SJW-convergence in Star Trek

Who would have thought that Star Trek, which has always been at the forefront of SJWism, could be further converged?

In the summer of 1968, George Takei attended a pool party at the Hollywood Hills home of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. The actor, then 31 and famous for his role as Hikaru Sulu, helmsman of the USS Enterprise, swam up to his boss and “had a conversation with him, a very private one. I was still closeted, so I did not want to come out to him.”

Nevertheless, Takei — who announced he was gay in 2005  — was fully attuned to the gay equality conversation gaining momentum at the time. He felt it was a topic worth exploring on the socially minded science-fiction series, which had previously tackled issues like the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War through keenly observed allegory.

But the show had recently seen its lowest ratings ever, with an episode featuring TV’s first interracial kiss between Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura, which NBC affiliates in the South refused to air. While sympathetic to his star’s pitch, Roddenberry felt he was in no position to take those kinds of risks.

“He was a strong supporter of LGBT equality,” recalls Takei, now 79. “But he said he has been pushing the envelope and walking a very tight rope — and if he pushed too hard, the show would not be on the air.” Alas, the show was canceled the following season anyway.

But Star Trek has lived long and prospered for studio home Paramount, spawning six TV series and 13 feature films. True to its title, the latest big-screen outing, Star Trek Beyond, has gone where none have gone before: Star John Cho — who assumes the Sulu mantle for the third time in the reboots — has told Australia’s Herald Sun that the character is revealed to be gay….

Except Takei wasn’t overjoyed. He had never asked for Sulu to be gay. In fact, he’d much prefer that he stay straight. “I’m delighted that there’s a gay character,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Unfortunately, it’s a twisting of Gene’s creation, to which he put in so much thought. I think it’s really unfortunate.”

Takei explains that Roddenberry was exhaustive in conceiving his Star Trek characters. (The name Sulu, for example, was based on the Sulu Sea off the coast of the Philippines, so as to render his Asian nationality indeterminate.) And Roddenberry had always envisioned Sulu as heterosexual.

Straights attempting to virtue-signal on behalf of gays do their best, but they never get it right. I don’t know a single gay man who likes the Saint Gay couples that pervade Hollywood entertainment or think they are anything but dressed-up suburban married couples, about as convincing as urban fantasy’s kick-ass kung fu waifs, science fiction’s men with tits, and the Magic Negroes who like nothing better than to defy gangbangers and help out white folk in distress when they aren’t busy philosophizing, providing moral instruction, or being President.

One would think, at some point, someone would have asked George Takei, or at least understood that there is an insult implicit in the idea that he could not act.

4GW in Dallas

11 police shot at Black Lives Matter in Dallas:

Eleven police officers were shot ambush-style, including five fatally, in Dallas Thursday night by at least two snipers, amid a protest against the recent police shootings of two black men, Alton Sterling in Louisiana, and Philando Castile in Minnesota, according to the Dallas Police.

The condition of the six wounded officers remains unknown. One civilian was also injured.

Officials said the gunmen aimed to kill as many officers as possible.

U.S. police have had this sort of response coming for a long time. Spacebunny and I were just talking yesterday about the shooting in Falcon Heights, which is very close to where we used to spend our Friday nights wandering the stacks at the Barnes & Noble, and how the police are never held accountable for lethally shooting people.

As Spacebunny tweeted:

  • I called Dallas last week.  Not in Dallas, but the retaliation. 
  • They created the climate by constantly and systematically protecting their own.
  • Everyone should be held accountable for their mistakes.  Especially when it costs someone their life.
  • If you don’t fix the general problem of cops literally getting away with murder, people will be sniping them all over. 
  • The problem is very obviously systemic. Everyone knows nothing is going to happen to a cop who kills someone

As of November, 1024 people were killed by police in 2015, 204 of them unarmed. For all that the police almost uniformly claimed to have been fearing for their lives, only 34 police were shot and killed during the same period. The public may be collectively stupid, but they’re not incapable of recognizing that statistical imbalance or that the police are trained to lie, obfuscate, and pretend that they are in danger when they are not.

Unless and until the police give up their military-style affectations, “us vs them” mentality, and most of all, their legal unaccountability, they’re going to find themselves fighting a war against the American people. And it is a war they simply cannot win.

What happened in Dallas may be shocking, but it isn’t even remotely surprising. Many people have seen it coming; what will likely prove the most surprising aspect of this incident is how many people will remain utterly unsympathetic to the Dallas police and their bereaved families. The police may consider themselves above the law, but they are not beyond the reach of an increasingly outraged public.

Is it a tragedy? Of course. Even worse, it is an unnecessary one. Did these specific police officers deserve to die? Almost certainly not. But no amount of moral posturing or striking ferocious pro-police poses is going to change the fact that the only way to avoid more attacks like this is for the police departments of America to stop pretending that being scared is sufficient justification for shooting a member of the public and start holding their killer cops fully accountable for their actions every single time an unarmed or non-aggressive person is shot.

The present situation is not one that any sane individual would celebrate, but it is one that many, including me, have been predicting for a long time. I’m only surprised that it didn’t happen sooner, especially in light of how many innocent military veterans have been shot and killed by police in recent years.

This is the heart of the problem. BLM may be the proximate cause, but until the causal problem of a lack of police accountability is addressed, the situation is only going to get worse.

UPDATE: “The suspect stated he wanted to kill white people – especially white officers.” – #Dallas Police Chief David Brown

As Bill Lind writes, 4GW is nothing if not messy. Forget your binary lines and single-cause simplicities.

The real championship

This has easily been the most entertaining Euro since I’ve lived in Europe. But as fun as it was to see Wales make their historic run that finally came to a sudden end in two minutes of brilliance by Portugal, it was hard to imagine either team being able to beat the winner of France vs Germany.

The French team is basically a talented African team with a pair of French attackers, plus the most dangerous shooter from outside the box, Payet. They’re very good, but even during the group stage I felt that neither of the highly disciplined major teams, Germany or Italy, would not have much problem with them when they got careless and broke down.

Germany, on the other hand, is still the team that destroyed Brazil, although their inability to score against Italy showed that they miss Miroslav Klose and their three penalty failures demonstrate that they are not the clinical Germans of the Klinsman and Bierhof eras. They also have the best keeper in the world, Neuer, which tends to be an advantage.

I expect whoever wins to win the Euro. And I tend to expect it will be Germany.

The first black woman on the Court

In other news:

Investigation Into Clinton’s Email Is Over, Lynch Says

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR 7:43 PM ET
In a statement, Attorney General Loretta Lynch accepted the F.B.I.’s recommendation against charges for Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state.

In other Justice Department news, Attorney General Lynch announced that Bill Clinton has asked her to stay on as Attorney General, while also being the next nominee for the Supreme Court, and that she signed a ten year contract with the Clinton Foundation with unspecified duties and an unlimited expense account. Her favorite niece will become ambassador to Monaco, her favorite nephew an astronaut, and Ms. Lynch will serve with Mrs. and Mr. Clinton on a new Semi-Unofficial Committee of Three that will oversee the FBI, NSA, and Navy Seals and choose targets of drone strikes (each member gets “one free one per year, no questions asked”). Also, the highest priority legislation of the New Clinton Administration will be “Shoulders & Up Only” hate crime legislation making it illegal to tweet a full body photo of a clothed female federal official.

Actually, I think we all know who would win if the media would give the lower body of Ms Clinton McCankles a miss. And that would be America.

Black Iron Girl

I actually rather enjoy it when white SJWs attempt to write diversity of one sort or another. It’s reliably hilarious how they believe they’re totally pulling it off when they are doing nothing more than writing men with tits, married suburban housewives with penises, or white people with dark skin.

There’s a new Iron Man. Well, Iron Man for now. She’s still working on the name. The events at the end of the comic-book event series Civil War II will result in Tony Stark stepping out of the Iron Man suit and a new character, Riri Williams, taking over, Marvel tells TIME. (Note: Tony’s departure doesn’t mean you know the end to Civil War II yet.)

Riri is a science genius who enrolls in MIT at the age of 15. She comes to the attention of Tony when she builds her own Iron Man suit in her dorm. Creator and Iron Man writer Brian Michael Bendis spoke exclusively to TIME about the creation of Riri Williams with comic-book artist Stefano Caselli and Marvel’s increasingly diverse cast of characters.

How did you come up with the character of Riri Williams?

One of the things that stuck with me when I was working in Chicago a couple of years ago on a TV show that didn’t end up airing was the amount of chaos and violence. And this story of this brilliant, young woman whose life was marred by tragedy that could have easily ended her life — just random street violence — and went off to college was very inspiring to me. I thought that was the most modern version of a superhero or superheroine story I had ever heard. And I sat with it for awhile until I had the right character and the right place.

As we’ve been slowly and hopefully very organically adding all these new characters to the Marvel Universe, it just seemed that sort of violence inspiring a young hero to rise up and act, and using her science acumen, her natural-born abilities that are still raw but so ahead of where even Tony Stark was at that age, was very exciting to me.

One presumes RihannaRiri – even the name comes from the writer’s extensive knowledge of African-American culture; I’m only surprised it wasn’t Beyonce –  must be exceptionally intelligent, considering that she’s been able to fund her technologically advanced R&D with an EBT card.

I’m looking forward to the plot twist when, like her real-world predecessor, Riri drops out of both MIT and the Avengers in order to work as a stripper.

From Twitter:

Supreme Dark Lord @voxday
If the comics imitated life, Riri aka Black Iron Girl would drop out of both MIT and the Avengers to work as a stripper in Atlanta. #IronMan

A ‏@atmaybury
If @voxday was a halfway competent author, he wouldn’t have to run his own vanity press.

Supreme Dark Lord @voxday
That “vanity press” is on track to become the largest publisher in science fiction. The Hugos were just a warning shot.

We are going to have some very interesting announcements around the end of the month. And I have no doubt that when Castalia passes up the twitching corpse of Tor Books, the event will serve as a tribute to what can be described, at the very least, my competence as well as my vanity.

The state of Star Citizen

Derek Smart provides a detailed, and devastating, summary of the current state of the troubled project:

The exodus of key talent from the four studios around the world has also been an on-going event this past year. To the extent that the project is so toxic, that at this point, anyone working on it has basically earned themselves a Black mark on their resume. Ridicule aside. But, in an unprecedented move, that hasn’t stopped two (John Dadley, Darian Vorlick) recent departures from immediately taking to social media to stress that the sky isn’t falling. Because, you know, it’s perfectly normal to bail on such a high profile project just as the general outlook is that it’s all falling apart, gamers are being screwed etc. A project which, as of this writing, has over 60 positions that it can’t fill. And this month alone, there are rumored to be at least four more high profile people looking to leave. But everything’s fine though. That’s just normal game development turnover you know. The thing about this industry is that we never – ever – forget.

Meanwhile, Sandi Gardiner, wife of Chris Roberts and “head of marketing” (<— lol!) was recently posting pictures of staff at the LA and UK studios on social media. Funny thing, some people (including the two aforementioned people) in those pictures are actually gone. And at least four are on their way out. I guess the teams over in Frankfurt and Austin, for all the hype they get for being key parts of the game’s development, don’t get their pictures taken.

Also in the past year, most of the media hype around the project has all but died down, as most (even those gamestar.de Shillizens over in Germany are heading South with their narrative) have started hedging their bets since all of this – sadly – has all boiled down to a “Derek Smart v Chris Roberts” narrative this past year. Even as they completely ignore the plight of gamers who unwittingly put their money into this crowd-funded project, and who previously had the security of refunds and financial accountability. Heck, even with the unprecedented ToS change that happened last month, very few in the media even wrote about that. And as a media contact said to me, simply put, nobody wants to deal with Shitizens descending on their sites and turning it into a war zone. Which to me begs the question: what about when the final collapse comes?

CIG/RSI has fermented so much ill will toward most of its very own backers, that when the Feds finally come calling, it won’t be because of anything that anyone has written, but from the many complaints that are being filed with various consumer protection agencies here and in various countries (Australians have it easy, nobody messes with consumers over there – get a refund!) where backers are frantically trying to get refunds.

And if your warning alarms haven’t started going off yet, recently in a new refund rejection letter template to backers, they have started saying that CIG is no longer the entity that should be reported to agencies regarding this project and/or refunds. They’re saying that RSI – a shell company before the past month – is now the one carrying the liability. This despite the fact that almost every single backer prior to the new ToS of June 1st, 2016, has a receipt for goods sold to them by CIG or one of the other many shell companies associated with this project.

There is more. There is considerably more. The upshot is that Derek and other skeptics were right to conclude, one year ago, that Star Citizen was not going to ship as advertised, and that the project is likely to end in a debacle of proportions that will make famous game industry failures of the past, including Battlecruiser 3000 AD, look like nothing more than modest appetizers to a royal feast.

The project has gradually morphed from overly ambitious project to troubled production to what appears to be an open pyramid scheme. At this point, it wouldn’t surprise me if it ended in recriminations, lawsuits, and criminal charges.

The Wikipedian war

High-ranking SJWs at Wikipedia – or in Gamaliel’s case, formerly at Wikipedia – are up to their usual tricks in attempting to disemploy journalists who fail to submit to the SJW Narrative:

Wikipedia bills itself as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” In reality, it’s a bureaucratic mess dominated by a small clique of established editors who exploit their position to bully, smear, and intimidate anyone who challenges their authority.

Their latest target is David Auerbach, a highly regarded technology columnist for Slate and a fellow at the New America Foundation. Auerbach has been in the editors’ crosshairs ever since he wrote a series of damning exposes of Wikipedia’s bureaucratic elite in 2014.

In one of these columns, Auerbach described how the Wikipedian aristocracy maintain their power.

As it turned out, I’d run into a couple of what one Wikipedia administrator terms “The Unblockables,” a class of abrasive editors who can get away with murder because they have enough of a fan club within Wikipedia, so any complaint made against them would be met with hostility and opprobrium.

Longtime editors, wrote Auerbach, “have developed a fortress mentality in which they see new editors as dangerous intruders who will wreck their beautiful encyclopedia.” According to Auerbach, the combination of hostility to new editors, and the precipitous drop in longstanding ones (MIT Tech Review counted only 31,000 active editors in 2013, compared to a peak of 51,000 in 2007) “increases pressure to retain other long-standing editors, even incredibly acerbic ones, reinforcing the fortress mentality.”

Previously, Auerbach’s opponents targeted him on Wikipedia, attempting to smear him in public articles, and  have his own page deleted — both favorite tactics of editors looking to damage someone’s public image. Although those efforts failed, Auerbach’s opponents — who hold senior positions in the Wikimedia Foundation’s DC outreach unit — are now targeting his job.

Robert Fernandez, a member of Wikimedia DC’s Board of Directors and Audit committee, who goes by the pseudonym “Gamaliel” on Wikipedia, was the primary culprit, accusing Auerbach of being “pro-Brexit, pro-GamerGate” and “anti-SJW,” as well as a “libel machine.”

One tweet in particular was amusing:

It’s good to know that I am the Dark Lord haunting SJW nightmares. Which, for some reason, happens to remind me of something. There will be a Brainstorm tomorrow, for Brainstormers and OGs only, at 7 PM Eastern. Keep an eye out for the email this evening and be sure to register, as we’ll be launching Round Two and providing a progress report tomorrow.

Two weeks

Adam Piggott, Gentleman Adventurer, reviews Owen Stanley’s The Missionaries:

When I lived in Uganda there was an old joke that would routinely do the rounds:

“In Africa, what’s the difference between a tourist and a racist?”

Answer: “Two weeks.”

Occasionally I would recount this joke to a particularly inane group of Swedes who were about to depart for a gorilla trekking excursion into the remote Bwindi forest. They would get all self-righteous and mutter at my blatant prejudice and soon after they would depart. It was not uncommon to bump into them again after they had returned from their excursion.

“Ya, now your joke, we understands.”

Like all good jokes its premise is founded in truth and also of shared experience.

“The Missionaries,” by Owen Stanley, depicts a fictitious land known as Elephant Island, located somewhere in the confines of the Bismarck Sea, its people closely resembling the ways and mannerisms of Papua New Guinea. As colonialism no longer allows the natives to practice their favorite pastime of headhunting, the burden of keeping law and order falls to a small group of misfit expats, who despite their individual shortcomings, keenly understand the idiosyncrasies of the local population….

I have not enjoyed a novel as much as this in a very long time. In fact,
this novel could not have been published by the regular publishing
industry as it skewers the type of people who haunt that industry as
much as NGOs in misbegotten locales in the far corners of the globe. It
is a credit to Castalia House that the author has sought them out and I
sense that this will be a breakthrough work not just for Stanley but for
this small publishing house as well.

It appears his instincts are correct. Not only have we recently signed a number of new authors about whom we are extremely enthusiastic, but some of the existing authors have stepped up their game as well. Just as Mutiny in Space will not be our only SF juvenile and Brings the Lightning will not be our only Western, The Missionaries will not be our only literary satire.

The media comes after the Alt-Right

As I mentioned a few days ago, it’s a big mistake for anyone on the Right to talk to the mainstream media. As I was explaining to one of the Dread Ilk yesterday, only a complete amateur believes he can somehow spin media coverage to his advantage, and only a complete innocent believes the media is genuinely interested in his story, giving him the chance to set the record straight, or wants to present both sides of the situation.

When a journalist contacts you, he already has the story outlined, the narrative is already established, and often, it has already been approved by an editor. Unbeknownst to you, your role has already been established, and if you are on the Right, you are almost certainly playing the role of the villain of the piece. The reason they are calling you, and will spend up to six hours talking to you, is to glean that single sentence or two they can use to put you on stage in your appointed character as Richard III or Iago.

You’re not going to play them. The average journalist has successfully played hundreds of people and is an expert at pretending to be a new and sympathetic friend before ritually sacrificing you before the public. They don’t hesitate to edit and elide, to insert nonexistent dialogue and false reaction faces, in order to present an intentionally false version of events. They are more cunning and insidious than you suspect. Consider that despite my customary caution, Amy Wallace of Wired managed to disarm my defenses by first interviewing Larry Correia and Brad Torgerson in an entirely friendly manner, then reading the pre-release version of SJWAL before interviewing me.

She then spent three freaking hours talking to me about the Hugos and science fiction, when all she was really after was a means of character-assassination required to support the SF-SJW Narrative of racist Puppies. She didn’t care about Correia or Torgerson or the Hugo Awards, I was the target all along. The only reason she failed was due to her being a parochial American; she didn’t realize the kill-quote that sounded so horrendously racist to Americans was, in fact, an accurate reference to a genuine and widespread problem in Europe, an issue that soon after broke into the English-language media via the UK.

Anyhow, several major news organization are now working on a stories about the Alt Right and connecting it to the rise of Trump. All of us have refused to talk to them, which means that they will have to make do with putting on their Kabuki play without an on-screen villain, or at best, a foolish lesser player or two dressed up in the villain’s clothes.

As Cernovich rightly points out, they need us more than we need them. We can help them sell their Narrative if we are foolish enough to play along, but we have no need of their exposure or their false promises of presenting our side of the story to the public. We will do that ourselves, and we will ultimately replace them as people increasingly turn to us for the simple reason that we tell the truth exactly as we see it, we do not knowingly push false narratives on the public and pretend that they are true.

My media policy is fairly straightforward. I will only do recorded radio or podcast interviews with Alt Right-friendly parties who are not part of any mainstream organization. Any interview with a newspaper or a blog must be written; no telephone or Skype interviews. No television period. No radio unless it is live and the purpose of the interview is clearly provided beforehand.

UPDATE: One of the organizations has asked me if I am willing to respond in writing to their written questions. While I’m not quite certain how that will work in a broadcast environment, I have agreed to do so, partly as an experiment, but mostly because I would prefer to provide the quotes being utilized rather than have them resort to cherry-picking them from my various writings.