Over-used RPG buzzwords

I'm not a fan of faddish buzzwords at the best of times, but having them intrude into my hobbies is especially a pet peeve. Here's some of my observed over-used buzzwords.

This is just a minor rant for amusement value. None of this should be taken too seriously. I mean, these buzzwords really are pet peeves of mine, but whatever. Pet peeves, by definition, aren't really important.

• OSR - OK, this first one is a little tongue in cheek. But given that nobody knows what the OSR really is anymore, and there are at least two overlapping yet also conflicting camps on what the definition really refers to, it's actually not a super useful label anymore.
• Cinematic - this one is another one that gets tossed around all the time, but I'm not very clear on what people mean by it. I'm not sure that they are either.
• -punk - this has been a pet peeve of mine for years. Unless it's related to a dystopian worldview and an anti-establishment youth street movement, it's not -punk. Steampunk gets a grudging pass because it's obviously a derivative evolution of cyberpunk, where -punk was actually used correctly. People who think that they're clever talking about hope-punk, or calling Eberron magi-punk do not.
• Liminal - I know that it's a pretty cool word, but c'mon. Horror in hallways and doorways? People use this all of the time to describe horror themes that are just... regular horror themes. It's either over-used now, or it's been under-used for decades. You could say that the original dungeon-crawling activity was liminal horror, and it'd be a mostly correct usage of the term. And yet for decades nobody felt the need to do so. There's really no need to do so now either; nine times out of ten, it's just a signal; "look at me; I use fancy vocabulary to describe regular things."
• Diagetic - what was wrong with in-game and meta, like we used for decades? Was the hobby over-run by a bunch of sound engineers from the movie business who brought their vocabulary with them to replace words that were already in use? More likely, as above, it's a "more intelligent sounding" word, so people like it because they feel like they sound more intelligent by using it.
• TTRPG - I feel like there's no need ninety-nine times out of a hundred to specify the context where an RPG is a TTRPG as opposed to a CRPG or ... I dunno, some other kind of RPG. (LARPG? Bedroom RPG? What other kinds even are there anyway?) Leave the TT off. It's superfluous. And a new, faddish addition to something that worked just fine for decades and still works fine. In fact, the more people play online, the less accurate rather than more accurate it becomes.

It's a Jeep thing...

I've long been a fan of Jeeps. Even as a kid, I loved the old CJ Jeeps, which were still being made up until 1986; four decades of them! The CJ-7s were relatively modern compared to the ones from the 40s, of course. All of these years, I've always kind of wanted a Jeep, but never gotten one; it was never a vehicle that it made sense for me to buy, and I still have never owned a car that I thought, hey, this is a fun car that I actually want as opposed to just a cheap and practical car that I need in order to commute and get around. Some day, maybe. Sigh.

Anyway, the shine on Jeeps has worn off on me. I was talking to a couple of people at church on Sunday about Jeeps, and I realized that I simply don't even want one anymore. They were both former Jeep owners and one was clearly a Jeep cultist. They were talking about the "ducking" practice, which I said I thought was really dumb and is a great example of how the brand has lost its way. The reason I always liked Jeeps is because it had a rugged outdoorsy masculine vibe to it. When they started embracing soccer mommification and Barbie Jeeps for daddy's little princess, they diluted the main appeal of the Jeeps in the first place. And yes, the sale figures back me up. From a peak of over 240k units moved in 2018, they fell to about 151k in 2024. There's a slight uptick in 2025, but something happened to the Jeep brand. And yes, the marketing focused on weird cult rituals like "ducking" which undercuts the whole Jeep thing and appeals to soccer moms, bratty princesses, and weird cultists who do dumb things just to be different; the dumber the better. The ducks are now a key part of Jeep's marketing strategy. It's weird. And when I said I thought it was weird, I got the rote "It's a Jeep thing, you wouldn't understand." Actually, I think I understand quite well. People like behaviors that are in effect "positional goods". Why would I not understand that? I'm fairly intelligent, and my initial training before getting into something more practical is in economics as an academic discipline. It's a cult signal, essentially. I understand it exactly. Which is exactly why I'm not impressed by it.

Sure, sure, other problems have plagued the brand, and I can't discount those. Price has gone to an average of ~$60k for a Jeep, which is insane. Meanwhile, the always crappy reputation of quality has taken even more of a beating, and Ford finally (I have no idea why they didn't do this years ago) launched a genuine competitor in the form of the Bronco, and even Toyota got back into the game with a new Land Cruiser, and the 4runner is always a possibility. A few others have entered the competitive landscape, although I'd love to see even more players, honestly. I'd love to see Nissan come out with a revamped Xterra, for instance.

In any case, I think that my love of Jeeps has turned into a love of "jeeps" lowercase, and that I'd really prefer something else altogether anymore rather than an actual modern Jeep. The real interesting, although even more unaffordable than a Jeep, movement is in restomods, and three vehicles in particular get a lot of attention there; old Dodge Power Wagons, old Ford Bronco Is, and old International Harvester Scouts. These can cost as much as a house, which is obviously too much, but they're way cooler than even the best Jeep Rubicon.

On another note, I recently was able to acquire for a decent price a used copy of the ten book D&D Iconics collection of novels that came out in the early 00s. While I certainly don't expect them to be great, reviews on Goodreads are that they're actually relatively fun. And the relatively more negative reviews talked about stupid stuff, like "implicit sexism" demonstrated, according to the review author, by Regdar noticing a some village girl looks good from behind. Ooookay. I think I'm going to like these more than I expected if that's the case. We'll see. I've already started the first one, and they're slim little books like the kind published in the 60s and 70s before bigger fantasy became the norm. Should be quick and easy reads, if the quality holds up.

Which it may not. Although all credited to the same author, T. H. Lain, that's not a real person; it's a pen name that applied to at least nine different authors. Only the first and last books in the ten book "series", which I use kind of loosely, were written by the same author; every other book was a different author. 

The lack of leaders in current generations

From a Sigma Game substack post. What explains the lack of leaders in Western civilization? Four reasons, annotated with comments by me.

Feminism and the rise of credentialism. The transformation of the university demographic has been astonishing. From negligible numbers in 1960s to nearly two-thirds majority in the 2020s, women have taken over higher education and eliminated its function. Being completely converged, it no longer serves its purpose of educating society’s future leaders and preparing them for their responsibilities, it’s now just a credential mill for midwits and worse to be provided make-work jobs and serve as a faux elite that will do whatever it is told.

To be fair, plenty of men have recognized the fake and gay nature of university educations over time, and skilled trades are growing again. But much damage was done in the meantime. And skilled tradesmen may be doing fine on their own, but they're not getting into leadership positions anytime soon.

Diversity and social atomism. The more diverse the society, the more people stay at home and avoid socializing. The black block party, the white suburban barbeque, the men’s club, the Junior League, all these ad hoc organizations are largely a thing of the past due to the demographic changes combined with the legal elevation of equality and the demise of the right to free association. A potential leader can’t lead a nonexistent organization to which he doesn’t belong. Even the organized churches are dying.

I don't know that there's anything more to say on that, or not. Even in my church, which is not dying and which does generate local leaders because of our lay volunteer clergy for all but the highest levels of the church, we're not doing all of the things that we used to when I was a kid, and many of those things I used to do were things that were done for generations. Of course, churches are more susceptible to the side effects of diversity. The Gospel is for everyone, regardless of their state, their race, their culture, or even their legal status. It's not the Church's place to turn people away, even if those people should be remigrated back to their homes where they can participate in Church meetings there instead of here. But that's the state's job. The Church's job is to bring the Gospel to them regardless. 

Of course, that doesn't mean that people in the church shouldn't remigrate if they don't belong here legally, or if they came under dubious auspices, or that people in the church can't work with ICE and whomever else to make sure that people who don't belong are sent back home. But I do understand why people are conflicted about the question, even if I am not, and I do understand that churches have to accept a higher level of diversity, perhaps, than other organizations do. Everywhere that I've lived, there's been at least one Spanish speaking congregation for every 10-12 regular English speaking ones. As long as the people are here, they need that kind of ministering. Whether or not they should be here isn't a question that relates to whether or not the church should minister to them while they are.

But, of course, the diversity contributes to lack of social cohesion and and increase in atomism. It just is what it is, as the post says.

The GATE/Epstein/gangstalker phenomenon. Young men of potential are identified early and then either sidetracked, controlled, or eliminated before they can rise along the probable trajectory of their lives. This probably goes too far into the conspiracy zone for most people, but it’s not a coincidence that the sort of self-righteous losers who attend Mock UN and student-leadership conferences are actually being put in charge of major corporations, resource-rich NGOs, and other organizations they manifestly have no business running. No wonder nothing works anymore.

It does go too far into the conspiracy zone for me. I don't disbelieve that at least some of this exists, but that people are literally running around "beaming" people just so that they have headaches and can't function well in regular normal roles is a bridge too far. I don't believe that's happening. Of course, that doesn't mean that there isn't some of this applied to people who do reach a certain level. It's no secret even to non-conspiracy-like people that Epstein and blackmail have been used to control many of our politicians, and there's even the slightly conspiracy zone idea, but one that's quite believable, that you can't even rise to a certain level very easily without allowing yourself to engage in blackmailable activities, because you're literally shut out of them until you do. 

It doesn't need to be quite the crazy Anonymous Conservative level of "American Stasi" and beaming and testing of smart little kids to still be effective at the top levels of corporations, NGOs, and politics at a much more low-key yet still substantial level of activity.

The technological distraction. Between video games, weed, and pornography, young men simply don’t have the burning desire to succeed that they once did. Mediocrity is much more pleasant now, and much more personally satisfying, than it ever used to be. Why bother working hard to buy a nice car when you can drive a better one for free in a racing game any time you want? Pleasure on-demand is inevitably demotivational and debilitating.

This is undeniable. And it needs not have anything said about it, I don't think. Especially when the most successful way to rise above that kind of mediocrity is not to achieve better, but to sell out to the powers that be.

Sigh. Trump's more or less (so far) success at draining the swamp could be a sea change, but it will take time, the swamp is weakened but not gone, and the damage of generations of this—starting with the Boomers on down—will take more generations to completely undo, I'm sure. 

NYC

What's his name, the communist Islamicist anti-American who won the mayoral race for NYC; how did it happen? Wring hands.

The answer is pretty obvious, although hardest hit will be virtue-signaling conservatives who applauded it happening until they suddenly realized what it meant. If they've even yet realized what caused the election result.

The big White Flight dip in the 70s is pretty notable too, of course. Same thing happened in most inner cities, perhaps most visibly in Detroit. Thanks, George Romney. You are ultimately responsible for this. You and everyone else who embraced your hateful, anti-American ideology that America wasn't for Americans and had to be stolen from them and given to any rough savage who came along and demanded access to it.

Vox Day said, about this same graph: 

The result of the mayoral election was not only inevitable, it was one of the primary objectives of the architects of the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act. This is exactly what those who hate America, hate Christianity, and hate Western Civilization have sought to accomplish since the turn of the 20th Century. Note the steep 25 percent decline in a decade after 1965.

This is the intended result of the so-called “Melting Pot”. It always was. And as New York City has gone, as Minneapolis has gone, so too will go the rest of the United States if Americans do not take control of their country back from the foreigners who have usurped their right to rule themselves.

And contra the New and Improved Nickles Fuentes, an American is not anyone who was born inside the geographic boundaries of the United States, or who was given a piece of paper by the federal government, but rather, the legitimate Posterity of the American revolutionaries for whom the Constitution was written.

Conservatives conserve nothing. They couldn’t conserve America. They couldn’t even conserve the definition of “American”. Which is why conservatism is not, and cannot be, part of the solution.

It's not rocket science. It's literally right there in the Preamble.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

There's been a lot of sophistry around who exactly are the Posterity of the Founding Fathers, but it's blatant and obvious sophistry, because the meaning of the words are quite clear, especially in context. The people who want it to mean something else clearly are afraid—and rightly so, in many cases—that they don't have a legitimate claim of being the Posterity of the Founding Fathers, therefore they engage in sophistry to blow smoke in the faces of the actual Posterity of the Founding Fathers and confuse them in an attempt to claim their legacy for themselves. 

Sorta like a certain stereotype of a certain tribe of lawyers and other corrupt rentiers who engage in stereotypical sophistry in an attempt to bamboozle populations all over Western Civilization since the time that they were a minor yet troublesome Middle eastern tribe in the Roman Empire. Hmm...

Journalists can't do math

https://thatparkplace.com/amazon-cant-cancel-rings-of-power-without-hefty-financial-kill-fee-to-tolkien-estate/

I really wanted to say women can't do math, but the image and name and biography of the writer says he's a seasoned journalist. But it's ridiculous to suggest, as he does, that Amazon can't cancel without it costing more than it's worth.

According to The Ankler, the first season alone cost north of $465 million, not even counting the $250 million Amazon paid for the global rights to Tolkien’s works or the hundreds of millions spent on marketing. By the time viewers at home were tallying their impressions, Amazon had spent well over three quarters of a billion dollars just to get the show on the air. 

And then this, of course:

The cruel truth is that Amazon may not be able to cancel Rings of Power even if it wants to. The Tolkien estate’s kill fee ensures every unfinished season costs the company another $20 million just to walk away. With season three already in production and five seasons originally committed, the company is boxed in.

So, the first season cost $465 million, but they have no choice but to spend that four more times or it will cost them.... $60 million! Granted, I'm sure that they're spending less on season 2, and can again on seasons 3-5, but there's no way that it's less than $20 million each. So no... it's clearly cheaper for them to just cancel it: pay the "kill fee" and stop hemorrhaging money.

Anyway, the joke I kind of wanted to make, but couldn't. Oh, well.

Don't listen to the fakes

Charlie Kirk seemed like, mostly, a decent guy. His schtick of going on campuses and having polite discourse with people was a cool idea, sure. But he was also a fake. I never understood why this guy who I had literally never heard of one day was suddenly propped up as a literal teenager as the next big thing in political commentary. It was clear from the beginning that he was manufactured. Watching some of the things that he promulgated change in front of my eyes was also instructive. Seeing him and Jack Posobiec and Matt Walsh, or whomever the other one was, post almost the exact same message, nearly word for word, one day was another.

Being a (probably) decent, nice guy doesn't mean that I trusted him or paid much attention to what he said, or thought that he was someone that I should have given much attention to. Vox Day found the following quotes. Along with some of his commentary: Selling Out is NOT Success

This is why one should never, ever, trust any “influencer” or “opinion leader” or “activist” who rapidly goes from nothing to hundreds of thousands of “followers”. It’s also why I pay no attention to the likes of Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Charlie Kirk, Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, and every other shill who sells opinions for donor cash.

CHARLIE KIRK: Just lost another huge Jewish donor. $2 million a year because we won’t cancel Tucker. I’m thinking of inviting Candace.

CHARLIE KIRK: Jewish donors play into all the stereotypes. I cannot and will not be bullied like this.

CHARLIE KIRK: Leaving me no choice but to leave the pro Israel cause.

Now, there are a lot of things that can be gleaned from these three texts written by Charlie Kirk. But first and foremost, mark that he was being propped up to the tune of $2 million per year from just one of his “donors”. It doesn’t matter by whom, it doesn’t matter for what, the salient point is that all of these guys are fake.

All of these characters are quite literally manufactured. Their opinions aren’t real, they are purchased and directed by their donors and investors.

If someone isn’t actually selling an actual product or service, then what he is selling, unbeknownst to most of those who listen to him, is his voice and his words.

Of course, this was shortly before he was assassinated in a kind of suspicious manner in a way that looks shockingly pro for a mincing weirdo who is unlikely to have been any good at being a professional hit man. And, as Ron Unz has pointed out repeatedly, who's most notorious for assassinating their critics?

Grab bag; and new Paizo format

I have a few topics, but only one of them is both lengthy enough to justify a post, or at least most of a post, and on topic for this blog... even given the pretty loose definition of what I consider on topic. 

First off, the one I want to speak about probably the least, but which is the more important one. I belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and I lived for many years in Michigan. I am in fact visiting Michigan right now, and I was at church when the church shooting happened in Grand Blanc. I wasn't in Grand Blanc; I was at church with my daughter in Monroe, but they sent us home. My son, who's also in another congregation in Michigan, was sent home, but because his church start time is later, he got sent home basically while on the way to church. He pulled up in the parking lot, turned around and went back home. This was no doubt a precaution, because nobody yet knew what was going on in Grand Blanc. I think that we still don't. There are reports that the guy hated the Church and had some kind of personal grudge against it, although that's just a comment from the White House press secretary without any background that I know of. 

I don't trust official narratives very much. There's usually a lot that they don't want to tell us that's actually quite salient. There's also a bunch of stuff that they tell us that is pretty suss, as the kids say. But I'd have already guessed that this is someone who has a grudge against the church. Most people who do are people who are in the LBGT community, but not necessarily. It's a bit grotesque that I've seen liberals online desperate to jump on board the narrative that he was a MAGA guy, because they desperately want there to be a violent crazy person who isn't a member of their rabid animal cult of violent extremists. Even if this guy doesn't turn out to be liberal at all, it looks very unlikely that his attack was politically motivated anyway, so like I said, the impetus to assign a MAGA political identity to the guy is at best grotesque... but also very revealing of the desperation that they feel, because they know the score. Democrats are the party who romanticizes hatred of normal life and violent revolutionary overthrow of the stable order for anarchy wherein they imagine that they will be free of... something. Or perhaps they imagine that they will be at the top of the order that they imagine will replace the one today in their new dystopia. An ideology based on resentment, entitlement and frustrated narcissism always has those kinds of stupid delusions at its heart.

In any case, as someone who is relatively close to this event, it had an interesting psychological effect on me and my family. I'd been to the building that burned down at least half a dozen times when we did bigger, broader activities that involved multiple congregations, and while I didn't know anyone in Grand Blanc, I'd likely met at least one of the victims briefly in the past. I do have a good friend here in Michigan who was part of that congregation for a while before moving to my neck of the woods and still retains friends there, I believe. He's also a professional federal law enforcement officer, and we're supposed to meet for dinner tonight. His perspective will no doubt be closer to it than even mine.

Secondly, to the side there is a picture of Rafael Sabatini. In spite of his name, he was half English and raised in many places, including England, where he settled as an adult. Although English was his sixth language, it's the language he wrote in, and he was a brilliant writer; one of my favorites, in fact. I'm not really much into forced rankings, but it's not hard for me to say that The Lord of the Rings is my favorite "book" (described by its author and original publisher as one book published in three volumes), A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs as next in line after that, and quite possibly Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini after that. I found my old copy and started reading it a little while ago, but my copy was pretty beat up (it's 100 years old next year) so I decided to get an audiobook version from Librivox and listen to it instead. I just finished it today, after starting over once I had the audio files.  After listening to a few Ron Unz podcasts, I'm going to listen to his Captain Blood next—a book nearly as good. Then on to a few ERB books; A Princess of Mars, Tarzan of the Apes and At the Earth's Core. I have physical copies of all of them, but I'm going to do the Librivox audiobooks for all three this time around.

It was also nice, I must admit, to hear the French names pronounced correctly, or at least I presume correctly. The book was, of course, as good as I remember it. It's at least the fourth time I've read it, probably more like the sixth, but I haven't really been counting. 

Although not nearly as good as the novel, the 1952 film adaptation with Stewart Granger, Mel Ferrer, Eleanor Parker and Janet Leigh is still a fantastic old swashbuckling movie of the Golden Age of Hollywood, and the duel fought between Granger and Ferrer is one of the most famous old school swordfights from Hollywood. I love the voiceover during the old trailer: "The hot-blooded adventures of masterful men! The bold intrigues of seductive women! The pageantry of a great novel! A fabulous swashbuckling era comes to life!" Yeah, that's what I'm talking about! Man, it is so good! But the novel is at least an order of magnitude better still. There's a reason that it easily hits my top five books of all time.

Also, in the wake of the socio-sexual hierarchy articles I've read, and I've read a lot, it's curious. Sabatini was probably a Sigma himself, based on the fact that his characters seem to be very clearly Sigmas themselves, not to mention what I know of his biography. Andre-Louis Moreau, Mr. Scaramouche himself, is perhaps one of the most iconic Sigma protagonists I know of in literature, although placed in a somewhat conventional swashbuckling romance. I haven't read them super recently, but I certainly remember thinking that Peter Blood and Charles de Bernis, the protagonists of Captain Blood and The Black Swan respectively give off very strong Sigma vibes too.

Third, The Living Daylights is a criminally under-rated James Bond movie. The first (of only two) to star Timothy Dalton, it's famous for it's more grounded, darker and edgier approach that wouldn't come into vogue again until the Daniel Craig era, in the wake of the wildly successful Bourne movies. I might actually like it better than most of the Craig Bond films; it's possible that it's my favorite of the entire series. The follow up was even darker, License to Kill, but Living Daylights was always my personal favorite. I love the Cold War vibes to it in particular, and honestly I think James Bond beyond the Cold War is a bit of a fish out of water anyway. 

I also really love the soundtrack. Of course, it's got a great a-ha song, when they were still a kind of 80s new wave slash synthpop band. (As an aside, their second album, Scoundrel Days is actually better than their first one, Hunting High and Low, even though it lacks the big hits. The first album is wonderful; one of my favorites of the 80s as a pop album especially, but the second one as an "alternative" New Wave style album, a little bit rockier but still very synthesizer 80s sounding. Absolutely recommended.) It's also got a great "other" song by The Pretenders, which becomes the de facto theme of the KGB assassin dude. I didn't realize this until just recently, but it's also the last James Bond soundtrack composed by John Barry. The orchestral score soundtrack is really, really good. But again; everything about the whole movie is under-rated. If you haven't seen it, or haven't seen it recently, I highly recommend that you watch it. It's pretty cheap, actually, which is nice. I also think you can get streaming James Bond on Amazon Prime of the entire run for a decent price. Which, I mean, why wouldn't you?

I did see a funny exchange online recently about this movie in particular: someone called it gritty and realistic; someone else sarcastically remarked that it was especially realistic when they were sledding down the mountainside under a hail of bullets sitting in a cello case. 

The final part of this post is my belated notice of a major change in the strategy of Paizo "adventure paths." Adventure paths started as linked modules in Dungeon Magazine during the later 3e era. Dungeon Magazine had been outsourced to Paizo by this point, so in theory, Paizo invented the Adventure Path as it has been known the last nearly twenty years. WotC at the time released at least a few large mega-modules, what they now call campaigns. The one that sticks out most to me is Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, an expansion of the old Ravenloft 1e module into the size and scope of the modern WotC campaigns, such as Curse of Strahd which is the latest iteration of the same adventure. But for whatever reason, the adventure path seemed to have captured the market's imagination in a way that these hardback ~250-350 page "campaigns" did not, at least at the time. When 4e was to launch and WotC canceled their agreement with Paizo to do Dungeon and Dragon Magazines, Paizo decided to (among other things) create their own subscription model to continue adventure paths, and they came out with their popular adventure path subscription, starting with the classic Rise of the Runelords, and then the more than 40 or so adventure paths. They were especially popular during the 4e era, but when 5e came out, WotC was able to regain their king of the hill approach to system. They also started issuing big loads of campaign books. They released enough of them that they started to compete credibly with the adventure paths. They are, after all, quite a big cheaper.

The "classic" adventure path was a 90+ or so page paperback book with a big module, and a few appendices, including a small bestiary, some setting info, and even often some short stories, which sold for about $20. Maybe more; the current price is $20 for a digital copy, and $30 for a physical copy, but I think that there's been inflation since 2008 or so. And classically, you had to get six of them to have the whole campaign. At a minimum, the adventure path cost $120, and at a maximum, $180. And they generally went from levels 1 to about 14-15 or so. 

In recent years, they experimented with different lengths of campaigns and different ranges of levels, but the "classic" line-up is by far the majority of the Adventure Paths. In fact, three volume more condensed adventure paths that cover ten levels seem to have been the intermediate step that they've been doing the last couple of years. But I'm way behind on collecting and reading them, so I'm not as familiar with the newer stuff.

The WotC campaigns, and they varied somewhat, were levels 1-10 in a single hardback volume that cost $50. (And the price hasn't really changed; the most recent one is listed on Amazon at $48 and change.) Needless to say, this is a better deal financially. Sure, sure... you don't get as much content, but the fact is that Paizo buffed up their content with stuff that people didn't really need. What you really needed was the adventures, not the fiction, not the setting essays, not even the bestiaries (much of which was more or less reprinted in the actual Bestiary books, and few of the animals within actually appeared in the adventures. I believe, although I haven't actually checked, that the actual adventure page count is probably more or less equivalent (more or less) to the WotC campaigns. 

Mike Mearls in a podcast interview, I think the one with Questing Beast, mentioned that the campaigns were a direct attack on the adventure paths, and given the most recent announcement from Paizo, I have to assume that they have been successful enough to have Paizo adjust their business model to one much more like WotC. Their "adventure paths" will now be basically equivalent to WotC campaign books in page count and format, and they'll issue one every quarter, I think they said. However, they will charge a fair bit more than WotC; $80 vs ~$50.

Of course, all of that assumes a consistent quality if you're going to assume the same value for price, and that's hardly a given. Some of the WotC campaigns are pretty good—reportedly—while many of them are largely considered ridiculous jokes. At least by the kind of people who's taste I trust. I think with Paizo, the quality is more even, but not necessarily anything super either. They're less obnoxiously woke, but it's still there in the ambient background, and slowly building like the temperature of the boiling frog analogy. Not that that's the only quality problem, but it's the biggest one in much of the entertainment industries, including RPGs.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk

My youngest son works at a Toyota dealership basically right across the street from Utah Valley University. Kind of on a whim, he and some coworkers decided yesterday to walk over and see what was going on during their lunch break. Of course, that meant that he was right there when Kirk was shot and murdered by a sniper. He said that later there was a lockdown for hours, and he was stuck at work, with all of his coworkers, freaking out and wondering if some desperate killer were about to bust in their door looking for shelter. One of his co-workers, rather heroically although it sounds a little silly in retrospect, I think, was running around trying to knock people's MAGA hats off so that they wouldn't be targets. Another one of his room mates was on the front row right there, got knocked over and trampled. He said he was kind of seriously injured, but I don't yet know what he means by serious. 

I've got a lot of thoughts, of course. Charlie Kirk always made me suspicious. Whenever these influencers show up out of nowhere, already well-funded and popular on literally the first day anyone ever heard of them, they feel manufactured by the Establishment as gatekeepers of some sort. And sure enough, Charlie Kirk advocated for an Establishment squishy kind of conservatism, and seemed to move in lock-step with other influencers of the same stripe. I think he was the Ben Shapiro 2.0 because Ben Shapiro couldn't help himself and flamed out in pro-Israel nonsense and angry tirades. Conservatives didn't take him seriously anymore, so his utility as a gatekeeper was compromised. He needed to be replaced, and Charlie Kirk seemed like a good one.

On the other hand, Kirk seemed to be coming around to sensible things. Either because the zeitgeist was changing and he changed with it, or because he was waking up to real realities. I didn't mind him. I didn't really take him too seriously, but he seemed like a nice guy, who's whole schtick was rational debate and reasonable discussion with his political enemies, in spite of their lunatic performative tantrums. It was harmless but kind of silly. And then, of course, he was just assassinated yesterday.

The double-whammy of watching the lying, spinning and gaslighting about that cute little Ukrainian girl in Charlotte all week followed immediately by this, and the lying, spinning and gaslighting that is already accompanying the Charlie Kirk murder means that moderate voices on the right are rapidly moving away from moderation. They're either being told to sit down and shut up, or their themselves realizing that there's no living with the Left. They're either at your feet or at your throat. Which isn't shocking; Leftism as an ideology is based on hatred, resentment, and entitlement, and it primarily is a draw for frustrated narcissists. 

I didn't keep the links, but I have three academic, peer-reviewed, scientific papers that demonstrate that leftists are orders of magnitude more likely to be mentally ill than conservatives. All of these murderous lunatics who go on these assassination attempts and shooting sprees are leftists (Charlie Kirk was, ironically, just talking about trans shooting sprees at Catholic schools when he was murdered.) And the left is trying to spin this into "sensible gun control?" The only sensible gun control that normal people will accept is to keep guns away from Democrats. At the trajectory that they're on, soon it will be "shoot known Democrats on sight, like the rabid animals that they are."

And if you think that that's a bit extreme; it is, sure. I don't like it. I predict, however, that it is inevitable unless things change. People like to say that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. What is history rhyming with right now? As many are pointing out, it's kinda the Bleeding Kansas stage right before the Civil War. I'm already seeing it start on social media. It always happens sooner than you think. 

UPDATE: Of course, checking out Anonymous Conservative's site, I'm exposed to all kinds of conspiracy theory stuff about Kirk's murder. The hit does feel a little... professional, perhaps. His rise to sudden prominence required some kind of backing, and his more recent skepticism regarding Israeli interests and Jeffrey Epstein... makes you wonder. It's also a powerful message to the administration, Kirk being such a friend of it. 

Of course, I don't believe these conspiracy theories. But... sadly... I can't discount them either. I feel like the D.A. saying, "you've got an interesting case, but it's not strong enough. Come back when you've got more evidence." They could be true. I don't believe that they are. I don't believe that there's a strong enough case to accept them. But... you never know. I've gotten too cynical about that kind of thing over the years.

UPDATE II: Like I said: https://x.com/NickJFreitas/status/1965927877926432868

I am told that as a state representative this is the moment where I'm supposed to express my heartfelt condolences and then stand in solidarity with those on the other side of the aisle as we condemn political violence and stand unified as one people.

But we aren't "one people" are we?

The truth is we haven't been for some time now, and there is really no point in pretending anymore, if there ever was.

We are two very different peoples. We may occupy the same piece of geography, but that is where the similarities seem to abruptly end.

I convinced myself for a long time that whenever the left called me a racist, a bigot, a sexist, a fascist, a "threat to democracy" for even the most innocent of disagreements, that it was simply hyperbolic rhetoric done for effect.   

And now the "effect" is a widow and two orphaned children, because the left couldn’t bear the thought of a peaceful man debating them and winning.    

I don’t think they realize it yet, but murdering Charlie is going to be remembered as the day where we finally woke up to what this fight really is.    

It’s not a civil dispute among fellow countrymen. It’s a war between diametrically opposed worldviews which cannot peacefully coexist with one another. One side will win, and one side will lose.    

Charlie tried to win that fight through argumentation, through discussion, through peaceful resolution of differences.   

And the other side murdered him.    

Not because he was “extreme” or “inciting violence” or any other hyperbolic slur they hurled at him. They murdered him because he was effective. Because he was unafraid. Because he inspired others and made them feel like they had a voice, that they were not alone. And he did it at the very institutions which have fomented so much hatred toward conservatives.    

I don’t want to “stand in solidarity” with the other side of the aisle. I want to defeat you. I want to defeat the godless ideology that kills babies in the womb, sterilizes confused children, turns our cities into cesspools of degeneracy and lawlessness…and that murdered Charlie Kirk.    

Social media is aflame right now with leftist celebration of Charlie’s death.

I wonder if any among them understand what has just happened. If there is a Yamamoto somewhere in their midst warning, that all they have done is awoken a sleeping giant.    

I doubt it. I think they gave up such introspection and self-awareness long ago.    

I don’t know exactly what will happen next. I just know that it won’t be the same as what has happened in the past.

There will be thoughts and prayers…Charlie would have wanted prayers. Not for himself but for those left behind and for the country that he loved.

But then there will be a reckoning.    

My Christian faith requires me to love my enemies and pray for those who curse me. It does not require me to stand idly by in the midst of savagery and barbarism...quite the opposite. 

So every time I feel tired, every time I feel discouraged or overwhelmed, I am going to watch the video of a good man being murdered in Utah…I will force myself to watch it…and then I will return to the work of destroying the evil ideology responsible for that and so much more. 

Rest with God Charlie, your fight is over.

Ours is just beginning.

UPDATE III: It's been gratifying to see this start to come true.

THE WRATH OF THE AWAKENED SAXON

by Rudyard Kipling (sorta)

It was not part of their blood,

It came to them very late,

With long arrears to make good,

When the Saxon began to hate.

They were not easily moved,

They were icy — willing to wait

Till every count should be proved,

Ere the Saxon began to hate.

Their voices were even and low.

Their eyes were level and straight.

There was neither sign nor show

When the Saxon began to hate.

It was not preached to the crowd.

It was not taught by the state.

No man spoke it aloud

When the Saxon began to hate.

It was not suddenly bred.

It will not swiftly abate.

Through the chilled years ahead,

When Time shall count from the date

That the Saxon began to hate. 

No Kings

There's a guy at work who was trying to get people to join one of his No Kings rallies this weekend. He didn't end up going, so as far as I know, nobody signed on. Not even sure if half of the people he invited even caught on to what he was asking them to do.

Can you imagine being so clueless and lacking in self-awareness that you call your protest "No Kings" after you 1) refused to hold a primary, 2) tried to anoint Kamala without a single vote, 3) tried to throw your opponent off the ballot through shady lawfare, 4) took all kinds of money from shadowy dark money NGOs who desire to pull the strings behind the scenes, and 5) most egregiously had one of your radical cultists literally assassinate people who voted for things that you didn't like? And this because the guy that you're accusing of being a "King" is trying to enforce the law that the majority of the populace strongly supports, and that majority is growing literally daily?

And these are the people who, when I say that Trump is at least the best president since Andrew Jackson ask "what about Lincoln or FDR?" No Kings indeed. You can't work with that kind of ignorance, but that kind of ignorance can only happen if you aggressively avoid trying to find out anything that contradicts your bougie cult beliefs.

Being a leftist with a straight face has got to be pretty hard these days. I'm sure that there are some ignorant suckers that make up this crowd; I even know some of them, but exactly how ignorant can you be and how much of a sucker to not start noticing that your stupid ideas about reality and actual reality don't line up? Maybe that's why they have so much anxiety and are prone to so much violence, actually. That cognitive dissonance makes them try to force reality to match their vision.

What a crazy time to be alive. Maybe in the grand scheme of things, the zeitgeist change is happening lightning fast, but I wish it would happen faster. The sooner this crazy left wing cult falls out of favor and is seen for what it is instead of a boutique prestige set of positional, luxury beliefs to virtue-signal to other would-be Cloud People, the better we'll all be.

UPDATE: Not really worth it's own post, but what does this look like online?

That's what I should have called Ad Astra / Space Opera X. I guess now I will... if I ever do anything with it again.

The Browning of America

Ben Shapiro revealed something that he probably wishes that he could unsay a few years ago when he said, and I quote, "I don't give a damn about the browning of America." Well, sure you don't. Because you're a fake American. You certainly give a damn about the potential browning of Israel, don't you? But my, how fast the Overton Window can move! Conservative Inc. has gotten a new message, and rarely has it been so obviously coordinated, not grassroots or viral, and subject to a top-down strategic roll-out. Heck, the language is literally exactly the same from these so-called unrelated "influencers" of "Boomer Conservatism."

Sure, sure. Third World immigration. It's not not a problem. But what about repatriating the Jews? Nobody suggested that? And do Africans (via American slavery generations ago) count as Third Worlders? Questions begged and not answered. I'm not sure if they're really ready for this, but they also know that they can't hide behind their outdated civic nationalist pose anymore. 

UPDATE: Right on cue...

Coverup is worse than you thought

https://open.substack.com/pub/coffeeandcovid/p/oil-spill-monday-may-19-2025-c-and?r=21uqse

As Childers says, prostate cancer doesn't just come out of nowhere. Either one of two things is happening:

1) The cancer risk caused by the vaxx is much worse than even the worst expectations, and turbo-cancers coming from nowhere that are suddenly terminal is a thing. I'm aware of some circumstantial, anecdotal evidence that will support the linked study in the article above, so I wouldn't be surprised.

2) More likely, they all knew he had cancer already, and not only did they cover-up his cognitive decline, but they also covered up his cancer. Harris was always the plan A after all, but they didn't want to have to show that because of her extreme unlikability. They thought that they could maintain the implausible narrative that Biden actually won—twice—and then have totter off and die like the President in Dave while the real "president" Harris, who was always as much of a bubble-headed figurehead as Biden, but potentially a little bit less obvious, could step in.

As the Z-man says, "The data in this case was our eyes. Everyone not blinded by their own models of reality saw a frail, doddering old man. Management’s model, however, showed that he was a model of fitness and virility. Now that model is being revised to show he was actually suffering from dementia and has aggressive cancer. The new model is now converging with reality." It's indicative of the crisis that managerialism has with reality in general.

Reddit is almost as bad as ENWorld

As the title says. I need to get out of internet conversations altogether. I rarely find that people are 1) intelligent enough to follow the logical outcome of what they even say, 2) discuss in good faith, or 3) exhibit anything at all approaching common sense. In fact, as both reddit and ENWorld have become more and more liberal, they are subject to the following problem, which rather than quote in part, I'll just link to. It's a very good piece.

https://barsoom.substack.com/p/the-involution-of-the-liberal-mind

Anyway, today's particular nonsense came from a post in, I believe r/osr where someone asked what changes to ShadowDark one would make. Houserules, etc. There was a small digression where one guy said that he strongly recommended not changing anything until the OP had played with the rules as is first, and a couple of other people chimed in to suggest that was some kind of law or something. Now, at the bottom of this page, you may notice that one of my mottos is, in part, the famous Latin phrase "Eventus stultorum magister est." And the fact that I first heard it in Tombstone doesn't negate the wisdom of this ancient proverb. That advice given on reddit is lowest common denominator advice, literally for the fools—the stulti, who can't figure anything out except by experiencing it personally. It's ridiculous advice for anyone who's been a roleplaying hobbyist for any amount of time at all. But, I guess, if you're not smart enough to extrapolate how a rule will work in play or if you're even interested in using that particular rule, I guess maybe it's decent advice. Stumble around on your own the hard way if that's the only way you can learn. Sucks to be you.

This was especially notable given the example I gave. One of the things that I don't care for in ShadowDark is carousing, wherein you can spend treasure to get bonus XP. I don't like any GP = XP equivalency rules, or rules where you can trade one for the other. There's generally two reasons for this kind of rule; 1) to motivate people to go seek out after treasure (I have no interest in motivating players to do that, but Gary Gygax did, back when the game was much more wargamey and roleplaying hadn't yet really caught on as the actual main event of the hobby, because everyone doing it was an old wargamer.) 2) to bleeds off excess treasure, because now your characters have too much. I called it a patch, in fact, to bleed off excess treasure, because due to inertia from old school treasure distribution, which has for a variety of reasons never been addressed in D&D-likes, characters get too much for most GM's taste. 

Given that this situation has literally been the case in D&D-likes for more than 50 years now, the idea that I don't know if I like how it works specifically in ShadowDark is absurd. 

And then Kelsey Dionne, writer of ShadowDark jumped in and said that carousing wasn't a patch to fix excess treasure, it was a resource to be spent. That's semantics, though. If you have treasure to spend on bonus XP, especially the really spendy bonuses, then you have too much treasure, and the bonus XP is a method to bleed off that treasure. And advance faster. Both of which are, by my tastes, not desirable. Therefore, they're easily fixed by simply giving less treasure and getting rid of the carousing stuff altogether. Don't bleed treasure (that you now don't have anyway) off to advance faster, so that you have a slower advancement schedule—which is also better. 

And... just to add some visual interest, here's another piece of Midkemia cover art, from the book that follows the Riftwar Saga and kind of starts treating with the next generation; Arutha and Anita's spoiled twin sons.

I have to wonder if the artist, Don Maitz, is familiar with Arnold Friberg's famous Book of Mormon illustrations, given the obvious resemblance here to this earlier work. His biography doesn't mention anything about his religious affiliation, or even much at all about his personal life, other than that he's married to Janny Wurts, who co-wrote the Empire trilogy with Feist, a spin-off from the Riftwar Saga. Probably how he got the gig in the first place. Of course, you don't need to be LDS to appreciate the art of Arnold Friberg; I've often thought that any sword & sorcery fan would immediately click with his weird mixture of savage Mesoamerican, Middle Eastern and Roman style aesthetic. 

Speaking of OSR weirdness, here's another reddit post I made, on a thread on "what are your OSR 'sins'?"

The thread title hardly endears to those who already see the OSR as almost cult-like in it's application of the "correct" way to play. That said, I'm a fan of the OSR mostly because I'm old, I remember when OD&D, Holmes, and B/X were what we played because they were current, and I love the DIY, garage band, indie aesthetic that the OSR has brought back to D&D-like games. I'm not, however:

• Very interested in faithful recreations of the original rules that don't fix certain things for either mechanical improvement or to change the tone of the game. I greatly dislike the overly weak thief, even though I love the archetype, I greatly dislike Vancian magic, I disbelieve the illusion that the cleric is actually an archetype and I don't like using them, etc. I've also never had problems with a shorter skill system of some kind, having also played plenty of GURPS and Cthulhu back in the day and been very comfortable with the idea of skills, etc.
• I'm also not at all interested in the so-called OSR playstyle. I don't have "adventurers" as a social class of any kind, nor do I find the implied story of dungeon-crawling for treasure to be interesting in the least. I strongly dislike dungeons, especially if they're loaded with gotcha traps, puzzles, riddles, or other things that have never existed really in reality. My playstyle is quite trad, although modified with a number of old-fashioned caveats. Maybe paleo-trad. My games tend to resemble more a combination of The Godfather, Mission: Impossible and James Bond in a dark Warhammer FRP or Cthulhu-like fantasy setting, and my motto is that while maybe I'm not old school, I certainly am old fashioned. That said, I don't mind hex-crawling as much as dungeon-crawling, but maybe that's because hiking/backpacking is another real-life hobby of mine.
• I simply cannot wrap my head around the idea that games that adhere to the "OSR as playstyle" but which don't really resemble old D&D are actually OSR. I know that I'm going to gradually lose this argument more and more as time goes on, but I've got to give credit to Yochai Gal for trying really hard to get the NSR recognized as something separate from, albeit related to, the OSR, rather than part of the OSR as a whole. Part of his failure may well have been the toxic gatekeeping, purity testing and insane overly political stance of the NSR in general, which makes it more difficult to focus on the NSR as an actual category of game and playstyle that's separate from the OSR. Or maybe the different types of rules aren't as important as I think that they are, and the OSR and the NSR, from the point of view of someone outside of either, are too similar to bother splitting.
• Similarly, I'm a little ambivalent on some aspects of weirdness and gonzo. While I incorporate a great deal of Lovecraftian influence in my fantasy gaming, it's less of the cosmic horror and semi-science fiction elements, and more of the interdimensional horror and risk of character madness. Warhammer FRP and the Darkest Dungeons video games are more the style that I'm looking at rather that mi-go and Yithians taking people to their interplanetary cities or whatever. Demons are, in fact, demons, and not intergalactic aliens, or whatever. I also dislike science fiction elements in fantasy; or rather, I don't consider it fantasy anymore when they're present, and I prefer to keep them discrete. Don't get me wrong; a Thundarr the Barbarian meets Cthulhupunk sounds amazing, but I'd have to treat it like something completely separate from whatever I'm doing in fantasy. Probably another reason that I consider the NSR so different from the OSR, given that the NSR is "more weird" than the otherwise fairly traditional OSR.

This isn't part of my post, but while I'm giving credit to Gal for that particular attempt, I also credit (blame) mostly him specifically for the NSR being such a hotbed of woke politics and cancel culture nonsense. He's specifically the one most responsible for how toxic the NSR community is. Although maybe it was inevitable given the genesis of the NSR community in the early work of weirdos like James Raggi and Zac S. to begin with. It naturally gravitated to that kind of personality, even if the games themselves (some of them, anyway) aren't necessarily woke. Some of them, in fact, I'd actually probably like. But the community... blegh.

Maybe, given that the OSR has been around for a good twenty years now (depending on when exactly you consider it to have started.) I have to stop trying to think of it as a monolithic thing. There are a lot of people in the OSR doing a lot of different (and mutually exclusive) things. It's OK to be a fan of certain elements of it and not necessarily the movement as a whole. I think a lot of people are having trouble letting go of the idea that they're part of "the OSR community" but I do think that it's clear that original B/X fans and fans of NSR stuff are two different communities... at the very least. In reality, you can break it down into being fans of all kinds of specific games and not of others; just like being fans of RPGs overall. The OSR has become something too big to just treat it as a single thing, just like being "a gamer" is too big for that mostly too.

Doesn't mean that there can't be a lot of overlap between fans of various different games or even various broader approaches to gaming, however, even while acknowledging that being a fan of this or that isn't necessarily correlated with being a fan of that or this. That's a bit of a pet peeve of mine in general; the assumption that because I play D&D, I must like any other RPG, or that I must like anime (I don't) or heavy metal (also don't.) But because the OSR was for quite some time united under a relatively singular approach and goals, it's been harder to give up the idea that it's not anymore.

It's a free country (spoiler alert; no it isn't)

The Z-man's post, slightly edited by me. The short answer is that we do NOT live in a free country, and haven't for a long time.

The story of Shiloh Hendrix has brought to the surface things that have been bubbling under the surface for some time. The most obvious is the general fatigue with regards to race among white people. The media is doing the usual point and shriek, expecting the lynch mob to chase after this woman, but instead money is flowing into her fundraising account with messages of support. The white population is using this event to make a point about race in America.

For most white people, this is not a moral issue. It is a practical issue. They wonder why we have Somalis in Minnesota. No one campaigned on bringing tribes of Somalis into the country and dumping them into white communities. No one was organizing pressure groups demanding the importation of Somalis. The people who made this decision never mentioned it to the public and the public was never consulted. Suddenly, we have this new problem, and we are expected to adjust to it.

If you are white, a central part of your life is navigating around nonwhites. Maybe it is knowing where the black areas are, so you avoid crime. Maybe it is teaching your children about dealing with the nons in their school, so they do not get jammed up by the morality police. Maybe it is educating the old people in your life on how to spot Indian scammers. Of course, the background noise of the public square is the endless drone of race talk.

The question is how did it get to this? Like the Somalis in Minnesota, the public was never asked about any of this. The people who decided on the new rules never campaigned on them or asked for public support. They just did it. They kept doing it one court case, one new law at a time. The place to start is the landmark Supreme Court decision Shelley v. Kramer, where the court declared that restrictive covenants violated the 14th Amendment.

In 1945, a black couple named J.D. and Ethel Shelley attempted to purchase a home in a white neighborhood in St. Louis, Missouri. The property was subject to a restrictive covenant that prohibited nonwhites from occupying the property. This was a deliberate setup to get another case in the system on this matter. McGhee v. Sipes was a similar case out of Michigan. This is a common trick by the usual suspects to help fast track a case to the Supreme Court.

Of course, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the blacks, declaring that while restrictive covenants do not violate the rights of the parties to the contract, any enforcement of these covenants violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. In other words, homeowners are free to make any rules they like about who can live in their community, but no court will enforce those rights if they discriminate on race.

What the court did is shift from a position where it enforces private contracts to a position where it decides if the contract is acceptable. In one decision we went from a world where private parties were free to make contracts with one another for whatever reasons they liked to a world where private parties must seek permission from the state before entering into a contract. If the court could selectively enforce contracts, as in the Shelley case, then they could do it with every type of contract.

This marked the beginning of the general shift away from a rights-based society where the state is a neutral arbiter in disputes between citizens to a permission-based society in which the state regulates the behavior of citizens to achieve goals never imagined or considered in the Constitution. Ten years after Shelley, the Court sealed the deal with the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, where they enshrined this entirely new moral paradigm into law.

Brown took the basic concept of Shelley, where the courts get to decide which contracts to enforce, and extended it to the law. Specifically, they declared that any law or private action that discriminates is assumed to be unconstitutional. Any law or behavior that furthers an open and inclusive society is assumed to be constitutional. This has been the moral framework of race communism ever since. The reason Shiloh Hendrix is famous now is because of this moral framework.

The great frustration that white people sense in that clip of Ms. Hendrix using colorful euphemisms is the result of the American false consciousness. We are regularly told we live in a rights-based society, that we are free to live our lives as we see fit, but in reality, we live in a permission-based society. If anything you do or say is deemed to be discriminatory by the courts or someone empowered by the courts, you can find yourself in a jungle of moral contradictions.

It is a good example of how reform within the rules is probably impossible. To fix the race issue it would require tearing down this moral edifice erected by the courts that now dominates the old Constitutional arrangement. That means removing the moral authority of the courts entirely. To do that would require a revolution in the law where lawyers cease to be a secular clerisy. Such a revolution in the law will require a revolution in the streets.

That aside, the tension between how we want to act and how we are told to act is why Ms. Hendrix blew her top in the park. She does not want to live in a world where she and her children are harassed by Africans. She thinks she has the right to not be harassed by Africans. She does not live in that world as the people in charge think she should be harassed by Africans. That video exists because we are about to find out who shall overcome whom.

New economics

I'm not necessarily surprised, but I am disappointed by the vast expression of economic illiteracy and the belief in obviously false narratives that I see in the wake of the Trumpian trade policy. Here's a redacted quote of today's Z-man post.

Last week, Trump stunned the world by following through on what he has been promising since he came down the escalator in 2015. This set off the Great Trump Stock Market Crash, which promises to continue this week as the rest of the world responds to the new world order. The yesterday men and the crazies are sure this is the Great Depression, because their history of the world starts in the 1930s. It is a stylized history, such that every modern event can be jammed into the 1930s, the 1960s, or the 1980s. Since they are sure Trump is secretly Hitler, this must be the 1930s—even though we have witnessed many stock market corrections in the last thirty years. The COVID crash, the mortgage bubble, and the dot-com bubble are easy examples.

In reality, what we are seeing is the long-overdue return to normalcy, where American economic policy is aimed at benefiting the American people, rather than abstract concepts from economics departments. If Canada has tariffs on American goods, then the United States should have tariffs on Canadian goods—unless it can be shown that the American people benefit in some way from the imbalance. The same is true for every other country in the world.

Of course, the reality is that the market isn't the economy, and isn't the only indicator of its health. As many have pointed out, not only is this a correction to normalcy, but jobs have come back significantly more than expected and projected. Wall Street may be struggling, but that's only fair, because Main Street is finally rebounding after decades of being stifled to prop up Wall Street. 

One of the weird things about decades of American trade policy is that it has created the same sense of entitlement as government racial policy. Just as nonwhites think they are entitled to be near white people without conditions, the world thinks it has a right to access the American market without conditions. This is most obvious in Europe, which has taken this lopsided arrangement for granted. They have also assumed they are entitled to American defense, while doing nothing in return.

The logic behind this arrangement has always been nonsense—but people love to believe in nonsense, especially their own. We see this with the free trade crowd, who are claiming tariffs will only harm the American people. If that were true, then the rest of the world should have been miserable for the last thirty years. Further, if that were true, then the rest of the world now has a chance to usher in a golden age for their people by eliminating their tariffs instead of raising them.

As he says, and I'll not quote this part, the reduction in the scope of the government, and in the tax burden on the American people is integral to this process as well. Main Street, i.e., regular Americans, have been subsidizing Wall Street and the globalists for decades. This is the scope of the realignment. So yeah, Wall Street will take a hit. But the only people who should really fear that are people who make their money in unproductive, globalist investments. Mitt Romney's income is at risk. Mine isn't. 

More important are the changes in how we think and talk about the economy. For the longest time, the economy has been treated as a god. Americans were expected to tolerate anything to please it. If the economy demanded Haitian cannibals in your town, you had to accept it. If the economy demanded that the quality of your hand tools decline, you just lived with it. If the economy required you to work two jobs to make ends meet, then you did it. The economy was a remorseless god.

This sort of thinking makes sense to an alien overclass that sees the United States as an opportunity to be exploited. It does not make sense if the ruling elite feels a connection and obligation to the people. Shifting from the old transactional model of economics to a nationalistic model requires a new language. Simply pointing at a graph that trends upward is no longer enough. The political class will now have to possess some economic literacy.

Bingo!

In the end, Bessent is correct. America cannot continue to create credit in the financial system and borrow trillions to hire government workers. We either have an orderly transition back to a normal economy, or we have a disorderly transition. The name for that is collapse—and that is vastly worse than a stock market correction. This is the reason the economic elites are backing this move. They know that the people who suffer the most from failure are the elites.

And bingo again!

If Trump hadn't come along and eased the transition, the current trend would have simply led to a Soviet-style collapse and the anarchy that followed... at best. At worst, it would have been more like a Roman-style collapse where the Romans essentially ceased to exist entirely, their impoverished and decidedly smaller in numbers mixed descendants emerging many generations later as something else. Arguably, either of those could still happen. But the fact that Trump has shoved the Overton window wide open on these kinds of topics makes both of them less likely then they had been even a year or so ago.

UPDATE: And a brief quote from today's post (the next day) because it reads like an extension of the same topic.

The reason regular people feel so much economic angst, despite the appearance of material prosperity, is that we have reached the end of the line for this model, where costs are socialized but profits are privatized. If you look closely, you will see this dynamic everywhere. The offset to those cheap products at big-box stores is the collapse of American manufacturing, and the social capital that came with it. The offset to cheap labor via immigration has been stagnant wages and emergency rooms that resemble Tijuana bus stops. The offset to a rising stock market is endless financial insecurity. The hidden costs have accumulated to the point where they can no longer be ignored.

The reason Trump is trying to usher in a new economic model is that the old one, the financialized economy, is running out of places to hide the costs of endless credit creation and the auctioning off of social capital. It is not just that we cannot borrow more money. It is that we cannot continue to socialize the costs of creating more credit money. Just as critically, we can no longer tolerate an oligarchy built on privatizing the profits of this system.

UPDATE 2: And another one, to add to it: Much of the politics of the right for the last 8+ years has been a continual battle against those who, when faced with a divergence between the model and observed reality, define "principle" as continuing to choose the model. Don't really need to add anything to that observation, do I?

A few things

I need to get back to blogging about gaming, and I will soon (or if not, I'll make another YouTube video about it, which I'm also behind on) but for today, here's some interesting data that I stumbled across by accident. First, a "perception of corruption by country" map that was presented to me in some work training, but which is distributed by some third party research group. I find it interesting, although not surprising, that it completely validates the Z-man's assertion that the war between Russia and the Ukraine is a war between the two most corrupt white nations... if you ignore Byelorussia, which is pedantically listed as a hair more corrupt than Ukraine (although I have my doubts. Besides, this is a list of perception of corruption, not necessarily actual corruption, which is certainly harder to measure.)

Mexico is also abysmally low and falling fast every time the data is refreshed. Because so many Americans do business with Mexico, our compliance training at work obviously focused heavily on dealing with Mexico. But it's also extremely relevant in our current political discussions about the Trump administration's grief with Mexico in general. It also of course is extremely relevant with regards to the expected behavior of large blocks of Mexicans living in the United States. As Vox Day has said for years, there's nothing magical about the dirt of America, where if foreigners set foot on it it magically turns them into Americans. They will continue to be Mexicans, or whatever it is that they were before they came. Therefore, patterns of behavior, genetics, and human capital by nation should be expected to continue to hold true (minus a mass admixture event, or something) regardless of geographic location. Mexicans are still Mexicans, even if they get American paperwork, and their behavior will continue to be Mexican, even in America, for the most part. Expecting anything other than that is wishful thinking, delusional, and ridiculous.

https://transparency.org/cpi is the link. The redder the color, the more corrupt the country is perceived to be. 

On another note, a lot of Canadians are bent out of shape by the tariffs, calling them unfair, and getting mad at America. Screw you, Canada! If you don't like tariffs, here's a sampling of tariffs that Canada has charged on American goods for decades (rounded to the nearest whole number):

Milk 270%

Cheese 245%

Butter 298%

Chicken 238%

Sausages 69%

Barley seed 58%

Beef 27%

Cars 25%

HVAC 45%

Vacuums 36^

Cable boxes 35%

TVs 45%

Steel 25%

Aluminum 45%

Copper 48%

I'm not impressed with their complaining, and much less impressed by their threats. The reality is that Canada's economy is extremely vulnerable, and they know it. Their tariffs are a blip on our economy. Our tariffs would be devastating to theirs. That's what happens when you have a gigantic trade surplus with much larger country that has a great many natural resources, and the capability to not need any of your imports at all. The US has funded a lot of Canada's nonsense; they have no real military to speak of, because they rely on ours. They engage in plenty of protectionism because it funds their economy at our expense, but they are a relatively small trading partner with us. On the other hand, we are a HUGE trading partner for them. 

Trudeau is, of course, a liar and an idiot, but even so-called conservative star Pierre Poilievre is sounding kinda whiny, calling Canada America's best friend because they sent a handful of soldiers to Afghanistan years ago or something like that. He says we stabbed them in the back (by reciprocating their own behavior?) and saying that we're already paying higher gas prices (my local gas price is down at least $0.25 in the last couple of days).

Canada isn't America's best friend. I've known too many Canadians to believe that, even regardless of the policies of their government. Canadians are smug and arrogant, and look at Americans with contempt, for the most part. Canada is the leftover New French, who resent the rest of Canada and the British Canadians, even as they rely on them financially, and the rest of Canada are Americans who do the same to America. They were afraid of freedom in 1776, were comfortable with living under tyranny, and continue to do so. But they have the same dynamic with America; they resent us and dislike us even as they are completely dependent on us financially. Their threats to sell their oil to China or India ring pretty hollow; they're pretty much allowed themselves to be invaded and purchased by China and India anyway.

Rather than being our best friend, Canada is our toxic, narcissistic ex-girlfriend, who still depends on us, but hates us in part because of that financial dependence. I have little sympathy for what could potentially happen to their economy if they continue to attempt to exploit and tweak us. You asked for it, sweet-cheeks. If you don't like it, you should have had a much better pattern of behavior in how you treated us. We're completely and utterly justified in putting the screws to you until you shape up, because you still haven't moved out of our basement and set yourself up as a legitimately independent country.

Must see TV

Or rather not. I didn't watch it, and now that I've seen summaries and reviews, I almost certainly won't. I wasn't the target audience. People who are really paying attention and are pretty current events savvy and politically/socially aware weren't the target audience. There literally wasn't anything for them in this speech. As Vox Day says, (who apparently didn't watch it either—but he lives in Italy now, so it would have been quite late local time for him):

Reading the reviews of the God-Emperor 2.0’s speech to Congress proved to be a bit deflating. While it was a good summary of what has been accomplished so far, it didn’t really provide us with any new information. Still no arrests. Still members of NATO. There is still a Department of Education, an Internal Revenue Service, and a Federal Reserve.

No one cares about a mineral deal with Ukraine. Everyone wants the US military out of Ukraine, out of Europe, and out of Japan.

There’s nothing wrong with a victories lap. There are certainly more victories to celebrate than anyone was expecting so soon. But everyone was expecting something more, something big, last night. And that speech was nothing big. Frankly, reading his executive orders is more exciting and encouraging.

Yeah, we were certainly hoping for some big announcements along the lines of pulling out of NATO, major arrests, the FBI files on Epstein, or something like that. But I wasn't really expecting it. (I think it's funny and kinda irritating that in Spanish there's only one word that means both hope and expect. Personally, I think they mean quite different things, and as highlighted here, the contrast between what I hope for and what I expect can be quite large.) 

Frankly, although the accomplishments of the speech itself were pretty modest, I think it still had some value. Cementing for a new audience who isn't paying enough attention what he's actually done, which the American people generally want him to do, in the faces of the mainstream media who're desperate to spin his presidency so far as something terrible, was valuable. Trashing the Democrat and progressive brands publicly and thoroughly is valuable. Allowing the petulant, entitled bratty little princesses of the Democrat party, like Al Green or whatsherface Slotkin to own goal and trash the Democrat brand publicly and inadvertently because they mistakenly thought that they'd be hailed as "stunning and brave" was even more valuable. 

But it was a bit deflating. I felt like I was bait and switched just a bit, being told to tune in for something amazing, and then being told stuff that I already knew. But, like I said, I wasn't really the target audience after all. Apparently the approval rating of the speech was quite high.

I suppose that's probably sufficient justification to do it on its own, in spite of what people like me think of it.

Sigh

Work is crazy this morning. The tariffs went into effect effective today after all, in spite of my hopes that Mexico et al would come to an agreement with the administration. Specifically because... I do Procurement professionally and because everything that I buy currently is pretty labor intensive, it's all located in the maquiladora region of Mexico. While I'm in support of the tariffs, and recognize that after China, Mexico is the country that will most lose if it engages in a trade war with the US; they simply absolutely cannot afford to do so because of the value of the trade deficit.

That said, just because I'm in favor of the tariff strategy from a big picture standpoint, it is certainly a major headache for my current work situation. One guy, who clearly isn't an economist, is really dropping a lot of passive aggressive crap in our group IM. It's been hard to ignore it, but that's the best approach. At his age in his 60s, he's not going to be interested in a dialectical discussion about it. He just clearly wants to snipe at the Trump administration, as if people agree with him. And maybe most people do, I don't know. I certainly know that I don't. I'm willing to put up with some frustration at work for long term benefit for my country, my people and my posterity. Putting Mexico in its place is one of the most important foreign policy initiatives that America can do; they've been waging de facto war and invasion against us for decades.

So, instead I'll leave with a portion of the Z-man's latest post for the day.

[I]it is fair to wonder if what we are seeing and have been seeing for the last few decades is the death of the last remaining ideology, progressivism. Populism seems to be an end of cycle phenomenon. It is, after all, a disorganized revolt against the current order, which has reached its maturity and is entering decline. What follows a populist uprising is either a replacement of the old order, a reform that replaces the old elite or a reform effort by the elites themselves.

The assault on the Blob by the Trump administration, led by Elon Musk, is clearly an assault on the old managerial order. Elon Musk is the face of the new technological elite, so it is fitting that he is the point man for this task. Managerialism is the traveling partner of ideology. It was a feature of both fascism and communism. Its looming demise at the hands of the Trump administration, which was powered by a populist uprising against it, fits the historical pattern.

Progressivism has had a long run, but for most of the 20th century it served as a bulwark against fascism and then communism. Its social reforms stopped making any sense by the latter half of the 20th century and either disappeared from the agenda entirely or morphed into bizarre sexual fetishes. Its main reason to exist was to fight communism, but once communism was gone, it was left without a devil, so it has gone insane over the last decades in search of Old Scratch.

The populism that brought Trump to the White House in 2016, sustained him in his wilderness years and then returned him the White House was driven by the excesses and insanity of progressives. Populism is usually framed as the people versus elites, but in this case, it was normal people versus crazy people. The best way to describe the first weeks of the Trump administration is the return of normalcy, unless you are a member of the hive we call the left.

In the fullness of time, what this period may be known for is the death of the last ideology, knocked off by the same forces that spawned it. American populism has always been a check on the excesses of the elite, not as a physical or even political force, but as a cultural force. Ideology is always about changing culture, so it is ironic that the last ideology will be vanquished by a cultural phenomenon. The ghost of the People’s Party has finally called progressivism home.

Also, how about this?

https://x.com/realdogeusa/status/1896395104937476110

Wouldn't it be interesting if it turns out that they're Mexicans? Or Israelis? Who are your friends, and who has been waging covert war against you while pretending to be your friend, and guilt tripping you anytime you get close to noticing?

And how about this?

https://x.com/Real_RobN/status/1888722651893694672

Where have all the cowboys gone?

https://x.com/IceSolst/status/1882279052113072194

The comments are sometimes kind of interesting. She wants to know why men don't do womanly things, and rejects answers that disagree with her preconceived notions of what men "should" do.

Vox Day pointed out that the pick-me girls don't seem to have any trouble finding out where the men are. Men aren't obligated to go where you want them to go and do what you want them to do. If you want to find men, then go where the men are, not demanding that the men go where you are. You're not nearly as interesting as you think you are, and the men aren't coming to be near you for that reason.

Classic case of toxic female narcissism.

UPDATE: Not exactly the same thing, but variations on a theme, certainly. Toxic female narcissism combined with classic Third World brown people narcissism who think that they're entitled to First World white people prosperity.

UPDATE II: Breitbart removed this comment. They aren't our friends. I go there because they're better than most of the alternatives, not because they're actually good. Honestly, my curated news from Vox Day and Anonymous Conservative is probably better, although also with big holes in their scope.