional mad scientist villains from the Golden Age. (“The fools! They’re threatened by my  superior intellect! But one day they’ll bow before me and be forced to admit I am the ultimate genius!”) Except the mad scientists actually knew enough about real science to build giant robots, resurrect dinosaurs, and genetically engineer monsters. Their real-life counterparts still can’t grasp rudimentary concepts like two genders, herd immunity, and the size of virus particles.

How was it different when our country was healthy?

Go back to the Golden Age, and most of the Silver Age. Characters created back then had superpowers like super strength, invulnerability, flight, X-ray vision, super speed, invisibility, growth, shrinking, stretching, fire, and breathing underwater. As farfetched as they were, those abilities were practical. It was easy to conceptualize how those superpowers could be utilized to protect the innocent, make society better, and counter threats to peace and order.

In the “silly” cultural phenomenon of comic books, we find a bellweather for the state of our civilization. Far from the only bellweather, of course. Just one more corroborating all the other evidence that our civilization is circling the drain.

I was inspired to study this subject by a comment AC (Anonymous Conservative) made on his website some time ago. He has done some groundbreaking work on r and K selection, what that looks like in human societies, and how pop culture reflects it. It’s no wonder that he made this observation.

(I recommend his book on r and K selection: The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics, and might review it here one day.)

As I understand it: from the colonial days, up until the end of WWII, America was mostly K-selected. We built stuff, could fix stuff. We protected women and children. We worked, saved, prepared for the future. We were trustworthy neighbors, loyal friends, good Samaritans to strangers, but vigilant about protecting/preserving our own families, property, neighborhood, etc. We didn’t tolerate obvious thieves, perverts, traitors, murderers or rapists. We certainly didn’t allow them to force their amoral attitudes on the rest of society. Superheroes with practical superpowers made sense in that civilization.

Long story short, America shifted toward r-selection in the Postwar era. They abandoned the values and attitudes that helped make us once great. They became , basically, a bunch of indulged brats who threw a party, trashed their parents’ house, then refused to clean up afterwards. In fact, their every effort concentrates on destroying what is left of the house. Every effort that isn’t focused on their own personal gratification, that is. This is exemplified by the forgettable superheroes this r-selected culture has introduced. And by how the iconic superheroes of yesteryear are being corrupted and destroyed.

What do you think?

Pet Peeves, Politics/Current Events, Reviews

Reviews Are the New Word-of-Mouth?

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I heard that suggestion recently and have been pondering it since.

Let’s glance at the Current Year literary landscape:

The population in the USA is about 340 million. Despite the growth of our population, the fewer literate people we wind up with. (IOW, recreational reading is a pastime only for a shrinking demographic.) Not trying to imply one is a cause of the other–just pointing out that our customer base is not related to the total number of living bodies within our borders.

  • The community of readers is not tight-knit.
  • In fact, most have never met, and never will.
  • Since they don’t know each other, discussions don’t take place.
  • “Word of mouth,” regarding books, is effectively extinct.
  • The substitute for literate conversation readers are stuck with are:
    • Online spaces like Goodreads, where you can make recommendations to strangers.
    • The product-featuring algorithms of online bookstores.
    • Online book reviews.

Can you see how the deck is stacked against indie authors, just from that?

Word-of-mouth would be our secret weapon to level the playing field with our tradpub counterparts…if word-of-mouth had not effectively withered and died since the advent of the World Wide Web. For 95% of literate America, there is no “word-of-mouth.” You can bump into other literate folks on social media or whatever, but when you do, it’s likely they’ve got something else on their mind besides discussing literature.

In my current job, I am fortunate to have some colleagues who have read books, voluntarily, in their life post-college. Occasionally we discuss one, if it comes up somehow in conversation. Our tastes don’t overlap all that much, but this is nice. And rare.

So how do readers find a book that looks interesting?

I’ll tell you how I do it, now that my days of browsing the shelves of brick-and-mortar bookstores  is ancient history: I pay attention to recommendations on social media (which I constantly curate,  keeping SJWs and most NPCs off my feed), and, when it’s time for the Big Based Book Sale, I go shopping there. Recently discovered is the Alchemy for Art Indie Library–also a good place to look.

When I’m intrigued by a book, I’ll click the link, read the blurb on the product page, and click “Read Sample” to get a feel for the prose. Lastly, I’ll peruse some of the reviews–positive and negative.

In the Current Year, that’s usually the extent of the vetting I’m capable of (and boy, is it necessary to vet in the Current Year!).

You may be thinking it’s risky allowing strangers to influence my final decision to take a chance on a book–and you’re right. But a well-written review is usually the closest I can get to word-of-mouth.

And there are dangers beyond the mercurial opinions of strangers who write reviews. I don’t necessarily share their tastes and pet peeves, for instance. Worse are the legions of reviewers who are deliberately disingenuous.

There are at least two demographics behind  drive-by one-star reviews. The first are Thought Cops for the Woketard Hive Mind, out to silence, cancel, or at least destroy sales of any book/author they disapprove of. Time was, their thought-policing often backfired. (If one of them reviewed a book I was already interested in, for instance, and complained that there was no sympathetic homosexual character or macho warrior womyn, that book was as good as sold.)

But now with ‘Zon’s “rating” option, the Hive Mind can sabotage a book’s overall rank without ever revealing the reason they don’t want you to buy it. (‘Zon abets the woke mob in many ways. One is, they sift through the books in their store every so often, and nuke reviews of books by the dissident right, without ever explaining why they did so. With my books, it’s always a five-star review they vaporize. I’ve quit tracking this because it’s too depressing.)

No less reprehensible than this leftist chicanery is similar behavior by who I suspect are fellow authors. I’ve met people like this, so my hypothesis is not entirely speculative: they assume they can build themselves up by tearing others down–unjustly in many cases. They, too, lack the courage to reveal their true motives. But that doesn’t hinder them from chopping down the rank of a book they feel competes too strongly with their own.

This brings to mind another hurdle facing indie authors I will hopefully address in another blog post.

I’m curious what others think:

  • Do you pay attention to book rankings?
  • Do you read customer reviews before making your decision to buy or not?
  • How much weight do you place on reviews?
  • Is there some other “word-of-mouth” substitute you trust better?
  • How is your opinion of an unread (by you) book affected when there’s only a handful of reviews (even if the reviews are all good…even if the book was a bestseller)?
  • How about when a book has a lot of ratings/reviews but most are negative?
  • Do you ever ponder the difference between ratings and reviews?
  • What if all the reviews are four and five stars, but most of the rankings are three stars and lower?

As always, I am grateful to all the readers who take the time to post honest reviews.

Pet Peeves, Reviews

Fisking Commie Thought Police “Reviews” Episode 1

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It didn’t take long for one of the self-appointed Thought Cops (who perpetually lurk around Amazon in their tireless crusade against wrongthink) to point and shriek once Appalling Stories 4 was published.

I have pretty much given up posting reviews at the Bulldyke Merchant, or commenting. I’ll do it here since Bezos can’t put his thumb on this little scale. Here we go:

“There is often a point in a teenager’s life when he wants to shock everybody with how edgy and offensive he can be.”

Here in the first sentence this individual has already resorted to personal insults. She is obviously outraged that somebody with the wrong ideology was allowed to publish a book.

“Now imagine physically-grown individuals who never grew past emotional adolescence who think that stuff is still cool.”

Okay, imagining… Oh, wow! There’s Spike Lee! And Martin Scorcese!

“Now imagine that for hundred and ninety-plus pages.”

Well, at least she looked at the product page before she began to screech.

“The tone of each story consistently equivocates scrofulous sneering for wit, ham-fisted sanctimony for satire, and a conviction of supercilious superiority so thick that it practically drips off each electronic page.”

Translation: “I stalked one of the authors and learned from their blog/social media status that these unwoke counterrevolutionaries had the audacity to publish something! Of course, it is my civic duty to torpedo such thoughtcrime however I can, since we’re at least one election cycle away from being able to burn books like these and arrest the authors. Meanwhile: notice my literary panache as I string together several multi-syllable words, with some alliteration thrown in for good measure! Aren’t you impressed? It is I who is the clever, witty, talented one!”

“Many writers here clearly were aiming for George Carlin but fell short by several orders of magnitude.”

Picking up a strong boomer vibe here. Boomers are the best at everything, you see–comedy, film making, outsourcing jobs overseas, normalizing sexual perversion–but especially literary satire! Nobody measures up to the boomer legacy, but naturally these unwashed rube authors must have been trying to.

“The greatest doom for a satirist is that their writings disclose to the world that they are no better than the opponents they wish to mock, at which point the gig is up- flipping through these stories, one tends to come to the conclusion that the gig was over before it began.”

But enough about George Carlin, John Lithgow and Garry Trudeau.  I guess when you foam at the mouth during a tantrum, the spittle can land on anybody.

“If it is subversive stories you wish to read, your money might be better spent watching a Richard Pryor special or reading one of George Carlin’s books.”

Yup: boomer for sure–and evidently has tingles for George Carlin. Probably owns the full Carlin stand-up collection on DVD and quotes from the routines at Starbucks and after yoga.

“If you wait a couple of decades, maybe these authors will have finally become adults with something to say, instead of edgy little kids merely seeking your attention.”

She’s straining to hide her hysterical outrage behind the same rudimentary attempt at an insult. We have ourselves a one-trick pony, here, folks. Notice this verbose “reviewer” offered no specific criticism or mentioned any details about the stories at all. But she has learned from past mistakes–never admitting that she hasn’t actually read the work in question.

Stay tuned for more fisking in the future.

Non-Fiction/Documentary, Pet Peeves, Satire

Auto Parts Store Employees and More Signs of the Impending Idiocracy

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I remember when I used to be able to walk into Car Quest (or better yet: Supershops) and approach the dude behind the counter.
Me: I need a fuel pump for a small-block Mopar.
Car Guy: Stock or high-performance?
Me: Hi-po, please. Whatcha’ got?
Car Guy: Gimme a sec–I’ll grab what we have in stock and let you look at ’em and read the specs. Anything else while I’m in the back?
Me: Yeah–timing gear and chain.
Car Guy: You want a double-roller?
Me: Yeah, might as well.
Car Guy: Be right back.
Fast forward to today. I walk up to the parts counter…
Millennial Retail Zombie: Hi. How can I help you?
Me: I need a fuel pump for a small-block Mopar.
Millennial Retail Zombie: (Deer caught in the headlights expression.) Huh? Um, what kind of vehicle?
Me: Mopar. You know–Dodge, Chrysler, Plymouth…even DeSoto back in the old days.
Millennial Retail Zombie: So it’s a Chrysler?
Me: Any of the above. The same fuel pump fits the 273, the 318, the 340 and the 360, regardless of the car or truck model.
Millennial Retail Zombie: Um, I need to know the vehicle, sir.
Me: Okay. ’71 Duster.
Millennial Retail Zombie: (Tapping at the keyboard.) A what? What make is that?
Me: Plymouth.
Millennial Retail Zombie: We don’t have any such vehicle in our database.
Me: (sighing) Fine. Let’s say it’s a 1990 Dodge Dakota.
Millennial Retail Zombie: (Tapping keyboard.) What engine?
Me: 360.
Millennial Retail Zombie: That engine’s not listed.
Me: Okay. A 318. It’s the five-point-whatever liter. A V-8.
Millennial Retail Zombie: Is it two-wheel drive or four-wheel drive?
Me: It makes no difference.
Millennial Retail Zombie: I have to choose one or the other.
Me: (Another sigh.) Four-wheel drive.
Millennial Retail Zombie: Is it an extended cab?
Me: (Rolling eyes.) Yes. Fine. It’s an extended cab.
Millennial Retail Zombie: Manual or automatic transmission?
Me: Dude, it doesn’t friggin’ matter!
Millennial Retail Zombie: (Gives me that I-may-have-to-call-the-manager look.) Um…
Me: Standard! It’s a friggin’ standard!
Millennial Retail Zombie: What?
Me: Standard transmission! Manual! “Stick shift” if you prefer. Row-your-own. You have to shift it yourself.
Millennial Retail Zombie: Eww! Why would anyone want to do that?
Me: Do you have the pump?
Millennial Retail Zombie: Just a few more questions. Does it have the cassette or CD player; manual or power windows, and where is the ash tray located?
Me: I don’t care. Make something up.
Millennial Retail Zombie: (Tapping keyboard.) Um, we don’t currently have it in stock here or our warehouse, but we’re expecting the next shipment from China to come in any day now.
Non-Fiction/Documentary, Pet Peeves

You’re On Your Own, Kid.

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There’s no back-up.

You’re surrounded. There’s no artillery or air support, nobody guarding your flank, no supply line and you’re gonna have to figure out your own exfil.

That’s your situation if you’re an author or other content creator who hasn’t sold his soul to the globohomo agenda.

The early bloggers, possessing a relative monopoly on readers hungry for free content, linked most frequently to their friends. Qualitative considerations were not a factor. Like in everything, it wasn’t what you knew, but who you knew. The most popular bloggers weren’t necessarily the best writers or thinkers: they simply succeeded in networking. You’ve no doubt followed a link from a popular blogger who claimed that the piece linked to was amazingly insightful, only to be disappointed. If you’ve been around for a few years, you’ve no doubt followed hundreds of such links. That’s the power of networking.

This turned out to be a gigantic boon for conservative media, which until then was comprised of two things: Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.

This still holds true: the most popular WHATEVER are rarely all that talented at anything but networking and self-promotion. And they were the beneficiaries of good timing.

Then social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter popped up, and with this new form of communication, many blogs shut down. Why go through the rigmarole of logging into your blog and writing a post about what made you angry when you could do it on Facebook, with the benefit of a captive audience of your friends, family, and former high school classmates? Facebook’s free, too. You get the same dopamine hits from Likes and Shares and comments as you did with your blog, but with less hassle.

This made many blogs go under. Some got bought by millionaires and became part of Conservative, Inc.: the network of opinion sites that operate much like blogs, but aren’t blogs, because they’re a little more professionally coded.

Why indeed? Especially if you’re so normalcy-biased that you can’t imagine that the people who hate you, and control those platforms, would press their advantage at the critical moment. And speaking of timing: at the very moment in history that this was happening, I became a rookie blogger with a brand new, unknown blog. I sure can call ’em.

The quality is inconsistent. Some columnists have been grinding out the same piece week after week for years, but still have fans. Others are there simply because they’re networked from the early days and got grandfathered in. There are a few sites that are consistently quality, in both content and writing, but they’re the exception, not the rule.

David Dubrow has dropped so many truth bombs in this post, I just can’t quit excerpting it. Here he perfectly summarizes my experience trying to follow conventional wisdom using social media as a marketing tool:

Why should I buy your book when I can just read your columns and Tweets gratis? I Shared your latest piece on my Facebook wall: I’ve done my part to support you. I’ve given you exposure. Now you want me to pry open my wallet, blow out the dust, and give you my hard-earned cash for something I might not even like? Are you crazy? You’ve got thousands of Twitter followers and write for a big site anyway; aren’t they paying you the big bucks?

Yup. So much for conventional wisdom. And here Dubrow touches on the every-man-for-himself attitude on the creative right:

…almost none of the big names in conservative media take risks, particularly to help other conservative content creators. Money trumps ideology. Money trumps culture. If you’re outside the network, you don’t exist. The thinking is if you’re any good, you’ll earn those fans, and when you’ve made it up here with us big boys, then we’ll notice you. That so many of them are there because of networking instead of quality isn’t something they consider, and for good reason. Who wants to think of himself as a recipient of internet nepotism?

…This ossification isn’t limited to conservative media: the conservative audience also suffers from the same condition. What’s easier, endlessly whining about the rot in our media culture, or doing something about it? If you can’t be bothered to shell out five bucks for a book that doesn’t spread its cheeks and spray woke agitprop all over your bad-attitude face, what will you do to change your culture? If you don’t support the content you want to see, it will go away. What will it take to move you? You’ll keep paying Hollywood degenerates and SJW book publishers to produce content specifically crafted to advance a social agenda that’s destructive to your ethics, but you won’t invest in alternative media?

You have choices. And choices have consequences.

Vladymir Lenin may have been correct that when International Communism has wiped out all but the very last capitalist on Earth “he will sell us the rope with which to hang him.”

But it’s actually worse than that. He will buy the rope himself, and even put his head in the noose, then ask Alexa to send an Uber driver over to kick the chair out from under him.

Historical, Non-Fiction/Documentary, Pet Peeves

All Men Are Created Equal

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First of all, Happy Birthday, America.

This Independence Day is probably a good time to make a point about something that’s become controversial in recent years. There is a faction at work in the political landscape that seems to have a vested interest in convincing right-wingers to abandon our commitment to freedom through individual rights (which the Founding Fathers won for us), and instead obsess over petty, superficial genetic differences.

A descent into white tribalism under an appropriately pale “god-emperor” is the only thing that can save “muh westurn sivulizayshun,” they tell us. I suspect some of them actually believe it. Part of their dogma has necessarily been to ridicule the idea of equality–especially as it is so famously referred to in the Declaration of Independence.

First of all, some of the men who supported the Patriot cause during the Revolution certainly harbored sentiments that are considered racist (or at least separatist) today. Some of them may have even been almost as racially-obsessed as the current Democrat Party…though that’s rather difficult to imagine. This is not an attempt to whitewash them all as abolitionists or colorblind according to the Current Year ideal.

But secondly, neither were they stupid. The Founders were highly intelligent men, more literate than probably anybody who currently works in Washington DC, or in the mainstream media.

Time-warp the Founding Fathers to present-day America, sit them down for a debate, and none of them would try to argue that Mike Tyson has the exact same capabilities as Stephen Hawking and vice-versa. That was not intended by the phrase “all men are created equal.”

You must appreciate, first, that English is an evolving language. Devolving for the last couple generations, actually. Some words have changed meanings, while others have lost certain nuances, and what was as obvious back then as the nose on your face is now in question, or even flat-out denied. What didn’t even need explanation to the average layman in the 18th Century is beyond the reckoning of the dumbed-down Useful Idiots of today.

Secondly, you must appreciate that the constitutional republic in America is utterly unique in world history. Whether monarchies, sultanates, or empires, the governments  of the world had predominantly been formed upon the premise that the people in the ruling class are inherently superior to the serfs, peasants, and other citizens. Yes, there were anomalies like Iceland, and even the British flirted with the idea of individual rights, but most of the human race was conditioned to believe that;

  1. Only the “superior” people in the ruling class had rights.
  2. A person was born into their station. Never mind that every noble and royal line could trace its lineage back to a commoner who simply was a talented leader.
  3. “Inferior” people (subjects) in the lower societal classes basically belonged to the royalty and nobility, to be used however their betters saw fit.
  4. Whatever a subject earned or made or inherited ultimately belonged to their betters, and could be confiscated if some fat cat wanted it (similar to how the Democrats and their IRS enforcers operate today).
  5. A subject’s life was not their own. A king or queen could sacrifice them at any time in a war, show trial, or royal temper tantrum.
  6. If you wanted to build houses or repair shoes, but your lord or lady wanted you to clean out sewers instead, for whatever reason, then you cleaned out the sewers. And liked it.

The Founders had a radical idea: that every man was a free moral agent with the same opportunity to accept salvation from their Creator. They believed that government should serve people–not the other way around–by protecting the individual rights endowed to each man by virtue of being a creation of God. Nobody had more or better rights simply because they were born to a certain family. All were blessed by God and accountable to God. What they earned belonged to them; they were free to make their own decisions; and they owed their lives to no earthly king.

This concept of individual rights was not popular, even in a Great Britain which had grown increasingly liberal* since the Magna Carta.

The Founders bothered to spell out their beliefs precisely because they were so idiosyncratic in a world where most people accepted the idea that those born to a “higher station” should rule, and law should hang on their every whim and fancy. Americans rejected the notion that anyone was owed anything by someone else simply by virtue of who they were born to (so much for Affirmative Action).

Contrary to either revisionist narrative you’re likely to hear, the Founding Fathers were neither white supremacists, nor egalitarians of the Baby Boomer stripe.

The word “equal” was used not to imply that every single man has the same exact capabilities, but to mean that nobody is actually born to a “higher station,” giving them the right to dictate when another man should live or die, to make their decisions for them, or to take for themselves the ownership of human beings that only God can rightfully claim. All men are equally accountable to God, and under His authority, subject to the same self-evident laws and endowed with the same unalienable rights.

*I use the word “liberal” to convey the word’s actual meaning. I do not use it in the Newspeak context it is so mindlessly used today.

Non-Fiction/Documentary, Pet Peeves, Politics/Current Events, Socio-Sexual Studies

You Paved the Way For This Gender Insanity

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A link was shared on MeWe about a judge who ruled that boys and girls in high school must shower together “in order to accommodate transgender students.” I commented on the thread, as did many others. Then some guy posted the following:

“Boy oh boy would I like to see that happen . my daughter in action you see some dumbass get in the shower with her and she Going to  knock him on his ass my girl is one badass” (sic)

And the guy has a Gadsen Flag as his profile pic.  It’s looking like, outside of Virtual Pulp, there is no organization, group, institution or movement that hasn’t been infected by this feminista virus.

First of all, he’s delusional. Mediocre male athletes are “identifying” as female all over the place and trouncing the best female athletes in their respective sports. The guy has watched too many Kickass Grrrrl Power scenes in action movies, and has confused fetish with reality. But that isn’t the point, here.

This person is not alone. Legions of “conservative” parents have been raising their daughters to be masculine, even if they’re not jock-ettes. The “female ideal” our depraved culture has been foisting on us is women who talk like men, act like men, and even look like men (just look at all the broad shouldered, narrow hipped, square jawed models and actresses sold to us as “female sex symbols”). Dads like this guy are fully on board with all that, even if they vehemently disagree with those silly libruls about kneeling during the National Anthem.

They don’t mind gender-bending, unless it goes too far too fast. They’ll obediently have their children flirt with gender confusion, just as long as they don’t go all the way.

It’s nearly as bad in the “alt right” as it is in “conservatism.” For people so obsessed about “muh westurn sivulizayshun,” they’ve apparently never made the connection that Rome didn’t conquer the known world with coed legions led by Kickass Womyn Warriors. Sane civilizations recognized that there are biological differences between the TWO genders, and the roles men and women played lined up with their capabilities. Women are biologically suited to caring for children and keeping the home, with a degree of competency that men can’t equal. Men are biologically suited to hunt, build, explore, and fight, on a competency level that women can’t approach without imposed handicapping.

Women were not designed to be “badasses.” Denying that is a symptom of a contrived fetish. It’s a wildly popular and state-approved fetish, but still just a fetish. Women who think they are badasses are not very attractive, therefore less likely to excel at what they are designed for (childbearing, nurturing children, etc.).

Obviously, the society we live in, through relentless conditioning, has been trained to reject reality. “Conservatives” have obediently jumped on the gender-bending bandwagon. Now they’re starting to realize where the bandwagon is going, and are horrified…but too invested in feminist myths to decisively jump off and change course.

Non-Fiction/Documentary, Pet Peeves

A Flame War With Neon Revolt

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For those who don’t know what Q Anon is, you may read my previous post.

I’ve been following Neon Revolt’s Q decodes for a while, and sharing some of them. He’s very detailed, and goes deep, whereas a lot of Q “decodes” on Youtube are little more than somebody reading the Q drops to the camera. I don’t have time to hang around the chans and decode them myself…or even to keep up with all the coverage from the two sources I follow. So I appreciate the painstaking work that Praying Medic and Neon Revolt put into that.

NR also struck me as a decent guy, too. Maybe he is. But anyway, one day I was reading one of his posts and came across this:

He said more than I’m including here on this marathon post, so out of fairness to him, you should probably visit his site and read it all in its entirety before deciding which one of us is on the right side of what follows.

Do take note, though, that the evidence he presents that “America was built on many classically fascist principles” are fasces in historic art and sculpture, and the Latin phrase “E pluribus unum” on Federal Reserve Notes. That will prove relevant in the next screenshots from a following post of his.

So superficial connections via fasces on old artwork, and a Latin phrase, are valid evidence of America being built on many fascist principles. But superficial connections between Nazis, Fascists and Communists just don’t cut it as valid evidence. Remember this logic, because this isn’t the only way or time it is applied.

Again: NR says a lot more on the subject than I’m including here, and it’s more lucid than how the average white nationalist or Nazi apologist normally present it. BTW: I’m not saying he is either one, necessarily (though I have no doubt he’s been influenced by one or more). He even makes some good points.

Secondly, it is true that the USA has been infiltrated by collectivists (called by different labels depending on the times or political winds) and other treacherous individuals throughout our history. Some of them had infiltrated America even by the time of the Revolution–meaning they were here, influencing our government, even before the republic came into being. That’s at least one blog post all by itself, so I’ll leave it at that for now.

Thirdly…well, we’ve posted here many times about white tribalism, so I don’t want to rehash that here. But while at one point you could reliably bank on two out of every three members of any white identity group being an informant or plant from a federal agency, that seems to have begun changing during the Obama Occupation. A whole lot of Fake Right trolls probably still are paid agitators, but a lot of non-shill white folks have become tired of all the institutionalized hate against whites, and have begun listening to the white identity messages–regurgitating it everywhere they go, as if it comprises their own thoughts and opinions.

These Fake Right recruits are more and more militant about reacting to standard SJW identity politics…with a big steaming pile of their own identity politics. Together, the shills and the true believers have dedicated their lives to proving left-wing propaganda correct (that everything is about race, and the left’s political opposition subscribe to white supremacy, etc.).  They’re as predictable as their SJW counterparts at introducing race into every topic–including those which have nothing to do with race.

The sad part is that some sincere people are buying into this tribalist thinking. It’s not gonna lead to anything pretty; but at this point it appears to be inevitable.

Anyway, Neon Revolt presents himself as a man who follows the truth wherever it leads. And we’re both on Gab. During a rare compulsive moment, I tagged him with a message. I don’t have a “pro” account (which allows Gabbers to write longer posts), and I’m not used to limiting myself to 300 characters, so I was forced to break some posts into parts. That, plus Gab’s display of complex threads in a visually non-linear fashion, caused me to chop certain things up in an attempt to sort it into chronological sequence here. Also, I didn’t capture all the streams that split off from the main thread (some of the comments are, frankly, incoherent).

This is a pet peeve of mine, as many readers know. There was probably a more diplomatic way to initiate a discussion. Anyway, here’s what happened next:

So at that point, I figured the conversation was over. He probably wasn’t willing to have his beliefs challenged, and that’s his prerogative. He’s got plenty of followers, of whom I was only one, so I wasn’t even banking on him replying at all. He did respond, but was pretty dismissive.

“Whatever,” sez I.

But then he replied again later, and this ensued:

Okay…asking relevant questions is revisionist and “blue pill.” And I didn’t press him on this at the time, but if he admits that both movements were funded by the same people, you’d think that knowledge, by itself, would spark his curiosity, not prompt him to gloss it over as if it’s insignificant. You’d think it would provoke questions. If the two revolutionary movements are “nowhere near the same,” why would certain people fund both of them? Who benefits from a one-two punch (or Plan A & B) like that? Presumably, two movements which are “nowhere near the same” would have radically different goals and results, yet he doesn’t find this information the slightest bit intriguing.

This was a sign that I probably had overestimated NR.

At this point I was disappointed at the knee-jerk reaction, and his lame deflection.

But speaking of “autistic screeching and bad memes,” one of his Gab sycophants decided to jump in and dazzle me with his based intellectual alacrity:

What is he mouthing off about here? What, exactly, am I being told to deal with? Absolutely nothing in this entire thread had anything to do with Q coming to /pol/. You probably think I lifted this from a different thread with a completely different conversation just to make this ankle-biter look like a fool, but I promise I didn’t. After getting no response to his first comment, he tried again later during my back-and-forth with Neon Revolt.

I wonder if guys like this really believe their input is relevant. There’s a wise old maxim that you shouldn’t argue with stupid people, because they’ll drag you down to their level, then beat you with experience. But I must admit: I’m occasionally in the right mood to engage in a battle of wits with an opponent who is unarmed.

The sad part is, looking back over the sub-threads, these ankle-biters probably do believe their petty insults really are devastating comebacks.

I don’t know why that black strip appears in some of my screenshots. Really annoying. But back to the main thread:

Again, Gab’s character limit forced me to cut off my comment, back up and finish the first part a different way. During that annoying interruption, I took a moment to reflect. This was descending into an Internet pissing contest, which was not what I intended. So I posted the following:

Neither Neon Revolt, nor his ankle-biting sycophants. ever replied to, or even acknowledged, this post. Too bad, because I was irritable later when I came back to Gab and read the replies posted while I was out in the real world:

If you’ve paid close attention, you can see that he’s subtly contradicting his earlier admission that both movements were funded by the same people (“the people behind it all”). And now he just falls deeper and deeper into his Dunning-Kruger spiral. Really disappointing. I’ve come to expect these “ready, fire, aim!” rules of engagement from most keyboard warriors on social media, but was hoping he’d be different.

His fans are probably fooled. I’m not: he didn’t answer my questions based on basic socialist principles because he can’t answer them–not without challenging the Narrative he has latched onto and is evidently quite fond of.

So after claiming that the National Socialists and International Socialists are nothing alike, he cherry-picks one of my questions to build a straw man out of, stacking up more assumptions about what I do think and don’t know. Maybe the “#BoomerPosting” hashtag he so adroitly wielded against me means he assumes I’m a baby boomer, too? Add that to the list of names I’ve been called by the Legion of Ignorance, I guess: racist; diversity bot; Nazi; kike; cuck; autist; and, of course: conspiracy nut-job.

Again, I had to split my comment up, and it makes the thread hard to follow in some places. Unlike Neon Revolt, I had kept my comments about the facts in dispute, and avoided attacking him personally in our dialog. These posts were as close as I got:

Anyway, what follows is how it ended.

Since I’m being called a baby boomer, what have I got to lose by referring to Monty Python?

So my questions were “aggressive”? Hmm. Then, after calling me plebian; oblivious to history; revisionist (based on what “concrete evidence,” I wonder?), blue-pilled; more informed by my “vague American dogma than actual research;” calling me ignorant a few more times; and declaring my criticisms are uninformed (Holy Hypocrisy, Batman!), he whines that I acted “indignant.” But wait! He’s got one more parting accusation: that I haven’t behaved like a grown adult (implying that he has, I gather). He then mutes me, suggesting that I unfollow him.

I knew going in that there was a good chance I wouldn’t be able to change his mind. I was just hoping for a little less knee-jerk and defensiveness. In fact, I had begun the task of unpacking some books and trying to track down some other misplaced resources so I could, in fact, show him the “concrete evidence” he allegedly would accept. But this is probably for the best. I can see now that he would have just dismissed it out of hand for one excuse or another and all that time and effort would have been wasted.

As it is with 99% of idealogues in the world today.

Here’s another sub-thread initiated by an ankle-biter, coincident with the other pissing contests:

I’m frequently surprised at how so many people  on social media so carelessly sling out these demonstrably false accusations. And when she’s called out, the poor blowhard drops her bombshell–sentence excerpts that even somebody with only First Grade reading skills can see is not the “EXACT SAME WORDING”:

And when these people are proven wrong, there’s no remorse. They never miss a beat–just double down. I hate to acknowledge this, but some of these people on my side of the political divide behave just as irrationally as the SJWs. At least she’s learned not to hoist herself on her own petard anymore. Notice how she covers her retreat by building a (lame) insult around the fact that I typed: “Oh, I see.”

The “soyboy” remark was probably wasted ammo. She likely has already forgotten her own opening shots (because it’s too painful for her to remember how they backfired?).

BTW, her loony, desperate comment above reminds me (as do some of NR’s, to a lesser extent) of a tactic I’ve been noticing a lot on social media lately. I’ve been in quite a few flame wars online. Whether I’m engaging a Fake Right Alt-Retard on Gab, a normalcy-biased coincidence theorist on the Gateway Pundit, or a rabid SJW on Youtube, they ALL wind up accusing me of being enraged by something they said. There’s literally no reason for them to legitimately suspect that I’m frothing into a berserker rage. In fact, it’s often them who appear to be rage-posting–with name-calling tirades and irrational (if not anatomically impossible) accusations, after I’ve directed all my attention to their arguments, and haven’t speculated about them personally. And for whatever reason, their accusation is usually some variation of the rhetorical statement: “Looks like I touched a nerve, didn’t I?”

Is it as simple as just wishful thinking on their part? They’ve unleashed the most powerful insults in their arsenal, so they’re positive it has provoked an emotional reaction from their opponent? Or are they trying to instigate a self-fulfilling prophecy? Maybe they believe that provoking a tantrum out of the enemy…or, at least, selling that version of events to onlookers…is equivalent to victory, so they can save face.

Finally, here are a couple comments from one of the subthreads the conversation inspired:

I haven’t read through NR’s comment threads, so I can’t verify the first post. However, after this episode, I’m sad to say I don’t doubt it at all.

The second comment is evidently from one of the Q skeptics who likes to call us “Qtards,” “low IQAnons,” etc. But I thought he made an interesting point about NR’s double standard regarding “concrete evidence.”

Many skeptics like to accuse Q of trying to tell people what to think. I point out that he mainly asks questions and encourages people to think/research for themselves. How ironic, then, that Neon Revolt was so intimidated by my “aggressive questions.”