I may have misread that one

Anonymous Conservative explains how I didn’t correctly grasp the message that some pinkshirts were attempting to send me the other day regarding their concerns that I be informed about Roosh’s supposed shenanigans. According to him, they were not merely probing for weakness in the pro-#GamerGate ranks by dangling an approval carrot, but were actually attempting to frighten me by threatening a stick. Which intention, I have to admit, escaped me entirely. He explains in On Rabbits and Disqualification:

What those leftists are saying is not, “Roosh is disqualified because his reputation is not respected due to a (supposedly) factual assertion by me.” They aren’t even saying that, “Roosh’s opinion doesn’t count because I am smearing him.” What the rabbits are saying is, “Roosh is about to have the group turn upon him, so anyone who stands with him is in physical danger themselves. Do you want to be there with him when he’s attacked?” That is the dogwhistle which any rabbit will hear blaring in their ear.

Vox’s expected response is to flee the rhetorical vicinity of Roosh, because that is how a rabbit is programmed, and rabbits base all their assumptions about the behavior of others on how they themselves would react. You can see what happens when you have no in-group loyalty. You know you are alone, because you would eagerly betray yourself if the circumstances were reversed.

What is funny is that Vox is so totally lacking in such fear and conflict-avoidance circuitry that he seems unaware that anyone would ever even experience a fear of danger from such a trigger. Yet the fear (and desperate desire for conflict-avoidance) is so ever present in the rabbit, he just assumes Vox will flee from Roosh immediately, both sacrificing Roosh’s support for Vox’s position, and casting Roosh adrift alone. This is how rabbits gain social status, when people aren’t actively killing off the weak. They use rabbit fear and selfishness to foster betrayal among other rabbits.

Vox’s response is dead on. In tightening ranks with Roosh offensively, and casting rabbits as the enemy, Vox releases a signal that things are getting aggressive, and the leftist’s best course to follow for conflict-avoidance would be complete capitulation and supplication. Of course the leftist response will be to flee. The defense has become most offensive indeed.

AC knows considerably more about the psychological mechanics of the cultural war between the r/selected and the K/selected than I do, so I will defer to his interpretation with a mild degree of astonishment that anyone is seriously supposed to be intimidated into modifying his behavior by what he describes as “dogwhistling”.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. And the SJWs are my enemy. I will stand firmly by anyone against them simply because there is no question that they are the sons and daughters of the Devil himself, they are the apostles of pure and undistilled evil. Whatever the moral failings of the broad spectrum of individuals who stand against them, those failings are nothing compared to the relentless, all-devouring monstrosity of the Social Justice Warriors. They are the Nothing Oecumene.

Give them an inch and they will take it with a smile, then come back for another inch tomorrow. There can be no compromise with them. They accept no moderates; to them a moderate is merely tomorrow’s target. Better to stand fast, stand by everyone who rejects them, and shoot back twice as hard.

Importing war through immigration

Australia has successfully imported the centuries-old Sunni-Shi’ite war:

A friend of Rasoul Al-Musawi, the man who was shot outside an Islamic prayer centre in Sydney’s south-west, said he was targeted by people claiming to be supporters of Islamic State.

Mr Al-Musawi’s friend – who did not wish to be named – is a Shiite Muslim and said the shooting in Greenacre was motivated by the sectarian struggle in the Middle East.

‘They called us “Shia dogs” and they threatened to come back down tonight and kill you, shoot you, whatever,’ he told ABC Radio on Monday.

This further demonstrates the insanity of the belief in the transformational magic of geographic location. And it is an ominous harbinger of the 4GW in the West that William S. Lind warned more than a decade ago would result from immigration combined with the USA’s misadventures in the Middle East.

In “Germany’s Blunder”, Mr. Lind writes:

“For the Establishment, the hard part will be accepting the need to isolate ourselves from centers and sources of disorder.
 
Centers of disorder will be the growing number of failed states. Sources of disorder will certainly include Islam, thanks to the concept of jihad, even if some Islamic societies are ordered internally. Isolation will mean minimizing contacts that involve flows of people, money, materials and new primary loyalties, such as religions ideologies, into the United States. First and foremost, that requires ending the current de facto policy of open immigration. In a 4th Generation world, open immigration is akin to leaving the castle gate open at night when the Huns are in the neighborhood.”

In “4GW on the Home Front” he observes:

“In a 4th Generation world, invasion by immigration can easily be more dangerous than invasion by a foreign army. At some point, the foreign army will go home. But immigrants stay, and if they do not acculturate, they permanently change the cultural landscape. As the Dutch recently discovered, the changes may go beyond introducing some highly spiced dishes into an otherwise bland cuisine.”
 
Both of these were written more than 10 years ago, in 2004. Both are selections from Mr. Lind’s ON WAR, in the event you are interested in getting a deeper insight into where the world is heading as 4th Generation warfare spreads around the world.

50,000 readers a day

From the 2012 New York Times:

Handily demolishing the burger that he had chosen over a Midtown restaurant’s fancier Mediterranean fare, Mr. Scalzi was anything but grim; he smiled readily and giggled heartily. He is comfortable with the business of promotion: An affable speaker, he is familiar with the patois of fandom and is adept at generating buzz through the nerd mafia of like-minded collaborators. He already reaches up to 50,000 readers a day through his popular blog, “Whatever.”

So with the end of October, the three-month daily traffic average, in direct apples-to-apples terms of WordPress pageviews, has now reached 50,504. In other words, for the last three months, I’ve been genuinely averaging the sort of traffic that McRapey used to lie about having. The fact is that in July 2012, Whatever averaged 21,102 pageviews per day, up from 16,356 the month before.

As it happens, I could claim “up to 65,000 readers a day” on the same basis, but I don’t, because that would be ludicrously untruthful. First, pageviews are not readers. Second, there is no reasonable justification for using an extreme outlier when an accurate average is available. It is knowingly deceptive, even if it is common in “the busines of promotion”.

SJWs always lie. Never forget that. Never take anything they say about anyone, especially themselves, for granted. They deceive, exaggerate, and spin. They will say anything they think will make themselves look better and make their rivals and enemies look worse. They are the sort of people who habitually pretend “everybody thinks” is synonymous with “I think” and try to influence others through nonexistent peer pressure. They repeatedly appeal to nonexistent consensuses. Even when they tell the literal truth, it is usually presented in a manner intended to deceive in some way.

But they are very comfortable with the business of promotion. It’s not hard to be, when you are equally comfortable with saying things that are misleading, deceptive, and outright false. So always – always – run their numbers.

The truth is that Whatever has actually reached over 100,000 pageviews in a single day thanks to some helpful external links on three or four occasions, but McRapey did not dare tell the New York Times “up to 100,000 pageviews per day” even though he could have truthfully done so because it would have sounded ridiculous considering his actual daily traffic. But he thought, correctly, that he could get away with the misleading “up to 50,000” claim. It’s worth noting that within five months, he dropped the true, but deceptive “up to” part of the claim and was directly lying about his traffic again. Just as he had previously done in 2010, when he was interviewed by Lightspeed.  

“Scalzi himself quotes it at over 45,000 unique visitors daily and more than two million page views monthly.”   

Two million monthly? That’s a claim of more than 64,516 average daily pageviews… and at a time when he was actually seeing 12,860 per day.

VPFL Week 8

61 Greenfield Grizzlies (7-1)
39 RR Redbeards (5-3)

108 Bane Cornshuckers (4-4)
73 Mounds View Meerkats (5-3)

112 King (4-4)
94 Gilbert Gamma Rays (4-4)

87 Favre Dollar Footlongs (5-3)
75 Texas Chili Eaters (4-4)

60 Boot Hill Bogs (2-6)
50 Clerical Errs (0-6)

An Unblinking Journey of Autumnal Despair

I rather enjoyed this parody of a New York literati’s take on It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown:

24:00 Lucy bobs for an apple. Snoopy is in the tub somehow. Lucy feigns disgust at the discovery.

Schroeder, a musical Faust, bangs away at a toy piano, coaxing impossible, darkly miraculous tones from the infernal instrument. The Devil’s notes pour out from his fingers like the blood offering from a slaughtered goat above the sacrifice-font.

Snoopy, utterly helpless in the music’s thrall, dances and weeps, dances and weeps. He stumbles back out into the night, disoriented. The music, the music.

Self-appointed identity police

The most dangerous blog on Tumblr observes that SJWs are not only the self-appointed Video Game Police, they have appointed themselves the Identity Police as well:

Catherine of Aragorn @PaleCompanion
@nero’s total lack of empathy with (& almost hatred of) the oppressed is so unique in a gay man I’m not unconvinced his sexuality’s an act.

remember you’re only gay if sjw’s say you are.

MOD 1:  Same for blacks or women or whoever else.

If you are “X oppressed minority” and you disagree with “approved
leftist minority groupthink,” you are no longer permitted to be a
minority. That’s what life is like today.  Being gay and/or black and/or woman
or whatever, and being told that even then, you are still not allowed in
our cool underdog outsider group because you don’t agree with OUR
politics.

Which brings these tweets to mind:

Trevor Curtis ‏@trevorcurtis23
I’m sorry to put it this way, but my balls are more Native American than @voxday 

Reggie Stone ‏@rock_regi
You are as “indian” as every other white guy claiming to be 1/16th Cherokee. Stop co-opting other’s race as a shield.

Pox Vay ‏@PoxVay
DNA, not heritage. No practicing of culture or tradition.

pure, impure ‏@pure_impure
Vox as as Indian as I am Yemeni.

Narc ‏@narciblog
If @voxday is Native American based solely on some genetic test, I’m black since all of Homo Sapiens came out of Africa.

I take it as quite a compliment that aside from two of the usual suspects (pure, impure is Andrew Marston), there are so few SJWs willing to take the risk of openly expressing doubts about my Indian heritage, although strangely enough, virtually no one has expressed any doubts concerning my Mexican background. Or perhaps it isn’t so strange, as there is no question that the Red Card trumps the Brown Card in the SJW mind. (One of these days, I’m going to finish designing that SJW card game I started. If you’re an interested artist, let me know.) My being an Indian increases their discomfort when they try to DISQUALIFY me.

Let’s face it, it’s more than a little amusing that the only writer ever expelled from the hyper-inclusive Science Fiction Writers of America was one of its only Native American members.

Anyhow, it’s pretty clear that more experienced SJWs like McRapey have finally learned that I simply do not lie when making direct and public claims such as these. They may be dubious, they may have their doubts, but they know that anytime I offer them something this easily attacked, it’s almost surely a trap. This demonstrates that I was wrong about them. It may be a long and painfully slow process, but as it turns out, they are capable of learning after all.

But denying science and playing Identity Police is nothing new. Back when I was in college, I remember a prominent feminist member of the faculty standing up and saying that “Margaret Thatcher was not of the gender woman” due to her offensive politics. In fact, Margaret Thatcher was indubitably of the female sex, whether the SJWs liked it then or not, just as I am a bona fide American Indian, and not one of the “1/16th Cherokee” sort either.

As for the claimed failure to practice either culture or tradition, that would be a surprise to anyone who ever had a birthday dinner with my family. The inability of SJWs to understand that some people are more interested in what they can make of themselves than what they are made of tells you all you need to know about their prospects in life.

Is Lena Dunham eligible for the SFWA?

It appears she’ll fit right in with the SJWs, pedophiles, and child molesters there:

If there is such a thing as actually abusing a child through
excessive generosity and overindulgence, then Lena Dunham’s parents are
child abusers. Her father, Carroll Dunham, is a painter noted for his
primitive brand of highbrow pornography, his canvases anchored by puffy
neon-pink labia; her photographer mother filled the family home with
nude pictures of herself, “legs spread defiantly.” Self-styled radicals from old money, they were not the sort of people inclined to enforce even the most lax of boundaries. And they were, in their daughter’s telling, enablers of some very disturbing behavior that would be considered child abuse in many jurisdictions — Lena Dunham’s sexual abuse, specifically, of her younger sister, Grace, the sort of thing that gets children taken away from non-millionaire families without Andover pedigrees and Manhattanite social connections. Dunham writes of casually masturbating while in bed next to her younger sister, of bribing her with “three pieces of candy if I could kiss her on the lips for five seconds . . . anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl I was trying.” At one point, when her sister is a toddler, Lena Dunham pries open her vagina — “my curiosity got the best of me,” she offers, as though that were an explanation. “This was within the spectrum of things I did.”

YERGGHH! I’ve always thought Dunham looked like a Daughter of Innsmouth straight out of Lovecraft. It turns out that she’s even uglier and more freakish on the inside than her appalling exterior would suggest. She’s not the voice of her generation, she’s not a voice of a generation, by her own account she is an incestuous child molester.

Mailvox: why C&C isn’t strategy

RD asks about strategy vs tactics:

I was browsing through some of your old columns on WND and came across
an article where you mentioned that one of the premiere, defining games
of the RTS genre, Command & Conquer, could could not actually be
described as a “strategy” game. You wrote:

“Like those video game
reviewers who insist on describing RTS games like Warcraft and Command
& Conquer as “strategy” games, the media consistently confuses
tactics with strategy.”

Would
you care to elaborate on this point? As a long-time fan of the C&C
series and the RTS genre, I am most curious to hear your justification
for distinguishing between tactics and strategy with respect to
describing RTS games. Also, what in your opinion is the best example of
an actual “strategy” RTS game?

The difference between strategy and tactics is pretty clear. If you’re trying to win a war, it’s strategy. If you’re trying to win a battle, it’s tactics. Even Wikipedia is useful in this regard:

Strategy (from Greek στρατηγία stratēgia, “art of troop leader; office of general, command, generalship”) is a high level plan to achieve one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty. In the sense of the “art of the general”, which included several subsets of skills including “tactics”, siegecraft, logistics etc., the term came into use in the 6th century C.E. in East Roman terminology, and was translated into Western vernacular languages only in the 18th century. From then until the 20th century, the word “strategy” came to denote “a comprehensive way to try to pursue political ends, including the threat or actual use of force, in a dialectic of wills” in a military conflict, in which both adversaries interact. The father of Western modern strategic study, Carl von Clausewitz, defined military strategy as “the employment of battles to gain the end of war.” B. H. Liddell Hart’s definition put less emphasis on battles, defining strategy as “the art of distributing and applying military means to fulfill the ends of policy”. Hence, both gave the pre-eminence to political aims over military goals.

Military tactics are the science and art of organizing a military force, and the techniques for combining and using weapons and military units to engage and defeat an enemy in battle. Changes in philosophy and technology have been reflected in changes to military tactics; in contemporary military science tactics are the lowest of three planning levels: (i) strategic, (ii) operational, and (iii) tactical. The highest level of planning is strategy, how force is translated into political objectives, by bridging the means and ends of war. The intermediate level, operational level, the conversion of strategy into tactics deals with formations of units. In the vernacular, tactical decisions are those made to achieve the greatest, immediate value, and strategic decisions are those made to achieve the greatest, overall value, irrespective of the immediate results of a tactical decision.

That’s the formal distinction, and it should be fairly obvious that most RTS are intrinsically tactical in nature. But there is also another way of looking at it, which is the one I actually had in mind, which is that strategy implies thinking and planning, whereas tactics implies acting and responding. Most RTS games such as Warcraft and C&C, involve considerably more of the latter than the former. Indeed, even if we disregard the fact of the old “grunt rush” tactic or the fact that success often boiled down to superior click speed, thanks to the “technology tree”, most RTS involve virtually no thinking or anything that can reasonably be described as strategy.

My old friend Chris, who has designed a few notable RTS games, is even quoted in the RTS article: “[My first attempt at visualizing RTSs in a fresh and interesting new way] was my realizing that although we call this genre ‘Real-Time Strategy,’ it should have been called ‘Real-Time Tactics’ with a dash of strategy thrown in.”

So, for both reasons, I don’t think it is possible for an RTS to be a proper strategy game. I actually designed an RTS, as it happens; the original WAR IN HEAVEN game was supposed to be an RTS. It would have been a lot better if we had gone that route too, but Valu-Soft wanted to chase Walmart with a DEER HUNTER-style game, which, as I have related in the past, backfired rather spectacularly when they foolishly hired the buyer who wanted it before the game was finished.

SpaceShip Two down

The right stuff returns. You have to respect the courage of the men flying private test rockets into space:

Virgin Galactic’s suborbital commercial spacecraft SpaceShipTwo has crashed during a test flight in the Mojave Desert about 95 miles north of Los Angeles, according to NBC affiliate KGET. The California Highway Patrol has confirmed that one of the two pilots aboard the vehicle is dead; and the other is in critical condition.

This is how you do it.

Since we’ve been talking about #GamerGate all day today, I thought we ought to actually talk about games too, which makes this the perfect time to post this article about one of the great, and massively underrated game designers, Steve Fawkner.

Fawkner released his first full game, Quest for the Holy Grail,
for the Sinclair Spectrum in 1983. “I didn’t know about publishing or
about how to get a game to the store,” he says. “So what I would do is
go to a gaming convention and take some copies of Quest for the Holy Grail in a snap-lock bag, with some instructions just printed out.”

He gave them away to attendees, free of charge, with a message at the
start and end of the game requesting players send $5 to fund the next
one. He didn’t expect to earn a penny, but Fawkner got 32 checks —
earning $160.

Encouraged by this unexpected success, he developed more games,
building up a mailing list of people who liked his work. He’d send them
games through the mail, and they’d pay another $5 for each title they
enjoyed. “It was extremely, extremely primitive, but it was kind of
pizza and beer money when I was a teen.”

Then one day in early 1989 he finished a game that seemed too good to
give away, either in snap-lock bags or through snail mail to his small
list of previous customers. Warlords combined two games Fawkner had been playing at the time: a strategy video game called Empire,
by White Wolf Productions co-founder and former Space Shuttle Program
flight designer Mark Baldwin, and a board game by TSR called Dragons of Glory.
A turn-based affair, it put you in charge of one or more clans — each
possessing heroes and citadels and soldiers — and asked you conquer at
least two-thirds of the map.

Fawkner thought maybe he could sell Warlords commercially.
“I sent it around to a few publishers,” he says, “and just got told no.
They weren’t interested in a game that was 90 percent finished by
someone they’d never heard of.” He also sent it to distributors, unaware
of the difference between the two. “They certainly weren’t interested
in something that didn’t come shrink-wrapped in a box.”

Almost ready to give up, Fawkner chased one last lead: Strategic
Studies Group (SSG) in Sydney. “They do strategy games,” he remembers a
friend saying. “OK, they’re tanks and planes and military kind of
strategy, but why don’t you send it to them?” Fawkner shipped a copy
off, and initially heard no response.

“Six weeks later, I got a phone call,” he recalls. SSG co-founder Ian
Trout confessed that his company had thrown the game out because it had
knights and dragons in it, but they gave it another look after his son,
Alex Shore, found the Warlords disk and dug in. “I owe Alex a
huge debt of gratitude for actually finding my game in the garbage and
playing it,” Fawkner says. “Because SSG published it. It reviewed really
well, sold I think tens or hundreds of thousands of units and did very
nicely.”

Steve’s a modest man. Warlords was also CGW’s 1991 Game of the Year. It’s still such a good game that Ender still plays it from time to time when he isn’t playing Fantasy General or Civ5. Warlords 2 was even better, although I thought 3 and 4 lost a bit of the plot, being too influenced by the newfound popularity of the RTS genre.

But then to come back with Puzzle Quest, which started the whole Puzzle RPG craze, was simply amazing. Anyhow, notice that not only did no one ever welcome to the industry with encouragement and snuggles, but despite the massive respect with which he is regarded by veterans throughout the industry, he still has to scratch and claw to find the money to make the games he wants to make.

I still have my original boxes, manuals, and disks for Warlords here in my library, an honor I convey on only the very best classic games.