Author: VD

SJWs define “good community”

The dubiously named “Geekess” explains the process of social justice convergence in open source projects:

There’s been a lot of discussion in my comment sections (and on LWN) about what makes a good community, along with suggestions of welcoming open source communities to check out. Your hearts are in the right place, but I’ve never found an open source community that doesn’t need improvement. I’m quite happy to give the Xorg community a chance, mostly because I believe they’re starting from the right place for cultural change.

The thing is, reaching the goal of a diverse community is a step-by-step process. There are no shortcuts. Each step has to be complete before the next level of cultural change is effective. It’s also worth noting that each step along the way benefits all community members, not just diverse contributors.

Level 0: basic human decency
In order to attract diverse candidates, you need to be known as a welcoming community, with a clear set of agreed-upon social norms. It’s not good enough to have a code of conduct. Your leaders need to be actively behind it, and it needs to be enforced.

Level 1: on-boarding

The next phase in improving diversity is figuring out how to on-board newcomers. If diverse candidates are only 1-10% of newcomers, but you have a 90% fail rate for people who try to make their first contribution, well, you can’t expect many diverse newcomers to stick around, can you? It’s also essential to explain your unwritten tribal knowledge, so that diverse candidates (who are more likely to be afraid of upsetting the status quo) know what they’re getting into.

Level 2: meaningful contributions

The next step is figuring out what to do with these eager new diverse candidates. If they’ve made it this far through the gauntlet of toxic tech culture, they’re likely to be persistent, smart, and seeking a challenge. If you don’t have meaningful bigger projects for them to contribute to, they’ll move onto the next shiny thing.

And it just gets worse, until the whole thing is run by non-white women, food served at conferences is vegetarian, drinking is banned, and the code of conduct explicitly acknowledges the spectrum of privilege. And while she left out literal self-flagellation, there is no doubt that the metaphorical form will be expected of any white male contributors that remain.

I am beginning to wonder if Microsoft and the other software vendors are behind this open source code-of-conduct campaign, because nothing short of special ops assault teams could destroy their OSS competitors more effectively.

A development failure

This is an interesting look at an AAA development project that hit a single when a home run was needed:

To understand why Homefront had such a troubled development,
it’s important to look at how THQ was trying to change the way it
greenlit games, and the context in which it did so. Its new procedure,
which is fairly common in the game industry, was a multi-stage process
designed to keep studios at work on new games without committing THQ to
seeing them through to publication. THQ would take pitches from all its
studios, give feedback, see prototypes and then authorize continued
development. After going through this a few times, THQ would make a
final decision about moving forward on full development, or pulling the
plug on the project.

What was unusual about THQ’s greenlight process is that it occurred
at a time when every THQ studio executive knew that closures were
imminent. With the stakes so high, THQ’s new pitch process turned into a
never-ending up-sell.

“We [Kaos] were in jeopardy of dying right after Frontlines,
and [Schulman] felt that we really needed to sell to THQ,” says one
producer. “So we put forth just about every bit of effort we had into
creating one hell of a package to sell to THQ. So much so that I believe
our package was held as a metric for what other studios should do to
sell their packages. And Dave Schulman was a really good salesman at
telling THQ what we could deliver, and turning back to us to say, ‘Hey,
sky’s the limit. Just pack more features in. Make it great. Put as many
bullet points as you can on the back of the box.'”

I was meeting with some THQ executives about funding one of Chris Taylor’s projects at this time and they had sky-high expectations of Homefront. I mean, the words “CoD-killer” were bandied about; they really believed it was going to be a Battlefield-level event. I remember being dubious at the time, and later, when it was released, barely even noticing that it was out. No one I knew ever played it.

Book club invite

The Goy Luck Club is reading SJWs Always Lie and has invited VP members to take part in the discussions if anyone is interested:

Vox Day, The Supreme Dark Lord of the Evil Legion of Evil, has been is a science fiction writer for Castalia House, and was purged by the Science Fiction Writers of America by SJW’s for having naughty thoughts (sound familiar?). Since then, he has devoted part of his blogging to fighting back against the SJW’s in the Hugo Awards and in the Culture War. By organizing some of his readership, which he calls the Evil Legion of Evil, he is successfully getting SJW’s to burn down the Hugo Awards, a group that has been infested with SJW’s for 20+ years. He has accomplished this by getting them to vote for “No Award” for the various book awards, so the books he and his supporters nominate (The Sad Puppies slate) will not win the awards.

The book we will be reading is called SJW’s Always Lie.

For the first reading starting today (10/16/15) and ending next Friday (10/23/15), we will be reading chapters 1-5.

I will also be doing a closed Brainstorm event after the reading for those who take part and will be taking questions from readers about the book. And yes, speaking of a reading group, I do need to finish up the quizzes for A History of Strategy. And speaking of SJWs Always Lie, this review from M-Zed is both characteristic and extremely complimentary, considering:

Even Despite Our Differences, A Strong Book
By Michael Z. Williamson on October 15, 2015

I review this as an ardent anti-Voxxer, who has argued with him many times. The man is a troll, a self-aggrandizing narcissist, and woefully ignorant of science.

However, in the field of philosophy and debate, there are few better in this market. He understands clearly the tactical use of dialectic and rhetoric, and that arguing facts against someone who refuses to accept them is pointless.

The key to arguing with such people is to recognize, evade, and turn their own tactics upon themselves, so they are forced into their own corners. And, may I suggest, it’s very useful for dealing with annoying exes who attempt to obfuscate at every opportunity.

It is well worth the money to learn how to debate with the unreasonable.

It’s wonderful to have fans and supporters, but there are few compliments more sincere or satisfying than one from a dedicated foe. Obviously M-Zed and I have our differences, a considerable quantity of differences, but what I like about him is that he’s not afraid to speak his mind, for better or for worse.

You heard it here first

From our Eastern European friends:

It’s official, foreign relations minister Péter Szijjártó announced that tonight at midnight Croatian border will be shut down.

UPDATE:

Funny thing is happening, probably this news really appeared first on
your blog in English, there is almost no coverage of this. Now it is 19:44, the announcement was at about 15.00 hungarian time. I was checking news pages many times today, both Hungarian and English/American. Now
it is on front page in the Hungarian ones, but it wasn’t like this a
few hours before, and for example on very popular liberal news page
ORIGO, you can barely see it between the first 10 bullshit/less
important news.

Just now it is on the front
page of CNN, hidden between a lot of other news, it is not even on the
front page of BBC, you can only find it if you search. Same with
Reuters, only if you search. One of the “news line” short news on
RT.com. For some reason, they are not enthusiastic covering this.
With
the serbian closure, it was all over the place, because people were
expecting riots and finger pointing poor treatment of migrants. They got a little of what they expected.
Croatian
interior minister Ranko Ostojic just announced that they will take
people to Slovenian border, and another Slovenian politician said that
they are prepared for the influx, until countries further north keep
their borders open (Germany). So they will basically continue the same organized transport of migrants to Germany, only through Slovenia. 
 
I don’t expect riots, neither does mainstream media. So
they do not want to tell people, that Hungary just quietly but surely
stuck to its plan, closed the borders, and is not doing it
alone, but in cooperation with 4 other countries.
The
other day I wrote that Czech soldiers already arrived, Slovak soldiers
and policemen will arrive, and the Poles will probably help with
something also. Well, Ewa Kopacz Polish PM announced today, that they
are sending to Hungary 70 border police officials, many jeeps, including
5 that have night vision devices built in.

The coverage of the first border closing backfired on the multicultis. Nearly everyone applauded the Hungarian action. That’s why they’re keeping the cameras away from this one.

Future trends, future history

It would appear that Richard Fernandez sees much the same future unfolding that I do:

Conventional wisdom has had  a pretty bad run these last 15 years.  For that reason there is little purpose to trusting it further. Instead it might be better to predict a future based on observable trends rather than scenarios that politicians offer. If those trends continue one would expect to see in 2025:

  • The self-destruction of the Muslim Middle East;
  • The rise of ethnic and national politics in Europe;
  • The widespread resurgence of religion and cultural identity as a consequence of (2);
  • Mass expulsions or segregation in large parts of the world to deconflict incompatible communities
  • Everyone packing personal weapons like the Wild West
  • The collapse of multi-ethnic countries into simplified pacts based around of national defense, with most social law generated by local communities and affinity groups;
  • One or more large regional wars with casualties in the tens of millions.
  • Several, possibly many WMD attacks on major cities involving radiological weapons, low yield nukes or biological agents.

Such a world would be rough, dangerous and in many places, miserable.   Perhaps it will not even be as good as that; for the list above omits the occurrence of an event equivalent to World War 3, in which case we can describe the future with a single word: ruin.  But it is the world we are building, absent any change of course.  The oddest circumstance is that politicians still pretend without the slightest basis, that if we stay their perverse course we’ll go right through the ruin and out the other side and find the dream we glimpsed as we crossed into the 21st century. 

I’m not concerned about nukes or radiological weapons. What concerns me are genetic weapons. I expect genetic research to be shut down and highly regulated in the relatively near future. In addition to the way advancement in genetic science keeps disrupting the Narrative, it also poses a genuine large-scale threat to Mankind that is very nearly unprecedented in human history.

The events of the post-WWII period desperately need to be chronicled in detail, because future generations need to learn from the utter idiocy of the international policy makers of the last 70 years. In the unlikely event we happen to have enough historians here, I have in mind a project like the Cambridge Medieval History series, where the different writers each focus on a different set of actors. If this is of any interest to you and you think you might have the ability to contribute a section, email me with POSTWAR in the title.

Also, in not entirely unrelated news, we still need 3-5 more non-fiction articles for THERE WILL BE WAR Vol. X. If you’re a published military writer, we’re looking for high-quality reprints, so if you’ve got any, let me know.

SJWs in the Church of Scotland

Here we not only see the consequences of entryism, but further evidence in support of the truism: SJWs always lie. In which David Robertson learns that he should have read the book before debating a Scottish wolf in sheep’s clothing:

At one level I was excited. Because the church was packed with over 250 people on a midweek evening to discuss theology; because I liked Scott when I had met him previously and believed that he genuinely wanted to have an open discussion about these vital issues; because it was a great opportunity to speak the good news in a different context. But I was also aware there was something else going on. I won’t go into details but I was under considerable pressure to back off and indeed even to give up and walk away. Even as I walked into the church I sensed not only the sense of anticipation but also the hostility from some, and also a strange sense that something was wrong.

This was made worse when I went into the vestry and met with Scott and Rev John Chalmers, the former Moderator who was there to replace the current Moderator, Rev Angus Morrison, who had called off because of a sore throat. John informed me at 7:25pm that the event would not be recorded. I was somewhat surprised at this because in setting up the event we had offered to film it and we were assured that there was no need to do so because the Church would do so and put it online.   This was an important aspect of the evening as this was a public discussion about subjects of vital importance to the whole church, and rather than rely on out of context quotes and sound bites reported on social media, it was important that people could hear and see the whole debate for themselves.(the interest and demand from people from people has been phenomenal). So I insisted that it be recorded and they agreed.

We went out, had the debate which went much as I had expected. Scott denied the Bible, called the atoning work of Christ on the cross barbaric (and Calvinist!) and at the end suggested that the future of the Church in Scotland rested on leadership styles like the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury as well as ‘mindfulness’.  I did my best to answer him in as biblical and gracious a way as possible. (I accept that I got some things wrong, said some things in a wrong way, wish I had said others,  and sometimes let my tongue run away with things-  God have mercy on me, a sinner).  My concern was for Scott and also for those who hear him preach, that he would turn away from his heresy and man-made gospel which is no gospel at all.   At this point I would normally suggest that you go to the video and judge for yourselves. Except even as I write, the video has been destroyed…. I was informed on the Thursday that the video would not be put online because I had hurt Scott’s feelings by suggesting that I would excommunicate him if he were a member of my church.   He also thought that it would not be a good witness, and he did not want that statement put online (ironically of course it was put on line immediately and tweeted all over the place by some of his supporters).  He informed me today, after further correspondence that he had instructed that the tapes be destroyed.

Why destroy the tapes? What was so incriminating on them?  It was not to
preserve Scott’s hurt feelings. Nor was it because they are concerned
about Christian witness.

This quote from the following letter I received from a life long Church of Scotland couple helps explain why: “We
too were horrified to learn in March of Mr. McKenna’s denial of the
atonement. We protested to Edinburgh Presbytery expecting disciplinary
action. None was forthcoming and we felt made to feel wrong for
mentioning this fundamental aspect of the faith. We fear that Mr.
McKenna is not only risking God’s judgement on himself but also on his
congregation and the rest of us for doing nothing.”

The
unpalatable truth for evangelicals and traditional Presbyterians is that
Scott McKenna is not on the eccentric fringes of the Church of
Scotland. He is one of its mainstream leaders who I suspect is being
lined up for higher office. To have such a man openly and publicly
teach such heresy (which itself is against the standards and teachings
of the C of S) would be the last straw for many such people. So in order
to do damage limitation, and prevent more people joining the growing
exodus from the C of S, they decided to try and bury the evidence.

This is why you ALWAYS record interviews and debates YOURSELF. ALWAYS. No exceptions. It won’t prevent the media from cherry-picking any mistakes or controversies and making the most of them, but it will prevent them from lying about what you have said and hiding the mistakes and infelicities of their own side.

David Robertson made the mistake that most people make when dealing with SJWs. He fucked up; he trusted them. But SJWs always lie! You cannot trust them, you cannot trust one single thing they say.

The problem is that until recently, no one who has dealt with an SJW and been played for a fool has seen the pattern, much less explained it to anyone else. That’s why it is important to understand the pattern and spread the word about it; SJWs are a civilization-wide menace as Western civilization is under massive assault by the servitors of social justice.

So that is a prime directive. ALWAYS RECORD ALL INTERACTIONS WITH SJWs. Because First Law of SJW. If the law requires their permission and they won’t grant it, then don’t talk to them. I’ve put this into practice myself, as whenever I get a request for an interview these days, I inform them that I will be recording it myself.

UPDATE: Fortunately, someone recorded the audio and provided a transcript. And it is no wonder that the SJWs in the Church of Scotland tried to erase Scott McKenna’s words. They clearly demonstrate that he isn’t a Christian and he should be excommunicated from the Church without any need for further discussion.

I was talking about penal substitutionary atonement which is the notion that, in order to satisfy the wrath, the anger of God who had been offended by the wrath of God, that Jesus had to die as a blood sacrifice to pay for this sin, in order to satisfy the wrath of God. Now I would be saying that I think this leaves us with a fairly despotic… despot of a god; a barbaric god who is vindictive and immoral. Now this is not unique to me. This is not radical theology. You will find this theology in numerous places including a number of evangelicals.

That may not be radical theology, but it also isn’t Christian theology. And while some “evangelicals” do subscribe to it, they are not evangelical Christians, they are atheist evangelicals in the mode of Richard Dawkins.

Fortunately, he apologized

Was said of no public figure in the last decade:

Dr. Marcy was mentioned only a few weeks ago as a potential Nobel Prize honoree. But he also left a trail of complaints and rumors about inappropriate behavior over the years.

This summer, in response to a formal complaint by four former students, the University of California concluded that Dr. Marcy had violated its policies on sexual harassment. The violations, spanning 2001 to 2010, included groping students, kissing them and touching or massaging them inside their clothes.

Dr. Marcy was informed that another harassment violation would leave him subject to immediate suspension or dismissal — a decision that was not widely known until BuzzFeed News reported it last week.

On the eve of the report’s release, Dr. Marcy posted an apology on his website, disagreeing with some aspects of the harassment complaints but saying he took responsibility. “It is difficult to express how painful it is for me to realize that I was a source of distress for any of my women colleagues, however unintentional,” he said.

But his apology and the university’s response were widely seen as not enough and lacking in sensitivity to the victims of his actions, some of whom have since left astronomy. The Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy declined his request that the apology be published in its newsletter, according to the Women in Astronomy blog.

Houston, we have convergence! Anyhow, just in case it’s not clear, an apology is not going to save you.

“This should put sexual harassers on notice: No one is too big to fail,”
Joan Schmelz, a former chairwoman of the American Astronomical
Society’s Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy, said on
Wednesday.

Nothing, NOTHING, is more important than preventing insufficiently attractive men from touching women. Not science. And certainly not astronomy!

Churchian cucks preaching Babelism

Terrible theology + kissing the world’s unwiped backside leads to cucky Churchians preaching the gospel of Babel:

As the Senate recently passed long
awaited immigration overhaul and the bill now heads to the House, the
long-standing national discourse on the issue of immigration will likely
heat up again. As we participate in these discussions, my hope is that
we, especially as Christians tasked with peacemaking and reconciling,
will find ways to build bridges instead of erecting walls. As a first
step in this bridge building, I pray that once and for all, we will stop
using the term “illegal immigrant.”
Here’s why:

1. The term “illegal immigrant” is a misleading and dishonest term, which violates the 9th commandment.

2. The term “illegal” singles out those who committed one, specific,
federal misdemeanor, but is never applied to other violations.

3. The term “illegal immigrant” has morphed into a racial epithet.

4. The term “illegal immigrant” cultivates hostility, animosity, and mistrust against our neighbors.

5. The term “illegal immigrant” is dehumanizing.   

  1. No, it does not. In fact, the author is lying. “Illegal immigrant” is an accurate and honest term that precisely describes the status of the individual so described.
  2. Considering that my father is often described as “a tax evader”, this is obviously false. Most “murderers” are not serial killers, after all.
  3. No, it hasn’t. What race does “illegal immigrant” refer to?
  4. No, immigration, especially illegal immigration, cultivates hostility, animosity, and mistrust against our neighbors. 
  5. This is ridiculous. Only humans are described as “illegal immigrants”. I have never heard of migrating birds being described that way.

Churchians are liars and deceivers. They worship the god of Babel, not the Christian God. They serve the world, not Jesus Christ.

    Mailvox: resistance really works

    It turns out that active resistance is a considerably more effective approach than silent submission and surrender. This tweet appeared in my notifications this morning:

    a friend is under real life SJW attack, pointed him to this, he followed your advice & it’s working. Many thanks!! *hat tip*

    It may be hard to break the habits into which we are brainwashed from kindergarten, but it is necessary. It is vital! Those whispers that tell you to give up, to give in, to abandon hope are the voices of the deceivers who programmed defeatism into you at an early age through school, church, and media.

    Don’t listen to those voices. God loves the fighters. God loves the warriors. The Father loved Gideon and David. The Son loved Peter. Unless you are being murdered for your Christian faith, you are not a martyr, you’re just a coward who lacked the courage to stand up for himself and for the truth.

    If you’ve got a friend who is under attack, please note that SJWs Always Lie is now available as a free read for both KU and Prime subscribers. And last night we received the notification that it will be available in paperback within a week or so.

    Mailvox: more border closures coming

    Apparently things are about to get even more interesting in Eastern Europe in response to the ongoing invasion. A reader from Eastern Europe writes:

    Get ready for things to get interesting again at the Hungarian border/Croatia/Slovenia/Serbia.

    When Hungary closed the Serbian border, there was about a day of riots, which were all over world news, horrible hungarian policemen teargassing poor migrants. But this lasted about a day, as they immediately started going towards the Croatian border.

    Today, still thousands of refugees cross Hungary, but no one notices them, since it is all organized, basically because Germany is still receiving unlimited amounts of them daily. Croatians bus them to Hungarian border, Hungarian authorities get them on special trains straight to the Austrian border, Austrians get them on special trains straight to Germany.

    This time though, Orbán is taking his time with the Croatian border closure.

    One reason is technical, it takes time to figure out the optimal way. The border is much longer than the Serbian (164 kms to 355 kms), and for the most part two rivers form the border (Dráva and Mura in Hungarian). First they said they were not going to build any fence at the rivers, than they decided to build anyway in some spaces they considered vulnerable. They spotted croatians scouting the border looking for vulnerable places, the days before it was supposed to start, so they took their time to make sure the fence will be effective. The deadline moved, and now they not even giving exact date, they will probably make it effective by surprise, when everything falls to place.

    Second reason is political. As you may know, there is an alliance called Visegrad Group, or V4, which is made up of Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic and Poland. I’m not going to Google the whole history of this, but the alliance is formal, every now and then there are V4 summits and workshops on different levels (PMs, presidents, ministers, etc), independently of which political formations govern at given moment. 

    Orbán this time does not want to play the bad guy alone, so he got the V4 to back him up with political support, and by sending policemen or military personnel/equipment to help patrol the Serbian and Croatian borders, which are the Schengen borders of Europe. He is also organizing a two-month military exercise, called “Balaton 2015”, aimed at practicing different logistical scenarios that could unfold at a migrant crisis. Today the first 20 Czech soldiers arrived for the exercise. Slovakian defence minister just announced that they will send soldiers also.

    Apart from that, Slovakia will send 50 policemen for the Schengen border patrol, they will be arriving until the 20th of October.The Poles didn’t do much yet, but they will probably help with something.

    So another border closure is coming in the next few weeks. I really don’t know what the hell are the Croatians and Serbs waiting for, I would be building my own fence like mad.

    So much for the idea of European “union”. It’s creating more walls than the Soviet invasion of Eastern Europe did. If this insanity is allowed to continue by the German elite, the walls will eventually be constructed of impaled migrants.

    Mass migration is war.