Peeple is fair play

I’m very amused by the widespread fear of this new app that will permit people to be rated being expressed:

You can already rate restaurants, hotels, movies, college classes, government agencies and bowel movements online.

So the most surprising thing about Peeple — basically Yelp, but for humans — may be the fact that no one has yet had the gall to launch something like it.

When the app does launch, probably in late November, you will be able to assign reviews and one- to five-star ratings to everyone you know: your exes, your co-workers, the old guy who lives next door. You can’t opt out — once someone puts your name in the Peeple system, it’s there unless you violate the site’s terms of service. And you can’t delete bad or biased reviews — that would defeat the whole purpose.

Imagine every interaction you’ve ever had suddenly open to the scrutiny of the Internet public.

Congratulations, world. Now everyone online will discover what my life has been like since 2001. And to be honest, it’s really not a big deal as long as you don’t have a problem with people not liking you. You’ll soon find that you are defined by your enemies as well as by your friends, and the more idiotic your enemies are, the better you look to the sort of intelligent, open-minded individuals whose opinions actually matter.

I welcome Peeple, as I’ve never been a fan of the cowards who think they can attack you because you are a public figure, but then start whining that it is unfair and you are “doxxing” them by posting links to their online, publicly accessible posts the moment you strike back at them. But lack of an audience is not synonymous with privacy and the moment you post anything online about anyone, you are a fair target for their online reprisals.

The $90M crash of Star Citizen

Lizzy Finnegan opens the floodgates on what is looking like one of the biggest crash-and-burns in the game industry since 38 Studios and Flagship, if not Atari’s ET.

Crowdfunding in general has seen a harsh decline in consumer trust in the past year, particularly when more prominent names are behind the projects. Mighty No. 9 has seen repeated delays, and fans voiced concerns when Shenmue 3 reopened crowdfunding after more than tripling their initial goal.

On September 22, independent developer Derek Smart penned a lengthy blog post that called into question Star Citizen, a title from game designer and producer Chris Roberts that was successfully funded on Kickstarter, raising over $2 million through the popular crowdfunding website. The game raised over $89 million total through a variety of sources, and remains the most crowdfunded video game project of all time.

Smart has been regularly critical of Roberts’ company Cloud Imperium Games, subsidiary Roberts Space Industries, and the development of Star Citizen, writing a total of five bulky blog posts since July. In these posts, Smart questions the allocation of funds, delays in the game’s release, changes to the format and features, silent changes to the Terms of Service agreement, and the ability for the company to produce the game at all.

Not all backers share Smart’s concerns, with a Change.org petition demanding that Smart “immediately desist in your ongoing actions against “RSI” (CIG) and Star Citizen.” The petition has garnered over 2,000 signatures.

In August, Smart wrote of his intention to send a “demand letter” to Cloud Imperium Games insisting on a “complete forensic accounting” of the money that has been spent on the game, as well as a solid release date and a refund option for anyone who wants one. Smart offered to pay for the forensic accounting out of his own pocket. In addition, he said that failure to deliver on any of those demands would lead to the immediate filing of a class-action lawsuit. That demand letter was sent on August 21.

Lawyers for CIG reportedly responded in a letter, which Smart shared online, stating that Smart had been a backer for the project, contributing $250 in 2012. The letter continued, stating that Smart “commenced his defamatory actions in early July 2015 on his blog – without any basis or backup, and with many links to his own game in development – that the “Star Citizen” project was a fraud and that it was never going to be delivered.” The money that Smart contributed to the project had previously been refunded to him, a refund that was not requested but rather initiated by CIG. The letter then points to Smart’s career and financial issues, accuses him of “desperate efforts to harm [Star Citizen] for his own publicity gains,” and concluded with the assertion that Smart has no legal basis and the demands were being rejected.

One major point of concern includes the seemingly silent alterations to the Terms of Service. In total, a revision to the Terms of Service includes 178 removals and 199 additions, and was instated after the initial release window for Star Citizen had already passed. The original ToS that backers agreed to when contributing the project was ToS v1.1 listed on the RSI website, and stated that if the game failed to be delivered within 12 months of the original Kickstarter estimated delivery date, refunds would be available. At the time, the project held a November 2014 release date, making the non-delivery period November 2015. This was changed on February 1, 2015 to ToS v1.2 to reflect a new timeframe of 18 months. The anticipated delivery date had also changed at this time, to the end of 2016.

“This company was given millions of dollars to deliver a product. They have not delivered that product. And in all likelihood, the company – and project – will both fail before they even get to delivering even 50% of what’s promised,” Smart asserted in his most recent post. “There isn’t a single pro developer on this planet, who after looking at what has thus far been delivered, compared to what was promised up to $65m funded, will say that they can deliver this product within the next three years.”

As it happens, I have been casually acquainted with Chris Roberts since the Wing Commander days and I consider him to be one of the game design greats. Along with Richard Garriott, John Romero, and Steve Fawkner, he is one of my game design heroes. I don’t merely like and respect Chris, I look up to him. The five or six hours I spent talking with him, John Romero, and Epic’s current audio director over drinks at the Santa Clara Westin one evening was one of the most fascinating, informative, and educational experiences of my life… and Chris paid the entire $700+ bill himself. I am still an Origin fan and Wing Commander is one of my all-time favorite games; I even gave Ender a fancy joystick last Christmas just so he could play through the first two games and the secret missions, which he greatly enjoyed doing. I was absolutely delighted when I heard that Star Citizen was in the works.

As it happens, I also had the responsibility of going through Chris’s plans in great detail when Star Citizen was still a Wing Commander reboot with a license from EA and a $25M budget. I ran into one of the guys from the fund this summer and we talked about whether the top man’s decision to reject it had been a mistake in light of Chris’s unprecedented crowdsourcing success; it is now looking as if the decision to not fund the game may have been the right call after all. I strongly recommended that we do it; I still think that an updated Wing Commander would have been hugely successful as it was originally conceived.

At one point, Chris and I even discussed the idea of Star Citizen making use of my Psy-AI design for wingmen, but I didn’t seriously pursue it, partly because I couldn’t tell if Chris’s interest was genuine or if he was simply being polite, and partly because the new game was bigger in scope and I didn’t see the focus being on wingmen the way it was in Wing Commander. And as time has gone on, and the scope of the project continued to grow, my dev-spidey sense began to twitch just like every other experienced producer’s has even though I wasn’t paying close attention to it anymore.

“Without disrespect to anyone, I’m just going to say it: it is my opinion that, this game, as has been pitched, will never get made. Ever. There isn’t a single publisher or developer on this planet who could build this game as pitched, let alone for anything less than $150 million. The original vision which I backed in 2012? Yes, that was totally doable. This new vision? Not a chance. The technical scope of this game surpasses GTAV, not to mention the likes of Halo. Do you have any idea what those games cost to make and how long they took? Do you know how many games which cost $50 million to make took almost five years to release? And they were nowhere [as big] in scope as Star Citizen?”
– Derek Smart, 6 July 2015

Every producer and executive producer knows the feeling of a project that is beginning to slip its date. And every producer and executive producer learns to distinguish between a game that is going to be late and a game that is simply never going to be the game it was promised to be. Unfortunately, when seen from the outside at this point, Star Citizen could not look more like the latter if it was called Battlecruiser 2015 AD.

Derek Smart has a reputation for spectacular failure in the industry, but it’s not really a fair one, and more importantly, that particular failure took place a long time ago. Nor was it anywhere nearly as bad as most people who have only heard about it secondhand tend to believe. And one very significant thing that the Star Citizen defenders are neglecting to note is that besides David Braben, there is no one in the industry who is better suited to recognize the danger signs of a large-scale space combat development project going awry than Derek. Now others are starting to look more closely into the situation, Forbes, for one, and unfortunately, Chris Roberts’s response to Smart’s observations and Finnigan’s article sounds a lot more like messenger-killing than allaying what increasingly appear to be substantive fears for what has become a gargantuan project.

The problem, I suspect, is not uncommon in the game industry. Chris is a visionary and a brilliant game designer. He is not a producer despite having successfully produced games in the past. But as too many developers have done before him, he appears to have effectively combined the lead designer’s role with the lead producer’s role into a single Game Director’s role for which he and many other designers – including me – are temperamentally unsuited, and as a consequence the project appears to have gone off the rails as a direct result of too much money combined with too many good ideas and too little focus on actually implementing those ideas and getting things done.

One thing game developers scraping by and wishing for more resources need to recognize is that funding is as much problem as panacea. Just as the crude state of early graphics technology partially dictated the gameplay and made it easier to focus by virtue of its limitations, a lack of money forces the development focus that is always needed to complete a project. Too much money means no strict externally imposed limitations, and if those limitations are not internally imposed by the producer, the project will tend to grow in scope and scale before collapsing.

I sincerely hope that’s not the case with Star Citizen. The success of Star Citizen after such a brilliant crowdfunding campaign would be absolutely wonderful for the entire industry and could launch a much-needed new era of creativity and innovation. The success of Star Citizen is in the material interest of every professional game developer. But after more than two decades in the game industry, I’ve learned to recognize the danger signs of a derailing development project and more than a few of them are observable around RSI of late.

Perhaps he didn’t see the sign

I wonder how many more “gun-free zone” failures are necessary before people begin to conclude that perhaps mass disarmament is not the ideal way to avoid large numbers of victims:

Up to 15 dead–
Several more injured…
WCNC reported:

    A shooter who opened fire at at Umpqua Community College Thursday in southern Oregon injured as many as 20 people before he was downed, a Douglas County official said.

    KATU-TV reports that Oregon State Police say there were multiple fatalities, but that could not be immediately confirmed.

    County commissioner Chris Boice told KGW-TV that 15 to 20 people were injured in the melee, including one woman shot in the chest.

Shooter is down…

People worry that lots of people carrying openly will lead to a “Wild West” situation, forgetting that four times more people were shot today in this Oregon “gun-free” zone than in the highest annual body count Tombstone ever saw, which was five.

“In cattle towns such as Tombstone or Dodge City, the average number of homicides was only 1.5 or 2 a year, according to path-breaking research by Robert R. Dykstra of SUNY-Albany.”

UPDATE: Mike Cernovich smells a rat:

Something is up. Shooter is Muslim or transgender. Otherwise we’d have a name and race by now.  

“The shooter then asked people to stand up and state their religion and then started firing.”

Sounds Muslim, as it was a feature of previous attacks in Kenya and other places, but could be atheist. The fact that the police and media are sitting on the shooter’s identity tends to indicate the former; they haven’t previously shown any tendency to resist identifying atheists.

Case in point

I think it’s rather cute that SJWs still think that any shaming technique has even a ghost of a chance of influencing my behavior in the slightest. See, that’s the problem with their approach. Once you throw everything and the kitchen sink at someone and they’re still standing, absolutely nothing you do has any impact whatsoever.

The Notorious S.J.W. @InnerPartisan
Oh hey, on his blog, failed author Vox Day is now publishing personal information of people who wrote negative reviews of his latest “book”.

This is a beautiful example of SJW behavior at its most blatant.

“failed author”: has published more than a dozen books, has been nominated for multiple awards in more than one genre, currently has had the #1 bestselling book in its category for more than a month. This is not only not failure, it is considerably better than the average author manages.

SJWs always lie!

“is now publishing”: Classic point-and-shriek. Of course, everyone knows I do this, I’ve been doing it for more than two years now. Not only will I continue to do it, but I will use my contacts at Amazon to ferret out anyone I can’t readily identify on my own in order to expose them. I’ll even make sure the SJW’s employer learns what they’ve been doing and learns about all your questionable online habits.

“negative reviews”: Obviously false. I don’t object to negative reviews. I object to negative non-reviews.

SJWs always lie!


“his latest ‘book'”: It’s not merely a book, it’s a bestselling and very highly-rated book. What is the point of claiming a book is not book? Not only does The Notorious S.J.W. contradict himself – how can I be a “failed author” and still publish a “latest” book – but he’s willing to deny objective reality in order to attempt to minimize and marginalize.

SJWs always lie!

I appreciate The Notorious S.J.W. for being willing to advertise my latest book by demonstrating, in real life, the very concepts I am attempting to elucidate and explain in SJWs ALWAYS LIE: Taking Down the Thought Police.

We also learned that Mike Brendan is a racist who hates Native Americans and Mexicans. He gives them “a two middle fingers down.” Mike Brendan is a racist who race polices minorities on Twitter and unminorities them.

Put a fork in the Republicans

They’re done. They’re not only sell-outs, they’re never going to be seriously competitive with the Democratic Party because apparently they have hamstrung themselves and agreed to never challenge voter fraud:

The following is compiled from an account on The Judicial View, a legal website specializing in court decision research and alerts, and from “Democratic National Committee v Republican National Committee,” Case No. 09-4615.

In 1981, during the gubernatorial election in New Jersey (NJ), a lawsuit was brought against the RNC, the NJ Republican State Committee (RSC), and three individuals (John A. Kelly, Ronald Kaufman, and Alex Hurtado), accusing them of violating the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA), 42 U.S.C. §§ 1971, 1973, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States.

The lawsuit was brought by the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the NJ Democratic State Committee (DSC), and two individuals (Virginia L. Peggins and Lynette Monroe).

The lawsuit alleged that:

    The RNC and RSC targeted minority voters in New Jersey in an effort to intimidate them.

    The RNC created a voter challenge list by mailing sample ballots to individuals in precincts with a high percentage of racial or ethnic minority registered voters. Then the RNC put the names of individuals whose postcards were returned as undeliverable on a list of voters to challenge at the polls.

    The RNC enlisted the help of off-duty sheriffs and police officers with “National Ballot Security Task Force” armbands, to intimidate voters by standing at polling places in minority precincts during voting. Some of the officers allegedly wore firearms in a visible manner.

To settle the lawsuit, in 1982 — while Ronald Reagan was President (1981-1989) — the RNC and RSC entered into an agreement or Consent Decree, which is national in scope, limiting the RNC’s ability to engage or assist in voter fraud prevention unless the RNC obtains the court’s approval in advance. The following is what the RNC and RSC, in the Consent Decree, agreed they would do:

[I]n the future, in all states and territories of the United States:

(a) comply with all applicable state and federal laws protecting the rights of duly qualified citizens to vote for the candidate(s) of their choice;

(b) in the event that they produce or place any signs which are part of ballot security activities, cause said signs to disclose that they are authorized or sponsored by the party committees and any other committees participating with the party committees;

(c) refrain from giving any directions to or permitting their agents or employees to remove or deface any lawfully printed and placed campaign materials or signs;

(d) refrain from giving any directions to or permitting their employees to campaign within restricted polling areas or to interrogate prospective voters as to their qualifications to vote prior to their entry to a polling place;

(e) refrain from undertaking any ballot security activities in polling places or election districts where the racial or ethnic composition of such districts is a factor in the decision to conduct, or the actual conduct of, such activities there and where a purpose or significant effect of such activities is to deter qualified voters from voting; and the conduct of such activities disproportionately in or directed toward districts that have a substantial proportion of racial or ethnic populations shall be considered relevant evidence of the existence of such a factor and purpose;

(f) refrain from having private personnel deputized as law enforcement personnel in connection with ballot security activities.

The RNC also agreed that the RNC, its agents, servants, and employees would be bound by the Decree, “whether acting directly or indirectly through other party committees.”

As modified in 1987, the Consent Decree defined “ballot security activities” to mean “ballot integrity, ballot security or other efforts to prevent or remedy vote fraud.”

Since 1982, that Consent Decree has been renewed every year by the original judge, Carter appointee District Judge Dickinson R. Debevoise, now 88 years old. Long retired, Debevoise comes back yearly for the sole purpose of renewing his 1982 order for another year.

Do you seriously believe any party that would agree to such handcuffs is even remotely capable of defending American interests?

The end of the 1st Amendment

Don’t think that the government is going to protect you from the global jihad. Not only is the US government resolutely refusing to go to war with ISIS, but it is actively importing the terrorists and settling them in your cities. This detailed recounting of the attack on the Westgate Mall is sobering indeed.

On Saturday, Sept. 21, 2013, the Somali militant group al-Shabab carried out an assault on Kenya’s Westgate Mall in one of the worst terrorist attacks in the country’s history. A group of young gunmen stalked the halls and stores of the upscale Nairobi shopping center, and methodically murdered at least 67 people. News of the attack seized the world’s attention, dominating international media coverage for days.

But much of that reporting was confused and contradictory, mirroring the litany of false and misleading statements made by Kenyan authorities. There were between 10 and 15 gunmen, the interior minister said. Two or three of them were Americans, said another cabinet minister. Together they took hostages, used heavy explosives, and pulled off a three-day siege, according to other government sources. Except none of these things were true.

Far from a dramatic three-day standoff, the assault on the Westgate Mall lasted only a few hours, almost all of it taking place before Kenyan security forces even entered the building. When they finally did, it was only to shoot at one another before going on an armed looting spree that resulted in the collapse of the rear of the building, destroyed with a rocket-propelled grenade. And there were only four gunmen, all of whom were buried in the rubble, along with much of the forensic evidence.

During the roughly three-and-a-half hours that the killers were loose in the mall, there was virtually no organized government response. But while Kenyan officials prevaricated, an unlikely coalition of licensed civilian gun owners and brave, resourceful individual police officers took it upon themselves to mount a rescue effort. Pieced together over 10 months from more than three dozen interviews with survivors, first responders, security officers, and investigators, the following account brings their story to life for the first time since the horrific terrorist attack occurred exactly two years ago.

I impression that the war in the USA will start when an attack of similar scale takes place in the USA and Americans begin to respond in kind despite the best efforts of the federal government to defend their attackers. There is no assimilation taking place; observe that one of the four Somalis involved in the attack grew up in Norway.

The First Amendment will be rejected by the American public long before the Second. As it has been said, the Constitution is not a suicide pact and few Americans will stand by freedom of religion when doing so jeopardizes their right to life, liberty, and happiness. Between the Scylla of godless pedophiles and the Charybdis of Sharia, the USA is no longer a society fit for a First Amendment.

After the Breivik shootings in Norway, I said that future Europeans generations will likely regard him as a national hero akin to William Tell and Vlad Tepes. In light of the way events are beginning to take shape, I may have been in error. They may well make him a saint.

Jews aren’t white

We are reliably informed by the Senior Rabbi at Adas Israel that Jews are not only not white, it is racist and offensive to suggest that they are.

Even today, some of us remember being called anti-Semitic names, having pennies thrown at us or being beaten up because we are Jewish. But that young woman I spoke with this summer, and most of her young adult Jewish peers today, can hardly fathom being singled out, being treated as “other,” because of their Jewishness. And the main reason why anti-Semitism is no longer mainstream in our society is because sometime in the last half century, we convinced America that we, too, are white….

The brilliance of being Jewish, though, is that we stubbornly refuse to fit into any social construct of power or oppression. We are simply Ivri’im, people from “somewhere else,” people who struggle with God and justice, who demand that the rest of the world does, too, and see every human life as sacred because we are all in the image of God. And the truth is, we have never belonged to one race alone. The Torah tells us that we left Egypt with the “erev rav,” with a mixed multitude of peoples. Around the world there are Jews of color, Asian Jews, Jews of all kinds. The idea that Jews are white is not only ridiculous, it’s offensive to who we really are!

So Jews are no longer white. Do try to keep up. It sounds as if Rabbi Steinlauf is attempting to prepare for the New America that is no longer a white country. That, or he is following the lead of the Learned Elders of Wye and is preparing to jump ship into a non-white nation as a successfully diversified America sinks into economic collapse and civil war.

I wonder if it has ever occurred to Rabbi Steinlauf that it’s not his business what the rest of the world elects to struggle with. And I can’t help but note that the Jews appear to have done a brilliant job of fitting into a “social construct of power” in Israel. I guess it’s a little easier to stop stubbornly refusing to fit into those social constructs when you finally get to the top.

SJWs shift the Narrative

Classic virtue signaling trigger manipulation. The Left is now being pulled into defending pedophiles by hardcore SJWs at Salon:

I’m a pedophile, you’re the monsters: My week inside the vile right-wing hate machine. My pedophilia essay outraged the right. My attempt to humanize a real problem brought out their nastiest rage

My article
“I’m A Pedophile, But Not a Monster”
was published last week and it has been a whirlwind since. I’ve spent
days doing radio interviews, even an appearance on TV (HLN’s Dr. Drew on Call), but mainly just answering the hundreds of emails that have poured in. Yes, the vast majority of them have been supportive.

While
there has been a visible backlash, predominantly from the political
right, in private it has been a different story. This piece has
generated debate and controversy all over the world, well beyond my
wildest imaginings. When I first approached Salon with the idea, my
editor was receptive, but throughout the process of refining the piece,
she asked me if I really understood what I was getting into. Her concern
was palpable. I assured her I did, which was mostly true; I had no idea
it would blow up as quickly as it did, and the bigger it got, the more
of a tempest it became. Even so, I have no regrets. I knew when I wrote
it that it was going to be an important piece, something unique and
necessary. And so it was.

Remember, SJWs are all about the Narrative. And what we’re seeing here, as many have recognized, is the SJWs deciding that it’s time to move on from Bruce Jenner and “transphobia” in order to start normalizing pedophilia. Because he “outraged the Right” and brought out “their nastiest rage”, that is the signal that his position is the virtuous one. As for the pedophile’s claims to have never touched a child sexually, do recall the truism: SJWs always lie.

We will see all the same arguments that we’ve seen since homosexuality was normalized. It’s not their fault, love is love, no one is harmed, you’re a bigot and on the wrong side of history if you dare to judge them on the basis of a sky fairy, and so forth. These are the early days, and we’ll know they’ve been officially normalized in SJW eyes when McRapey hires Nickerson to do some art for him in order to signal his virtue.

But we are not the previous generation and we do not fall so readily for their moral modification sequence or the ever-shifting narrative. Our answer is a straightforward one. We reject tolerance, we reject pedophilia, and we reject pedophiles. They are monsters and there is no place for them in any rational or moral society.

Reviewing the reviewer

It’s amazing how predictable SJWs can be and how easy it is to smoke them out. I posted this tweet about SJWs Always Lie this morning:

Vox Day @voxday
172 five-star reviews in a month and the #1 bestseller in Political Philosophy. What more do you need to know?

Which quickly prompted this “review’ by one Jeremy Lance Software Engineer, Educator, Project Manager, Utter Geek, Jack of All Trades (Master of a Few), who works at Perficient in the Greater Detroit Area and is on the Penguicon Board of Directors.

I feel like I’ve seen better delivery mechanisms for these thoughts on …
ByJeremy K. Lance on September 30, 2015

Not especially well written, and not very well thought out. Even if I agreed with the subject matter, I feel like I’ve seen better delivery mechanisms for these thoughts on bus benches and bathroom stalls.

I feel like I’ve read more convincing fake reviews by people who don’t speak English and have never heard of the book being reviewed. Of course, Jeremy Lance is precisely the sort of SF-SJW loser you’d expect to engage in Amazon activism. He’s a tech nerd with a blog who isn’t very intelligent, went to community college, and just happens to be – surprise, surprise – an overweight alcoholic with drug problems prone to depression and “suicide”.

It was during this narrow window of my life that I found myself sitting in the bedroom that I rented from a friend holding the shotgun he kept beneath his bed and crying. It was a place I found myself in a lot around that time. Several times each week—sometimes several times in a single day—I would find myself sitting with that gun simply trying to work up the courage to use it. For weeks I kept returning to that familiar position, wanting so much to no longer be alive and being trapped in life by a fear of literally and figuratively pulling the trigger.

On this occasion, though, I was committed. So much so that I had written my note, had dressed in the clothes that I wanted to be found in, and had gone and sat in the bathtub with the shower curtain pulled closed—I certainly didn’t want to make my exit more of an imposition on anybody else than it needed to be, they’d already put up with so much.

So brave. Thank you for this. Fucking Gamma drama queens. Those “suicide attempts” sound about as genuine as the “book review”. I’ll bet he found himself in that place a lot. For weeks, he kept returning to that position, waiting for someone to find him and stop him in the nick of time.

Anyhow, if you happen to work at or with Perficient, you should probably be aware that Jeremy K. Lance is a mentally unstable SJW. Can a responsible corporation really afford to take the risk of continuing to employ an individual like Jeremy K. Lance who is known to have access to firearms, to abuse drugs and alchohol, and who observably poses a risk to himself and others?

I was a bit amused to see Lance call himself “the David Foster Wallace of software development” when he’s quite clearly not qualified to call himself that.

UPDATE: The icing on the cake:

Milo Yiannopoulos ‏@Nero
@voxday You are cruel, vindictive, mean and heartless. Never change!  

Russian airstrikes in Syria

Vladimir Putin was not bluffing:

US officials are now widely briefing that Russia has started carrying out airstrikes in Syria, following a vote by the Moscow’s upper house of parliament this morning approving military action in Syria.

Valentina Matvienko, the speaker of the Russian upper house of
parliament, says senators approved Vladimir Putin’s permission for
airstrikes in order to crush the “hydra” of terrorism:
 
We proceeded from the fact that first of all it is in the interests of national security of Russia for many reasons. Because
if today this hydra is not crushed at its roots, where it is already at
war, if we do not destroy “Islamic State” today, Isil could come to
threaten the entire world, including Europe and Russia.

This is very interesting from a grand strategic perspective. Note that Russia is portraying itself as a defender of Europe against Islam, and an ally in that fight, whereas the USA has been actively fostering the Islamic invasion of Europe.