#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
Alt★Hero Episode 4 is now live on Webtoons.
In other project news, we have decided that the fourth book in the Castalia Library series will be Dante’s The Divine Comedy, complete with woodcuts from the 1491 Venetian edition by Pietro di Piasi Cremonese. While we had originally intended to do Inferno, upon further contemplation of the task at hand, we decided the Library team was ready to tackle a more substantial project.
Ron Unz observes, with mild bemusement, the fact that Facebook has belatedly banned The Unz Review:
My morning newspapers had recently mentioned Facebook’s plans to crack down on misinformation related to our ongoing Covid-19 epidemic, and probably like most other readers I just nodded my head. After all, many Americans might die if cranks or pranksters began promoting highly dubious cures to the deadly disease, perhaps even suggesting that people should inject themselves with Lysol to ward off an infection.
However, those bland public statements took on an entirely different meaning yesterday afternoon when I discovered that all material from The Unz Review had suddenly been banned for alleged violations of “community standards” and our own Facebook page eliminated.
I don’t use Social Media much myself, but others obviously due, and blocking all our website content from access to the 1.7 billion Facebook users seems a pretty drastic step. So it’s quite reasonable to wonder why, and especially why now?
From the very first, the motto of our publication has been A Collection of Interesting, Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media, and I think we have fulfilled that pledge, publishing many thousands of articles and posts on an enormous range of extraordinarily controversial and even forbidden topics, notably including my own American Pravda series.
Under such circumstances, being banned by Facebook might hardly seem surprising. However, many of our most extremely controversial pieces were published years ago, drawing angry denunciations from various quarters, but received with apparent equanimity from the Lords of the Social Network. Nearly all of the “touchy” pieces we published in the last couple of weeks seem no more “touchy” than the ones from a year or two years or even three years ago. So what suddenly sparked this unprecedented action?
Although I can’t be sure, I strongly suspect that the triggering event was my own most recent American Pravda article, dealing as it did with the Coronavirus epidemic, the supposed focus of Facebook’s current crackdown. And this piece not only accumulated more early readership than any of my previous articles here, but also two or three times as many Facebook Likes, which might have raised serious concerns in certain quarters.
Fortunately, since Unz has long practiced the dark art of building his own platforms, this won’t harm the Review in the slightest. But it does serve as a reminder that even in times of extreme difficulty, SJWs won’t hesitate to cut off their own nose if they imagine doing so will harm you.
I left Facebook long ago, of my own volition, and I’m confident that my life is the better for it. Don’t live in their walled gardens.
Zeroh Tollrants wonders, in light of the ruin that is now games, why anyone ever wanted more women in gaming:
I need an explanation as to why any man thought it would be awesome to have women involved in their games. No one should trust anyone that dumb.
The gammas and omegas who make up the larger part of the RPG players and wargamers imagined that if women started spending time playing games with them, those women would be willing to date them. So they sacrificed their hobbies to their mostly unsatiated desires and wound up with SJWs policing their games.
It’s not hard to tell which of them still believes that price was worth paying.
It rather looks as if General Flynn’s original legal team was working for the other side:
After Flynn pleaded guilty to making false statements to federal investigators, representatives of multiple congressional committees with oversight responsibility for national security matters asked Flynn’s lawyers if Flynn would testify before Congress in exchange for a congressional grant of immunity. Robert Kelner, Flynn’s attorney at the time, immediately dismissed the overtures, sources told The Federalist. During one conversation, Kelner allegedly responded that in situations like the one facing Flynn, the prosecution essentially “owns” the defendant and added that he would be unlikely to pursue congressional testimony without the approval of former Spygate Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office.
Flynn was not told of these immunity conversations with congressional officials before they were rejected on his behalf.
If you haven’t read The Trial of Roger Stone yet, you may not realize what a Potemkin Village the U.S. legal system is. It’s no more legitimate than the infamous Stalin-era Soviet show trials. And you can’t expect a team that has been paid to throw the game to put up much of a defense.
No, the SJWs not intending to police anything. They’re not intending to ban anything. They only seek to educate and critique:
I want to preemptively say that wokescolds like me are not coming for your favorite media or going to police your enjoyment. Banning anything is not on the table. I seek to educate and critique. To paraphrase Anita Sarkeesian, we can enjoy media while being critical of its problematic aspects. Orcs are here to stay. Nobody is going to take away your Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance novels.
But understand that colonialism and its tropes are the original sin of the modern age. You can’t divorce anything from it. Time marches on and so has fantasy literature. Fantasy literature and its derived role playing games have, like everything, been touched by colonialist narratives. It is important to recognize that. I love fantasy. I even love elves and orcs but to think that race science bullshit isn’t part of its DNA is ignorance.
The way Orcs are depicted in fantasy literature mirrors the racist tropes and narratives about indigenous and black people that was used to justify colonialism and slavery. At various times there were ideas like the Curse of Ham, to Mormon views that black people and native americans were once white but cursed by God, to later eugenic and race science views. All of this was in the zeitgeist when Orcs were imagined by the pioneers of the genre like Tolkien. Elves too are evocative of race science mythology about a lost hyperborean master race that Aryans are descended from.
Excuses about how Orcs are corrupted elves then, fall flat, because that to is also a trope of racist mythology. Ultimately Orcs aren’t real. They are made up. But they were not made up in a vacuum. When they were made up, they mirrored the white man’s burden narrative. And the passage above is alarmingly similar to things written about human beings in those times.
I would say Eberron, Warcraft 3, and Elder Scrolls all made strides in reimagining Orcs Elder Scrolls also does a good job not making orcs canon fodder villains that are fair game for anyone to kill. I feel that Eberron got this right. The designer didn’t make fantasy counterpart cultures and reimagined the monstrous races. None of them, except for literal demons, are presented as inherently evil and Orcs have a druidic order that protects the world from the plane of madness. But even that is going to be fruit of a poisoned tree to some degree but so is everything.
None of this is to say you can’t enjoy DnD or even include Orcs in your game or cosplay as Orcs, but understand that there is a history there and that history might make people uncomfortable.
Translation: #Orcgate has begun. There is literally nothing they will not seek to take away from you.
I have a simple, one-word response: WAAAGH!
Courts outside the USA are increasingly uninterested in hearing the social media platforms assert that they are above the civil law:
Google has been ordered to pay $40,000 in damages to a Melbourne lawyer after a Supreme Court of Victoria ruling found the internet giant was a publisher, and had defamed the man. In today’s ruling, Justice Melinda Richards has determined that Google was a publisher, despite denials by the company.
The case centred on articles and images published by The Age newspaper in 2004, after Mr Defteros was charged with conspiracy over the murder of Carl Williams and other underworld figures.
At the time, Mr Defteros ran a legal firm in Melbourne whose clients included gangland figures.
The charges were dropped the following year, but Mr Defteros had surrendered his practising certificate for three years.
Mr Defteros argued that in 2016 and 2017, searches on Google continued to turn up articles and hyperlinks to web material that defamed him, including an entry in the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia.
During a trial last year, Google’s lawyers had argued it was not the publisher of the material and it had not defamed Mr Defteros.
It submitted that the automation of its search engines meant it was not an intentional communicator of words or images, particularly if a user clicked through to another website.
Justice Richards rejected this in her ruling today.
“The Google search engine … is not a passive tool,” she wrote in her 98-page judgement.
“It is designed by humans who work for Google to operate in the way it does, and in such a way that identified objectionable content can be removed, by human intervention.
“I find that Google becomes a publisher of the search results that its search engine returns to a user who enters a search query.”
She also found that providing the hyperlink within the search results “amounted to publication of the webpage”.
Unfortunately, they can still get away with their curated weaponization with complete impunity in the USA thanks to the federal laws that let them do the publisher-not publisher dance and state laws that let them use anti-SLAAP laws to impose costs on their victims.
No Discussion. A little late getting this up, but it’s still Wednesday there, right?
Grandpa Lampshade has come around to the idea that there is more to the concept of the gamma behavioral pattern than the mere desire to devalue disagreement:
Just wanted to say that I thought that the whole “gamma” thing came off a bit like “Anyone who doesn’t agree with me = gamma”
I was wrong.
The patterns are like the “Well actually” meme; instead of simply pointing out where one could be incorrect about something, it always seems to be some form of semantics and always framed as a “gotcha” from a standpoint of superiority.
This is precisely why I no longer tolerate any mention of me, my motivations, my inclinations, or my objectives in the general discourse here. Because it’s not all about me and there isn’t a single idea that can be negated by my personal flaws and failings or proven by my positive attributes and accomplishments.
Argument ad hominem isn’t merely a logical fallacy, not infrequently it is utilized as a dishonest rhetorical attempt to distract, discredit, and derail.
A government employee who has been responsible for public outreach during the pandemic adds his two cents on how to distinguish between people who are legitimately asking questions and those who are there to argue:
If the questioner refuses to click on a link, call a number, or take any effort at all to read or know the answer, then they are there to argue. Many times they have already read the answer and simply want to gripe. Other times, the answer is irrelevant and they just want to argue. They may have already asked multiple people and are digging for the answer they want to hear in order to pit different groups against each, and once again, argue.
They waste everyone’s time and that is their actual goal.
It’s been fairly obvious to most game developers for years that in-game communications are a relatively secure system for communications, simply because they have a sort of code built into them. And since terrorists and other bad actors have been known to use online games as a communications platform, it should not be surprising that the Deep State has too.
If Q is correct, one game being used for that purpose was Star Wars: Commander. Certainly some of the in-game exchanges there appear to be unrelated to the game nominally being played. So, it may be significant to note that it is being shut down as of June.
GAME CLOSURE ANNOUNCEMENT
We have come to the decision to shut down Star Wars™: Commander on June 12, 2020. As of March 13, 2020, all in-game purchases have been suspended. Star Wars: Commander will remain playable until 11am GMT on June 12, 2020.
I would expect that there is also a considerable amount of money-laundering taking place in the case of some of the more inexplicably successful online games.
Or rather, reintroducing it. This little comic strip about Game features the delightful art of [insert pen name that ISN’T shared with a porn star here Lacey Fairchild] and will run every Tuesday. Readers of the old Alpha Game blog will recognize the first few strips, but we’re already writing brand new material that I’m certain you will appreciate.
We will soon be running Webtoons every workday, thanks to the Alt-Hero backers and Arkhaven subscribers.
