Tag: media

A misguided manifesto

Nearly 20 years ago, the national media was abuzz with the publication of the Unabomber’s manifesto. The editors at the St. Paul Pioneer Press wanted someone to read and analyze it, but the task proved to be beyond the ability of its columnists and journalists. Then the Technology Editor had the bright idea of having their twenty-something games columnist have a look at it, thereby resulting in the only time my name appeared on the Pioneer Press Op/Ed page.

I found this when I was digging through some of my old game review columns that I’ve been gradually scanning and putting up at Recommend. I thought perhaps it might be of interest to the sort of hardcore readers who will swing by today as well as those who used to read my WND column to see how my thought processes have been fairly consistent over the years.

Unabomber misses how technology aids freedom
St. Paul Pioneer Press
October 4, 1995

While the Washington Post’s publication of the Unabomber’s treatise, “Industrial Society and its Future,” has attracted much attention and commentary, it is unfortunate that most of the discussion has revolved around the question of publication rather than the manifesto itself.

The publication issue is not only of little interest to anyone outside the newsrooms, but also will resolve itself soon, as Unabomber imitators will either begin to crawl out from under their rocks, or they will not.

But the treatise is not worthy of attention so much for the macabre means through which it reached the mainstream media as for the concepts it contains. The Unabomber’s discussion of modern leftist psychology is not only thought-provoking but insightful, while his indictment of the evils brought about by industrial society carry more weight than the critiques put forth by latter-day Marxists. Nevertheless, when it comes to the issue of technology and human freedom, the Unabomber goes astray.

The manifesto traces many of the psycho-social problems of modern society to the Industrial Revolution. Since technology has made it unnecessary or impossible for humans to support themselves independently, it prevents them from exercising the natural Power Process of goal setting and attainment. (The “Power Process” is a concept that psychologists say is necessary for human mental health. The “Power Process” is the natural need of humans to exert some degree of control over their own destiny.) This inability to exercise the Power Process leads inevitably to the loss of dignity and human autonomy. The central point of the treatise thus revolves around the inherent conflict between technological development and individual freedom.

The Unabomber sees the seductive nature of technology as a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom. While each new technology appears desirable by itself, the totality of societal-technological advance slowly envelops us, whether we actively choose to accept it or not. As we become dependent on the new technologies, government steps in and regulates access to them, removing even limited opportunity to exercise the Power Process and eventually resulting in the reduction of human beings to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine.

What this theory ignores is that technology is a double-edged sword. Far from being the inevitable tool of government repression, technology has historically shown itself to be a primary force in providing freedom and power to the people. The monopolistic power of the medieval Catholic Church could not have been broken without the printing press, just as the omnipresent television cameras recently helped Boris Yeltsin and the infant Russian democracy movement survive the last reaction of the Soviet hardliners.

Governments and other would-be oppressors may use technology, but they are also afraid of it in the people’s hands. Witness our own government’s fear of high-level encryption software and its tawdry attempts to force the Clipper encryption chip on us. The Clipper chip would have allowed the FBI and other government agencies to read any data supposedly encrypted by the public. God forbid that we should send e-mail without the FBI being able to read it!

And the Chinese government has a tiger by the tail as it learns how difficult it is to allow free technological development and still keep the masses under control. The point is that technology can be a force for freedom as well as a weapon against it.

To prevent us from being turned into cogs in the techno-industrial machine, the Unabomber’s manifesto prescribes a return to a more natural state where our time would be spent exercising the Power Process by surviving via primitive methods, so we would no longer need to find surrogate means of exercising the Process. By “surrogate means,” he meant art, science, sports and anything not immediately related to survival. One wonders where the dignity and autonomy are to be found in the primitive life that Hobbes once characterized as nasty, brutish and short.

This regressive longing for a return to the natural state is nothing new. At the very least it echoes back 200 years to Rousseau. But human nature is very much a part of nature too, and like the Left he disdains, the Unabomber argues his way into the totalitarian corner of making choices for people in order to preserve their freedom to choose. George Orwell would have been proud.

But truly autonomous freedom, the freedom to choose and to exercise the Power Process also means the freedom to choose poorly. If Americans are working harder and longer than before, it is not because technology forces them to do so, but because many of us have decided to work more in order to pursue the larger TV, the BMW or the second home. These decisions to pursue things we do not need may well be foolish, but they are not the Unabomber’s to make. They are ours.

Day writes a Sunday technology column for the Pioneer Press.

Banning “feminist”

Men loathe them. Women are embarrassed by them. Civilized people despise them so much that TIME Magazine had to withdraw “feminist” from its “words to ban in 2015 poll” because so many people were voting for it and that made the feminists at the magazine experience the dread feelbad.

TIME apologizes for the execution of this poll; the word ‘feminist’ should not have been included in a list of words to ban. While we meant to invite debate about some ways the word was used this year, that nuance was lost, and we regret that its inclusion has become a distraction from the important debate over equality and justice.

In other words, “the important debate over equality and justice” should not involve any actual criticism of the beliefs of one side. Forget banning the word “feminist”, what would be better is to ban all feminists from the Western Civilization they are trying to destroy.

Feminism is the one ideology that makes National Socialism look merciful and Communism look viable by comparison. Regard its adherents accordingly.

What we can do

That’s what I was asked in the comments yesterday. I came up with one solution, which I’m pleased to see that about 100 of you implemented right away. But that’s just a start. First, I think it is important to take Cailcorishev’s observation into account of why the SJWs are so often successful with their entryist tactics and how they so regularly obtain positions of power in an organization or an industry.

They’re able to take over the things they do because normal people just don’t care that much. It’s how they run all the committees in a school: no one else wants to. People who create games and play games don’t care much about the incidental stuff like reviewing. We don’t need that to exist at all, so when someone emerges to do that, we figure “Better her than me.” Most of us don’t realize until too late how much power that concedes to them, because what they do looks so irrelevant from our ends.

This is true. I know the power of what he’s saying, because I entered into the industry via reviewing games myself. I started out as a contributor to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, then was syndicated by Chronicle Features, and before long was appearing in papers from the North Bay Nugget to the Boston Globe and the Atlanta Journal/Constitution. Within 18 months, I was personally acquainted many of the major game developers, guys like John Carmack, Richard Garriott, and Chris Roberts, as well as important media and publishing figures like Johnny Wilson and Scott Shannon.

How? It was easy. No one at the Pioneer Press seriously played computer games. They didn’t have anyone to do it, and they even started to rely upon me to do things like analyze the Unabomber’s manifesto for the editorial page. Of course, the Left polices itself much more carefully than the Right. When there was a vacancy on the op/ed page, I asked for the spot. The editor met with me – I was only the sixth columnist in the paper’s history to be nationally syndicated, so he couldn’t just blow me off – and politely made it clear there wasn’t a chance in hell he was going to put a libertarian extremist on the page every week. But the tactic works.

Now, I have to go for the time being. Work takes priority over the Cause. It might, however, be worthwhile to consider this until I’m able to finish this post and provide some concrete suggestions. Everyone knows that I don’t get paid for blogging. But what many people don’t know is that I never took any money to write eleven years worth of columns on WND. (Hence my amusement when people talk about Daddy getting me the “job”.) They couldn’t afford it when I first started, but I supported the alternative media that the Farahs were attempting to build.

That’s why the Left is progressing. Because they are willing to invest the time.

Never rely on a moderate

@totalbiscuit is one of the #GamerGate guys whose heart is more or less in the right place, but has never grasped the underlying issue. He released a joint statement with some other guy with whom he has been sparring. Most of the points are banal enough, but two require comment:

Diversity is important among game creators, players, and characters, and this is an important conversation that must be encouraged, not punished. Diversity leads to better stories, better stories lead to better games. If someone posts an article or video that you disagree with, the correct response is to write a comment, write to the editor, or create your own opposing article or video. It is not appropriate to threaten his or her safety, family, or anything else along those lines.

No. Diversity is not even remotely important among any of these people. Nor is it an important conversation that must be encouraged. It is simple SJW entryism and Totalbiscuit has fallen for it. If Diversity led to better stories, then SF/F would be better than the SF/F of 30 years ago. It’s not. It is considerably worse, by virtually every standard.

But yes, it is not appropriate to threaten people simply because you disagree with them. Or to spend hundreds of hours trying to hack their server; we are still seeing the hacker bounce off our security.

Gamers have endured attacks from the mainstream media for decades and we should be doing everything we can to bring that ignorance to an end, not further fuel it with incendiary rhetoric.

Again, @totalbiscuit is wrong. Only rhetoric can fight rhetoric. I cite Aristotle: “Before some audiences not even the possession of the exactest
knowledge will make it easy for what we say to produce conviction. For
argument based on knowledge implies instruction, and there are people
one cannot instruct.”

In other words, you cannot use dialectic to convince anyone who cannot be instructed of anything. It will not work. Only rhetoric will suffice.

PS: Do to some various distractions, I will be posting my answer to “what can I do” tomorrow. In the meantime: join Twitter, follow, 1 #GamerGate retweet, 1 #GamerGate favorite. That’s a 10-second daily commitment. If you can’t do that, you can’t do anything.

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.

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.

Sci Phi Journal #2

Quite a few New Release subscribers opted for SCI PHI JOURNAL #1 as their free book, so I expect more than few people might be pleased to know that the publisher is permitting Castalia House customers to purchase SCI PHI JOURNAL #2 a few days prior to its official release on November 1st.  The second issue of SCI PHI JOURNAL features short stories, book reviews, and some interesting articles such as “On the Ethics of Supersoldiers” by Patrick S. Baker and “The Making of the Fellowship” by the excellent fantasy essayist Tom Simon. it also contains the first part of a serial, Beyond the Mist by Ben Zwycky, and a history that never-was by Castalia House standout John C. Wright, entitled “Prophetic & Apotropaic Science Fiction”.

From the reviews of the premier issue:

  • It’s a bit tragic that you’d need a somewhat
    specialized magazine to read stuff that treats Sci Fi, philosophy and
    Christianity seriously and with respect – but here it is. 
  • This was an enjoyable read, well worth the price. As with anything in
    this format, the individual entries are of varying quality, but none
    were all bad. “Domo” was my personal favorite.
  • Enjoyed it enormously. The stories are well written. The magazine is thought provoking. 

SCI PHI JOURNAL #2 is now available in the Castalia Store for $3.99. 

Everything has fallen into place

Now isn’t that just unfortunate:

Former CBC radio star Jian Ghomeshi took to Facebook Sunday, publishing an extraordinary account of what he says led to his termination from the public broadcaster.  The CBC announced Sunday it was severing ties with Mr. Ghomeshi, citing
“information” it had recently learned about the popular host of Q on CBC Radio and CBC TV….

Mr. Ghomeshi details an “on and off” relationship with a woman in her mid-20s, which included “adventurous forms of sex that included role-play, dominance and submission.” After he opted to end the relationship, Mr. Ghomeshi said an anonymous woman began reaching out to his former partners, “to tell them she had been a victim of abusive relations with me. In other words, someone was reframing what had been an ongoing consensual relationship as something nefarious.”

Mr. Ghomeshi said a freelance writer started probing the allegations and he has “lived with the threat that this stuff would be thrown out there.” He said he informed CBC of the allegations and the broadcaster was part of a team that dealt “with this for months.”

“They said they’re not concerned about the legal side,” Mr. Ghomeshi wrote. “But then they said that this type of sexual behavior was unbecoming of a prominent host on the CBC.”

Probing the allegations. Living with the threat. Unbecoming sexual behavior. Indeed. In case you’d forgotten, Mr. Ghomeshi once hosted Rapey McRaperson and helped him record some vocals for the Pink Rabbit Posse’s hit number. I can’t help but wonder: what panoply of perversions will freelance writers eventually uncover about his co-vocalist?

Ask not for whom the pinkshirts come
Crawling on hand and knee.
A-slavering from their forked tongues
They come, they come for thee!

#Gamergate: an open letter

Joel Johnson
Editorial Director
Gawker Media

Dear Mr. Johnson,

As a professional game reviewer, game developer, and game designer with 22 years of experience in the game industry who has worked
closely with Intel in the past, I would like to request that you
immediately ask Max Read to resign from Gawker Media for the blatant
disregard he has shown for the gaming community as well as one of
its most important corporate supporters. Mr. Read wrote:

  1. “So let’s say it now: Intel is run by craven idiots. It
    employs pusillanimous morons. It lacks integrity.”
  2. He dishonestly described GamerGate as “dishonest fascists” and
    “an ill-informed mob of alienated and resentful video
    game-playing teenagers and young men
  3. “He, and later I, made the tactical mistake of
    publicly treating Gamergate with the contempt and flippancy that
    it deserves.”

Mr. Johnson, GamerGate does not consist of fascists. It is not an
ill-informed mob. It is not limited to teenagers, to men, or to
white people. It does not deserve to be treated with contempt and
flippancy. GamerGate is a broad spectrum of the gaming community,
including players and developers, and consists of men and women of
all ages who wish nothing more than to simply continue to design,
develop, and play the games that we wish to design, develop, and
play without being attacked by professional political activists,
corrupt game journalists, and publicity-seeking independent game
developers.

And speaking as one who has worked with upper level executives at
Intel, including Andy Grove, I can personally testify that Intel
is most definitely not run by idiots.

Mr. Johnson, I think you will recognize that both the game and
mainstream medias have exhibited considerable bias with regards to
the issue of GamerGate and have failed to cover it in a manner
that can be described as either fair or objective. While there has
obviously been some problematic behavior on both sides, I do not
see how it can possibly be in Gawker Media’s interest to continue
attacking both its readers and its advertisers alike. I hope you
will see fit to remove those employees and contributors who have
been inclined to do so, beginning with Mr. Read.

Thank you,
Vox Day

In other #GamerGate-related news, Castalia House has posted its statement on the matter which features insightful quotes from Popehat’s Clark as well as Castalia author William S. Lind. And Teepublic has a #GamerGate shirt out that is very retro and is all but guaranteed to set the usual suspects to frothing at the mouth on sight.

And Nero has another great article on #GamerGate, entitled: “Incredibly, GamerGate Is Winning – But You Won’t Read that Anywhere In the Terrified Liberal Media”:

Perhaps it won’t surprise you to learn that microchip manufacturers
and car companies are pretty sympathetic to the concerns of male
consumers. But some of the things said to me–all, sadly, on condition
of anonymity–have been nothing short of remarkable.

There’s the Intel vice president who told me via email that GamerGate
was “doing great work” and that he was “sick of slander and
self-loathing from the press”. He was talking about male journalists who
do misandrist feminists’ work for them.
“I am pressing that team, it’s not mine, but I am exerting influence
when I can, to stop spending money with people who hate themselves and
hate our clients,” he added by phone later.

Then consider the product manager, who was happy to be identified as
“senior management at a German car manufacturer”, who told me that, “the
violence against women is unacceptable and we cannot support it, but we
will not financially support people who insult our customers either”. The manager told me: “We would prefer not to make headlines like
Intel. But you should expect to see strategic changes in how we spend in
coming years. It is very much an open question inside the company and
we are watching closely.”

Finally, the executive at a household name video game developer who
said: “Opinion is sharply divided within the company. But that’s
remarkable in itself, given how totally the media has slammed and lied
about gamers. We’re split straight down the middle. One thing I can tell you, though, is that when claims about gamers
being woman-hating or abusive start to unravel, because journalists
didn’t check them properly before running these ‘bleeding heart’
editorials, it’s very difficult to win people back from there. So God
help Kotaku and Polygon if any of these women are shown to be making
stuff up.”

How fortunate for the anti-GamerGate crowd that women (and, presumably, men wearing dresses) never lie about rapedeath threats….

Dems are getting worried

The checked-out president is beginning to make Democrats, both politicians and in the media, observably nervous and twitchy. Consider Frank Bruno at the New York Times:

Rationally or not, this is one of those rare moments when Americans who typically tune out so much of what leaders say are paying rapt attention, and Obama’s style of communication hasn’t risen fully to the occasion. Even as he canceled campaign appearances and created a position — Ebola czar — that we were previously told wasn’t necessary, he spoke with that odd dispassion of his, that maddening distance.

About the ban, he said, “I don’t have a philosophical objection necessarily.” About the czar, he said that it might be good to have a person “to make sure that we’re crossing all the T’s and dotting all the I’s going forward.” He’s talking theory and calligraphy while Americans are focused on blood, sweat and tears.

Ebola is his presidency in a petri dish. It’s an example already of his tendency to talk too loosely at the outset of things, so that his words come back to haunt him. There was the doctor you could keep under his health plan until, well, you couldn’t. There was the red line for Syria that he didn’t have to draw and later erased.

With Ebola, he said almost two weeks ago that “we’re doing everything that we can” with an “all-hands-on-deck approach.” But on Wednesday and Thursday he announced that there were additional hands to be put on deck and that we could and would do more. The shift fit his pattern: not getting worked up in the early stages, rallying in the later ones.

It’s more understandable in this case than in others, because when it comes to statements about public health, the line between adequately expressed concern and a license for hysteria is thin and not easily determined. Still, he has to make Americans feel that he understands their alarm, no matter how irrational he deems it, and that they’re being leveled with, not talked down to, not handled. And he has a ways to go.

“If you were his parent, you’d want to shake him,” said one Democratic strategist, who questioned where Obama’s passion was and whether, even this deep into his presidency, he appreciated one of the office’s most vital functions: deploying language, bearing, symbols and ceremony to endow Americans with confidence in who’s leading them and in how they’re being led.

Right now in this country there’s a crisis of confidence, and of competence, and that’s the fertile ground in which the Ebola terror flowers. That’s the backdrop for whatever steps Obama and Frieden take from here. With the right ones, they can go a long way toward calming people who are anxious not just about Ebola but about America. I don’t even want to think about the wrong ones.

That is not the writing of a happy rabbit. After all, it is pretty hard to argue for more government intervention as one watches an indifferent president lurch half-heartedly from one potential disaster into the next one.