Category: Uncategorized

History and the limits of SJW dishonesty

Don’t bother looking for the limits of SJW stupidity or dishonesty. You will not find them. In an astonishingly inept attempt to defend the BBC and “historian” Mary Beard, one English SJW actually put forward the following defense, accompanied by a screenshot.
Dave Tooke‏ @burstdrum
I answered your question. Even though it was a straw man. No one ever said mixed race families were typical (majority) of Roman Britain.
Dave Tooke‏ @burstdrum
The BBC cartoon did not say “typical”. It merely suggested one such family as possible. Which it was.
This was the screenshot attached to the second tweet.

In fairness, the SJW was undermined by the dishonesty of the BBC, which is the more significant aspect of this little story. You see, this was how the video was described 5 days ago, before BBC “historian” Mary Beard tried to school Paul Joseph Watson and was caught bullshitting by NN Taleb. Emphasis added.
Original BBC Two description
Life in Roman Britain is shown through the eyes of a typical family nearly 2000 years ago. The Romans bring towns to Britain, and also roads, forts, and Hadrian’s Wall, to keep out the Picts. The father is supervising the building of Hadrian’s Wall, while the son manages to lose his father’s special military scarf, or focale. This incident is used to explore Roman beliefs and religion, food and entertainment.

Current BBC Two description
Life in Roman Britain as seen through the eyes of one family nearly 2000 years ago. The Romans bring towns to Britain, and also roads, forts, and Hadrian’s Wall, to keep out the Picts. The father is supervising the building of Hadrian’s Wall, while his son manages to lose his father’s special military scarf, or focale. This incident is used to explore Roman beliefs and religion.
You see, with SJWs, it’s Fake News and Fake History all the way down. You can NEVER trust anything they say. Because – all together now – SJWS ALWAYS LIE.

Breitbart is on it.

Yeah, this diversity debacle doesn’t promise to die down anytime soon:

Numerous individuals alleged to be members of Google’s management team have been caught bragging about forming blacklists to impact the careers of colleagues with different political beliefs.
In a series of screenshots from 2015 onwards provided to Breitbart News by a verified Google employee, individuals described as left-wing Google management employees can be seen discussing the ways they punish their colleagues both inside and out of the company.
“While Google appears to be doing very little to quell the hostile voices that exists inside the company, I want those hostile voices to know: I will never, ever hire hire/transfer you onto my team. Ever. I don’t care if you are perfect fit of technically excellent or whatever,” declared former employee Adam Fletcher in a post on Google’s internal, staff-only Google+ network: “Internal Plus.” “I will actively not work with you, even to the point where your team or product is impacted by this decision. I’ll communicate why to your manager if it comes up.”
“You’re being blacklisted by people at companies outside of Google,” he continued. “You might not have been aware of this, but people know, people talk. There are always social consequences.”

Nothing new to readers here, but Breitbart has considerably more reach than I do. However, Allum Bokhari’s interview with a rebel Googler, “Hal”, is illuminating:

Hal: Witch hunts are a well-known cultural problem at Google. The company is currently facing a Federal complaint filed by the National Labor Relations Board in April for interfering with employees’ legal right to discuss “workplace diversity and social justice initiatives.” The complaint alleges that Senior Vice President Urs Holzle and numerous managers in his organization actively stoked up witch hunts in 2015 and 2016 intended to muzzle low-level employees who raised concerns about the company’s practices. The trial is set for November.
Several managers have openly admitted to keeping blacklists of the employees in question, and preventing them from seeking work at other companies. There have been numerous cases in which social justice activists coordinated attempts to sabotage other employees’ performance reviews for expressing a different opinion. These have been raised to the Senior VP level, with no action taken whatsoever.
Allum Bokhari: What’s it like to work in such an environment? Do you think it damages employee output?
Hal: A lot of social justice activists essentially spend all day fighting the culture war, and get nothing done. The company has made it a point to hire more people like this. The diversity gospel has been woven into nearly everything the company does, to the point where senior leaders focus on diversity first and technology second. The companywide “Google Insider” emails used to talk about cool new tech, but now they’re entirely about social justice initiatives. Likewise, the weekly all-hands “TGIF” meetings used to focus on tech, but now they’re split about 50/50 between tech and identity politics signaling.
For conservative employees, this is obviously demoralizing, but it is also dangerous. Several have been driven out of the company or fired outright for sharing a dissenting view. Others have had their promotions denied or suffered other forms of deniable retaliation. Most of us just keep our heads down because we can’t afford to lose our jobs.

Google takes a stand

It’s a bold move by Sundararajan. We’ll see how it works out for him. It was inevitable, because SJWs always double down, but the irony of Pichai Sundararajan, a high-caste Tamil Brahmin, firing an employee for expressing his belief in biological inequality, is practically off the charts.

Google has fired an employee who wrote an internal memo that ascribed gender inequality in the technology industry to biological differences. James Damore, the engineer who wrote the memo, confirmed his dismissal saying that he had been fired for “perpetuating gender stereotypes,” in an email to Reuters on Monday. Damore said he is exploring all possible legal remedies.

As I observed after reading the Google CEO’s memo, Damore was doomed because Sundararajan had to mollify his insane SJW employee base, which right now is dancing and celebrating its own inevitable demise. Damore will be fine; he’s better off out of the SJW-converged madhouse and has already been offered jobs by Gab’s Andrew Torba and WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange. But Google will not be, because this is a clear signal to the key engineers in Search and AdWords that it is Time To Go.
DH, who is one of the Dread Ilk’s expert data guy’s, explains.

All of Google is kept afloat by one thing only. Adwords. They have no other significant source of income after a decade or more of trying to diversify. Every other business is borderline trivial when compared to AdWords. All the moonshots have failed. All the R&D has failed. It’s. All. AdWords.
The money-making core of Google is a tiny speck of its workforce, a tiny core of people who make AdWords work. The fear is not that 2/3 are SJWs, it’s that one or two or three of the key engineers, who are working on the next version of Search and Adwords, who are actively fighting and hardening against existential threats to the product, might walk, or even just do a slightly less great job.
Google is actually a very fragile company. They are ripe for disruption from a new player, or alternatively, to be drained from a few deep pocketed rivals. The entire bubble of online advertising stems from a belief that is often irrational that online advertising is effective at certain definitions of cost effectiveness.

In other words, as the AdWords model fails, which is already happening, Google’s massive market cap is going to rapidly decline with it because all of its other businesses have failed to find traction. The company has observably entered the ideological death spiral that is the inevitable result of the Impossibility of Social Justice Convergence.

Back early

Google’s CEO returns home early from vacation and sends a message:

From: Sundar
Subject: Our words matter
This has been a very difficult few days. I wanted to provide an update on the memo that was circulated over this past week.
First, let me say that we strongly support the right of Googlers to express themselves, and much of what was in that memo is fair to debate, regardless of whether a vast majority of Googlers disagree with it. However, portions of the memo violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace. Our job is to build great products for users that make a difference in their lives. To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK. It is contrary to our basic values and our Code of Conduct, which expects “each Googler to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination.”
The memo has clearly impacted our co-workers, some of whom are hurting and feel judged based on their gender. Our co-workers shouldn’t have to worry that each time they open their mouths to speak in a meeting, they have to prove that they are not like the memo states, being “agreeable” rather than “assertive,” showing a “lower stress tolerance,” or being “neurotic.”
At the same time, there are co-workers who are questioning whether they can safely express their views in the workplace (especially those with a minority viewpoint). They too feel under threat, and that is also not OK. People must feel free to express dissent. So to be clear again, many points raised in the memo — such as the portions criticizing Google’s trainings, questioning the role of ideology in the workplace, and debating whether programs for women and underserved groups are sufficiently open to all — are important topics. The author had a right to express their views on those topics — we encourage an environment in which people can do this and it remains our policy to not take action against anyone for prompting these discussions.
The past few days have been very difficult for many at the company, and we need to find a way to debate issues on which we might disagree — while doing so in line with our Code of Conduct. I’d encourage each of you to make an effort over the coming days to reach out to those who might have different perspectives from your own. I will be doing the same.
I have been on work related travel in Africa and Europe the past couple of weeks and had just started my family vacation here this week. I have decided to return tomorrow as clearly there’s a lot more to discuss as a group — including how we create a more inclusive environment for all.
So please join me, along with members of the leadership team at a town hall on Thursday. Check your calendar soon for details.
— Sundar

Translation: you can go ahead and fire him, because Code of Conduct, but we’ve got a problem here and we really need to figure out how to keep the whackjobs from getting completely out of hand.
But it’s always harder to get off the tiger without it eating you.

John Scalzi withdraws

Mr. John Scalzi has graciously withdrawn his fine work of science fiction, THE COLLAPSING EMPIRE aka SEE, I CAN’T DO ASIMOV EITHER, from consideration for Best Science Fiction novel.

The other day I announced The Collapsing Empire was a finalist for the Dragon Award in the Best Science Fiction novel category, which was neat. Today, I notified the Dragon Award administrators and let them know I was withdrawing The Collapsing Empire from consideration for the award.

The reason is simple: Some other finalists are trying to use the book and me as a prop, to advance a manufactured “us vs. them” vote-pumping narrative based on ideology or whatever. And I just… can’t. I don’t have the interest and I’m on a deadline, and this bullshit is even more stale and stupid now than it was the several other times it was attempted recently, with regard to genre awards.

My plan was to ignore it, but on further reflection (and further evidence that this nonsense was going to continue through the finalist voting period), I decided this was the better course. To the extent this bullshit manufactured narrative is centered on me, well, now it’s not, as far as these awards are concerned. I’m delighted to be able to chop it off at the knees by removing myself from consideration. I wish the progenitors of this narrative luck; now they will have to compete with the other finalists on the basis of the quality of their work instead.

Also, it will spare him the embarrassment of losing. Because, you see, if you don’t try, then it doesn’t count!

And the Secret King wins again.

Dear Yes-at-Googlers

Welcome to the home of the Evil Legion of Evil.

I, Vox Day, the Supreme Dark Lord of said ELoE, am your humble host. Benvenuti. You need not worry about your physical safety being at risk, the Vile Faceless Minions are chained in their kennels, and muzzled, and have been provided sufficient SJW bones upon which to chew.

Let me assure you that as the bestselling author of SJWs Always Lie, I am perfectly aware that you have been lied to by your fellow Googlers about me and this site. This is not a site that incites harassment, quite to the contrary, as an American Indian who is regularly attacked and misraced and misrepresented and lied about, I am often a victim of SJW harassment.

Since I have been receiving death threats from your kind since 2001, when I first became a political columnist, you will forgive me if I am less than entirely impressed with your preening and posturing about the imminent danger that public exposure supposedly poses you. And before you attempt to engage in the usual toothless social justice rhetoric here, you may wish to keep in mind that I literally wrote the book on the subject.

As you were belatedly informed, your newsletter, of course, does not endorse the content here, so let this welcome serve as your trigger warning that here you will encounter people who:

  • do not agree with you
  • are actually more intelligent than you
  • are better-educated than you
  • and frankly find you to be tediously predictable and rendered functionally stupid, if not delusional, by your foolish social justice convergence.

But if you are polite and civil, I expect the Dread Ilk will treat you in a similarly polite and civil manner. And if you choose otherwise, well, as our guests, we are happy to permit you to establish the rules of engagement.

In certain confidence of the ultimate victory of the Legion, I am,

VD,
SDL
ELoE

Since absolutely no one here has any idea what I’m talking about, I refer to the following excerpts from Google’s internal SJW newsletter, to which I of course subscribe. Apparently making it known that Google employees are threatening people with violence, threatening to silence those with differing opinions, refusing to work with each other, spying on each other, and making blacklists is, somehow “putting Googlers’ physical safety at risk”.

I would have thought it was putting their employment at risk, but perhaps Google’s executives want their employees engaging in that behavior. I don’t know, and really, I don’t care. And if you think the best way to move forward is lobbying your bosses to delete this blog, well, all I can say is that it certainly would make for one HELL of a chapter in my forthcoming SJWs Always Double Down.

Meme of the Week

It was close, but Liberals and the Military just managed to edge Moderate Arrow.

  1. 29.3% Liberals and the Military
  2. 28.8% Moderate Arrow
  3. 15.8% Star Trek: Disaster
  4. 14.1% Third Colossus
  5. 12.0% Alt Lite and Alt Right

To get a vote and receive fresh daily memes in your email, sign up for the Daily Meme Wars.

The whining continues

English “historian” Mary Beard is still whining about the pushback she received for incorrectly claiming that a multiracial Roman British family was “typical”, as portrayed in a BBC children’s cartoon.

Mary Beard has spoken about the “Twitterstorm” of abuse she received after arguing that Roman Britain was ethnically diverse.

The historian and television presenter said she received a “torrent of aggressive insults” for days after she said a BBC schools video that depicted a high-ranking solider and a father of a Roman Britain family as being black to be “pretty accurate”.

She argued that the character in the BBC cartoon was loosely based on “Quintus Lollius Urbicus, a man from what is now Algeria, who became governor of Britain.”

She spoke against the “rubbish” arguments about genetic evidence from alt-right commentators and their “desire for certainty” when it came to historical information that was not always possible to ascertain, such as the population of Britain during the Roman empire and the ethnic make-up.

“It also feels very sad to me that we cannot have a reasonable discussion on such a topic as the cultural ethnic composition of Roman Britain without resorting to unnecessary insult, abuse, misogyny and language of war not debate (and that includes one senior academic),” she wrote in the Times Literary Supplement. She was referring to comments from  Nicholas Nassim Taleb who accused her of “bullsh*tting”.

I don’t think her new book is going to help restore her reputation any time soon. Best response: “It would explain all the dead white wives.”

In the meantime, Cambridge University has doubled down and released a Faculty Statement.


Faculty statement responding to the online debate of ethnic diversity in Roman Britain

Roman Britain has long been an important part of the teaching and research in the Faculty of Classics. The question of ethnic diversity in the province has been getting unusual amounts of attention recently. Professor Mary Beard has been at the centre of some of this attention. In the Faculty we welcome and encourage public interest in, and reasoned debate about, the ancient world, such as Professor Beard has always sought to encourage. The evidence is in fact overwhelming that Roman Britain was indeed a multi-ethnic society. This was not, of course, evenly spread through the province, and it would have been infinitely more noticeable — it can be assumed — in an urban or military context than in a rural one. There are, however, still significant gaps in our understanding. New scientific evidence (including but not limited to genetic data) offers exciting ways forward, but it needs to be interpreted carefully.

UPDATE: Glorious. Mary has really become quite prolific of late. We need to send old GRR Martin a case of whatever she’s drinking.

Convergence at AirBNB

I don’t use AirBNB. But if I did, I would stop.

This Saturday, Virginia’s Lee Park is slated to be the meeting place of the Unite The Right rally, a much-publicized gathering of far-right personalities and their sycophants. With less than a week to go, Airbnb has taken active measures to delete the accounts of some members the company believes to be staying in Charlottesville for the rally… According to screenshots shared on Twitter, the users have apparently been banned for violating Airbnb’s Terms of Service.

“Violating Terms of Service” is SJW speak for banning badthinkers and thought criminals. And their list of badthinkers and thought criminals is growing every single day.

Meanwhile, at Google, you can expect to discuss diversity, and nothing but diversity, should you happen to interview there. The middle managers want to make sure they hire nothing but SJWs. At this rate, Google’s eventual crash-and-burn promises to rival Yahoo’s.

All the heads of the medusa

First, I’m not applauding the official Google response. Their position is intrinsically and observably absurd; the fact that they are managing to refrain from digging themselves in deeper by going on a witch hunt and burning one of their employees at the stake is merely an indication that someone in the Google executive team possesses at least a minimal amount of common sense. If you want to provide a platform for everyone, then you obviously have to give up any ambitions of playing thought police.

Second, we can see that Google’s SJWs are starting to get nervous as evidence of their internal thought-policing begins to leak out into the public. And never forget, they genuinely believe that they are better-educated, as well as our moral and intellectual superiors, because Google only hires the smartest, best-educated people, right? You would almost feel sorry for the executives who have to deal with this nonsense, until you stop and think, what else could have possibly resulted from their decision to hire SJWs and prioritize diversity?

However, the way in which the SJWs immediately go to no-platforming as an ideal response underlines my oft-repeated point about the importance of building and supporting our own platforms.