Author: VD

Fourmilog review

John Walker reviews SJWs Always Lie at None Dare Call It Reason:

This book is a superbly written history of GamerGate and the revolt against SJWs in science fiction and fantasy writers’ associations and fandom, but also provides deep insight into the seriously dysfunctional world of the SJW and advice about how to deal with them and what to do if you find yourself a target. The tactics of the SJWs are laid bare, and practical advice is given as to how to identify SJWs before they enter your organisation and how to get rid of them if they’re already hired. (And get rid of them you must; they’re like communists in the 1930s–1950s: once in place they will hire others and promote their kind within the organisation. You have to do your homework, and the Internet is your friend—the most innocuous co-worker or prospective employee may have a long digital trail you can find quickly with a search engine.)

There is no compromising with these people. That has been the key mistake of those who have found themselves targeted by SJWs. Any apology will be immediately trumpeted as an admission of culpability, and nothing less than the complete destruction of the career and life of the target will suffice. They are not well-meaning adversaries; they are enemies, and you must, if they attack you, seek to destroy them just as they seek to destroy you. Read Alinsky; they have. I’m not suggesting you call in SWAT raids on their residences, dig up and release damaging personal information on them, or make anonymous bomb threats when they gather. But be aware that they have used these tactics repeatedly against their opponents.

You must also learn that SJWs have no concern for objective facts. You can neither persuade nor dissuade them from advancing their arguments by citing facts that falsify their claims. They will repeat their objectively false talking points until they tire you out or drown out your voice. You are engaging in dialectic while they are employing rhetoric. To defeat them, you must counter their rhetoric with your own rhetoric, even when the facts are on your side.

The word is spreading. I appreciate the efforts some of you have been making to bring the book to the attention of those with platforms to reach potential readers that I cannot.

And an Amazon reviewer asked a question that merited a response:

Very funny, but why get embroiled in fights with crazy people in the first place? You can’t win, they are not open to logic, and nobody benefits one way or the other. Some SJWs will grow up and realize their silliness, but others, like the hags of N.O.W., never change or advance. The general public is oblivious, and always will be.

Why? Because you can’t avoid them. They are on the Long March through the institutions and organizations of the West and they will attack everyone who does not submit to the Narrative. They are not open to logic, but you can win and I am living proof that you can benefit from standing up to them and defeating them.

And while the general public is oblivious, it will not always be. There is absolutely no reason for defeatism when until recently, most of us didn’t even realize they have been attacking and undermining Western civilization for over 150 years. We not only CAN win, we WILL win because reality always reimposes itself in the end.

Mailvox: Social Justice Convergence in YA

I’ve never read his work, but as YL informs us, it appears Rick Riordan is an SJW:

Rick Riordan has written on his blog about The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, by N.K. Jemisin.

“I picked up this book after reading a thought-provoking article about the author in The Guardian. I really liked what she said about coming to fantasy with no interest in maintaining the status quo. She’s right that so many fantasy books are about restoring order to a kingdom, returning a rightful heir to the throne, or getting back to the good old days by defeating some dark power that threatens to unbalance society. Jemisin, as an African American female writer, says this simply doesn’t resonate with her or interest her, and why should it? Instead, she writes science fiction which challenges those in power, threatens the ordered society, and questions whether the good old days ever existed. I like books that force me to rethink paradigms, so I decided to check out her work.”

Per an Amazon review, his new book, Magnus Chase, features:

“His Valkyrie, Samirah al-Abbas, is a teenage, hijab-wearing muslim girl, who dreams of flying as a Valkyrie and as an airline pilot. She’s also already set up in an arranged marriage, but one that she actually wants, because she loves the guy, and arranged marriages really aren’t as unfeeling and calculated as we might think. Obviously there’s more than a little bit of prejudice she faces. Their two other primary teammates are Blitzen, a dwarf (or dark elf) with dreams of becoming a fashion designer, and Hearthstone, a deaf elf who is one of the only practitioners of rune magic in the nine worlds. These characters are absolutely unique and open the doors to talk about racial prejudices (within humans and among the mortal races) and disabilities.”

And the sales will be in millions.

Warm regards; I loved your book SJWs Always Lie.

I’ve never read Riordan myself, but it’s hardly a surprise that a bestselling YA writer should be in tune with the lunatic mainstream zeitgeist. Of course, he’ll fall out of harmony with the Narrative soon enough; he’s only pushing Islam, fabulousness, and physical disabilities instead of mass migration, pedophilia and the glories of child molestation.

Prediction: Riordan’s career will henceforth decline as per the Impossibility of Social Justice Convergence indicates his books will become less entertaining as they become more openly politicized.

Lunatics wanted

There is apparently an opening for mentally unstable shoggoths, in case any of you happen to be looking for unpaid employment:

I’m sorry to say that my co-chair s.e. smith and I have resigned as
Wiscon 40 chairs and as members of the Wiscon concom, effective
immediately. This is a really unfortunate decision to have had to make,
and we very much regret placing the con in this position. That said, it
seems clear that we are a poor culture fit for the concom, and we feel
the need to prioritize self-care rather than further risk our own mental
health and well-being.

I can’t help but wonder what makes them poor culture fits for the zoo-like freakfest that is Wiscon. Are they attracted to men? Do they weigh less than 200 kilograms? Did they Question the Narrative or did they simply fail to keep up with its rapid mutations?

In any case, “I feel the need to prioritize self-care” is now my go-to excuse for, well, anything. I was going to mow the lawn today, but regretfully, I felt the need to prioritize self-care. I’m sure you understand.

Surprise! The models were off

As anyone who has been paying attention knew, the AGW/CC models were incorrect:

A former climate modeller for the Government’s Australian Greenhouse Office, with six degrees in applied mathematics, Dr Evans has unpacked the architecture of the basic climate model which underpins all climate science.

He has found that, while the underlying physics of the model is correct, it had been applied incorrectly. He has fixed two errors and the new corrected model finds the climate’s sensitivity to carbon dioxide (CO2) is much lower than was thought.

It turns out the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has over-estimated future global warming by as much as 10 times, he says.

“Yes, CO2 has an effect, but it’s about a fifth or tenth of what the IPCC says it is. CO2 is not driving the climate; it caused less than 20 per cent of the global warming in the last few decades”.

Dr Evans says his discovery “ought to change the world”.

“But the political obstacles are massive,” he said.

His discovery explains why none of the climate models used by the IPCC reflect the evidence of recorded temperatures. The models have failed to predict the pause in global warming which has been going on for 18 years and counting.

“The model architecture was wrong,” he says. “Carbon dioxide causes only minor warming. The climate is largely driven by factors outside our control.”

The fact that the models were wrong has been totally freaking obvious for years because they completely failed as predictive models. That is supposed to be the sign to throw them out, or at the very least, try to fix them. But since “the science is settled”, tens of thousands of credulous buffoons who blindly accept any pig-in-a-poke that is marketed as “science” are still insisting that if you don’t take these inept and incorrect models seriously, you are an uneducated climaphobic Nazi denialist.

Or, as I prefer to pronounce it, “science-literate”.

Multicultural success in Sweden

Given that this is what “success” looks like in a multicultural society, imagine what “failure” will amount to:

It is supposed to be the model multicultural state. But Sweden is facing problems of its own after gangs of immigrants spent a fifth consecutive night rioting  in Stockholm.

Officers are battling to keep the  capital under control after hundreds of cars were torched, a police station set alight and fire services kept from  a major blaze by a stone-throwing mob of youths.

To make matters worse, rioting has now spread to Sweden’s two other major cities, Gothenburg and Malmo. The disturbances, which have lasted longer than the riots in England in the summer of 2011, started last week after police shot dead a foreign-born pensioner who threatened to attack them with a machete. Left-wing activists came forward to accuse police of racism – a charge strongly denied by the Stockholm force.

Growing unrest turned to violence last Sunday in a north-western suburb called Husby – where more than 80  per cent of the residents are from overseas, mostly Turkey, Somalia and the Middle East. Trouble then spread to some of the city’s most deprived areas, shattering the country’s proud claim that it is a template for a successful and ethnically diverse society.

It looks like Europe is rapidly approaching the “no more” point, which will be soon followed by “kick them out”, then “kill them all”, if history is any guide.

There is no diversity crisis in tech

Repeat it, understand it, grok it, live it. There is no diversity crisis in tech.

Repeat after me: there is no “diversity crisis” in Silicon Valley.
None. In fact, there is no crisis at all in Silicon Valley. Silicon
Valley is doing absolutely gangbusters. Apple has $200 billion in cash reserves and equivalents — and a market valuation of about $630 billion. Amazing. Facebook now garners a billion daily users. This is a nearly unfathomable number. Google is worth nearly $450 billion and has $70 billion in cash on hand.

This is not a crisis. Silicon Valley is swimming in money and in
success. Uber is valued at around $50 billion. Companies like Airbnb are
remaking travel and lodging. Intel is moving forward into the global
Internet of Things market. South Korea’s Samsung just opened a giant
R&D facility in the heart of Silicon Valley. Google and Facebook are
working to connect the entire world. Netflix is re-making how we
consume entertainment.

Silicon Valley is home to the next phase of the global auto industry.
Fintech and biotech are transforming banking and medicine. The success
of Silicon Valley is not due to diversity — or to any bias. Rather, to
brilliance, hard work, risk taking, big ideas and money.

Want to be part of this? Great! Follow the example of the millions
who came before you. Their parents made school a priority. They took
math and science classes, and did their homework every night. They
practiced ACT tests over and over. They enrolled in good schools and
focused on English, Political Science and Humanities.

Okay, that last bit is not true. They took computer programming,
engineering, chemistry — hard subjects that demand hard work. They then
left their home, their family, their community, and moved to Silicon
Valley. They worked hard, staying late night after night. They didn’t
blog, they didn’t let their skills go stale, they didn’t blame others
when not everything worked out exactly as hoped.
Are you doing all of these? Are you doing any of these? Do them!

The “diversity crisis” is a fake crisis manufactured by SJW parasites who want to leech off the success of others. Tech doesn’t need more women. Tech doesn’t need more blacks, American Indians, Eskimos, walruses, penguins, or meerkats.

And, as the Impossibility of Social Justice Convergence predicts, as the observation of previous diversity crises will demonstrate, the continued success of tech actually depends upon IGNORING those who are attempting to sell the diversity crisis scam and actively RESISTING all of their “solutions”.

The collapse of Star Citizen

Derek Smart contemplates the inevitable end game of a project that appears to be in severe distress:

Last week, The Escapist magazine wrote a scathing investigative report (follow-up podcast) into this project. Something that no other media outlet had done before regarding this project. As they have said, I was not
their source. In fact, only an incompetent media person would use me as
a source. Given how close I am to all of this, the fact that I could
not be regarded as an unbiased source even if I swore on a stack of
Bibles to be unbiased etc.

For the purposes of full disclosure: What I did do, as I’ve been doing since July, was made contact with some mainstream (names withheld as per legal) media sources, trying to get them to investigate this project. This was as per my July 10th blog, Interstellar Discourse
in which, right at the top, I had called for the investigation of this
project and all its creators. This was because I had already been made
aware of most of what is now coming to light as portrayed in The
Escapist article.

As part of that effort, I gave them some of my credible sources,
along with an overview of what I had uncovered and why I simply wasn’t
the one to investigate this any further, due in part by information that
I had access to and which was better off being in the hands of those
same people (the media) who helped hype this project to what it is
today.

I was wrong in making this decision and thinking that anything would come from it. They all chose to bury the story….

My question is that, with all the numerous articles out there,
interviews, visits, face time etc. Why is it that nobody wants to ask
the tough questions about this project? Primary question being, where
did ALL this money go? We have pretty much nothing to show for it – four years later.

In response to the article, Chris Roberts, in continuing the downward trend to disaster, wrote a scathing diatribe
that, on the face of it, looks like you’d have to be high to unleash
that sort of tirade into the public domain. From the CEO of a $90m+
company no less. And clearly it wasn’t vetted by legal (LOL!! that would
be Ortwin). It’s a Gold mine of actionable legal liability. And all it
did was lend credence to some of the things being said behind closed
doors about him, and which were now coming to light via these sources
talking to the media.

The gist of it was that “Derek Smart is bad, this was all his fault, and he was the puppet master”.
Oh, and GamerGate. He mentions me a total of 20 times. The author of
the article got a single mention. And I didn’t even write the damn thing.

Sound familiar? Yes, that’s the blame game.

I was concerned about Star Citizen about a year ago, but I wasn’t half as convinced that the project was on the verge of collapse by Derek Smart as I was by Chris Roberts’s disastrous and very poorly considered response to Derek’s questions. What Chris should have done, what I advise him to do, is to invite Derek to visit and see how development is going for himself. Give him a personal tour. Explain to him how well things are going and how good the game is going to be. Then do the same thing with Lizzy and anyone else The Escapist is willing to send.

This is a GOLDEN opportunity to show off and sell Star Citizen. Instead, Chris and his team have reacted if they have something radioactive to hide. They have reacted as if they are on the verge of being caught red-handed. There is absolutely no reason to react with anger, lengthy diatribes, and legal threats to someone who has doubts about how your project is going.

Whoever is advising Chris is going about it the completely wrong way. I know both Chris and David, and when I get the time I’m going to give them a call and urge them to rethink RSI’s response to critics and doubters, because this simply is not the way to reassure anyone, not even the most sincere Star Citizen supporters and true believers.

And #GamerGate? Seriously? Derek Smart isn’t #GamerGate. I am #GamerGate as are many others who wish both Chris and Star Citizen well. I don’t know what that is supposed to be, other than an ill-advised attempt to dog-whistle corrupt game journos who didn’t do their job covering Star Citizen in the first place.

Derek is correct. None of this has ANYTHING to do with him. Like him or loathe him, his opinions and his history are irrelevant. All that matters is the very relevant observations he has made and the very pertinent questions he has raised. And for RSI to engage in argumentum ad impertinens hominem is not merely self-defeating bad public relations, it tends to call their own credibility, as well as the future of Star Citizen, into serious question.

Ultimately, Star Citizen may well prove to be another painful lesson in “Beware the Awesome” ala Homefront:

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.’ When Kaos turned that into a demo to show THQ, the ideas
practically sold themselves. THQ executives loved it, and gave Kaos a
green light to complete the game. “Now beyond that initial preproduction phase,” said one producer,
“then you actually have to pay your dues. You have to actually make the
thing you’ve been promising. I think that’s where Dave Schulman’s
expertise fell short. He had promised so much that there was absolutely
no way we could deliver.”

The damning phrase: “We spent about a total of eight months of our production time making a
five minute demo that was … not an actual game. It was a very nice demo.
But it was all smoke and mirrors.”

The birth of anti-SJW advertising

Direct 2 Drive shoots directly at the SJWs:

Direct 2 Drive, an online games retailer, has adopted the PR strategy of the moment: relentless mockery of hand-wringing social justice warriors on the web.

D2D recently launched a tongue-in-cheek “Trigger Warning Week,” a limited offer of 50 – 80% discounts off gaming’s “most inclusive, diverse, and empowering titles.”

They were, of course, being ironic. Among the “empowering titles” on sale is Hitman: Absolution, a title which was once angrily accused by feminist critic Brendan Keogh of epitomising the “rape culture problem” in gaming. Tomb Raider: Underworld, one of the last Tomb Raider titles before her de-sexualised 2013 reboot, is also on sale. The icing on the cake is the latest instalment of Duke Nukem, a series famous for explosions, breasts, and foul language. (Anita Sarkeesian might call it “toxic masculinity.”)

D2D followed up their sale with some triggering posts on social media. They mocked the concept of “cyberviolence,” a term recently coined by a widely-mocked report from the United Nations women’s group. They also gave a nod to GamerGate, attacking SJW blogger Leigh Alexander’s notorious “Gamers are over” article, a left-wing critique of the gamer identity which became a catalyst for the movement in 2014.

Someone was telling me I should market myself as an anti-SJW consultant. My initial thought was that he was joking. But it might actually make a good deal of sense. After all, few things destroy an organization’s raison d’etre more completely than social justice convergence.

30,000 infiltrators

Both the math and the social mood is less than promising:

Hungary and Slovakia have been vilified by many for rebelling against
taking in thousands of refugees. Not only have they rejected European
Union-imposed quotas, but both countries have made it clear that a mass
Muslim migration would pose unacceptable demographic and cultural
challenges. Their concerns are well founded, not only over integration
but especially from a security perspective.

Lebanon’s education
minister, Elias Bousaab, warned recently that two in every 100 Syrian
migrants arriving in Europe are Islamic State fighters, sent to
infiltrate a continent distracted by sympathy. If Bousaab’s conservative
calculation proves accurate, it would mean that among the 10,000 Syrian
refugees that Secretary of State John F. Kerry has pledged to allow
into the United States in 2016, there could be 200 committed terrorists.

Germany is now expecting 1.5 million migrants. If the Lebanese estimate holds, that means there will be 30,000 Islamic State fighters resident in Germany by the end of the year. Now, granted, most of the “Syrian refugees” are not even Syrian, but then, we have no assurance that the Pakistani, Afghani, and Yemeni migrants are any less likely to sympathize with ISIS than their Syrian cohorts.

There is nothing any of us can do about any of this except watch, wait, and understand that when the native populations begin taking measures that go well beyond the infiltrators, they are not the parties responsible for the inevitable tragedies. The responsible parties are those who made the invasions possible in the first place.

I can’t possibly do justice to how angry people are here. I mean, I quite literally can’t post what I am hearing people of all ages, of all political identities, saying about the invaders and their own politicians, or as doing so would be in violation of numerous speech laws, including those of the USA.