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.

Beamdog vs #GamerGate

Here is a textbook example of SJW entryists ruining an organization through convergence. In this case, I very much doubt the people running the organization even had any idea that their simple and straightforward objective – make an entertaining and enhanced expansion of Baldur’s Gate  – and been subverted to serve the interests of the SJW Narrative.

But Amber Scott’s little declaration of war on #GamerGate didn’t escape GG’s attention, as the reviews of Siege of Dragonspear on Steam and GOG and Metacritic show. Here are three examples from GOG:

just another vessel for SJW propaganda
by installgentoo
Amber Scott, the writer of this game, says that the original Baldur’s Gate is sexist. Captain Corwin, a major NPC, is a single bisexual mother whose daughter calls you out for mansplaining to her.
There is a transgender NPC.
Etc etcIf that’s your sort of thing, then this
review should be useless to you.
But for people like me who don’t want to financially or morally support
the ever more omnipresent liberal lunacy injected in all forms of art,
perhaps you should skip this.

Apr 2, 2016
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Not in the spirit of Baldur’s Gate by Valerie.377
 
While the mechanics of the game are in line with the originals, the story falls short. It sacrifices the narrative and world building of the original Baldur’s Gate in order to break the 4th wall and beat players over the head with messages about social issues with the grace and subtlety of a Saturday morning cartoon from the 90’s.

There is no problem with having messages about social issues in a game. The problem comes when one hijacks another franchise, gut out its soul and fill it with vapid maxims and fables in its place. That is one of the surest ways to kill off a franchise, and it is especially odious when it happens to a well-loved franchise.

Want social justice? Sure, but stop hijacking the industry and make your own games. You’re not going to improve the industry, you’re just going to kill it from the inside out.

Apr 3, 2016 | Thanks for your vote! (182 of 223 users found this helpful)

Not Baldur’s Gate.
by Ajaarg
Even
if you don’t disagree with their political agenda, it’s ham-fisted and
very groanworthy. Minsc makes jokes about Gamergate. If that’s what you
want out of your baldur’s gate game, go right ahead. If you would like
to keep baldur’s gate in your baldur’s gate, just keep playing the
originals and don’t waste time on this toilet retread.Side note: Beamdog is locking down any and all criticism on any forum they control or moderate, including Steam.

Apr 2, 2016
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The ability of devs to keep quiet and remain neutral is rapidly vanishing. This is not due to the gamers, but due to the SJWs in their own organizations who will not permit ANYONE to refuse submission to their sacred Narrative. And if you’re foolish enough to permit SJWs to penetrate your organization, this is exactly the sort of thing you have to look forward to – your involuntary enlistment in their cultural war.

And the SJWs are just going to LOVE how you can gain experience by killing a trans character after he bores you, appropos of nothing, with a tedious tale of discovering his true self. I’ll be shocked if Literally Wu doesn’t find a way to insist it’s actually a LITERAL attempt on his life by #GamerGate and “flee his home” again. 

UPDATE: The Beamdog CEO doubles down on Techraptor:

I find the controversy ridiculous.  Yes, we have a transgendered character.  I know a number of transgendered people and they are genuine, wonderful humans.  Yes, we also have a character who cracks a joke about ethics.  The original Baldur’s Gate had a whole sequence about the Bob Newhart show.  If this generates controversy it makes a sad statement about the world we live in.

As for my post on the forums, I merely asked people who were enjoying the game to share their positive feedback. I know our fans can become engrossed in their enjoyment and I really don’t want potential fans to miss out on the series because of protest reviews by small minded individuals.
    
As for Amber’s interview, I also believe in strong female characters and I feel she did an excellent job bringing dimension and interest to Safana with her writing in Siege of Dragonspear. Her “Too bad” comment, I chalk up to a long day of interviews, having personally done such interviews.
    
    Regards,
    -Trent

I guess we know where the SJW rot set in, then. Too bad. Notice how despite their talk of “choices”, you can’t express any disapproval of Mizhena blathering about “the truest reflection of who I am”. There is no 4: Who asked you, you self-absorbed freak?

A scalp is a scalp

In which we are informed #GamerGate has taken “its most disgraceful scalp yet”

For many people, Gamergate isn’t really a thing anymore. For the most part, it has receded from the headlines — we’re more than a year past the period of peak thinkpiecery on Gamergate, online harassment, and how the two intersect. But that doesn’t mean some of the group’s more enterprising members have stopped rabidly going after anyone they think is promoting an SJW (social-justice warrior) narrative or messing with their previous vidya.

For a particularly gross example, look no further than a piece of news that just dropped (part of a Twitter thread that starts here):

    Today, the decision was made: I am no longer a good, safe representative of Nintendo, and my employment has been terminated.
    — smol pterodactyl (@alisonrapp) March 30, 2016

Over the last few months, many of these gamers have turned their ire on Rapp, a young marketing employee at Nintendo who, as Patrick Klepek wrote in a comprehensive and well-reported article in Kotaku, “has been accused of somehow being a driving force behind the supposed censorship of that company’s games.” Rapp, it should be said, doesn’t even have anything to do with localization at Nintendo; she’s been targeted simply for having been “outspoken on Twitter about online abuse against women in gaming,” as Klepek put it. In the course of digging as deeply into her past as possible to find ways to discredit her, some gamers found an undergraduate thesis she wrote in 2011, and it seriously exacerbated the campaign against her.

In her thesis, Rapp laid out a highly academic case for why the U.S. shouldn’t pressure Japan, where the sexualization of young teens has long been entrenched in certain corners of the culture, to adopt child-pornography laws similar to our own. It reads like pretty standard-issue undergraduate cultural relativism. Anyone familiar with these arguments — even those inclined to think it’s fair to judge someone based on academic papers they wrote in college — would know that Rapp wasn’t condoning child pornography, but rather making a more nuanced argument about American cultural imperialism and so forth (she also argued that child pornography doesn’t cause people to abuse children).

These nuances were lost, perhaps willfully, on a group of Gamergaters and their allies, who quickly used the thesis and various old tweets of Rapp’s to launch a campaign to tar her as a defender of child pornography.

Ah, pity the poor SJWs. We aren’t correctly nuancing their defenses of child pornography. We aren’t treating them fairly. We are digging deeply into their pasts. We are contacting their employers. We are targeting their sponsors.

I wonder where we learned to do that? I wonder why we have adopted these terrible tactics?

They began this cultural war. Now they’re whining that someone is finally fighting back. If you’re not engaged yet, you should be, because they are coming after you just as surely as they are going after gaming, comics, the universities, and everything else.

Read SJWs Always Lie if you haven’t already. It’s all in there.

UPDATE: Unsurprisingly, Kotaku has rushed to the defense of the indefensible:

Rapp specifically mentioned the GamerGate today as being agents of her
harassment, but it was never clear whether one particular group was
after her.
My reporting suggested
some people had taken tactics used by harassers during GamerGate and applied them here.

Britain is breaking out

#BREXIT takes the lead in the UK polls.

This may be their last chance to restore British sovereignty without having to fight for it. Here is hoping that the British people have the courage to vote themselves free of the fascist shackles that have been imposed upon them by decades of deceit.

It’s still early, though, and one expects the EU establishment will run a sweets-and-scares campaign sooner or later. There is, however, some reason to hope it will be an indifferent one, because there are no shortage of French and German politicians who would just as soon see the British leave.

SJWs retroconverging games

I saw that the Enhanced Editions of Baldur’s Gate were on sale at Good Old Games and put them in my cart. However, in between that and clicking through to checkout, a tweet by Escape Velocity drew my attention to this interview with a writer at Beamdog concerning the expansion they’d created in the process of enhancing the original games.

And by “enhancing” them, of course, they mean “converging” them:

“If there was something for the original Baldur’s Gate that
just doesn’t mesh for modern day gamers like the sexism, [we tried to
address that],” said writer Amber Scott. “In the original there’s a lot
of jokes at women’s expense. Or if not a lot, there’s a couple, like
Safana was just a sex object in BG 1, and Jaheira was the nagging wife
and that was played for comedy. We were able to say, ‘No, that’s not
really the kind of story we want to make.’ In Siege of Dragonspear, Safana gets her own little storyline, she got a way better personality upgrade. If people don’t like that, then too bad.”

“I got to write a little tender, romance-y side quest for Khalid and
Jaheira where you could learn a little bit about how their marriage
works and how they really feel about each other.”

There’s also four new companions, one of whom is gay, one of whom is bisexual.

They loved the games so much they just needed to remake them in their own converged image. Consider this absurd example.

We don’t like that. We won’t play it. Too bad.

Don’t quit your day job

Consider how many books are sold by a traditionally published multi-Hugo winning author:

It’s the question every writer dreads: “How many books have you sold?”

It’s a tricky question because for 99% of the year, those with traditionally published books honestly have very little idea. But two times a year – in the spring and in the fall – we receive royalty statements from publishers, which give a sometimes cryptic breakdown of what has sold where. So for those keeping track here with my “Honest Publishing Numbers” posts, here’s an update.

THE MIRROR EMPIRE

Sold about 23,000 copies as of December 31st, 2015 (representing about 16 months of sales)

EMPIRE ASCENDANT

About 7,000 copies as of December 31st, 2015 (note that this book came out in October last year, so that’s only two months of sales. Not bad)

That’s not bad, but less than one would tend to imagine. However, to put it in perspective, “tiny” independent publisher Castalia House reliably sells between 3,000 and 10,000 copies per book. Self-published Mike Cernovich has reported over 15,000 23,000 copies of Gorilla Mindset sold since June 2015. And while I’m not at liberty to talk about their book sales, mostly self-published and sometime Castalia authors Jonathan Moeller and Christopher Nuttall both sell… considerably more than that.

All without any of those books appearing in a single traditional bookstore. And despite being nobodies in the eyes of every mainstream publisher, they’re all doing rather better than most traditionally published authors.

Almost a third of published authors make less than $500 a year from their writing, according to a new survey, with around a half of writers dissatisfied with their writing income.

In the wake of a year that has seen a bitter war of words rage between traditionally published and self-published authors, the survey shows that the old way of doing things continues to reap the most financial rewards for writers, with traditionally published authors making a median annual income of $3,000–$4,999, and independent writers a median of $500–$999. So-called hybrid authors, however – those who publish in both ways – did best, earning $7,500–$9,999 a year.

This is why I always tell people who say they want to write that they should never pursue it as a career. It is a pastime; if you enjoy it, then by all means, write! But don’t focus on the possibility of making money, and by no means plan on it. Do it because you love it. Let your enjoyment of your work shine though it.

It can be done. Larry Correia shows that hard work can sell books. John Scalzi shows that relentless self-marketing and politicking can sell books. Mike Cernovich shows that owning social media can sell books. But the odds are against the average individual, and against the better-than-average individual as well.

UPDATE: Jerry Pournelle adds his thoughts on the matter:

Some of us do a little better than that.  See my essay on how to get my job.

Self publishing works for some who work very hard, and do a lot to let their intended readership know their works exist. Being displayed for sale in a bookstore used to work, and for some  still does, but being known for writing good stories of a particular kind has always been the key to making a living at writing.

My essay was written  before the self-publishing revolution, when independent publishers were known as the vanity press, and sold mostly to the author’s friends and relatives; today it’s possible to sell eBooks to a large niche readership, who, I suppose, can be thought a big expansion of friends and relatives; big enough, sometimes, to support someone who tells them stories they will pay to read.

Of course, as Mr Heinlein taught us, we write for discretionary income: as Robert put it. Joe’s beer money, and Joe likes his beer.

The disappearing US doctor

It occurs to me that there are two ways to address the problem of the growing doctor shortage:

The doctor is disappearing in America.

And by most projections, it’s only going to get worse — the U.S. could lose as many as 1 million doctors by 2025, according to a Association of American Medical Colleges report.

Primary-care physicians will account for as much as one-third of that shortage, meaning the doctor you likely interact with most often is also becoming much more difficult to see.

Tasked with checkups and referring more complicated health problems to specialists, these doctors have the most consistent contact with a patient. But 65 million people live in what’s “essentially a primary-care desert,” said Phil Miller of the physician search firm Merritt Hawkins.

Without those doctors, our medical system is “putting out forest fires — just treating the patients when they get really sick,” said Dr. Richard Olds, the chief executive officer of the Caribbean medical school St. George’s University, who is attempting to use his institution’s resources to help alleviate the shortage.

Dr. Ramanathan Raju, CEO of public hospital system NYC Health + Hospitals, goes even further, saying the U.S. lacks a basic primary-care system. “I think we really killed primary care in this country,” said Raju. “It needs to be addressed yesterday.”

Interesting. 65 million people lack primary care. There are at least 61 million post-1965 immigrants. One way to assure that all Americans have sufficient health care is to repatriate those 61 million people. Wouldn’t having primary medical care be considered in the American national interest?

But I don’t see what the problem is. Have we not been repeatedly assured that those 61 million immigrants are here to do the jobs that Americans won’t do? I’m sure Dr. Dirka, Dr. Jose, Dr. Wang, and Dr. Awolowo will do a bang-up job, despite their lower average IQ, under the guidance of Dr. Raju.

The connection may seem a little strange to you, but just as the changing ethnic demographics significantly altered the behavior of Wall Street bankers, I suspect that they have also changed the specialties pursued by med school graduates.

The most likely solution is to relax the accrediting standards for med schools, which should have been done back in the 1980s.

A Jewish case for white nationalism

Mytheos Holt explains why Donald Trump appeals to so many dispossessed and disadvantaged whites, as well as why white nationalism is on the rise:

This brings me to the first and, arguably, the most important lesson
that Sylvia taught me about what drives people into the arms of white
nationalism: that urge comes not from economic dispossession, nor
spiritual dispossession, but cultural dispossession.

No, I don’t mean the sort of “where has my country gone”
ignorance that I and my fellow coastal cosmopolitans like to mock over
cocktails. I mean the sorts of people who are attracted to white
nationalism are people whose own communities have been hollowed out by
economic and cultural forces beyond their control, and who are now
adrift in a society they perceive to be universally hostile to their
heritage for no good reason.

That heritage, as white nationalists in America see it, is the
heritage of Western civilization. If you wonder what that means (which
is reasonable), let me spell it out: It means historically Western
European cultural norms. Specifically, norms like respect for agents of
the law, aspirational pride in work, willingness to accept the
consequences of one’s actions, disdain for laziness and welfarism, and
reproductive responsibility (i.e., not having children you can’t afford
to keep).

They respect these norms not merely because these are what their own
communities follow, but also because they think these norms make
constitutional government, liberty, and classical republicanism
possible. If you have to pick between the two, defend the norms every
day, since temporary cessations of liberty will naturally recover if
they’re still in place, whereas the institutions without the norms will
become meaningless: the Constitution will become a pointless scrap of
paper to which people pay only lip service, and constitutional
government will become bureaucracy hiding behind the fig leaf of a
separation of powers.

Where this otherwise perfectly respectable, conservative pride
in Western culture atrophies into white nationalism when the person
holding it comes to believe that respect for liberal Western
civilization is inextricably tied to one’s race. One particularly
irreverent white nationalist YouTube songster sums this attitude up in a video mocking libertarians: “It’s not that freedom is bad/But only whites think it’s rad.”

Moreover, and this cannot be stated enough: these people genuinely
believe that to be proud of the history of Western European
accomplishment, and one’s own descent from the people responsible, is
taboo in modern America. If you look at what cultural studies
departments, much of modern media, left-wing college students, and the
crazy wing of the Democratic Party says, this is probably at least
partially accurate. Unfortunately, however, it’s not just leftists who
are responsible for the rise of white nationalism in communities like
Sylvia’s. We conservatives bear some blame too, though in this case,
largely because of misunderstandings of how our own behavior is
perceived.

It’s a fairly honest assessment, although I would say that it is not a misunderstanding of how conservative behavior is perceived, but rather a straightforward failure of conservatism to defend or conserve Western civilization. Conservatism is not, as Red Eagle and I chronicled in Cuckservative: How “Conservatives” Betrayed America, a set of principles or a coherent ideology. It is an attitude, and more, it is an attitude that is intrinsically incapable of holding its ground against the forces that assail both Western civilization and the various white nations that built and value it.

Now, I am not a white nationalist for the obvious reason that I am a red nationalist. Also, and more importantly, there is no white nation; only in America can anyone even contemplate the concept. When one lives in Europe, it is considerably more clear that the English nation is not the German nation is not the Dutch nation is not the Italian nation.

However, just as the Jews who historically considered themselves German discovered that it didn’t matter what they considered themselves to be, many Americans of various European descents are learning that in the eyes of those who hate and envy them, they are nothing more than “white”. And, as Holt observes, it should be no surprise that they are beginning to band together and respond to the tribalist attacks on them with a tribalism of their own.

But whether it is intellectually coherent or not, white nationalism is entirely Constitutional. Freedom of Association is an unalienable and Constitutional right. Diversity, imposed and involuntary, is intrinsically anti-Constitutional, anti-American, anti-human rights, and anti-Western Civilization.

Perhaps it takes a Jew to understand that if white nationalism is immoral, so is Jewish nationalism and the State of Israel.

So brave

Lee Stranahan courageously resigns from Breitbart:

My Statement: Why I Have Resigned From Breitbart News
by Lee Stranahan

Tonight I informed the management at Breitbart News of my immediate resignation.

As a close personal friend of Andrew Breitbart, I am wicked sad to announce that as of 12:01am Eastern Time, I said “I divorce Breitbart News” three times which officially renders any contract we had null and void, including that thing I signed voluntarily about non-disparagement.

Andrew Breitbart centered his life on just one mission: fight the bullies. His only stated purpose was: more voices, not less. The solo creed he lived by was: e priebus unum. More than anything, be believed in: loyalty. The thing he cared about to the exclusion of all other things was: ‘Merica. His top priorty was: family.

That singular goal has been betrayed.

This sad chain of events leading up to me began in New York City, where Donald Trump’s campaign manager came out of nowhere and yanked me to the ground with a touch that I believe he delivered from several thousand miles away. He seems to have an invisible touch.

Rather than supporting me, Breitbart News instead published an article by me. Then, Breitbart News completely ignored my plight by calling on Mr. Lewandowsky to apologize. After that slap in face to my feeling’s face, they ignored the material that I leaked about the incident to other publications until they wrote about it immediately. I was shocked when they betrayed me by once again calling for an apology by Lewandowsky. Shockingly, at no point during my ordeal did Breitbart News refer to Donald Trump as “Hitler.”

I hope you will all join me in lighting a candle for this brave, brave man, who has suffered so much at Mr. Trump’s hands.