Does craft beer have a diversity problem? Of course it does….
Given that big beer makers for decades courted male consumers with sexist TV ads featuring women in bikinis, it perhaps surprises no one that the craft beer business has become a haven for white males — most of whom happen to be hipsters. Sadly, what counts as diversity in this industry is the clean-shaven minority mixing with the bearded majority….
While Boston Beer may be mum about what more could be done on diversity, the Brewers Association, the trade group for small and independent American brewers, is not. Since 2016, the association has been on a mission to figure out how the industry can be more welcoming to everyone, whether as a consumer or a brewer.
Measures include updating advertising standards to ban sexually explicit, lewd, and demeaning language, graphics, and images; forming a diversity committee; hiring a “diversity ambassador;” and giving out grants to encourage brewers to promote diversity and inclusion.
Unlike big beer companies, which rely on expensive TV ad campaigns, craft brewers depend on word-of-mouth and grass-roots marketing to build their brands. Through its diversity grants, the Brewers Association is supporting Fresh Fest 2019 in August in Pittsburgh — the nation’s first black brew fest, featuring 28 black-owned breweries, and Beers With(out Beards), an event series in Brooklyn, N.Y., that promotes women in the craft beer industry and women-owned breweries.
Whether you obediently cuck or whether you try to hide in your basement and brew your beer in solitude, Diversity will hunt you down and try to inclusivate you. So, you’d better learn how to stand up and fight for your interests before they are demolished through diversification.
Last Thursday, I received the news that the HuffPost Opinion section—where I’d been opining on a weekly basis for a few months—had been axed in its entirety. The same opinion column had had a home at The Village Voice for some 21 weeks before that entire publication shuttered as well. “This business sucks,” I tweeted, chagrined at the simple fact that I kept losing my column because of the cruel, ongoing shrinkage of independent journalism in the United States. Dozens of jobs were slashed at HuffPost that day, following a round of layoffs at Gannett Media; further jobs were about to be disappeared at BuzzFeed. It was a grim day for the media, and I just wanted to channel my tiny part of the prevailing gloom.
Then the responses started rolling in—some sympathy from fellow journalists and readers, then an irritating gush of near-identical responses: “Learn to code.” “Maybe learn to code?” “BETTER LEARN TO CODE THEN.” “Learn to code you useless bitch.” Alongside these tweets were others: “Stop writing fake news and crap.” “MAGA.” “Your opinions suck and no one wants to read them.” “Lmao journalists are evil wicked cretins. I wish you were all jail [sic] and afraid.”
I looked at the mentions of my editors, who had been laid off after years at HuffPost, and of other journalists who had lost their jobs. There they were, the swarm of commentators, with their same little carbuncular message: “Learn to code.”
On its own, telling a laid-off journalist to “learn to code” is a profoundly annoying bit of “advice,” a nugget of condescension and antipathy. It’s also a line many of us may have already heard from relatives who pretend to be well-meaning, and who question an idealistic, unstable, and impecunious career choice. But it was clear from the outset that this “advice” was larded through with real hostility—and the timing and ubiquity of the same phrase made me immediately suspect a brigade attack. My suspicions were confirmed when conservative figures like Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr. joined the pile-on, revealing the ways in which right-wing hordes have harnessed social media to discredit and harass their opponents.
Last June, DC Comics announced that the company would be reviving their graphic and adult content imprint, Vertigo Comics. The relaunch was announced alongside several new titles which aimed to speak to current social issues, such as xenophobia in Eric Esquivel’s Border Town or sexual freedom in Tina Horn’s Safe Sex. One of the titles announced for this relaunch was Goddess Mode, a cyber punk adventure series written by Zoë Quinn with art provided by Robbi Rodriguez.
Recently, The Verge’s Laura Hudson conducted and published an interview with Quinn. The published piece is a fairly standard promotional interview in which Quinn speaks at length on Goddess Mode in order to promote her book in the wake of the comic’s official release. Yet many readers were quick to point out that, while the piece itself was innocuous, there was a glowing omission: Hudson did not disclose her personal relationship with Quinn.
If there is anyone in the media who does not have a personal relationship with Zoe Quinn, please raise your hand. At least we can all look forward to the inevitable CSI-SVU episode about a crazed ComicsGater kidnapping the Zoe Quinn stand-in.
I’m done with social media. Maybe I just don’t fit into whatever the social media world is. I mean, the people who are all over the various Mastodon instances made it really clear that I wasn’t welcome there (with a handful of notable, joyful, exceptions, mostly related to my first baby steps into painting), and it seems as if I was just unwelcome because … I’m me? I guess? Like, I know that I’m not a transphobe, but holy shit that lie just won’t die, and right now as I am writing this, someone at Mastodon is telling me that I am, because people said so, and I should apologize to them. I mean, how am I supposed to respond to that, when it happens over and over and over again? “You’ve been lied to about me. Please give me a chance” just doesn’t seem like a viable way forward with people who are, for whatever reason, very, very angry. And these people seem to have an idea of me in their head that doesn’t fit with the idea of myself that I have in my head. It’s honestly caused me to rethink a lot of stuff. Like, am I really the terrible person they say I am? I don’t think I am, but I’m doing my best to listen, and when I say, “please stop yelling at me and let’s have a conversation that I can grow from” I get yelled at for “tone policing” and honestly I just get exhausted and throw up my hands. Maybe I’m not this person they tell me I am, but I represent that person in their heads, and they treat me accordingly? This is one of those times when my mental illness makes it very hard for me to know what’s objective reality and what’s just in my head.
But I don’t deserve to be treated so terribly by so many random people, so I’m not going to put myself in a place where I am subjected to it all day long. As the saying goes, I’m too old for this shit. What we used to call microblogging isn’t worth the headache for me. I’m gonna focus my time and my energy on the things that I love, that make me happy, that support my family.
This is why you should never crawl in bed with crocodiles. Sooner or later, they’re going to get hungry. Wil Wheaton and John Scalzi are just two of the increasing number of examples of white male SJWs belatedly discovering that they are on the Social Justice menu. And much to their horror, they are discovering that they won’t even be eaten last.
Once the white males are gone, the white females will be next on the list, no matter how avowedly feminist and trans-friendly they demonstrate themselves to be.
Of course, the amusing thing is that Wil Wheaton is one of the few individuals on social media who genuinely deserved to be treated as terribly as he has. He abused his position and wound up being treated in exactly the same way that he treated so many others. He was happy enough to label others on the sole basis of the ideas in his head, so how can he possibly complain that others are now doing precisely the same thing to him?
Wil Wheaton finds himself banned from Mastadon. Whatever that is. Apparently for insufficient diversity:
Wil Wheaton isn’t here. @wilw@mastodon.cloud I have been notified by an Admin here that they are getting 60 reports a day about my account. As far as I can tell, I’m not breaking any rules, and I’ve done my best to be a good person here. But this admin is going to suspend my account. It’s the Admin’s instance, so I fully support their choice to eliminate a source of frustration, but something to consider: a person who is doing nothing wrong can be run off one instance by a mob from another instance. That seems … not cool.
Wil Wheaton isn’t here. @wilw@mastodon.cloud But it’s been made very, very clear to me that I am not welcome in the Fediverse, and I hear you. I hoped to find an alternative to the birdsite where I could find the same fun community that existed over there in the beginning, and it’s clear to me that I won’t be finding that. Before I leave, I want to just make something very clear, because I’ve spent most of my life being yelled at by people who don’t know me at all, and I want the record to be clear.
Wil Wheaton isn’t here. @wilw@mastodon.cloud During GamerGate, I was dogpiled and mobbed and brigaded and attacked by thousands of accounts. I started using a blocklist that was supposed to help stop that. I did not know that the blocklist I signed up for also had a lot of trans women on it. When I found out, I did everything I could to remove those women from the list I shared. When there were still innocents on the list, I stopped sharing the list entirely. Despite this, a mob has decided that I’m anti-trans.
Wil Wheaton isn’t here. @wilw@mastodon.cloud This lie that I am anti-trans, or anti-LGBQ, is deeply hurtful to me (I know it’s nothing like the pain LGBTQ people deal with every day, as they simply try to *exist* in a world that treats them so badly, but it is still hurtful in its own way to me). I just want to make it extremely clear: that is a lie, and the people spreading it are misinformed. So I’m leaving the Fediverse, which has treated me with more cruelty, vitriol, hatred, and contempt than than anyone on the birdsite ever did.
Wil Wheaton isn’t here. @wilw@mastodon.cloud I know that I’m well-off, well-known, and as a CIS white hetro dude in America, I live life on the lowest difficulty setting. I know that I have very little to complain about. But I still have feelings, and I really do care about the world and the people in it. What I see is a lot of anger and cruelty directed at the IDEA of me, from people who I just hope don’t realize that it really does hurt me, in my heart, to be accused of being someone I am not, and to be the target of a hateful mob.
Wil Wheaton isn’t here. @wilw@mastodon.cloud Anyway, take your victory lap and collect your prizes. You’ve made it clear that I’m not welcome here, and even though I disagree with the action this Admin is taking (banning me when I didn’t break any rules doesn’t seem right), I respect and support the Admin’s decision to run their instance the way they see fit. Please do your very best to be kind to each other. The world is a terrible place right now, and that’s largely because it is what we make it. Bye.
Oh, the irony. “Wil ditched Twitter because they wouldn’t ban Alex Jones.” This is a microcosm of what is happening in the Democratic Party right now. It doesn’t matter how they abase themselves. It doesn’t matter if they pledge their lives and fortunes. It doesn’t matter if they are genuinely true believers. They are not Diversity and there is no place for them either any more than there is for those they called “Nazis” and “Neo-Nazis” and “white supremacists”.
Which, of course, is why the Alt-Right is inevitable.
The best part is that this happened because Wil Wheaton used Randi Harper’s anti-GamerGate blocklist.
During the gameplay reveal of DOOM: Eternal at this year’s QuakeCon in Grapvine, Texas at the Gaylord Texan Resort & Convention Center, there was a comment during the demonstration about demon’s being “mortally challenged” and that didn’t set too well with Social Justice Warriors.
The 25 minute reveal can be viewed below, running on the id Tech 7 and featuring the ability to render geometrical vertices at ten times the rate of the id Tech 6 at a full 60fps… without drops.
There are a couple of gender-fluid Twitter users who likely removed “she” from their pronouns list after watching that video.
The comments about the demons, however, are made by a blue hologram that looks very similar to Cortana from Halo. Throughout the demonstration she mentions a number of comments that SJWs construed as “anti-SJW”, such as…
“My brothers and sisters, let’s help top make our friends transition into our world a comfortable one.
“[…] Remember: ‘Demon’ can be an offensive term, refer to them as ‘mortally challenged’.
“[…] Earth is the melting pot of the universe.”
These comments from the UAC hologram used as a reverse propaganda tool to keep humans from being terrified of the demon invasion.
Social Justice Warriors took offense to this, claiming that it was racist, anti-immigration, and a “gross”, “anti-SJW” “dog whistle”.
This is how you win the culture war. Also, the game looks awesome and very much in the core DOOM tradition.
The entire tradition of computer gaming is intrinsically anti-immigration. As anyone with an even casual knowledge of the history of games knows, gamers have been slaughtering immigrants en masse since the days of the original Space Invaders.
I told you the media was going to stick to the GG-Pizzagate narrative and try to stage a “violent” attack by “dangerous Q cultists” in order to disqualify and discredit the Qanon movement. But apparently, it’s happening already. NeonRevolt has the details about what happened behind the scenes at the Wilkes-Barre Trump rally:
Intel from 2anon friends at rally tonight.
CNN 4 AM talking points stated videos ready of POTUS recognizing Q
chatter suggested a disturbance would be recorded victimizing CNN by Q
Secret Service noticed Q sign saying just the plan instead of trust the plan
Two individuals with large Q signs very visible reference to the plan wrong refused to give up signs when asked
Moved off camera by SS then removed from premises
Anyway, now you know the media’s setup: they’re attempting to frame the #QArmy as violent and dangerous, and then air that footage nonstop across the nation to try to get the normies all riled up.
This won’t be their last attempt. The false narrative is all set to push “journalists are victims of the evil Q”. It’s Fake News in operation.
From the transcript of the Darkstream, which is in reference to the coordinated new media narrative aimed at Q that was chronicled by Neon Revolt:
This is exactly what we saw in GamerGate, this is exactly the same sort of thing that we saw with the whole “gamers are dead” thing, and so they are desperate to delegitimize Q and they are going to completely fail. They’re going to absolutely fail in this, but here’s what’s going to happen next. What’s going to happen next is there’s going to be some bullshit false flag. You know, there’s going be some nonsense akin to Anita Sarkeesian claiming that she got death threats and Brianna Wu claiming that he was driven from his house by death threats. In the case of Pizzagate, they hired an actual actor to go into this pizza place with a rifle and shoot one bullet into the floor, which then magically hit the computer and destroyed the hard drive.
I mean this is the system, it’s the dumbest narrative, and yet they roll it out again and again and again! I guarantee you there’s going to be some stupid false flag about some fake Q supporter, you know, accosting or otherwise endangering or jeopardizing a Hollywood celebrity, and once the story gets dug into a bit, it’s going to turn out that the supposed Q supporter is going to be just another left-wing nobody who was brought in to deal with the Q stuff. Yeah, “Tom Hanks was driven to fear for his life from insane Trump fanatics!” It’s going to be like that, except it’s not going to be “Trump fanatics” it’s going to be “dangerous Q cultists”. The thing is that you have to remember what they do, because then you start to recognize the pattern when they do it again and again and again.
You know, this is the same thing as GameJournoPros and you’re going to see the same narratives presented in the same order. You know what, with GamerGate they actually had a Law & Order episode, I think was Law & Order SVU, and it was just hilarious to see how they made up a story about how a GamerGater had kidnapped a woman because gamers hate woman players. I mean, it was the most retarded narrative you can imagine, they actually made an entire TV episode about it, and so anyhow, here’s how we responded to it, and here’s how I would encourage those who are following Q to respond to the media’s false narratives.
Postscript: Q recognized it too:
Fake News WW Fake MAGA supporters Bandwagon shills Paid shills (Media Matters) Intel infiltration (neg dissemination). MSM infiltration (neg dissemination). Twitter bot attack (twitter controls dir/fake accts) (FB/Twitter/etc create massive amounts of fake user accts for SP (fake user growth {2f950ec02e67afe15e56ddb5018469898c7f7df1891e5cecbf34a80033d044ba})/bot use etc). All activated past 24hrs. Full attack mode (brute force). False ‘violent’ narrative push. Ask yourself, why? Enjoy the show! Q
I don’t think these guys understand how many people now sincerely believe that everyone on the Left is an evil deviant who hates Jesus Christ, Christendom, children, comics, and video games.
At this point, though, good faith isn’t required for a conservative social media takedown. After seeing figures like Google engineer James Damore fired for what their supporters see as mere political differences, many on the right have subscribed to what conservative writer Kurt Schlichter has termed “the new rules.”
As long as conservatives get fired for their political opinions, in their view, they can use campaigns to get liberals fired for the same.
Of course we can. And of course we will. If you don’t like it, then you shouldn’t have permitted us to be deplatformed in the first place.
The other shoe has finally dropped for Clare Bronfman, the heiress behind the alleged cult leader. Bronfman, who’s an heiress to the Seagram’s liquor fortune, was long ago outed as a major bankroller of Keith Raniere, the empowerment guru turned master manipulator who’s been charged with sex trafficking conspiracy, sex trafficking, and conspiracy to commit forced labor.
On Tuesday, Clare Bronfman was taken into custody in New York City. A superseding indictment charged Bronfman alongside several other top NXIVM members: Kathy Russell, Lauren Salzman and Nancy Salzman. The six defendants stand accused of running an organized criminal enterprise. Crimes alleged within the indictment include identity theft, harboring of aliens for financial gain, extortion, forced labor, sex trafficking, money laundering, wire fraud and obstruction of justice. It describes Bronfman as “a member of the Enterprise and a high-ranking member of Nxivm” who served as an executive board member from approximately 2009 to 2018.
This Darkstream starts poorly, but bear with it as it appears I am finally beginning to figure out how this livestreaming thing actually works.
This is Battlefield 5. The trailer was released quite recently and a couple of the striking things about it are the way in which that we have this figure here. At first you’re not sure what the time frame is, then you realize there are World War II tanks, some of the weapons are also WWII-era, and then you realize, wait a minute, is that a woman riding on a Jeep on the battlefield?
Now what is a jeep doing suddenly surrounded by all of these tanks, and is that a… what kind of plane is that? I can’t tell. It looked for a second like it might be some sort of Messerschmitt, like a Messerschmitt 109, but if you recall your World War II history then you realize that Messerschmitt 109s were mostly used in air-to-air combat, they were not used as ground support, and you certainly were not shooting them down with machine guns. And so you know what we’re seeing here… and that was, if I recall correctly, that was actually a V1 buzz bomb rocket, which again you would not use on the battlefield, okay, they were used for bombing civilian centers.
Oh, and here we get rescued by a woman, a woman with a claw no less, interesting. So, a lot of people were not terribly impressed with this and for good reason. What is the purpose of this game, what are they trying to demonstrate? You know, I understand, I think we all understand, that an arcade game is not meant to be a serious World War II combat simulation okay? I played Modern Warfare 2 through Level 70 Elite and I also played two previous Battlefields, and you know, the interesting thing about this is that were we’re seeing the same sort of behavior from the producers that we were seeing when GamerGate first got started and what we’re seeing is the appeal to possibility.
So what SJWs do is they come in and then they begin messing around with the history. They begin messing around with whatever they can in order to get the point across that they want to get across, and so it doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about a fantasy game, it doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about a World War II game. What was particularly egregious about this is that we all had the same response when they first came out with the remake of the old Dungeons & Dragons games [Beamdog’s Balder’s Gate II etc] but the argument then was that it’s fantasy, you know, it’s fantasy, so what does it matter? If you can have dragons, and you have flying dragons and dragons breathing fire and all this sort of thing, well, why can’t you have women who are just as good at fighting as men?
Well, the reason is because it’s not consistent with the story lines, it’s also not consistent with what the audience wants, and so now what we’re seeing is that they’re getting even more egregious, now they are putting these women in the battlefield and they are making them more heroic and more lethal than the men as this particular trailer demonstrated, and they’re using the excuse of saying, well you know there were WACS and there were WAVS and there were Russian snipers and all that sort of thing, and that’s all true, but none of that excuses what they’re doing. All they’re trying to do is come up with some sort of ex post facto rationalization for what they’re doing.
I’ve played dozens of World War II-related games, you can look on my shelf right there, you can see I’m an Advanced Squad Leader player. At no point in time in the extremely complicated Advanced Squad Leader system – where they literally count the precise numbers and probability of the appearance on the battlefield of the most obscure German, Romanian, and Russian tanks – at no point did they ever see any need to simulate women. I mean they’ve got everything from the late war German militias that were called “the stomach battalions” because they were made of young kids and men who had previously been disqualified from service and they even got that accounted for My son and I are about to play Decision at Elst, which is the the first ASL Starter Kit campaign game, and they’ve actually got special rules for steeples because it’s important for the actual physical characteristics of the territory where that was found… again they’re going to that level of detail and yet there’s been no need whatsoever to figure out how to simulate women in combat in World War II.
So you know, this is a new level of egregious, this is a new level of SJW onslaught, this is a new offensive by SJWs in the game industry.
