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Impossible?

Martin van Creveld, the author of Equality: The Impossible Quest, has written a five-part essay on modern feminism and what he sees as its inevitable consequences.

I. Introduction

Want to know what the strangest thing about modern feminism is? Not the derogatory things many feminists say about other women (“only anxious to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition:” Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of modern feminism and author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women). Not the foolishness of many of the claims its proponents keep on making, e.g that men designed the famous qwerty keyboard specifically to make the lives of female secretaries hard. Nor the fact that it often comes at the cost of women’s health and welfare, as when they try to compete with men in fields where the latter’s greater physical force and resistance to dirt gives them a clear advantage; thereby inviting injury and shortening their own lives. Nor the truly nauseating combination of aggression and self-pity which has become its trademark. But the fact that so many men tolerate it, abet it, and even help push it forward.

Consider. When men demonstrate for their rights, which is something they have done many, many times throughout history, they are often shot dead. In the words of a nineteenth-century German proverb, gegen Demokraten helfen nur Soldaten (against democrats, the only remedy is soldiers). When women do the same as, qua women, some of them started doing during the last decades of the nineteenth century, normally the very worst they can expect is a short and relatively comfortable prison sentence. Even the Nazis, notorious for ruthlessness, did not treat their German male and female opponents equally.

It was only in 1938, five years after “the seizure of power,” that the first female victim of National Socialist “justice” was put to death (along with two male comrades with whom she had been passing state secrets to the Russians). It was only in the same year that the first concentration camp for women, Moehringen, opened its gates. Later Ravensbrueck, the most important camp for women, was distinguished by its relatively low mortality rate. So much better did the Nazis treat lesbians than male homosexuals that, come 1942-43, some ministry of justice officials asked their superiors to please explain why the former should be left off the hook. To that request, they never received an answer.

Part II. The Road to Herland, will appear tomorrow.

Hate is bad

Also, humans are bad. Those are the lessons we are supposed to learn from the latest SJW debacle in the making otherwise known as the sequel to The Last of Us. But first, a spoiler of the upcoming game and its ending, simply because I despise SJWs in game development and the idiot designer is upset that everyone now knows how the game ends.

To sum it all up, Everybody dies in TLOU II.  Dina, Ellie, Joel, Jesse. Don’t know how Neil Druckmann thought this ending is something everybody would like. I’m disappointed becuase I waited years to just find out everyone dies

There are two main issues that come from the story as it is now outlined on the ResetEra message board. The first is that it takes a lot of beats from The Walking Dead’s plot points, especially with the “humans are the real monsters” and “cycle of revenge” ideas. Even so, those messages aren’t new to the zombie genre, which The Last of Us as a franchise falls into. “There is nothing new under the sun” of course, but from what we’re seeing of the plot, there’s nothing interesting here, either. It also doesn’t help that the exceptionally talented writer Amy Hennig (who wrote much of The Legacy of Kain and Uncharted games) was let go from the company during development. It is speculated that Hennig may have had disagreements with the direction Naughty Dog wanted to go.

What doesn’t really help Naughty Dog’s case is how they’ve focused on identity politics over actual quality storytelling. There have been warning signs for a long time. Creative director Neil Druckmann cited Anita Sarkeesian as an influence in his creative direction. Anita Sarkeesian is the head of Feminist Frequency (a non-profit that criticizes creative works for not being feminist enough), and has zero experience in creating fiction. It is rumored that the female designs in the game were made less feminine so as not to offend trans women. The main enemies of the game are apparently going to be one of the safest kind you could pick: a fundamentalist Christian cult. Generally speaking, the safest bad guys in fiction are demons, Nazis, and fundamentalists. Nobody likes fundies except for other fundies. What’s even worse is that people apparently don’t like the new character Abbie much either.

All of this comes across as a major train wreck. When your creative lead’s main concern is being properly feminist or being a “proper ally,” the product suffers. Especially when you say your game will be “about hate.” The lesson of half of fiction is “hate is bad.” Star Wars created an entire philosophy in its universe where hate turns you monstrous. It’s not exciting. Everything about this project seems generic. The main enemies are the dullest thing imaginable without having them summon Satan and walk around in SS uniforms. The new protagonist is “trans safe” and exists to kill off the old ones, who people actually liked. This is turning into The Last Jedi of video games.

Naughty Dog’s assurances seem pretty hollow. You can’t really do anything to make a narrative-driven game tantalizing to gamers when the narrative looks so poor. The best way to summarize the plot is to compare it to a treehouse with the LGBTQ+ flag draped over it. Naughty Dog is trying its best to assure people that what’s under that flag is great, but when you finally get past them and pull the flag down, the treehouse is likely rotten and termite-infested. The fact of the matter is that Neil Druckman was too busy worrying about not offending Woke Twitter and the trigger-happy games press, and not worrying enough about telling a good story that will make people want to buy his game.

SJWs delenda est. It’s interesting that the author points to Star Wars, specifically, The Empire Strikes Back, as the source for so much of the SJW’s nonsensical narrative. All because, being wicked and despicable, they are desperate to avoid being the subject of the well-deserved righteous hatred of normal, functional people.

The ride never ends.

New comics coming

A preview of one of Arkhaven’s forthcoming comics. Thanks to the Arkhaven subscribers, this will be on Webtoons later this summer. You can perhaps think of it as Blade meets the Militi Sancti Sepulcri meets Adam Smith.

Keep your gates

And defend your interests. Inclusivity is just another word for invasion, and diversity is just a synonym for destruction:

This is where the inclusivity experiment must end. Everything cannot be made for everyone, no matter how much some people try. Popular media with decades of history should not be trashed just so individuals who didn’t even like it in the first place can feel at home. And since most companies don’t have the balls to stand up to internet outrage, it’s up to long-term fans to shut down those who want to forcefully enact change. So, for as much backlash as the woke crowd is already receiving, they need to get even more of it. These people don’t deserve to feel welcome in our hobbies. There is no place for them here.

On the same hand, I don’t belong in theirs. If they create a new property built around stopping orc racism and snagging the land back from colonizers using the power of rainbows and hugs, who am I to barge in and demand they include more death and murder? That would be a game that caters to them, and they deserve to have that, just as we deserve to have our D&D with orcs as they have always been.

Gatekeeping. It’s for the best.

Don’t be afraid to kick people out of your games, groups, and organizations. No one has a right to be involved, and they certainly don’t have a right to demand changes that will suit their preferences or psychological issues.

And different people suit different roles. A perfectly suitable player might make for a terrible DM or guild master just as a first-rate sales manager can turn out to be a horrifically bad director of sales and marketing. The Peter Principle applies to entertainment as well as business.

Exposing the fraudulent “Green” movement

Who would have expected Michael Moore would take on one of the biggest shibboleths of the Left, the so-called Green movement and its massive globo-corporate charade of “renewable energy”:

Examples include a zoo that claims to power itself on ‘renewable’ elephant dung but only produces enough to heat the elephant house.

They film a supposedly solar-powered music festival that quietly plugs into the grid and a similar arrangement at General Motors’ HQ at the launch of a hybrid, plug-in car, where the electricity grid powering the vehicle is ’95 per cent’ fed by coal.

The film also takes issue with solar panels, highlighting their limited shelf-life and that they are made from non-renewable quartz and coal.

In another sequence, joshua trees are chopped down in California so a huge solar facility can be built.

Moore’s documentary is particularly damning of ‘biomass’, the supposedly-renewable energy created by burning organic matter. The film shows huge piles of trees that have been chopped down to feed a power plant, its chimney belching out smoke that appears far from environmentally sound.

Viewers are told biomass is the biggest single source of renewable energy around the world, and — nonsensically given it is supposed to be about energy conservation — has involved wood chips being shipped to Europe from North America, Brazil and Indonesia.

‘Our anxiety over [global] warming has panicked us into embracing anything green or alternative without actually looking too closely at what is involved,’ the film states. With plans to turn animal fat into biomass fuel, the film asks: ‘Is there anything too terrible to qualify as green energy?’

The film suggests that mega-rich businessmen — including Sir Richard Branson and British timber investor Jeremy Grantham — and banks such as Goldman Sachs — are keen to invest in green energy because they want to make a quick buck rather than because they are worried for the planet. According to Moore, Toyota, Citibank and bulldozer giant Caterpillar becoming sponsors of Earth Day provided final confirmation that Big Business has taken over the green movement.

When they had picked their jaws off the floor, the first response from some of the climate scientists and environmental campaigners who have been enthusiasts for renewable energy delighted their opponents — they wanted to ban it.

The truth is always the most powerful rhetoric.

No challenge, no escape

Alt★Hero Episode 4 is now live on Webtoons.

In other project news, we have decided that the fourth book in the Castalia Library series will be Dante’s The Divine Comedy, complete with woodcuts from the 1491 Venetian edition by Pietro di Piasi Cremonese. While we had originally intended to do Inferno, upon further contemplation of the task at hand, we decided the Library team was ready to tackle a more substantial project.

Facebook bans The Unz Review

Ron Unz observes, with mild bemusement, the fact that Facebook has belatedly banned The Unz Review:

My morning newspapers had recently mentioned Facebook’s plans to crack down on misinformation related to our ongoing Covid-19 epidemic, and probably like most other readers I just nodded my head. After all, many Americans might die if cranks or pranksters began promoting highly dubious cures to the deadly disease, perhaps even suggesting that people should inject themselves with Lysol to ward off an infection.

However, those bland public statements took on an entirely different meaning yesterday afternoon when I discovered that all material from The Unz Review had suddenly been banned for alleged violations of “community standards” and our own Facebook page eliminated.

I don’t use Social Media much myself, but others obviously due, and blocking all our website content from access to the 1.7 billion Facebook users seems a pretty drastic step. So it’s quite reasonable to wonder why, and especially why now?

From the very first, the motto of our publication has been A Collection of Interesting, Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media, and I think we have fulfilled that pledge, publishing many thousands of articles and posts on an enormous range of extraordinarily controversial and even forbidden topics, notably including my own American Pravda series.

Under such circumstances, being banned by Facebook might hardly seem surprising. However, many of our most extremely controversial pieces were published years ago, drawing angry denunciations from various quarters, but received with apparent equanimity from the Lords of the Social Network. Nearly all of the “touchy” pieces we published in the last couple of weeks seem no more “touchy” than the ones from a year or two years or even three years ago. So what suddenly sparked this unprecedented action?

Although I can’t be sure, I strongly suspect that the triggering event was my own most recent American Pravda article, dealing as it did with the Coronavirus epidemic, the supposed focus of Facebook’s current crackdown. And this piece not only accumulated more early readership than any of my previous articles here, but also two or three times as many Facebook Likes, which might have raised serious concerns in certain quarters.

Fortunately, since Unz has long practiced the dark art of building his own platforms, this won’t harm the Review in the slightest. But it does serve as a reminder that even in times of extreme difficulty, SJWs won’t hesitate to cut off their own nose if they imagine doing so will harm you.

I left Facebook long ago, of my own volition, and I’m confident that my life is the better for it. Don’t live in their walled gardens.

Proximity equals possibility

Zeroh Tollrants wonders, in light of the ruin that is now games, why anyone ever wanted more women in gaming:

I need an explanation as to why any man thought it would be awesome to have women involved in their games. No one should trust anyone that dumb.

The gammas and omegas who make up the larger part of the RPG players and wargamers imagined that if women started spending time playing games with them, those women would be willing to date them. So they sacrificed their hobbies to their mostly unsatiated desires and wound up with SJWs policing their games.

It’s not hard to tell which of them still believes that price was worth paying.

Be careful whom you hire

It rather looks as if General Flynn’s original legal team was working for the other side:

After Flynn pleaded guilty to making false statements to federal investigators, representatives of multiple congressional committees with oversight responsibility for national security matters asked Flynn’s lawyers if Flynn would testify before Congress in exchange for a congressional grant of immunity. Robert Kelner, Flynn’s attorney at the time, immediately dismissed the overtures, sources told The Federalist. During one conversation, Kelner allegedly responded that in situations like the one facing Flynn, the prosecution essentially “owns” the defendant and added that he would be unlikely to pursue congressional testimony without the approval of former Spygate Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office.

Flynn was not told of these immunity conversations with congressional officials before they were rejected on his behalf.

If you haven’t read The Trial of Roger Stone yet, you may not realize what a Potemkin Village the U.S. legal system is. It’s no more legitimate than the infamous Stalin-era Soviet show trials. And you can’t expect a team that has been paid to throw the game to put up much of a defense.

And then they came for Tolkien

No, the SJWs not intending to police anything. They’re not intending to ban anything. They only seek to educate and critique:

I want to preemptively say that wokescolds like me are not coming for your favorite media or going to police your enjoyment. Banning anything is not on the table. I seek to educate and critique. To paraphrase Anita Sarkeesian, we can enjoy media while being critical of its problematic aspects. Orcs are here to stay. Nobody is going to take away your Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance novels.

But understand that colonialism and its tropes are the original sin of the modern age. You can’t divorce anything from it. Time marches on and so has fantasy literature. Fantasy literature and its derived role playing games have, like everything, been touched by colonialist narratives. It is important to recognize that. I love fantasy. I even love elves and orcs but to think that race science bullshit isn’t part of its DNA is ignorance.

The way Orcs are depicted in fantasy literature mirrors the racist tropes and narratives about indigenous and black people that was used to justify colonialism and slavery. At various times there were ideas like the Curse of Ham, to Mormon views that black people and native americans were once white but cursed by God, to later eugenic and race science views. All of this was in the zeitgeist when Orcs were imagined by the pioneers of the genre like Tolkien. Elves too are evocative of race science mythology about a lost hyperborean master race that Aryans are descended from.

Excuses about how Orcs are corrupted elves then, fall flat, because that to is also a trope of racist mythology. Ultimately Orcs aren’t real. They are made up. But they were not made up in a vacuum. When they were made up, they mirrored the white man’s burden narrative. And the passage above is alarmingly similar to things written about human beings in those times.

I would say Eberron, Warcraft 3, and Elder Scrolls all made strides in reimagining Orcs Elder Scrolls also does a good job not making orcs canon fodder villains that are fair game for anyone to kill. I feel that Eberron got this right. The designer didn’t make fantasy counterpart cultures and reimagined the monstrous races. None of them, except for literal demons, are presented as inherently evil and Orcs have a druidic order that protects the world from the plane of madness. But even that is going to be fruit of a poisoned tree to some degree but so is everything.

None of this is to say you can’t enjoy DnD or even include Orcs in your game or cosplay as Orcs, but understand that there is a history there and that history might make people uncomfortable.

Translation: #Orcgate has begun. There is literally nothing they will not seek to take away from you.

I have a simple, one-word response: WAAAGH!