Tag: Sargon of Akkad

Aragorn’s Tax Policy

Another absolutely fantastic video by Sargon of Akkad, this time taking down George R.R. Martin for his snarky critique of Tolkien, proving once again that Tolkien was a far better fantasy writer than Martin, even at his prime.

The central thesis is that the real reason Martin hasn’t finished his Song of Ice and Fire series is that he’s written himself into a corner: he either has to have the worst villain in the series win the game of thrones, or he has to resurrect Jon Snow and giving him a heroic arc, thus repudiating the cynical, nihilistic worldview on which the series is based. But Martin can’t bring himself to do either of those things, because he’s a soft liberal boomer in addition to being a lazy fat ass.

Personally, I think there may be some truth to JDA’s take on Martin: that he finished the last book and sent it to the publisher just as the TV series finale was airing, but the show bombed so badly that he realized he had to rewrite it, and he just hasn’t been able to bring himself to do that. In other words, the final season gave us the true ending that Martin had planned for the series, and since that was an utter failure, Martin has inwardly resigned himself to living out his last few years in luxury, and leaving some other writer (human or AI) to finish his work.

Anyways, it’s a great video, well worth watching. My summary doesn’t do it justice at all.

2019-10-10 Newsletter Author’s Note

This author’s note originally appeared in the October 10th edition of my author newsletter. To subscribe to my newsletter, click here.

I saw Joker yesterday. Don’t worry, I won’t give away any spoilers. It was every bit as incredible as I expected it to be, and yet in some key ways, not what I was expecting at all.

First, the basics. This movie is dark. Very, very dark. I believe this is the darkest, most terrifying iteration of the Joker ever made. Part of that is because it is so realistic. There are no magical superpowers, no aliens or infinity stones or any of that stuff. This story could have already happened in our world. It could yet happen.

That said, it is clear that the people who made it have deep respect and appreciation for the franchise. It isn’t like The Last Jedi, where the filmakers explicitly tried to subvert all of the things the fans love about Star Wars. In many ways, Joker is a homage to all of the iterations of Batman that have come before it. This could just as well be the origin story of Cesar Romero’s Joker as Heath Ledger’s.

Joaquin Phoenix is incredible. I didn’t think it was possible to do a better Joker than Heath Ledger, but Phoenix has done it. He really draws you into the Joker’s head, and his transformation from a broken misfit to a sociopathic supervillian is believable, compelling, and utterly terrifying. He earned every moment of the eight-minute standing ovation this movie received on its debut.

There is a dramatic arc to violence that very few movies, TV shows, or even books show in its entirety. When a character swings an axe at someone’s head, the scene usually cuts. You know what happened. But in Joker, you see everything. It’s a lot like Blade Runner in that respect. The bodycount is not that high, but the violence really hits you, and stays with you.

If you aren’t in touch with your dark side, this movie will profoundly disturb you. It will also screw with your mind. If you struggle with PTSD, this is probably one to avoid, unfortunately. Even if you think you like dark movies, this one may be too much for you. But if you do enjoy it, you will probably want to see it again, and again. There are so many layers to this movie that a single viewing is not enough to fully take it all in.

Without question, Joker is a major cultural landmark. It is, above all else, a brutally clear and damning indictment of all of us. In a world convinced that guns cause violence, Joker focuses on mental health and the cracks in our healthcare system. In a world obsessed with priviledge and inequality, Joker is about our pathological lack of empathy and compassion.

Part of the controversy surrounding this movie is the gulf between the critics who hate this movie, and the general audience, which loves it. After watching it, I think the critics can be divided into three camps.

First, there are the social elites who are so out of touch with the reality that the rest of us live in that Joker is anathema to their lived experience. It’s not that they hate it, so much as that they’re confused and bewildered by it. They are also bewildered by Brexit and the election of Donald Trump.

Second, there are the wokescolds who hate Joker because they recognize it as an indictment of themselves. They deride it as an “incel movie” because they know that their woke politics are partly responsible for creating a culture where “incels” are a thing, and that drives these people to violence.

I actually think that this isn’t the case for most of the critics. Sargon of Akkad recently put out a video on this, and while I agree with him that the wokescold critics see Joker as a mirror, I don’t think they see themselves as the people who drive the Joker into psychopathic madness. Instead, I think that the vast majority of the wokescold critics see themselves in the Joker.

In Milo Yiannopoulos’s interview with Jordan Peterson, he made the very salient point that the angriest, most radical people on the far left are, in their personal lives, broken and in pain. Often, they are victims of abuse. Personally, I would expand that to include many on the alt-right as well, but the point still stands.

The wokescolds want to see themselves as heroes working to overcome systems of oppression and inequality. They see themselves as builders, but Joker shows them that all they really want is to burn it all down. That’s why I believe this movie has provoked such a virulent backlash from the wokescolds: because it is a mirror that shows them as they really are, and they are terrified of what they see in it.

Without love, it is impossible for our culture and society to heal. That, I believe, is Joker’s ultimate message. The reason that Arthur becomes the Joker is because no one ever showed him any compassion, empathy, or love. He laughed through the pain until the pain made him laugh, and became the villain that Gotham deserved.

How often do we really listen to each other? How often do we reach outside of ourselves and genuinely connect? A recent study shows that the average American hasn’t made a single new friend in the last five years. Is that you? Is that your neighbor? The family across the street, or the guy who lives down the hall?

It doesn’t take much to reach out. Sometimes, all it takes is a smile—but isn’t that the joke? Somewhere, I hear maniacal laughter…

Would you kill baby Hitler?

So the March for Life happened recently, and Ben Shapiro did a live show where he used a thought experiment about going back in a time machine to kill baby Hitler to make a pro-life argument. His argument was that you shouldn’t kill baby Hitler; instead, you should raise baby Hitler in a more loving home so that he doesn’t grow up to be Hitler. In other words, you shouldn’t kill baby Hitler because babies are always innocent, and killing babies is wrong. Fair enough.

But the left immediately went crazy over this argument, calling Shapiro a nazi for defending Hitler, or just making fun of him for coming up with such a ridiculous idea. Never mind that it’s a thought experiment. Never mind that it raises valid moral and ethical questions, which those on the far left refuses to address.

Everything you need to know about this controversy is basically summed up in the video above, where Sargon of Akkad does a point-by-point critique of The Young Turk’s cringeworthy reaction. At this point, Sargon’s video has more views than TYT’s original video, and YouTube is deleting downvotes on the original.

I think Sargon is right. I think that Ben really hit a sore spot on the left, because they’d all kill baby Hitler if given a chance, and they don’t want to admit it. Not only is it bad optics, but it also points out the lack of moral foundation or principles on the far left. After all, if they’d go so far as to kill a baby, simply because of what that baby might turn out to be, what else are they going to do?

For the left, Nazis aren’t merely on the extreme end of the scale of good and evil; they are the scale. This is what gets to me. Black Pigeon Speaks put out a video on YouTube that has since been taken down, because it is true, and because it gets to the heart of this issue. Civilizations always have founding myths, which accomplish three things:

  1. they tell the civilization’s origin story,
  2. they define, in cultural terms, the difference between good and evil, and
  3. they describe what the civilization holds to be sacred.

For example, traditionally in the United States, our founding myth has to do with the founding fathers, the Constitution, and the Revolutionary War. Our civilization was founded by pilgrims and pioneers, who lived under British rule until the King became tyrannical and we rose up to declare our independence. In cultural terms, good and evil are set out clearly in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. The thing we hold most sacred is our liberty.

You can also see this reflected in our coinage:

  • E Pluribus Unum — “from one, many,” harkening back to the Revolutionary War and our civilization’s origin story.
  • In God We Trust — recognizing the Judeo-Christian values that informed our founding documents, including the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
  • Liberty — the thing that American civilization holds most sacred.

In the Black Pigeon Speaks video which has since been taken down, he argues that Western civilization adopted a new founding myth after World War II, and that this new founding myth is responsible for much of the cultural and moral decay we’ve experienced in subsequent decades. In this new myth:

  • our civilization was born out of the horror and devastation of the world wars,
  • Nazism became the definition of evil, and
  • the Holocaust became the most sacred aspect of our civilization.

The Nazis were clearly evil. I’m not disputing that, or the reality of the holocaust. Killing six million Jews, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, political dissidents, and mentally and physically handicapped in gas chambers designed specifically as engines of mass genocide is incredibly heinous, on a scale that is difficult to comprehend. There is no downplaying or excusing that kind of horror.

But without defending the Nazis in the slightest, that doesn’t make them the most evil regime in history, or even the most evil regime of the 20th century. Stalin was just as genocidal, possibly even more so, and I would argue that he was worse than Hitler. Mao was arguably worse than both of them.

Hitler wasn’t just a monster: he was a man, like any of us. Jordan Peterson is right: we should never make the mistake of thinking that we’re morally superior to the Nazis, because if we were in similar circumstances, we’d probably make similar choices. That’s simply the reality. Hitler isn’t the boogeyman, and the Nazis are not the definition of evil. They fall on an extreme end of the scale of good and evil, but we should never mistake the Nazis for the scale.

Which brings us back full circle to the pro-life argument. How do we know that we aren’t more evil than the Nazis? The Nazis exterminated the Jews out of fear and hatred, but we’re killing our own babies in many cases out of nothing more than apathy. The Nazis at least believed that the Jews were behind the collapse of German civilization, and used that argument to justify their argument that Jews were non-people. What argument do we use to justify treating the unborn as non-people? Certainly not a scientific argument. And we’ve aborted ten times as many victims of the Holocaust, so it’s not like the Nazis were worse in terms of scale.

I genuinely believe that future generations will look back on us with the same horror and revulsion that we look back on the Nazis. And honestly, I can’t say they’ll be wrong.

So would you kill baby Hitler? It’s a valid question that raises some very important points. Not only would I not kill baby Hitler, but I wrote a short story about a time traveler who stopped Hitler not by killing him, but by altering the course of history in a very different way. If you haven’t already, you should check it out: “Killing Mister Wilson.”

Anyways, those are my thoughts on the subject. Also, TYT has hit a new low for cringe. I suppose that’s par for the course when your network is named after a genocidal regime.

Racism is trendy again

“People of color” is an inherently racist phrase.

There. I said it. I may get into trouble for saying it, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

Before we unpack the phrase “people of color,” let’s first define our terms. This is where the heart of the controversy lies.

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, racism means:

: poor treatment of or violence against people because of their race

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, racism means:

Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior.

I refer to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary specifically because they are the two highest authorities in the English language. In the interest of impartiality, I’ll include the Wiktionary definition as well, which anyone can edit:

Prejudice or discrimination based upon race.

Seems pretty clear, right? Racism is discrimination based on race.

That is, unless you’re a progressive. To them, the only people who can ever be racist are whites, because racism is systematic and the systems of oppression benefit whites at the expense of non-whites. This is called “white privilege,” and the fact that most of us cannot see it is further proof that it is true.

(Pay no attention to the fact that a black man became President of the United States—effectively the most powerful man on Earth—in the face of these “systems of oppression.” How do the progressives justify this? I have no frickin’ idea. The mental gymnastics it must take… but I digress.)

Because the system is racist, and all non-white people are oppressed, according to progressive “logic” non-whites cannot be racist. This effectively gives them a free pass to discriminate in almost any way, shape, or form against people who are white.

This is where the term “people of color” comes in. It’s simply a more polite way of saying “non-white.” Don’t believe me? Check out the Wikipedia article. It’s right there in the first sentence:

Person of color (plural: people of color, persons of color, sometimes abbreviated POC) is a term used primarily in the United States to describe any person who is not white.

In other words, it is a term that was invented to discriminate against whites. What do African-Americans, Punjabs, Japanese, Mayans, and Australian Aborigines racially have in common? Nothing at all—except that they’re all non-white, and therefore fall under the catch-all term “people of color.”

I despise the progressive redefinition of racism as much as I despise the term “reverse racism.” There is no such thing as reverse racism, because racism doesn’t have a damned direction! When ANYONE discriminates against another person based on ANY race, whether black, white, yellow, red, green, or purple, it is racism pure and simple.

Lately, I’ve seen the phrase “people of color” come up in the submissions guidelines of a number of short story markets. Usually, it will be something along the lines of a call of submissions for a special issue, though it sometimes appears in their diversity statements as well. To me, it always raises a red flag.

When all of the major markets are regulary running “people of color” special issues, with diversity statements calling for more submissions from “people of color,” then we’ve achieved a system that is racist to the core. If it weren’t for indie publishing and the Sad Puppies, I would be very wary of this trend. And if things change in the indie world to really put the squeeze on writers (subscription services, exclusivity agreements, royalty cuts, etc), I would be very concerned.

Make no mistake about it: “people of color” is a racist term. It’s also quite trendy, but that doesn’t make it any less racist.

I’ll leave you with this hilariously topical video from Sargon of Akkad: