A Spacedad appears! @SuperSpacedad Yes Gamergate, it’s clearly other people making you look bad and not your own fault. Here’s your bottle and bonnet
Exposing Jihad @XposingJihad @SuperSpacedad Wouldve been more effective you hit post before screencapping
Isn’t it fascinating how we’re still supposed to believe #GamerGate is all about harassing a few individuals despite the fact that no one has mentioned them in weeks? The SJWs are so desperate for evidence that they have to manufacture it themselves.
Remember, rabbits always lie. They have no sense of honor or self-respect.
UPDATE: Speaking of fascinating, we have a real rabbit here. Never heard of the guy before, so he must be blocking #GamerGate en masse while simultaneously trying to spoof us.
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The only good thing about The Hobbit III is that it means Peter Jackson and his two-woman Harem of Stank is done squatting and urinating upon the text of Tolkien.
It’s a damn shame that the three Hobbit films feature so little of the titular hobbit.
Martin Freeman has established himself as a quietly great actor with serious dramatic and comedic chops, and his scenes in these movies have consistently been the best thing about the films. Bilbo Baggins is the only character capable of eliciting genuine reactions from the audience, which is what Peter Jackson’s bloated Hobbit trilogy needed more than anything—Bilbo’s scenes form the kernel of what could have been a smaller, quieter, but ultimately more narratively successful series of films, one where Bilbo’s personal journey isn’t swallowed whole by loud Lord of the Rings-style battle sequences.
Other than Freeman’s wonderful, quiet little scenes and a bare handful of others, Battle of the Five Armies is one big two-hour-and-24-minute-long argument against splitting the book up into three films.
The disappointing thing is that Jackson actually got off to a pretty good start. He did a wonderful job bringing the scenery of Middle Earth to life. The Shire and the hobbits were excellent. The first thing he really got wrong, in my opinion, was Arwen Evensong, followed by Rivendell and Elrond. But Arwen was a harbinger for Jackson’s lack of respect for the text, which only got worse as the movies went on, culminating in the insane decision to completely vivisect and spread out The Hobbit over three cash-grabbing vehicles.
Verdict: “These movies aren’t Star Wars prequel-level unredeemable, but both as a follow up to the Lord of the Rings movies and an adaptation of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit, this new trilogy misses the mark in just about every possible way.”
The movies were not a complete loss. The first three were genuinely enjoyable despite the “improvements” to Tolkien’s masterpiece. Perhaps in another generation, a filmmaker will do the sort of justice to his books that the producers of A Game of Thrones have done to George Martin’s.
Anonymous Conservative observes a rabbit strategy at work in the Mayor of New York City’s response to the killing of two NYPD officers:
Two NYPD cops killed in retaliation for Eric Garner’s death, while DeBlasio observes from safety. When I see this, I see the transvestite cuttlefish seizing mating opportunities, while competitors are occupied fighting each other. DeBlasio is a hard core rabbit, who no doubt dislikes the K-selected culture of aggression, competitiveness, and loyalty you find in K-selected populations such as the Police. He seeks the support of the angry and aggressive in-grouping class of the black community. At the same time, he tries to appear neutral to police, to avoid open conflict with them. Yet by his actions, he fosters acrimony, to the point that the Police even begin to out-group him.
Remember, rabbits never want to fight. They always want someone else to fight you on their behalf. That’s why Yama is trying to present himself, however impossibly, as a victim, despite the fact that he is the individual responsible for cyberstalking me for the last 56 months, in addition to many other individuals over the last 11 years.
I have been a fan of William Gibson ever since reading how Johnny was a very technical boy. Even as his novels have gotten more literary, and less coherent, I’ve always enjoyed reading them. So, I was quite pleased when The Peripheral came out recently; a new William Gibson novel is always something to be celebrated in my book.
And it’s good. The novel well-written, the plot is intricate, the sensibilities are cool (if perhaps indicative of being influenced by Hollywood’s new fascination with the rural American South), and, as always, Gibson presents a vision of the future that is somehow more plausible than the average science fiction writer’s. His skill, I think, is to present something between dystopia and the present; perhaps one might describe his perspective as dystrendic. Or in this case, dystrendic to catastrophically dystrendic, as the book spans a small spectrum of futures for reasons I would find difficult to describe even if it wasn’t a spoiler of sorts.
Gibson’s style, never florid, has become increasingly sparse as his disinclination to provide detailed description has now stripped down his dialogue. While this has the effect of making the conversations flow more realistically, the combination of the two frequently leaves the reader slightly confused as to what is going on. It’s very important to pay attention to even small details, because that’s all you’re going to get; he’s not going to go back and explain things for you. And while I rather like this approach, it’s perhaps not optimal for a book with a plot that would already be challenging to follow.
The story is about a young woman who witnesses a real murder while in a virtual environment. The story expands considerably from there, and since there is no way to reasonably do it justice in less than two or three pages, I won’t even try. As is often his wont, Gibson bring in elements of technology, art, and shadowy corporations in a sophisticated manner.
However, after a year of confronting the growing divide between Pink SF and Blue SF, it is readily apparent that Gibson is of the Pink school, and to his detriment. He is among the best of the Pink school, to be sure, but The Peripheral wind up being shortchanged by Gibson’s resort to several Pink SF conventions.
Chief among them is a mostly non-portrayal of religion that is retarded to the point of being embarrassing. We are supposed to believe that the complete collection of rural Southerners, including a number of military veterans, are as completely and utterly irreligious as wealthy elite Brits on the future arts scene. Moreover, there isn’t a single mention of football… in the American South of the 2030s. The only nominally religious individuals are the fictional version of the Westboro Baptist Church, although to Gibson’s credit, he recognizes their lawyerly activism for the financial scam it is.
However, even their nominal Christianity leads to an unfortunate demonstration of Gibson’s moral vacuity, as he literally equates silent, public, and entirely legal protest that takes a judgmental position with gassing a large group of people with lethal psychotropic drugs. Because doing the latter would make them “assholes” like the former. This was, to put it mildly, an astonishing ethical metric.
The worst aspect of the book, however, is the phoned-in characters. He gets the military aspects more or less correct, but completely fails on the Southern ones. And the female protagonist doesn’t even rise to the usual level of a man with breasts, she is little more than the book’s Macguffin, a character sans agency to whom things happen, and things more incredible than Cinderella. She is often praised for possessing attributes that she doesn’t show in any way; it’s almost Mary-Sueish at times. Throw in the fact that all the bad guys die instantly whenever shot at by the female superagent, who eventually shows up to absolutely no reader’s surprise and outperforms even the Marine veterans, and the reader occasionally finds himself dismissively rolling his eyes.
I also have to note that happy ending is so prodigiously stupid with regards to the characters that it boggles the mind. It gives absolutely nothing of interest away to note that the entire mixed-sex group, none of whom have shown ANY sexual interest in each other throughout the entire book, abruptly pair up and live happily ever after. Ye cats.
It is a pity that Gibson appears to be unable to turn his keen eye for observation towards the points where his ideological assumptions depart from reality, as it would have made for an objectively better book. if he had been able to do so The Peripheral isn’t a bad science fiction read, but it will be quickly forgotten, and William Gibson could be, and should be, better than that.
Specifically, The Book of Feasts & Seasons. You’ll want to read the whole thing:
This week I’m reviewing a title that’s seasonal in nature, although the seasons it deals with occur across an entire year rather than a small part of the year. I’ve not read much of Mr. Wright’s work, but what I have has been better written and more original than much of what’s currently being published.
The same is true here. These stories have a great deal of depth, both in the characters they’re about and the concepts with which they deal….Wright is an author who isn’t afraid to delve into deep topics. Some of the themes here dealt with the nature of God, forgiveness, kindness, racism, sacrifice, and second chances. A number of authors these days try to deal with serious themes and issues in their fiction. Few are as accomplished or as entertaining as Mr. Wright.
The Book of Feasts & Seasons is one of the best and most thought provoking books I’ve read in the past year. I highly recommend it.
It’s perhaps worth noting that Mr. Wright’s The Book of Feasts & Seasonshas a 4.9/5 rating. But I find it a little surprising that of the six stories the reviewer deemed worthy of mention, none of them were the one I consider to be the best, namely, “The Parliament of Beasts and Birds”.
@Pure, Impure thought this piece of art was worth noting. I’m not sure why, but then, I am not a visual artist. But I always find it worthwhile to discover what the would-be critic finds praiseworthy before either dismissing his criticism or taking it seriously. And while I am not a visual artist, I thought the self-portrait looked familiar. I was, in fact, correct.
The amusing thing was that when I contacted the artist to confirm Pure, Impure’s identity, she initially pretended not to know of him. She even commented that he sounded like “a real dick”. Unfortunately, it was not possible to simply take her at her word given that one arrives at the same artist’s Tumblr account by following a) Yama’s LiveJournal, b) @pure, impure’s Twitter account, or c) her own LinkedIn account.
It appears, however, that she is a mere acquaintance of the individual in question, and not an actual friend. And she did appear to have been previously unfamiliar with his online activities.
In any event, several other individuals have already agreed to provide affadavits concerning their cyberstalking by the individual known variously as: Yamamanama, Dan Picaro, Andthestarshine, Kasa the Wicked, Nikola, Alauda, Arachnothera, Beardsley McTurbanhead, Chokley Carmichael, Clamps, Comrade Questions, Daphis, Daphnis, Freddy Foreshadowing, Luscinia, Luscinia Hafez, Starshine, Sunlight, Will, Will Le Fey, Yama, Yama the Space Fish, Gobbler, Count Bullets-ula, N.T.A., Hazel-Jeu, Lilacanddatura, Phoenixwing667, Darkprophet667, and @Pure, Impure.
If you have been cyberstalked by the individual using any of the above names and would like to see it stopped, please email me for instructions. And for those who ask why I am bothering to address this matter, the answer is that 56 months is a sufficiently long time to have put up with this criminal harassment and it takes me considerably less time to place a few calls and do a little research than it does to delete the stalker’s comments almost every single day. Also, it is considerably more entertaining.
And to Yama himself, this:
I’m now giving you the opportunity to turn yourself in, admit your crimes, and ask for leniency. If you do, I will speak up for you on your behalf and welcome you here in your true identity. If you do not, no mercy will be shown to you from those you have harassed for the last 11 years. Do not think I’m the only one involved here. I have contacted many of those you have harassed in the past, and several of them are quite willing to swear out affadavits against you.
I’m not bluffing, Yama. This is really happening. I don’t know what the eventual consequences for you will be, but I strongly encourage you to repent and turn from the path you are on before you make matters any worse for yourself. You are only thirty years old, there is still plenty of time for you to turn your life around and make something meaningful of yourself. You are not happy. You are miserable. You are lonely and full of hate. That is not the result of what has been done to you by the evil and rejection of men, it is the result of the path you are walking, which leads inevitably to destruction.
And what has it ever done for you that you should cling to it in such a determined fashion?
Sure, it’s a little ironic at the moment, given that more blacks have hunted down police officers than whites of late. But one can hardly say that TIME Magazine is wrong to say that right wing groups pose a serious hypothetical threat to the police of the USA. Or rather, to the police who don’t already belong to or sympathize with them.
Time Magazine warned of a growing threat to cops nationwide in September 2010. The nationally renowned publication argued that sinister individuals would launch targeted attacks against police officers and even ambush them in their patrol cars.
Time alerted readers that these groups and individuals have a disturbing hatred of cops and that there was a real threat of “lone-wolf” attacks.
Who are these groups that present such a threat to police? Right-wing militias, according to Time.
In a lengthy six-page article entitled “The Secret World of Extremist Militias,” then-Time Contributing Editor-at-Large Barton Gellman made the case that America should be deeply worried about private citizens forming militias.
“Scores of armed antigovernment groups, some of them far more radical, have formed or been revived during the Obama years, according to law-enforcement agencies and outside watchdogs. A six-month TIME investigation reveals that recruiting, planning, training and explicit calls for a shooting war are on the rise, as are criminal investigations by the FBI and state authorities. Readier for bloodshed than at any time since at least the confrontations in the 1990s in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas, the radical right has raised the threat level against the President and other government targets,” the article says.
Of course, this is hardly news. I’d be more impressed with TIME’s analysis if they had mentioned any actual numbers or focused on the threat being posed by those within the police ranks. After all, as we’ve learned everywhere from India to Afghanistan and Iraq, penetrating the police and the federal agencies has been found to be the most effective tactic for 4GW forces.
Instead, I find it morbidly amusing that in the middle of a global economic downturn, with the world gearing up for a whole series of shooting wars and Americans openly arming to defend themselves against a corrupt federal government, the left-liberals at TIME concluded that the time was just right to score some rhetorical points against the right wing.
Live by the Manning, die by the Manning. Both the defending champion and the regular season champion were upset, creating an opening for a shock return to the VPFL championship game by the dark horse Redbeards.
I am going to find it difficult to tell you precisely why I was so taken by this scene and why I threw myself so enthusiastically into its underworld. The simplest and likely sufficient answer is that I was 14 years old. It all felt vaguely dangerous, vaguely revolutionary, but with ill-defined goals. Its romance was the same one that makes Randians of so many high-school sophomores. It gave the sickly sense of power one gets from finding the next button to push, laughing in a rapidly reddening face. It’s no different from the power trip a bully takes at school, except now I was the powerful one and not the victim. It was something between having power for the first time and the guilt of knowing it was ill-gotten. Power, because there is nothing quite so seductive to a teenage malcontent as a world that offers belonging coupled with authority; that is secret in the way that everybody knows you’re into something slightly criminal. Guilt, because it was all schoolyard. Even when it was less dangerous, it was offensive, vaguely sexist and vaguely racist and vaguely homophobic in the daring-to-transgress kind of way. Even if I wasn’t better than it then, I already had the sense that I might like to be.
I can’t tell you whether my experience and motives were typical or not. I am, however, certain of a few things. If there was a difference between trolling and schoolyard taunting, it was trolling’s particular take on the best way to be an outsider. The prototypical rebel without a cause is either a nihilist or self-serious, disappointed by a vapid world or giving up on it entirely; in either case, he is not content to gossip while there are motorcycles to be ridden in stoic search of the real. For us, it was neither possibility: the world was the place that cared too much, but the way to be above it all was to take aim at its vanity, to embarrass those who thought themselves too composed and too in charge to ever be caught flustered by something petty. We engaged. We had a cause. Whether it was a worthwhile one was a separate issue entirely.
I don’t know if that sensibility is still prevalent in theory, but if so, it no longer means what it once did. Now, as then, the victims of a concerted trolling effort are selected not only by the probable combustibility of their reaction but also by the sense that they have it coming. In the previous decade, you had it coming because you were pompous or entitled or privileged or foolish. The spirit was mischievous, and its intent was to humiliate unclothed emperors. Today, to have it coming is to expose the nakedness of masculinity or whiteness or some other sacred cow of the self-serious; the trolls these days are the red-faced ones, the ones who cannot stand to have their worldview made fun of. “Butthurt” used to be a schoolyard taunt for our marks, not us….
Trolling isn’t really trolling anymore. The motive isn’t sublimated. The rage is bare.
My apologies for the late start in posting today. We had a Christmas party to attend, and then there was a considerable quantity of information concerning the Great Troll Hunt to digest. I thought the article was interesting, despite its SJW slant, because it demonstrates the fundamental problem with Yama: he doesn’t understand power. He doesn’t understand right and wrong either, but many people don’t. What sets him, and some other trolls, apart from most people who can’t distinguish right from wrong is that they don’t understand that people can and will hit them back much harder than they believe possible.
He’s rather like Petyr Baelish in A Game of Thrones, rubbing his hands gleefully as he works undetected behind the scenes (or so he thinks), certain that he has everything under control right up to the moment that the Queen orders the guards to put their daggers to his throat. The Queen makes the mistake of not exercising her superior power, and eventually she pays the price for it.
Now, I’m hardly the Queen. But I’m also not helpless or without resources and allies. I’m also not invulnerable; Castalia House has been under a persistent cracker attack for over a month now. The difference is that I know my vulnerabilities and do what I can to harden them because I am aware that they will always be under attack by some SJW who disagrees with me.
Yama is quite clearly surprised that anyone is able to do anything to him despite the fact that he has committed counts of a crime in his state. This shows the extent to which he fails to understand the nature of power. It’s one thing to fail to believe that someone is going to do anything about it, it’s another to believe that no one can. But as anyone who has ever read a fantasy novel should know, the nature of ill-gotten power is that it always turns on its wielder in the end.
As William S. Lind predicted it would in his book ON WAR, 4GW has arrived in America and is targeting the police. Because the police have militarized and lost their moral authority, they are now deemed legitimate enemy targets by a growing number of armed individuals.
In an apparent targeted killing, two police officers were shot in their patrol car in Brooklyn on Saturday afternoon by a man who later fatally shot himself in head, police officials said. The shootings come at a moment when the city is roiled by demonstrations after a grand jury decided not to indict an officer in the chokehold death of a Staten Island man. The shootings on Saturday took place near Myrtle and Tompkins Avenues in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
“It looks like they were shot in the upper body,” Deputy Chief Kim Royster said.
She said that a man fled into a subway station after shooting the officers from the patrol car’s passenger side, and that the police had recovered a gun from the scene. Chief Royster said the man opened fire on the police officers, ran up Myrtle and went into a subway station. The man died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, Chief Royster said.
Fire Department officials said that a 911 call came in around 2:50 p.m. reporting that two people had been shot. Charlie Hu, the manager of a liquor store at the same corner, said he saw two police officers slouched over in the front seat of their patrol car. At least one of the officers, Mr. Hu said, appeared to have been shot in the head.
A high ranking police official called the shooting an assassination.
The problem faced by the police is that their instincts are now in direct contradiction to their best long-term interests. They are increasingly corrupt, increasingly frightened, increasingly gunned-up, increasingly feeling at war with the general population, and increasingly of a different ethnicity than the people with whom they are interacting on a regular basis.
What they should do is disarm completely, stop playing soldier, abandon the concept of “law enforcement”, and stop their confrontational tactics. This is highly unlikely, however, because most police officers recruited after the Drug War began are psychologically well-suited for confrontation and quasi-militarization. They’re neither trained nor psychologically equipped to lower the temperature these days.
The police problem is the same one faced by occupation forces everywhere. While they have the ability to project overwhelming Mass at specific targets at will, the complete lack of Shape means that their opponents can deliver superior Mass at any time, in almost any place. The police have forgotten that their very survival depends upon the good will of the people; the people could re-enact the Sicilian Vespers and wipe out every single police officer in the country in a single night if they were so inclined. One hopes that they will come to their senses and remember this before things get any uglier.
And this isn’t uglier. We’ll be fortunate if the 4GW forces developing in the USA remain content with only targeting armed officers.
A reader asks: “In 2007 or so Bill Lind wrote that cops understood that you can’t fight an insurgency by cracking down.Think they still know that?”
I don’t know. I am concerned that they do not, as the manhunt in Los Angeles that very nearly killed some innocent women indicated a propensity to panic and overreact once they discover that they are the prey and no longer the untouchable predators.
