Mississippi stands firm

The governor doesn’t hesitate to sign a religious liberty bill:

Mississippi’s governor signed a law on Tuesday that allows public and private businesses to refuse service to gay couples based on the employers’ religious beliefs.

Gov. Phil Bryant signed House Bill 1523, despite opposition from gay-rights groups and some businesses who say it enables discrimination. Some conservative and religious groups support the bill.

The measure’s stated intention is to protect those who believe that marriage should be between one man and one woman, that sexual relations should only take place inside such marriages, and that male and female genders are unchangeable.

“This bill merely reinforces the rights which currently exist to the exercise of religious freedom as stated in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” the Republican governor wrote in a statement posted to his Twitter account.

The measure allows churches, religious charities and privately held businesses to decline services to people whose lifestyles violate their religious beliefs. Individual government employees may also opt out, although the measure says governments must still provide services.

“This bill does not limit any constitutionally protected rights or actions of any citizen of this state under federal or state laws,” Bryant said. “It does not attempt to challenge federal laws, even those which are in conflict with the Mississippi Constitution, as the Legislature recognizes the prominence of federal law in such limited circumstances.”

Other states have considered similar legislation. North Carolina enacted a law, while governors in Georgia and South Dakota vetoed proposals.

Meanwhile, Paypal decides it’s a good idea to play politics in North Carolina:

PayPal has canceled its plans to open a new global operations center in Charlotte, following passage of a North Carolina law that prevents cities from creating non-discrimination policies based on gender identity.

The measure also mandates that students in state schools use the bathroom that corresponds with their gender when they were born.

On March 23, North Carolina, in an emergency session, passed the controversial Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act. 

It’s always educational to see how corporations are willing to virtue-signal on certain issues, while cheerfully doing business with some of the worst regimes on Earth at the same time.

And now various governors are getting into the act.

Governor Andrew M. Cuomo today signed an executive order banning all non-essential state travel to Mississippi. The order requires all New York State agencies, departments, boards and commissions to immediately review all requests for state funded or state sponsored travel to the state of Mississippi, and bar any such publicly funded travel that is not essential to the enforcement of state law or public health and safety.

Round Two is coming. I don’t know which issue will set it off yet, but it’s increasingly obvious that Round Two is on the horizon. There is no nation any longer, and the sooner the various nations inside the USA go their separate ways, preferably in peace.

Wisconsin results

This is your post to discuss the primaries in Wisconsin today. Poll average has Cruz ahead by 5 and Sanders by 3.

Preliminary exit polls show 7/10 GOP primary voters support the Muslim ban in Wisconsin. I doubt this matters much, however, as I expect many Cruz voters would support it too.

The best place for incoming results is Decision Desk HQ.

Book of the Week

Stendahl, despite the Norwegian-sounding name, was a French writer who later moved to Italy and became very popular there. As part of my program to catch up on the great writers of the past I have not hitherto read, I began reading what is considered to be his greatest novel, The Red and the Black, recently. Some consider it to be one of the 100 greatest novels of all time.

I would not go quite that far, I think. While I haven’t quite finished it yet, I am three-quarters through it, and while it is indubitably an excellent novel, and one well worth reading, being remarkable for its attention to detail and its focus on the psychology of the protagonist, it is somewhat marred by what I consider to be its socio-sexual flaws.

It is this book, more than any other, that has convinced me that my socio-sexual theory of literature may be a significantly useful writer’s tool if it is ever refined and articulated. In any event, the Kindle ebook is only 99 cents, so it is absolutely worth the purchase price.

Also, I should mention that the Castalia House site is back up. If you’re not seeing it, just wait a little while, it just means your ISP hasn’t refreshed the DNS. We apologize for the inconvenience.

A recognizable response

Grimfate notes that Beamdog’s response to the criticism of Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear falls into what has come to be a recognizable pattern:

Usually if there’s a big uproar, the company will try to make things
right, try to save face and hopefully do something to appease those who
have decided not to purchase the game because of it. For example, the
ending of Mass Effect 3. Also, whenever an SJW complains about
something, the company seems quick to address the issue, such as the
butt thing with Blizzard’s latest game. So it’s interesting to see that
when there is an uproar AGAINST the SJW side, the company digs their
heels in, asking people to post positive reviews for the game instead
of, you know, addressing the concerns of their actual and potential
customers…

This is the tell. This is what informs gamers that a game developer is not on their side, and is sufficiently SJW-converged to stand their ground on the basis of SJW politics rather than artistic expression or creative freedom.

If you are the sort of organization that would immediately cave, (or worse, has caved) before a single SJW pointing-and-shrieking racist, or sexist, or goblinist, or geometrist, or whatever the complaint du jour is, you cannot expect people to take you seriously when you suddenly stand firm against tens of thousands of ordinary gamers expressing their disapproval of your design choices. Observe that the review ratings are consistent: 70 to 75 percent of gamers are openly hostile to Beamdog’s “enhancements”.

An SJW complains about a single character’s pose: “OMG! We are SO sorry! We will change it ASAFP! Do you like her new butt better? Is that okay? PLEASE FORGIVE US!”

Tens of thousands of gamers complain about smirking SJW convergence inserted into a beloved series: “Too bad, small minded bigots! You’re just a vocal minority and you’re BANNED!”

Moreover, if you are going to disrespect a much-loved classic of the genre by rejecting various elements of it and “improving” it, you really should understand that you are also rejecting its fans and that more people are going to actively hate your enhancements than are going to enthusiastically embrace them.

It’s a legitimate choice, although I would argue it is a foolish and self-destructive one. And while the developer has the right to make that choice, it is very important to understand that a deliberate choice is being made by someone inside the organization. It’s not like any of this is new, as the memelords well know.

Meanwhile, a longtime fan of the Baldur’s Gate series reviews Siege of Dragonspear:

Creating more content for a game that is in desperate need of a revival at a time when CRPGs are finally coming back into vogue was a great idea, and had I been a game developer, I would have jumped at the chance to do it myself.

Of course I was warned, both by friends and by readers of this site posting in comments on Dragonspear news articles I posted, that the game wasn’t going to be worth the money.

“They hired Gaider, you know what that means”

“Did you see how bad that stream was”

“You know they’ll screw it up.”

Naturally, I didn’t believe them. Call it putting the nostalgia goggles on, but I couldn’t possibly believe Beamdog’s Baldur’s Gate expansion would be anything but a continuation of the same events and personalities that made the original so timeless and memorable….

After five hours with the game, I encountered numerous situations where a
combination of very poor writing and social justice pandering began to
weigh the game down. Technical and gameplay missteps were one thing, but
the sheer amount of modern 2016 Tumblr-level politics turned what was
once a grand medieval swords & sorcery epic into the equivalent of a
emotional teenage girl’s self-insert fanfic.

What a small minded bigot! Nevertheless, it appears the controversy has already broken through and hit the mainstream media:

The problem with Minsc’s dig at #GamerGate isn’t that it breaks the fabled “Fourth Wall.” After all, Minsc is already making a jump through the fourth wall with his delightful pet Spelljammer reference. Heck, Baldur’s Gate is just as happy to reference The Bob Newhart Show and Monty Python as it is murder and betrayal.

Rather, the problem lies in Beamdog’s level of respect — or lack thereof — for a character that is deeply meaningful to an entire generation of gamers. Minsc is the lovable hamster-toting warrior of both Baldur’s Gate titles. His legacy extends into novelization and comic books, and he’s been praised by just about every conceivable gaming publication at one time or another. He’s an intellectual innocent, a gentle giant.

With one quip, they’ve turned that great big teddy bear of a hero into a passive-aggressive tool to insult a portion of their potential customers. It’s a cynical decision, and a needless one. It’s intentionally sarcastic and insulting, stooping to the tactics that people consistently ladle onto anyone who has ever participated in the #GamerGate conversation, without offering any useful rebuttal.

Not only is it grossly out of character for Minsc, it’s a little bit of the Internet’s ugliness that quite simply didn’t need to be there. Where the transgender character is an expression of the developer’s intentions toward inclusion, Minsc’s dig is designed to exclude people with whom Beamdog disagrees. It’s trite, it’s catty, and it makes Beamdog’s other in-game statements come off as posturing rather than sincere.

Beamdog’s response to the controversy hasn’t been extremely constructive and suggests a very loose grasp on the heart of the problem.

The problem is that the amenable authorities think their best interests are served by pandering to the SJWs who put them in their untenable position in the first place rather than jettisoning them at the earliest opportunity. What every leader of an organization needs to understand is that the SJWs within have no loyalty to the organization nor do they harbor any concerns for it. The organization is only of interest to them insofar as it provides them with a vehicle for pushing their Narrative.

Give them the chance, and they will burn it all down around them in the interest of virtue-signaling without even a moment’s hesitation. And then they’ll move on to their next victim.

Cheap at the price

Critics complain Trump’s deportation plan would cost $500 billion:

Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s plan to deport all undocumented immigrants would cost between $400 billion and $600 billion and take at least 20 years to implement, according to a report from the American Action Forum.

The report estimates that there are currently 11.3 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States. To deport them, these individuals would have to be apprehended, detained, legally processed, and transported back to the country they originated from.

In order to do this in two years like Trump has proposed, the report estimates that there would need to be 90,582 federal immigration apprehension employees, 348,831 immigration detention beds, 1,316 immigration courts, 32,445 federal attorneys to process undocumented immigrants, and a minimum of 17,296 chartered flights and 30,701 chartered bus trips.

“If the federal government were to remove all undocumented immigrants in only two years, it would require a massive expansion of the federal government’s immigration enforcement personnel and infrastructure,” states the report.

The report says that if the federal government began enforcing mass deportation, about 20 percent of undocumented immigrants would begin to leave voluntarily which would leave about 9 million illegal aliens in the country. Currently, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement only has the capacity to remove 400,000 undocumented immigrants in one year.

“That means if ICE were to operate at its current maximum capacity, it would take over 20 years to remove 9.04 million undocumented immigrants,” states the report. “To remove those 9.04 million immigrants in two years, ICE would have to remove 4.52 million immigrants per year. That is 11.3 times larger than ICE’s current maximum capacity.”

I can solve those problems easily. The answer is private enterprise. The AAF estimate claims a cost of $55,555 per individual deported. So, the cost can be cut to less than $100 billion by simply offering a $10,000 bounty on every illegal immigrant delivered to a station on the Mexican border. Assume that it costs $5k to do a quick identity check to confirm their status and transport them home.

That means the USA would be saving nearly $250 billion per year based on the $346 billion per year that illegal aliens cost as estimated by the National Research Council. Trump is not only right to call for deportations, but America can’t afford NOT to round them up and repatriate them.

DEVGAME developments

It’s time to start thinking about the next DEVGAME course, but even though the recent course is over, the learning doesn’t stop. I’ve put up a post about putting my own production principles into action, which worked out rather well in the case of Art of Sword, and the game’s lead programmer has put up sample code to duplicate and order 2D animation sprites in Unity.

There are also other posts by programmers, artists, and even musicians. It’s rapidly turning into a great resource for neophyte game developers. If you’re interested in attending, or you know someone who might be interested, let them know about the DEVGAME blog before the next session begins in May.

In other news, we’re looking at offering additional advanced education courses, including Astronomy and Economics, about which more soon.

Liberals, not conservatives, hate science

As Maddox has amply demonstrated, they don’t “fucking love science”, they like pictures that remind them of science. Actual science, they hate, because it’s not careful of their precious feelings and tends to gradually destroy their sacred narratives:

I first read Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science when I was home for Thanksgiving, and I often left it lying around the house when I was doing other stuff. At one point, my dad picked it up off a table and started reading the back-jacket copy. “That’s an amazing book so far,” I said. “It’s about the politicization of science.” “Oh,” my dad responded. “You mean like Republicans and climate change?”

That exchange perfectly sums up why anyone who is interested in how tricky a construct “truth” has become in 2015 should read Alice Dreger’s book. No, it isn’t about climate change, but my dad could be excused for thinking any book about the politicization of science must be about conservatives. Many liberals, after all, have convinced themselves that it’s conservatives who attack science in the name of politics, while they would never do such a thing. Galileo’s Middle Finger corrects this misperception in a rather jarring fashion, and that’s why it’s one of the most important social-science books of 2015.

At its core, Galileo’s Middle Finger is about what happens when science and dogma collide — specifically, what happens when science makes a claim that doesn’t fit into an activist community’s accepted worldview. And many of Dreger’s most interesting, explosive examples of this phenomenon involve liberals, not conservatives, fighting tooth and nail against open scientific inquiry.

It’s probably not a book anyone who reads this blog regularly needs to read, but it may be one that most of us would like to give to someone we know. As Nassim Taleb explains, what passes for science simply isn’t really science and it certainly isn’t reliable.

What we are seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.

With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30y of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, microeconomic papers wrong 40% of the time, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating only 1/5th of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers with a better track record than these policymaking goons.

Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats wanting to run our lives aren’t even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. I have shown that most of what Cass-Sunstein-Richard Thaler types call “rational” or “irrational” comes from misunderstanding of probability theory.

Cruz snaking Trump delegates

Keep this in mind when you hear Republicans pontificate about democracy and the will of the people:

Sen. Ted Cruz is out-hustling Donald Trump and looks set to ensure many Arizona delegates will defect to him in a convention floor fight. The Texas senator, who ever since Iowa has played a stealthy ground game in contrast to Trump’s chaotic populism, is taking steps to snatch the Republican presidential nomination from The Donald at the convention in July.

The New York businessman easily won last month’s Arizona primary taking 47 percent to Cruz’s 25 percent, scooping up all 58 of the state’s delegates. That’s nearly 5 percent of the 1,237 Trump needs for the nomination, and they’re tied are to him on the first ballot.

But Cruz, exploiting deep opposition to Trump among grassroots Republicans, has been far more active in Arizona than Trump, insiders say. He’s recruiting candidates for the available 55 delegate slots, that along with the other three delegate positions filled by party leaders, would be allowed to vote for him in a multi-ballot contested convention.

“Cruz, out of all the campaigns, has the most folks on the
ground and has been the most organized,” Michael Noble, a Republican
consultant in Arizona who is neutral, told the Washington Examiner on Friday. “Trump has no real organization in Arizona,” added GOP
strategist Sean Noble (no relation) in an email exchange. “Cruz will get
most/all Arizona delegates on second ballot.”

This is all according to the rules. The problem is that it is indicative of structural and institutional corruption, not that this comes as any surprise. Legality is not morality. Of course, if the Republican establishment doesn’t like the Trump wind, they really won’t enjoy reaping the nationalist whirlwind that is beginning to swirl even now.

What is alarming about this to me is the way it reveals the elite political establishment to be extraordinarily short-sighted. No wonder the Republicans have conserved nothing. Unlike the die-hard Left, they have no long-term strategy, only short-term tactics.

ClarkHat knocks back SJWs

Good to see ClarkHat come out roaring in his first post-Popehat anti-SJW campaign. ESR explains the situation:

 In brief: LambdaConf, a technical conference on functional programming, accepted a presentation proposal about a language called Urbit, from a guy named Curtis Yarvin. I’ve looked at Urbit: it is very weird, but rather interesting, and certainly a worthy topic for a functional programming conference.

And then all hell broke loose. For Curtis Yarvin is better known as Mencius Moldbug, author of eccentric and erudite political rents and a focus of intense hatred by humorless leftists. Me, I’ve never been able to figure out how much of what Moldbug writes he actually believes; his writing seems designed to leave a reader guessing as to whether he’s really serious or executing the most brilliantly satirical long-term troll-job in the history of the Internet.

A mob of SJWs, spearheaded by a no-shit self-described Communist named Jon Sterling, descended on LambdaConf demanding that they cancel Yarvin’s talk, pretending that he (rather than, say, the Communist) posed a safety threat to other conference-goers. The conference’s principal organizers, headed up one John de Goes, quite properly refused to cancel the talk, observing that Yarvin was there to talk about his code and not his politics.

I think they conceded to much to the SJWs, actually, by asking Yarvin to issue a statement about his views on violence. Nobody asked Jon Sterling whether he was down with that whole liquidation of the kulaks thing, after all, and if a Communist who likes to tweet about sending capitalists to “hard labor in the North” gets a pass it is not easy to see why any apologia was required from a man with no history of advocating violence at all.

But, ultimately, they did make the right decision: to judge Yarvin’s talk proposal by its technical merit alone. This is the hacker way.

The SJWs then attempted to pressure LambdaConf’s sponsors into withdrawing their support so the conference would have to be canceled. Several sponsors withdrew (I don’t know details about who; my sources for this part are secondhand).

So far, so wearily familiar – Marxist thugs versus free expression, with free expression’s chances not looking so hot. But there’s where the story gets good. Meredith Patterson and her friends at the blog Status 451 organized a counterpunch. They launched an IndieGoGo campaign Save LambdaConf …and an open society.

The campaign is already fully funded. But I thought some of you in the tech world might like to know about it, and be a part of it. There are many ways to help fund the alt-right’s war against the SJWs, and helping those who are victims of their successful attacks is an important defensive strategy, as it will embolden those who are standing up to them.

And good for LambdaConf for standing by its speakers rather than caving to the SJW-converged sponsors. This is how cultural wars are won, one hard-earned victory after another.