Author: VD

Two-Hand Monte

The central bank giveth, the government taketh away:

Five of the world’s biggest banks have today been handed fines totalling more than £2billion for rigging the £3.5trillion-a-day foreign exchange market. British, US and Swiss authorities all launched an onslaught after an 18-month investigation as regulators today revealed the latest scandal to rock the industry. 

State-owned Royal Bank of Scotland has been fined £217million ($344million) by the London-based Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) as well as £182million ($290million) by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The others involved in the settlement are Citibank, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase and UBS, who will also pay up to £500million each. Barclays said it continues to hold discussions with regulators.

More than 30 traders have been fired, suspended, put on leave, or resigned since the probes started, and the Serious Fraud Office has launched a criminal investigation – but there have been no arrests.

The lesson is: if you’re going to make a career of theft, better do it as a bankster. It’s remarkable to observe how no matter what law is broken as an employee of an international bank, the only penalty will is a relatively small financial one directed at the artificial person of the banking corporation.

The RBS CEO said: “‘We had people working at this bank who did not know the difference between right and wrong, or worse, didn’t care about the distinction.'”

You don’t say. It’s cute that he uses the past tense there.

Snow day!

I don’t often miss Minnesota. But I have to admit, I did enjoy the excitement of looking outside, seeing a field of white where there used to be a street, and turning on the radio, listening to hear that school had been canceled that day. As a kid, there isn’t much better than an unexpected snow day.

Prophecy has its privileges

I have to admit, I didn’t even know this was an issue:

The Mormon founder Joseph Smith married as many as 40 women, including a
14-year-old girl, church leaders have acknowledged for the first time in a
surprising revelation about their most important prophet. Although the Mormon church was closely associated with polygamy during its
first decades, its teachings had previously portrayed Smith as happily
married to one woman. The reality was apparently very different from that monogamous picture. And
with increasing speculation circulating on the internet about his marital
history, the Church hierarchy has revealed Smith as a prolific polygamist
via an essay posted on its website.

Anyhow, congratulations to the church hierarchy for deciding that truth is better than falsehoods and propaganda. Better late than never.

What we can do

That’s what I was asked in the comments yesterday. I came up with one solution, which I’m pleased to see that about 100 of you implemented right away. But that’s just a start. First, I think it is important to take Cailcorishev’s observation into account of why the SJWs are so often successful with their entryist tactics and how they so regularly obtain positions of power in an organization or an industry.

They’re able to take over the things they do because normal people just don’t care that much. It’s how they run all the committees in a school: no one else wants to. People who create games and play games don’t care much about the incidental stuff like reviewing. We don’t need that to exist at all, so when someone emerges to do that, we figure “Better her than me.” Most of us don’t realize until too late how much power that concedes to them, because what they do looks so irrelevant from our ends.

This is true. I know the power of what he’s saying, because I entered into the industry via reviewing games myself. I started out as a contributor to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, then was syndicated by Chronicle Features, and before long was appearing in papers from the North Bay Nugget to the Boston Globe and the Atlanta Journal/Constitution. Within 18 months, I was personally acquainted many of the major game developers, guys like John Carmack, Richard Garriott, and Chris Roberts, as well as important media and publishing figures like Johnny Wilson and Scott Shannon.

How? It was easy. No one at the Pioneer Press seriously played computer games. They didn’t have anyone to do it, and they even started to rely upon me to do things like analyze the Unabomber’s manifesto for the editorial page. Of course, the Left polices itself much more carefully than the Right. When there was a vacancy on the op/ed page, I asked for the spot. The editor met with me – I was only the sixth columnist in the paper’s history to be nationally syndicated, so he couldn’t just blow me off – and politely made it clear there wasn’t a chance in hell he was going to put a libertarian extremist on the page every week. But the tactic works.

Now, I have to go for the time being. Work takes priority over the Cause. It might, however, be worthwhile to consider this until I’m able to finish this post and provide some concrete suggestions. Everyone knows that I don’t get paid for blogging. But what many people don’t know is that I never took any money to write eleven years worth of columns on WND. (Hence my amusement when people talk about Daddy getting me the “job”.) They couldn’t afford it when I first started, but I supported the alternative media that the Farahs were attempting to build.

That’s why the Left is progressing. Because they are willing to invest the time.

What created the Fourth Generation?

The Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld has an interesting hypothesis concerning where the seeds of the Fourth Generation’s military bypass of the state were planted:

Many of the distinctions between army and people which had been established by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century international law also broke down. Armed violence, far from being limited to combatants, escaped its bounds. Terrible atrocities, including even the planned starvation of tens of millions, were carried out against the inhabitants of occupied countries both in Europe and in Asia. The populations themselves did not acquiesce with their lot. Occupation per se was now regarded as a monstrous injustice and resisted. In places such as Yugoslavia, Tito’s partisans, though comprising neither government nor army, came close to waging full-scale conventional conflict; and indeed in retrospect this may have been the most important of all the changes which the War brought about. Meanwhile the sky was filled with mighty fleets of heavy bombers—later, flying bombs and ballistic missiles—headed in both directions. They deliberately set out to kill civilians, women and children not excluded. Entire cities were destroyed by firestorms in a manner not seen in Europe for three centuries. A climax of violence was reached in 1945 when two nuclear bombs were dropped on Japan, killing 150,000 people in flat disregard of the fact that peace negotiations were already going on in Moscow at the time. Officially the destruction of enemy civilians was justified by their wickedness. In practice, often they had to be declared wicked so that they could be destroyed by the indiscriminate weapons available….

Metternich, looking back from the eve of his resignation in 1848, might have felt satisfied with the results of the Congress of Vienna despite several limited revolutionary outbreaks that had taken place in the meantime. Similarly, a backward glance from the perspective of 1990 makes the attempt to put the genie back into the bottle appear successful up to a point; those who set out to establish a new world order after World War II did their work reasonably well. The principal reasons for this outcome were the ever-present fear of nuclear Armageddon and, of course, sheer war-weariness. At any rate, to date there has been no repetition of “total” conflict on the model established by both World Wars. When the principal military powers went to war—always excepting the “low-intensity conflicts” which, though they formed a large majority, hardly counted as a war—they usually abided by the rules. Whatever may be said about the Falkland War, it did not witness either the breakdown of distinctions between the military and civilians or, consequently, large-scale atrocities. The same is true about the Arab-Israeli Wars, except perhaps for the first; though in this case things might have looked different had victory gone to the other side.

The point, however, had been made and would not be forgotten. Whatever else total war may have done, it put an end to any idea that armed conflict, including specifically the largest ever fought, is necessarily governed by the Clausewitzian Universe. Historically speaking, in fact, trinitarian war—in other words, a war of state against state and army against army—is a comparatively recent phenomenon; hence, the things that the future has in store for humanity may also be very different indeed.

The interesting thing here is that he presented this idea that war had moved beyond the state and trinitarian war in his book The Transformation of War, which was published in 1991. After all, if since the people have become the targets of total war, they have been made participants whether they will or no. And so, as Lind told a group of Marines at Quantico in his Four Generations of Modern War lecture: “[4GW doesn’t want to fight you, it wants to bypass you and go straight after the society you are supposed to be defending.”

Never rely on a moderate

@totalbiscuit is one of the #GamerGate guys whose heart is more or less in the right place, but has never grasped the underlying issue. He released a joint statement with some other guy with whom he has been sparring. Most of the points are banal enough, but two require comment:

Diversity is important among game creators, players, and characters, and this is an important conversation that must be encouraged, not punished. Diversity leads to better stories, better stories lead to better games. If someone posts an article or video that you disagree with, the correct response is to write a comment, write to the editor, or create your own opposing article or video. It is not appropriate to threaten his or her safety, family, or anything else along those lines.

No. Diversity is not even remotely important among any of these people. Nor is it an important conversation that must be encouraged. It is simple SJW entryism and Totalbiscuit has fallen for it. If Diversity led to better stories, then SF/F would be better than the SF/F of 30 years ago. It’s not. It is considerably worse, by virtually every standard.

But yes, it is not appropriate to threaten people simply because you disagree with them. Or to spend hundreds of hours trying to hack their server; we are still seeing the hacker bounce off our security.

Gamers have endured attacks from the mainstream media for decades and we should be doing everything we can to bring that ignorance to an end, not further fuel it with incendiary rhetoric.

Again, @totalbiscuit is wrong. Only rhetoric can fight rhetoric. I cite Aristotle: “Before some audiences not even the possession of the exactest
knowledge will make it easy for what we say to produce conviction. For
argument based on knowledge implies instruction, and there are people
one cannot instruct.”

In other words, you cannot use dialectic to convince anyone who cannot be instructed of anything. It will not work. Only rhetoric will suffice.

PS: Do to some various distractions, I will be posting my answer to “what can I do” tomorrow. In the meantime: join Twitter, follow, 1 #GamerGate retweet, 1 #GamerGate favorite. That’s a 10-second daily commitment. If you can’t do that, you can’t do anything.

SJWs devour themselves

Larry Correia is vastly amused by the spectacle of SFWA turning on an Campbell Award-nominated Asian lesbian:

Apparently a member of the literati SJW army—and super prestigious Campbell nominee for BEST NEW WRITER—has turned out to be a huge internet troll, with a bunch of aliases, attacking and tormenting people. Of course, those of you who read this blog or followed Sad Puppies are like, duh… They attack and torment Larry, and anybody who agrees with him nonstop, but not my friends… Benjanun Sriduangkaew did the unthinkable and used their regular SJW tactics of threats, insults, intimidation, and career sabotage against fellow SJWs, and that is super badthink!

Now, when you threaten, intimidate, troll, and try to sabotage the career of anybody who disagrees with the Social Justice narrative, then that is doubleplus good!

The SJWs are perfectly aware of their hypocrisy. They talk about how
Sriduangkaew was praised for “punching up”, meaning that it was okay for
her to use these tactics against non-members. Threaten somebody of the
correct sex and race, cool. Threaten somebody of the wrong sex and race,
bad. If you have a brain, you will find that sexist or racist, but you
are not thinking like a proper SJW. Anything they say isn’t sexist or
racist, but anything we do is. Simple.

As I’ve repeatedly warned, pointing out SJW hypocrisy is meaningless to any SJW. They aren’t dialectic. They aren’t rational or coherent. And deprived of any non-rabbits to attack, they naturally turn on each other. The funniest thing is, of course, that Benjanun Sriduangkaew was entirely correct to be cruelly dismissive of the likes of Jemisin and Rothfuss. At her best, Jemisin is mediocre; Rothfuss is painfully unreadable. He’s the Britney Spears of SF/F. I tried reading The Name of My Rose-Scented Wind or whatever it is called once when I was on the road and found myself turning to an Avalon Hill rulebook I’d previously read because it was more interesting. Rothfuss’s achievement is creating the only protagonist you would murder if forced to choose between him and Rand al’Thor. Larry also addressed #GamerGate:

This is one reason I’ve been enjoying the hell out of GamerGate. First,
it has been awesome having a great big group of people witness the same
bullshit that my industry has been dealing with for years. Second, SF/F
people tend to be squishy and polite, with a handful of outspoken
outliers like me and the rest of the Evil League of Evil, so SJWs have
run roughshod over my industry… But gamers? Holy shit. You really think
you can pick a fight with people whose brains are programmed to win?
Gamers will outlast, outthink, and outfight the SJWs. Tell a Gamer that
there is loot or XP in it, and he’ll grind SJWs to the grave.

That’s what SFWA never understood about me when they couldn’t figure out why I didn’t humbly lower my head and slink off the way a good rabbit who has been rejected by the warren is supposed to vanish. I’ve always been a gamer and a game developer first and foremost. It was more likely that I would go methodically through the entire SFWA directory like Michael Myers with literary taste than to even think about submitting to those ghastly little creatures. The thought literally never crossed my mind. The anti-GamerGate SJWs are making exactly the same mistake.

The end of the Common Law

The British turn their backs on 900 years of legal sovereignty:

Today Parliament votes on extending the European Arrest Warrant scheme. Indefinitely.

I’m perplexed. Usually when we approach a significant milestone in this country we hold a national commemoration of sorts. But alas, thanks to David Cameron’s Three-Line-Whip, and the grim tendency of today’s MPs to fall into line by putting Party before country (and self before children/grandchildren), we seriously face the prospect of Britain falling one year short of a worthy 900th anniversary next year: of the independence of the British legal system.

How can I say this?

Because we appear to be tearing up almost a millennium of hard-won legal rights, to accommodate the free movement of (at most) several hundred European criminals – or ‘alleged’ criminals. At least, that’s how I would explain it to an alien in an elevator pitch.

As a police officer told me recently, “we wouldn’t be supporting these powers if politicians didn’t keep pushing free movement and EU expansion.” So, before this ‘wicked’ Parliament (and I don’t use this word as enthused street-slang) fires another nail into the coffin of citizenship and justice, not just for Britons, but all European residents, let’s reiterate some highlights from times before November 2014, when British generations slowly triumphed to be the masters of their own judicial system.

These cultural wars are long-wave historical events. They won’t be won or lost in our lifetimes. We can, of course, ignore them and simply go along to get along. Or we can take part of them, acting in the full knowledge that while we might win, or lose, a battle here and there, we will not get the chance to see the final outcome.

But we can influence it. Don’t you think Pelagius and the Asturians would look on the results of the Reconquista and feel that theirs had been lives well-lived?

Some thing that these extended timescales proves that there is no conspiracy and “progress” is a mere accident of history because no human lifespan is long enough to encompass the strategy or the consequences. The logic is correct, but then, logic also suggests an alternative, which is that there is something, or someone, that exists on a larger timescale and is capable of guiding events of these temporal proportions.

So, the question comes down to this: given what we can observe with the limited means at our disposal, which do you find more unlikely? A coin almost always flipping tails at random or some sort of unknown, long-lived being imposing its will on the coin toss?

I very much disagree with Sherlock Holmes. Vox’s 4th Law of Logical Analysis states: once you have identified the improbable, look more closely at what you assume to be impossible.

Cultural war on Twitter

In a cultural war, communication is king. So, that’s why it behooves the potential 4GW forces of the Christian right to learn from #GamerGate as well as from the tactics of our SJW enemies. Here is one example of an SJW attempting to mine for DISQUALIFY:

Vox Day ‏@voxday
#GamerGate “Saying things on Twitter both feels futile and dangerous” – SJW. They are openly afraid of public ridicule now. Show no mercy.
28 retweets 33 favorites

Average Joe ‏@ridinjustice
@voxday are you really saying to publicly ridicule SJW without mercy??

Vox Day ‏@voxday
@ridinjustice Until we can apply for hunting licenses, yes, that will have to do.

Average Joe ‏@ridinjustice
@voxday and then what?

Vox Day ‏@voxday
@ridinjustice Then we will convince you of the error of your ways with Aristotelian dialectic and sweet reason.

Average Joe ‏@ridinjustice
@voxday why not use reason now?

Why not? Because, as Average Joe and I both know, the SJWs are incapable of having their minds changed by mere information. If they were capable of discourse at the dialectical level, they would not be SJWs in the first place. They are creatures of emotion, they communicate via rhetoric, and what Average Joe was seeking was something capable of inflaming emotions that he could wave as a red flag to incite his side. That’s how they operate.

But there was no need to spell it out or waste any more time on his fishing expedition. I baited him with the promise of a really big red flag, and then denied it to him. But that wasn’t the important part, that was just me amusing myself. The important part was the initial tweet, which the 63 retweets and favorites indicate had the effect of remoralizing people on our side due to the revelation of the demoralization on the part of one of our enemies.

As Col. Boyd observed, the moral element is the highest level of war, and morale is a vital part of it. (One can even connect Boyd’s model to the Aristotelian perspective by observing that rhetoric is an important weapon at the moral level just as dialectic is a primary tool at the intellectual level.) So, when people sneer at blog posts and tweets, all they are doing is indicating that they don’t understand how war operates at its highest level. One reason ISIS is so formidable is that they put out over 90 tweets per minute, a constant stream of remoralization for their own troops and demoralization for their enemies.

Later today, I will answer in more detail the question that was posed to me: “what can we do?” But one effective thing that everyone who is reading this can do, very easily, is this. Create a Twitter account. Follow me, Roosh, Adam Baldwin, Nero, Hotwheels, the Leader of GamerGate, The Devs of GamerGate, and other reliable schwerpunkts. Then do at least one tweet with a relevant hashtag, one retweet and one favorite per day. If even 500 people do that, it will have an observable impact on the moral level.

Remember, this is not about games per se. Games are merely the latest battleground that the cultural Marxists have chosen to attack. This is about the cultural war that has affected, and demoralized, so many of you. If you want your culture back, you will have to fight for it, and this is the first ground where there is a strong and fearless anti-SJW force that you can reinforce. So, whether you are a gamer or not, stop complaining about ads on TV and horrible messages in Disney movies and strike back. This is just a small step, of course, but every journey has to begin with one.

Of course, you have to expect this sort of thing from time to time. But don’t be put off by it, as women on our side can actually use it to our advantage:

Vox Day ‏@voxday
#GamerGate Women already have their game industry without men. I believe it’s called “Zynga”.

Damon Gant ‏@Demon_Gant
@voxday fuck you.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
@Demon_Gant Please stop harassing me. Your tweet is offensive, Indigenophobic, and harassment.

Damon Gant ‏@Demon_Gant
@voxday fuck you, you disingenuous asshole.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
@Demon_Gant You’re being repeatedly abusive. This is harassment and Indigenophobia. Please stop harassing me.

Damon Gant ‏@Demon_Gant
@voxday Shut up. Everyone hates you. You’re an awful human being. Pretend victim language doesn’t disguise your cloacal stench. #gamergate

Vox Day ‏@voxday now
@Demon_Gant This is the third time you have harassed me. I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to report your abusive tweets to Twitter now.

Here is another good one:

Robot Archie ‏@RobotArchie
To repeat that warning to the #gamergate community. @voxday is a genuine racist. He has done years worth of damage to the SF community.

Unsurprisingly, the Concern Rabbit didn’t get the response for which he was looking, but was instead met with derision by several parties for his racist indigenophobia and Hispanic hate.

VPFL Week 9

93 Bane Cornshuckers (5-4-0)
75 Greenfield Grizzlies (7-2-0)

83 King (5-4-0)
63 RR Redbeards (5-4-0)

77 Clerical Errs (1-8-0)
67 Mounds View Meerkats (5-4-0)

71 Gilbert Gamma Rays (5-4-0)
42 Favre Dollar Footlongs (5-4-0)

57 Texas Chili Eaters (4-4-1)
57 Boot Hill Bogs (1-8-0)

And here I thought it was an easy week before the bye. Not so good. Practically everyone is in playoff contention, led by the defending champs who have a two-game lead going into their battle with the Meerkats.